At the end of Enlightenweight there is the following recap summarizing the key points of the entire book:
“To warm and dry: Pungent, bland and bitter foods combined with sweating and breathing as though you are yawning.
To warm and moisten: Pungent, Salty sweet and oily foods combined with breathing like you are yawning. Continue reading
“You are made of Heaven and Earth-a delicate combination of gasses and microbial dust merged into an elegantly integrated whole….Master your microbiome and the world will become your garden, your pharmacy, and your playground.”- Enlightenweight
After 3 years and countless revisions it’s finally ready. We wanted to offer 3 versions.
Version 1: Kindle (Available now)
Version 2: Paper (Available now)
Version 3: Audiobook (Expected completion within the year.)
Enjoy,
Andrew Miles L.Ac and Qiu Xuelan Ph.D
Reading time : 2.5 min
Cold and Moist
The animals in a temperate forest sing, but not with the complexity of their tropical cousins. The flowers bloom and fruits ripen, but more modestly than their tropical counterparts. Cool weather slows the collective metabolism. There is less density of life and less competition than the tropics.
There are certainly areas of the body that should be swampy, but when this extends into areas which are meant to be dry, it creates problems. Sedentary living reduces fluid metabolism. This can lead to water retention. When the internal microbiome becomes cold and damp, it overloads your water transport mechanisms. It doesn’t matter how much water you are drinking. What is important is that your body is distributing all of the water you absorb. Continue reading
Reading Time: 4 minutes.
Buddha taught his disciples to avoid eating after noon so they could enjoy life without illness, buoyancy of strength and a comfortable life. In Buddhism there is a saying that Heavenly beings eat in the morning, humans eat at lunch, animals eat in the evening and ghosts eat at night. This sounds really strange if you take it literally. Certainly animals eat in the morning. The point of this is not about angels or ghosts, but rather about the effects of darkness and light on the human body. This may seem esoteric, but when you think about it within the context of daily life it becomes more down to Earth. People act like jerks when they are hungry. Sometimes they act like demons. By contrast, a great breakfast sets the foundation for an amazing day.
Jesus, was a proponent of fasting. This may be why he is typically depicted with fabulous abs. While modern Catholic views on fasting are more flexible, it used to be that people were limited to one daytime meal per day. Most traditions of Christianity advocate fasting or intermittent fasting with a daytime meal. Continue reading
Reading Time: 4 Min
Heat and Dampness
The rainforest hums. Tiny feet pitter-patter over wet leaves. In the warm nights animals sing erotic serenades. Life is abundant and competition is fierce. Trees race to reach the canopy, choking out their competition. The fallen quickly rot and rejoin the soil. These hot, wet climates host most of Earth’s species. This rivalry inspires living things to adorn themselves with bright colors. They spread seeds in sweet fruit. They display beauty in movement, color and sound. They protect themselves with piercing points and with poison. This is where you can find some of the most chemically active plants and animals. You can also find intensity of decay.
Leaves spread out evenly across a forest floor will turn into mulch at a consistent rate. If you rake those same leaves into a pile and cover them to retain moisture, they will get hot from all the microbial activity. In some instances, they can get so hot that they catch fire.
Reading Time: 3 Min
Heat in the human body comes from external radiation and from internal metabolism. In either case the effects on the body are similar. The human body responds to heat by increasing circulation and sweating. By bringing the blood to the periphery of the body it can easily release heat into the outside environment. This decrease in resistance causes a drop in blood pressure. Its like having your thumb on a hose to get it to spray further and then suddenly taking your thumb off. The spray quickly becomes a drizzle. The same thing happens with heat. The increased size of the blood vessels and additional areas for circulation causes a drop in blood pressure. This is part of the reason that heat can make people feel tired. In this overbearing heat it is difficult to get out and exercise or even think strait. Many black men are more prone to high blood pressure. This could be a heat adaptation allowing them to work through intense heat. In intense heat most people lose their appetites. This is because your body wants to the reduce caused by metabolism to prevent overheating. Heat generally manifests with red eyes, thirst, and dark urine. It is associated with skin rashes, lesions, and irritability. One of the key signs of systemic heat is inflammation.
In the desert, heat can be deadly. The way to make yourself comfortable is to consume substances that help your internal environment stay cool. I once met a Bedouin man from Egypt. He described how his people could survive with little water: Continue reading
Reading Time: 6 min
You can eat nothing, but whole grain, organic, superfoods hailed by celebrity doctors and personally blessed by an actual talk show host, but if you aren’t considering your internal microbiome, you might as well be eating shards of glass. Either way, you could be tearing your insides apart. When your gut loses balance, 100 trillion microbes which were once beneficial citizens of your internal world begin to riot. They begin feasting on your intestines like a horde of microscopic zombies.
This feeding causes intestinal lesions which have been associated with a host of the chronic diseases such as:
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD):
This autoimmune disorder takes the forms of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA):
RA is an autoimmune disease that often results in bilateral inflammation of the joints.
Fungal infections:
This includes everything from toenail fungus to yeast infections.
Fibromyalgia:
This disease is associated with fatigue, generalized pain and sensitivity to pressure. It is heavily correlated with depression and anxiety. Continue reading
(Reading time-3 minutes)
” …and He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
— Genesis 2:7
The gasses in the Universe form a living breath. The Sun is a burning ball of gas. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form droplets of water which fall to Earth as rain. In a flash of lighting, nitrogen descends to Earth. As this breath of the heavens mixes with soil, the land becomes a living thing.
The gasses in the heavens descend to the Earth allowing life to thrive. As the winds blow over the landscape microbiota in the soil rise up on vapors into the atmosphere. Sometimes when the light is just so you can see the fullness of the air.
I was maybe six years old when it first donned on me that the air wasn’t empty. In the morning light, sunbeams shone through an old window. I could see the dust floating and swirling in imperceptible currents. It seemed at once like an the undulating ocean or the swirling of the cosmos. Continue reading
Andrew Miles, DOM & Xuelan Qiu, PhD 