Soy Sauce: It Can Be the Reason You are Bloated

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Many people use soy sauce in their cooking and at the dining table without thinking much about it. It is so common in Asian cuisines that it is assumed to be safe for everything. Well, it is not.

Soy sauce is a fermented product. We know very well from Chinese medical point of view that a person with any form of injury or internal inflammation should avoid fermented food at least until after the wound is closed up or that the inflammation is gone. However, many people would not notice that they are eating fermented food when they prepare their food with soy sauce. That’s one of the reasons why it takes so long for some people to recover from a simple shoulder injury (or post exercise stiffness) even if they cautiously avoiding food that is known to keep the inflammation staying longer. The most common form of reactions to soy sauce due to internal inflammation is bloating.

There is also this growing issue of soy sauce allergy. There are more and more cases of allergy reactions to soy sauce that were unnoticed before. Only until after some people actually go for allergy testing due to allergy reactions to other allergens like gluten that they discover that they are allergy to soy sauce as well. If you do have such problems, try switching to organic non-GMO soy sauce to see if the problem goes away. Many people I talked to actually have no allergy reactions since they switched.

Dining out at a non-Asian restaurant no longer guarantee that you are safe from soy sauce. Many Western restaurants prepare their food with a hint of soy sauce to improve the favour. So telling your server at the restaurant that you don’t want your food prepared with soy sauce can often help. One classic way to reduce the soy influence on our bodies is drinking green tea. If you find you are very bloated several hours after dining out at a Chinese restaurant, and that drinking green tea right after can bring you back to normal, you know you need to avoid or reduce soy sauce in your diet.

Finally, just try using simple sea salt or going fancy with Himalayan pink salt instead of using soy sauce for favouring. If you have never tried that, you will discover a whole new dimension of taste from the original ingredients that were masked out by soy sauce.

Seriously, putting soy sauce on everything is kind of boring, isn’t it?

Picture Source: Wikimedia.org

Server Maintenance This Weekend Aug 12

Last week this site was down due to hosting company had a problem with their data centre in the East Coast. I could not even post onto the site. I still find the access to the site not stable but it is in the hands of the hosting company so all I can do is hope for the best that they will resolve the problem completely soon.

We are going to conduct server maintenance on DaytradingBias.com backend servers. It should not affect the website access. If anything, it will be slow down on weekend updates.

Lots of things going on in the background and I will be able to show something interesting soon if all goes well.

Have a nice weekend all!

Post Birthday Thoughts

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Last week was my birthday. I received quite a number of messages wishing me well. One of them stands out, however, because it is not one of those at all. It stands out also because of who wrote it – my mother. Sharing it here because it is a classic example of the fusion of traditional thoughts and mythologies. It is kind of funny.

The Fusion of Astrology and Traditional Customs

My mother warned me that this year my birth year offends the year spirit (in Chinese 犯太歲) so I may have troubles and dangers ahead. Obviously, she is kind of concerned because of the Chinese practice of reading those yearly astrology books I mentioned before. She worries about me for a good reason as I jokingly told her I got into some sort of trouble thanks to one of my clients. She was thinking that I should perform the classic rituals to claim truce with the year spirit.

Classic Chinese astrology places a lot of emphasis on the birth year. This astrology based birth year has the same length as the Roman calendar at 365.24 days. The main difference is that the traditional Chinese astrology year starts when the sun reaches the celestial longitude 315 degree. It is called Lichun (in Chinese 立春). That usually falls on February 3-6 every year.

The concept of offending the year spirit is ancient concept that can be simplified into cycle study. Based on Chinese astrology, the day you were born is 1 year old. There was no zero in the Chinese numeric system back then. By the 7th birthday, that year is the year you offend the year spirit. In other words, the timing is half the 12-year cycle I mentioned in a previous article. This recurs every 12 years.

For example, if you were born between year 1990 February 4th to year 1991 February 3rd, the first time you offend the year spirit would be 1996. From there onward, every 12 years, you would offend the year spirit again in 2008, 2020, 2032, etc.

Ancient System vs. Modern Interpretation

The classic Chinese astrology was actually abandoned many years ago in favour of the modern Chinese astrology about 500-800 years ago. Yes, it took that long for the struggle to end, mainly due to the older practitioners died from old age in the process. The old system emphasizes a lot on the birth year while the new system (not so new by now) emphasizes on the exact birth date and time which is much closer to modern western astrology system.

The concept is still valid in the sense that many people do experience major changes in their lives at the half cycle and full cycle years like changing their jobs, moving into a new home, making major purchase commitment, etc. You can actually look back into your past to see if this happens to you too. The older you are, the more interesting it gets as you will find out that the recurrences can be quite consistent.

Such displacement events, when happening in ancient times, were most likely very unpleasant or even disastrous. As majority of people were living in very simple villages in the past, major changes were likely bad ones. For example, it could be the lost of your land (that’s why you had to move), or it could be your master in your craft giving you up (that’s why you had to change career). After generations of similar experiences, people developed the deep rooted beliefs that it is important to be careful when one is dealing with the half cycle years. But ever since the rise of modern life from 1900, such events no longer map to bad consequences only.

So, in my case, my birth year is not even offending the year spirit per se. I am actually experiencing the completion of the full cycle of 12 years and is now going into a new one. I told my mom that she does not need to worry – whatever it is, as long as I am prepared, things will be fine.

Awareness Matters as Usual

The so called displacement changes are just things that meant to happen. I am not saying in those mythical terms of fate or destiny. Whatever these events that are happening to you, they are the results of the accumulated effects of whatever you have done, based on your own decisions. In other words, it is very much your own doing that push you to these expected outcomes. You are playing a much bigger role in what is happening to you than you are willing to admit. Just that many of the decisions we made, we do not know the unintended consequences and the ripple effects from these decisions.

The problem of believing in the power of the year spirit and that offending it would cause you trouble is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you fear about bad things that are going to happen to you, the more likely you will fail to handle things objectively. First and foremost, your decisions will no longer focus on handling matters in a way to get the best possible outcome. Your thoughts would be tainted by your fear and approaches things defensively with no justification. The aggregation of such decisions can only result in, at best, not doing better, and at worst, every possible bad thing that you are not prepared to handle.

In traders’ speak, this is exactly doing the opposite of cutting your losses fast and letting your profits run.

What can change these displacement events from being disastrous incidents into opportunities for a better future, is that well before dealing with the events themselves, you have paved your way years ahead with the right mindset and decisions based on higher awareness of where you are and what you are. As a start, try owning the responsibility of your future as oppose to blaming fate or whatever causing your miseries. With the right mindset and discipline, you can be sure that these “offend the year spirit” stuff will be taken care of in the best possible way without you even knowing that they happened.

Trading Product Reviews Have a New Home

The moving of the trading product reviews from DaytradingBias.com to EssenceofTrading.com is now completed. It took a while because the rating system has to be replaced and the formatting of the posts have to be manually revised. Anyway it is now done so we are going to proceed with the next step of the revision process.

Major changes to the front page will be next as we remove all the sections there that are retired from the site. The clean up has been a slow and painful process since the site was built some 10 years ago and has been evolving on the same older platform since. Upgrading the site into something more mobile friend should improve the overall usability going forward.

For more advanced searching options on the trading product reviews, they will be addressed separately.

Completion of Moving Content

I expect that by the end of next week all contents unrelated to the core businesses of DaytradingBias.com will be moved to the proper websites. The slowest part are the reviews as the ratings have to be reconstructed manually and we do have a lot of reviews done. Once the moving is completed, I plan to write more reviews too so getting this migration done correct is very important for me.

The news section will be dropped as social media like tweeter is doing a better job from actual experience.

Front page and main menu will be revised soon to reflect the all these changes.

I am still waiting for the overall theme redesign to be done so that DaytradingBias finally becoming mobile friendly.

Things are progressing slowly but definitely getting close to what I envisioned two years ago.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Feeling Stupid

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We were working on a computer with Multicharts to test our trading models on a live trading account this morning. But we were stuck at the very first step. We just couldn’t get the damn thing to connect to CQG for some mysterious reason. My team freaked out as that computer was completely clean installed for just this purpose. And it was working perfectly several months ago. Once we have it working we never look at it again until now.

So WTF gone wrong?

I was told that it was not working earlier in the morning so I simply asked my team to figure it out. I thought it must be something trivial and told them so.

The first thing they tried was looking for help. My team talked to technical support with the brokerage. They recommended us to turn off the firewall, opening ports with our routers and even turning off our anti-virus program. All things were done. Nothing helped.

My team were so desperate that they literally tweaked everything they could before talking to me again that they could not fix the problem.

I then joined them walking through everything they had done so far.

Something did not feel right though … and I popped the question,

“Is everything up-to-date?”

Shockingly, that damn Multicharts installed on the computer was on version 9.1 BETA.

I asked my team to check with the brokerage again to make sure that version still works. Of course, it is not and the currently supported version is version 10. My team waited anxiously over the next few moments for the download to complete and rushed to do the installation.

Voila! Problem solved.

What a reminder of overthinking and missing the most basic things by a group of accomplished programmers and engineers. Not just them, same goes for the support with the brokerage.

If I were the first person handling the situation, I would probably do the same whole routines of messing with the computer and the network. Lucky me that I was the one who sit out of the diagnosis process and got to join them later with a fresh look. Otherwise we would still be struggling at this point.

At the end, everyone has a laugh though.

Taking Supplement or Not

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It is very interesting how divided people are in terms of taking health related supplements. Many older people hold the belief that these supplements are just snake oil that the big companies created to grab more money from gullible people. Some other people, especially those whose health are compromised, keep on seeking for better supplements to relief their pains, insomnia and other ailments. The big question boils down to one thing though – are you knowledgeable enough to make the right decision for yourself whether you need supplement or not.

Many Supplements Actually Work

Many classic supplements, especially the ones made with natural ingredients, work. And most of us actually eat them in one form or another. The very flavourful soup you drank when you were young, the traditional fermented food from your home country and those special cocktail of stuff in your herbal tea for treating your cold are all functional supplements, in a way. The old ways in making these digestible stuff to augment our health still work but it takes time and lots of effort to prepare them. Technology and medical science has taken on these tasks, resulting in readily available forms of these supplements.

However, we have a new issue to deal with as it gets much easier to access to these health supplements. Namely, there are so many kinds of supplements and so many brands to choose from. It is very difficult to figure out which one to take and what is actually suitable for your situation.

Everyone Needs Some Form of Supplements to Stay Healthy

Once a person has reached their prime of 30 years old, the ability to absorb nutrients declines. This belief comes straight from traditional Chinese medicine and is confirmed by Western medical science with better details. This very simple fact contributes a lot to the aging process. Think about this. When you cannot absorb the same quantity of nutrients from the same amount of food you eat, you are starving your body from what is needed to maintain it in top healthy state. Slowly, the deficiency in certain types of essential nutrients will cause sickness in you without you knowing. It is exactly like the story of boiling a frog.

One good example is vitamin D deficiency which was told to me by a nurse managing research cases on patients with long term illnesses. Tons of people living in Canada and other regions of the world where sunlight is not there for the better half of each year rarely get enough vitamin D. Worse yet, as one ages, the ability to absorb sunlight to convert that into vitamin D declines quickly. It takes an elderly much longer time under the sun to get the same benefit like a young adult. One can eat to get enough vitamin D but one has to be aware of the issue in the first place to make sure their diets taking care of that.

The surprising issue with long term mild vitamin D deficiency is feeling depressed. When someone feels down they tend to stay home which in turn further reduce their exposure to sunlight that is essential in generating vitamin D themselves through their skin. Another form of the mild depressed state is the increase in anxiety. I can keep on going of the problems one will get from this one simple issue which can take forever to write. The main point is that we can become very ill from causes we are not aware of, even though you may consider yourself having a relatively healthy lifestyle.

To help patients with long term illnesses that keep them bed ridden, vitamin D is often prescribed now to keep these patients out of mood swings and improve their recovery speed. It works wonder and the approach is adopted in many places in the world.

But if you can keep yourself healthy in the first place by taking vitamin D supplement, why not?

Know Yourself for Real

People often take supplements when they feel something is not right with their bodies. Other times, it is recommended by the family physician after regular body check up. One common recommendation by physicians is taking calcium supplement for women that are 40 years or older as a preventive measure. But can you do more to help yourself?

In fact, yes you can figure things out before it gets to the point it is affecting your health. You can ask for comprehensive checking on your blood profile on both essential nutrients and hormone levels. In Canada, such tests can be ordered by our family physician without extra costs. In many other countries, it will cost you but I think it is well worth it.

One reason why supplements are getting so many bad reps is that people are taking them based on observed symptoms. But many symptoms are common among many kinds of ailments you may be having. In other words, you are guessing what your actually underlying issue is without the proper scientific background nor the complete picture of the situation like having your blood profile on hand. Your pick of supplements will likely be whatever last pop science article or video suggested instead of well informed decision.

So, in fact you can use trial and error method until you find the supplements you need. It takes a long time to get the right combination. Just be patient and learn to study yourself by recording how you feel over time so that you can eventually figure out what you need.

Or, you can use the more scientific approach with blood profile and other biometric measures (i.e. blood pressure, oxygen concentration level, etc.) to see what you need and target those deficiencies right from the beginning.

Personal Preference

I prefer taking supplements that are basically food over the highly refined pills coming from these brand names that have very expensive price tags. It is not because I do not believe that they work. In fact, I know many of these brands work very well. The main concern is that from my background in Chinese medicine, I know these highly concentrated dose of nutrients or stimulants would overdrive the liver (not just the liver as in Western medical science, I am talking about the liver system as in Chinese medicine) over time. In other words, continuous usage of such supplements may eventually cause your liver problems years down the road as suggested by Chinese medicine theories. Again, it is just my personal opinion so if you do not agree to what I say here, move on.

I treat taking supplements similar to taking medicines for sickness with same kind of care. I make such I know what I put into my body but I am also willing to experiment with different supplements to see the effects first hand. Sometimes things just do not workout the way I expected. I certainty hope that whatever I am doing now can help me staying fit and active by the time I am at my 80s.

If you are getting to middle age or older like me, and interested in maintaining good health in years to come. It may be the right time now to educate yourself about health supplements so that you can make informed decisions yourself. In this era of chronic diseases everywhere, safe guarding our health is a challenge we should all take very seriously.

Week Long Reconstruction of Sites

We are getting ready to tidy up daytradingbias.com by removing the rest of the parts not fitting with the future design. There will be many changes coming and can from time to time affecting the look at feel of the site. Do not be alarmed as that will not affect the access to the content.

Remaining obstacles include user forum not mobile friendly and that many supportive tools used on the site are now out-dated and obsolete. I am sure these will be taken care of too.

Enjoy the weekend!

Breathe: Do You Know How?

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We all breathe but it is rare that people are breathing correctly. The difference is clear and the impact on health and mental clarity is very significant. Yet, no one spend time to talk about it at all. Well, for one, talking about basic of the basics generate no buzz. So, here it is on how to breathe right.

Most people breath by simply relaxing their chest hence air flow in. Naturally, you will let the air out as your brain detected signals from your lungs that the oxygen intake is used up. Yep, your brains and bodies are doing that with every single breathe you take. But there is a problem with that, you are using just 25-30% of your lung capacity on each breathe. You are providing bare minimal supply of oxygen to your brain and your body.

By practicing the following simple breathing exercise for 2 weeks, you will reprogram your body and your mind to increase the average air intake to at least 45%-60% of your lung capacity. Do not underestimate this change – we are talking about 100% increase or even more in terms of air intake volume, or oxygen supply going into your body. This does wonders to your health. If your daily activities include a lot of mental work (e.g. having a desk job), you will see marked improvements in your ability to concentrate as well.

1. Preferred to lie down somewhere. If you are doing this first thing you open your eyes, you are already on the bed. Try not to do this when you are going to sleep because it can make you more awake thus delaying your bed time.

2. Breathe in by pushing your stomach/ tummy out first until it reaches 70% to 80% from the maximum you can do when pushing hard.

3. Then expand your chest to continue the breathe in process until your chest is at least 60% to 80% from the maximum you can do with expanding your chest from breathing in.

4. Relax and let the air out slowly. If you can control it to take as long as the breathe in time, it is a bonus.

5. Repeat the breathing for at least 30 times.

Remember your lungs and the muscles surrounding it are just like the rest of your body. They can be trained to become stronger and more flexible. The breathing exercise above will strengthen your respiratory system and teach your brain to breathe like this method when you are not practicing it deliberately. The more you do it, the faster it will become a natural part of you.

Note: I was talking to my son the other day that I suddenly remember this is actually one of the fundamental breathing work that one has to learn before doing all the more complex ones. I guess we all tend to forget about things that is already a part of yourself.

June 2017 Site Revision Progress

I have decided to move the review section of trading books and trading related stuff to the Essence site. However, we have encountered a problem that the review ratings done on DaytradingBias cannot be moved due to the plugin that produces the ratings no longer exist. I am still trying to find a solution to that.

Another consideration is that I will retire the site news section as we look at the traffic stats we find out the posts there are not read at all. So there is really no point to clutter the site with too many posts.

My team has completed the protection work on art of chart reading articles so that only premium members can read them from now on. This will satisfy the requirements from several ebook publishing outlets as we are getting close to publish the book.

Our prototypes of the new trading signals are working fine. The only worry is that the internet stability is not as robust as I like. I guess eventually I have to use a data center in the States to run the signal servers. I have asked my team to evaluate which data centre to try out. And no need to worry if you are thinking of the disaster we experienced quite some time ago that the move totally failed. The new servers will just produce the new trading signals. The existing ones will still be running off our servers here in Canada until we know it is safe to move anything over.

More work to get done.

Have a nice weekend all!