Chiang Kai-shek's five health secrets will definitely help you live to 99

As a figure in modern Chinese political history, Chiang Kai-shek's daily life contains health-preserving philosophy in many details. Looking back at Jiang's 88 years of hard life, his health regimen is nothing more than the following five precepts:

Stop Anger

As early as his youth, Chiang Kai-shek had a very violent temper. When something goes wrong, he often gets angry and slams the table. As Chiang himself wrote in his diary from 1921 to 1925: "I curse and abuse without restraint and have lost my composure. I am not fit to be a superior officer and I have been given a serious warning." After 1925, Chiang Kai-shek began to try his best to control his character flaws and tried his best to "refrain from anger" when encountering things. In his diary, he made four vows, namely, "not to curse others, not to hit others, not to speak angrily, and not to be arrogant." After the Xi'an Incident, Chiang Kai-shek consciously reread "Mozi", "Laozi" and some medical books related to health preservation. The truth that "too much anger will cause discomfort in all the meridians" made him feel at ease. In his later years, Chiang Kai-shek concluded that the key to controlling anger is to do everything possible to restrain it when anger is about to break out. Regulating the fire in the chest in this way can not only avoid temporary anger, but also achieve the purpose of health preservation.

Abstinence

Before the age of 30, Chiang Kai-shek led a dissolute private life. After 1930, the 43-year-old Chiang Kai-shek had a smooth career and a good living environment. At this time, he began to think about the issue of maintaining his health. Chiang Kai-shek believed that if human desires, especially physiological desires, were not restrained, it would likely damage one's innate constitution. After Chiang Kai-shek became the president of the Kuomintang, he began to actively avoid contact and communication with the opposite sex, and even rarely attended official cocktail parties and dances. After the age of 60, Chiang Kai-shek progressed from restraining his desires to "abstinence from desire." Taiwanese biographer Wang Feng once said in his book: "Because the couple (referring to Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling) were both old, the old man began to gradually stop having sex since the Taiwan period, and officially slept in separate beds in the 1950s."

Stop being impatient

While living in Huangpu Road in Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek began to use "be cautious" as his motto. He once wrote: "Don't be impatient. There is a clear ancient saying: haste breeds impatience, impatience breeds boredom. Think twice before doing anything, and plan slowly; impatience is the source of all troubles, while rationality leads to great things."

Chiang Kai-shek's "avoiding greed" in health preservation certainly does not refer to money and material things, but for the sake of health in his later years, he advocated "eating less will gain more, eating more will not gain. Eating too much is harmful to the body." He has a famous saying, "Money can't buy you a slim body in old age." Due to strict diet control, he did not suffer from chronic diseases such as high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis when he was 70 years old.

Precepts

"Too much talk leads to mistakes. Too much talk hurts the mind. Too much talk hurts the body." In addition to the fact that talking too much would affect his political career, another reason Chiang Kai-shek "avoided talking" was that "too much talk drains the mind, while fewer words benefit the spirit." After arriving in Taiwan, he often used gestures to express his thoughts when exchanging views with Soong May-ling.