The diet is a very elaborate and important system within TCM; through the food we eat on a daily basis we can get sick or recover the balance. Diets must be personalized depending on several factors (age, gender, geographical location, state of health). There is not a universal diet for all people.
Dietetics in TCM put emphasis on the effects each food produces in our body. By its flavor and by its nature, a food can generate an effect of cooling, heating or harmonization, an energetic movement which is ascendant, descendant, centrifugal and centripetal, etc.
The majority of Western diets (weight loss and others) are considered absurd, harmful and counterproductive from the point of view of TCM because they cause an imbalance in the body that in the medium and short-term leads to a worsening.
A typical example: a woman with overweight (cold) receives a dietary advice from a professional without knowledge of the dietary energy, and he advises her to eat daily salads (plants in raw state). This woman in the medium and long term will get the opposite effect: weight gain, retention of fluids in the body and weakening of the metabolism in general.