Always Cold, with Cold Hands and Feet — Was It ‘Frozen’ Into You? Women and Cold: Internal Causes Come First, External Causes Still Matter

Opening: Before you blame the air conditioner and the popsicles

A few days ago, when Doctor Luo Dalun talked about women being affected by cold, the comments exploded — many friends wrote, “Doctor Luo, what you’re describing matches me exactly, please keep talking about this.” So today’s article is about getting to the bottom of this whole business of cold, once and for all.

Doctor Luo opens with a point that surprises most people:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: When we talk about women feeling cold — their constitution being cold — we must be clear about one thing: it has internal causes, and the internal cause comes first. What internal cause? Your own qi and blood must already be running into trouble. Only then can you be affected by cold. Only then can a change in outside temperature make you cold.

A lot of people talk about women’s cold constitutions and overemphasize the external factors — “she eats too many cold things,” “she sits in air conditioning all day.” In fact, the internal cause is primary.

The Song-dynasty Complete Good Prescriptions for Women said it long ago: wind-deficiency fatigue cold — you have to be depleted before you get cold

This is not something Doctor Luo invented. The famous Song-dynasty gynecology text — the Complete Good Prescriptions for Women (Fu Ren Da Quan Liang Fang) — devotes an entire chapter to a condition called “wind-deficiency fatigue cold” (feng xu lao leng).

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: What is wind-deficiency fatigue cold? It means the body is fatigued and depleted, and then it gets cold — you must first be weakened and damaged, your zheng qi (upright qi) must be insufficient, and only then can you be affected by external cold.

The book says it plainly: if you take good care of yourself, if your qi and blood are harmonious, running normally and abundantly, then “wind, cold, summer heat and dampness cannot harm you” — such a person has flourishing qi and blood, a strong spleen and stomach, eats well, has a good complexion; even if they catch some cold, sit in a draft of air conditioning, or come in from a cold rain, they recover within a short time.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Why? Because we humans have a self-regulating ability — this is what the ancient books teach.

Once qi and blood weaken, wind and cold slip in through the gap — external cold and internal causes feed each other

But the reverse — if you drain your qi and blood through overwork, so that they become insufficient and sluggish, and the body enters a depleted state — then you are in trouble:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: If you labor and injure your qi and blood, then wind and cold take advantage of your deficiency and invade (feng leng cheng xu er gan zhi). This external evil — wind, cold — will always enter through the gap: it may disturb your channels, or lodge in the channels, or enter the abdomen — that is, enter the viscera.

Once the channels are chilled, qi and blood become even more congealed and sluggish. Do you see the pattern? External cold and internal causes reinforce each other:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: At first the qi and blood may simply be congealed, insufficient. Then the cold evil arrives and enters the channels, and the qi and blood congeal even more — so they can no longer warm the skin (bu neng zi wen yu ji fu), your qi and blood can no longer warm the body surface, and therefore you constantly feel cold.

And if the cold enters the viscera? The book says it “harms according to where it enters” (sui qi suo shang) — whichever organ it reaches, that organ gets sick:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: If the abdomen receives wind and cold, then the spleen and stomach qi weaken and cannot digest food — eating causes stuffy pain, bloating, constant cold discomfort; that is stomach pain. If the large intestine is deficient, it turns into diarrhea (ruo da chang xu zhe, ze bian wei xia li) — a slight chill gives you diarrhea, a slightly cold drink gives you diarrhea, sitting on a cold bench gives you an upset stomach.

And here is the one every woman should pay special attention to — wind and cold entering the womb:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: When it enters the uterus, in mild cases the periods go wrong — some women get painful menstruation. In severe cases, it chills the viscera and causes childlessness (ling zang leng, zhi ling wu zi) — it can make you unable to have children. This happens more often than people think.

A real case: the Inner Mongolia couple eating popsicles in bed in deep winter

Speaking of “causing childlessness,” Doctor Luo told a case from his own practice:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: A relative of one of my junior fellow students — her cousin — had been married for many years and could not have a child. The young couple came all the way from Inner Mongolia to Beijing to see me. When I looked at them, both were physically strong and robust — after all, they were Inner Mongolians, sturdy people. I thought, why can’t these two conceive? Then I looked at their tongues: snow-white coating, white tongue body — both of them, exactly the same.

Both of them the same — so it wasn’t one person’s problem; it had to come from a shared habit. They chatted, and the habit came out:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: What did this young couple do? They loved cold food — to the point that in the middle of winter they lay in bed under the quilt eating popsicles. Can you imagine? Popsicles, in bed, under the quilt, in winter!

Young people whose organs are truly solid and whose qi and blood are truly abundant are actually rare — Inner Mongolians eat lamb and beef and grow strong, but staying up late and going out every day drains them; their upright qi isn’t necessarily that sufficient. Eating cold like that day after day, their bodies filled up with cold-dampness. Doctor Luo gave the couple treatment to warm the yang and resolve dampness, and then heard nothing for a long time…

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Later I happened to ask my junior fellow student — I said, by the way, how is your relative doing? The child was already several years old — they had had a baby. The ancients put it clearly: wind and cold entering the womb chills the viscera and causes childlessness.

What are the internal causes? Constrained liver qi, blood deficiency, blood stasis, heavy dampness

So what, concretely, are the internal causes? Doctor Luo connected the dots from the previous lectures:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Constrained liver qi — qi stagnation stuck inside — makes qi and blood run poorly, so you easily get cold; blood-deficient people easily get cold; people with blood stasis also easily get cold, because their qi and blood don’t circulate; and people with heavy dampness inside — why heavy dampness? Because the spleen and stomach are insufficient, qi is deficient; spleen-stomach insufficiency produces dampness, and such people easily get cold too.

So you see, the factors behind getting cold are actually many. Next, let’s focus on the external causes.

External cause one: diet — watermelon is the “Heaven-born White Tiger Decoction,” and milk is cool too

The first external cause is careless eating. Why “careless”? Because food itself has a cold, hot, warm or cool medicinal nature:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: This is the wisdom of the ancient Chinese — the ancients already tasted and classified all of it. That’s why on my other channel, “Luo Dalun Channel,” I keep introducing food ingredients — you must understand these ingredients; matched to your own constitution, you will eat very sensibly. If you don’t understand and eat the wrong thing for your body, that’s bad news.

Doctor Luo gave an example that genuinely pains him:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I often see it — a cold winter morning, at a hotel buffet breakfast, a parent looking at the fruit table and putting watermelon chunks on their child’s plate. I think, this is harming the child. What is watermelon called? The Heaven-born White Tiger Decoction (Tian Sheng Bai Hu Tang) — the White Tiger Decoction is made with gypsum (sheng shi gao), extremely cold. In the morning, yang qi has just begun to rise like a tiny flame — and you pour a dose of Heaven-born White Tiger Decoction on it. This parent truly doesn’t understand Chinese medicine.

People with particular food preferences especially need to learn the nature of what they eat. Consider another example — watermelon chunks with milk at breakfast. Milk is also cool:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Chinese medicine doctors today all say milk is cool in nature and has a moistening action. But if you are yang-deficient, it genuinely doesn’t suit you. Nutrition science talks about “lactose intolerance” — some people get diarrhea after milk. This partly overlaps with the Chinese medical idea of cold-hot-warm-cool: yang-deficient people do get severe diarrhea from milk, that’s real. The ancients treated milk as a medicine and used it for its cool moistening — for esophageal problems caused by heat, using things like the Five-Juice Drink (Wu Zhi Yin) to moisten gradually. So its medicinal nature is cool.

So can you drink milk or not? It depends on the person:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: People with abundant yang qi — for example Mongolians who eat lamb and beef all day and run hot — can drink milk with no problem. But for most of us — city people who don’t move around and never get sun — milk may have an effect on us. That’s why most Chinese medicine doctors don’t recommend drinking milk every day, year-round.

Watermelon and milk in the morning, then seafood during the day — most shellfish and shelled seafood are cool in nature, some even cold — then iced drinks at night. Doctor Luo ends with one sentence: Do you think your body can stay healthy like that?

External cause two: temperature — iced drinks in summer injure the viscera

Apart from the cold-hot-warm-cool natures of food, there is an independent coordinate — temperature. Eat fewer raw-cold things; eat fewer iced things especially.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The ancients didn’t actually have much frozen food, yet women in ancient times still had lots of cold constitutions — because eating raw and cold food caused it. Modern people are something else — we have refrigerators, so much is chilled; everyone thinks cold drinks in summer are refreshing — and many people injure themselves exactly this way.

Why is iced drinks in summer the most damaging? Doctor Luo explained the body’s balancing principle:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: In summer it’s hot outside; the body surface temperature is high, pores open to sweat. To balance this, the body keeps the inside in a quiet, cool state — that’s why many Chinese medicine doctors say in summer the body is “hot outside, cool inside” — this is the viscera working hard. The body has a temperature-control center — the thermoregulatory center. Outside it’s that hot, so inside it stays relatively cool. At that moment you pour in a cold drink, making the viscera even colder — that’s when they get injured most easily.

And then there is that phrase everyone repeats — “People all over the world drink cold water; only the Chinese drink hot water.” Doctor Luo’s reply is direct:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Don’t copy them. Their ancestors didn’t have this wisdom — that’s really true. Look at the United States: when COVID-19 hit, the number of infections exploded and the death rate was very high — America has many obese people, a huge burden of metabolic diseases, diabetes, hypertension; their constitutions aren’t as good as people imagine. And us? We controlled it very well — for everyone treated with traditional Chinese medicine, the proportion that progressed to severe disease was zero. So don’t think America is better at everything — our ancestors had wisdom, and we learn from our ancestors.

Who gets hit the moment they eat something cold? People with puffy, scalloped tongues

Combining internal and external causes — who, exactly, is most likely to be injured by cold food?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: People with spleen-stomach qi deficiency and heavy dampness inside are especially vulnerable to cold qi. Someone with liver fire may eat cold food and not suffer that much. But if the spleen and stomach are usually weak — for instance from eating recklessly, or eating far too little to lose weight — then the spleen and stomach are injured; that’s the internal cause. The spleen belongs to Earth, and Earth controls Water — when the spleen and stomach weaken, dampness inside the body becomes heavy.

Such people have very characteristic tongues:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Stick out your tongue — pale, a puffy swollen tongue (pang da she), scalloped edges from tooth marks, coating spread over the whole surface, lots of saliva — that’s spleen-stomach qi deficiency with heavy dampness. Such a person eats something cold and the body is easily chilled — and the specific site is usually the spleen and stomach getting cold.

Doctor Luo backed this up with the COVID tongue pictures:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: We saw many COVID patients’ tongues white, coating like frost, snow-white — these people already had heavy dampness and qi deficiency. Wuhan’s winter was cold and gloomy, ten straight days of rain — they became easy prey. Do you see? Evil qi always comes looking for your constitution — for such people it arrives as cold evil; internal and external combine, and the external evil gets in.

So if you stick out your tongue and see puffiness, scalloped edges, full coating, lots of saliva — insufficient upright qi, heavy dampness:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Never drink cold things or eat cold things. Eat warm things — warm in medicinal nature and warm in temperature. You must consider food along these two dimensions, and only then can you gradually turn your constitution around. The root is the spleen and stomach — if you can take some medicine to tonify the spleen and stomach, regulate them, warm-tonify them, even better — we’ll get to that medicine later.

External cause three: clothing — this spring was extraordinarily cold and damp

Besides eating, there’s also getting cold from changes in outside temperature. For example, as soon as spring arrives, many women put on thin clothes and skirts — especially in the north, where mornings and evenings are still cold — and many people get chilled right at that moment.

About this year’s spring, Doctor Luo especially warned:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: This year’s climate is completely different from other years. In past springs, it warmed up quickly and people started feeling dry and hot — yang-deficient people were miserable. But this spring, the cold-dampness was extraordinarily heavy — just the other day it was snowing in Henan, and the wheat seedlings were all flattened; many parts of China got snow, and this was already April, after Qingming. The dampness was heavy, the fog was heavy; many people reported their heads feeling foggy and dizzy — this year’s spring vital energy of growth (sheng fa zhi qi) is insufficient.

The clothing traps hit young women hardest:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Many young women don’t understand how to care for their health — they dress for beauty, nothing else: low socks that bare the ankles, barefoot shoes, leggings, and cropped tops that bare the navel — all of these very easily invite cold. As for wearing pretty clothes in winter, I won’t even go into that. Especially cropped tops — the navel area is extremely vulnerable to cold.

External cause four: air conditioning — the lesson of Singapore’s 17 degrees

Air conditioning is a major source of cold. Start with the car:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: When the AC is on in a car, the air blows at three levels — up at the head, middle at the chest and abdomen, and down at the legs: three vents. The day is scorching, you’re soaked in sweat, you get in and switch the AC on full blast — three streams of wind go straight at your head, your chest and belly, and your feet. Can you take it? Never set the AC too cold. I basically don’t use the AC in my car; I drive with natural ventilation. Even when it’s so hot I have to turn it on, I close the vents and let the air blow gently to the side; once the whole car cools down, that’s enough.

Home AC and office AC need even more care. Doctor Luo told of his own experience:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I often go to Singapore to lecture. Every time I go, I’d say 80% of the time I catch a cold — first, my own upright qi isn’t that strong; second, the air conditioning really is too cold, I can’t adapt. How cold? Indoors 17 degrees Celsius, outdoors thirty-something, nearly 40. Outside you’re sweating all over; you step inside and whoosh — freezing. Parents in Singapore bring their children to see me, and 80% of the children have skin problems — all kinds of eczema. Why? The skin pores open and sweat is leaving the body; you step inside and the body surface is suddenly frozen, the fluids can’t get out, they stay trapped at the surface of the skin — of course you get all kinds of eczema.

Air conditioning — the ancients never had it; it’s a product of the last few decades — if mishandled, it’s one of the great enemies of human health. So what to do? Doctor Luo recommends the “indirect air-conditioning method”:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: For example, at night, run the AC in the bedroom first, and turn it off when you go to sleep — it’s not that hot anymore, you just sleep; or, while you sleep in the bedroom, run the AC in the living room with the door open, and let the cool air seep in gradually. It’s a bit wasteful, but not blowing directly on you is much better. And don’t set the temperature too low — not down to the teens; 25 or 26 degrees is fine — a little cool, but not excessive.

Review: whom does external cold hurt? People whose channels don’t run smoothly

After all those external causes, let’s review — the external cold washes over our body surface; who is affected?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: It’s people whose channels don’t run smoothly — blood-deficient people, people with blood stasis, people who get angry easily (qi stagnation). As long as the channels don’t run smoothly, qi and blood can’t reach the body surface to warm it, and the surface is more easily injured by cold evil. Then the cold makes the channels even more blocked, and the body starts to get sick — the cold easily goes deeper, and once it’s inside it injures more severely.

The worst outcome: “cold consumption” — a disease from Song-dynasty medical books that many modern women already have

If the cold never leaves, it’s like people slowly freezing from the outside in — it keeps affecting the circulation of qi and blood and finally pushes the body into a state the ancients described long ago — cold consumption (leng lao).

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: What does lao mean? Exhaustion — a depleted state caused by over-consumption. In the old days people said “room-exhaustion” (fang lao) — the depleted state caused by excessive sexual activity. Add the sickness radical to it — lao bing, consumption — and that’s tuberculosis. So lao is a depleted, weakened state of the body, a long-standing illness.

The Complete Good Prescriptions for Women describes “women’s cold consumption”:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The book says: cold consumption in women arises from qi and blood insufficiency and deficiency in both the interior and exterior (biao li ju xu) — the viscera aren’t flourishing, the primordial qi isn’t strong, interior and exterior are both weak; once cold is contracted, the cold evil enters the viscera and the viscera become cold. Prolonged chilling (su leng) — that is, cold accumulating over a long time — makes food undigested and creates accumulations in the abdomen — qi and blood don’t move freely, accumulations form, and slowly the qi and blood clump into masses; then cold pain below the navel; irregular periods; aching joints and bones; weak hands and feet; wasting of the flesh (ji fu lei shou) — the person starts to become skin and bones. Hence the name cold consumption — long-term cold finally pushes you into a depleted state.

Doctor Luo says many women today actually have a bit of cold-consumption state, more or less:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The viscera lack upright qi, qi and blood don’t circulate smoothly — and on top of this weak internal foundation come the bad habits: dressing too lightly, drinking and eating cold things, sitting in air conditioning every day. When the inside is already insufficient, long-term external cold attack finally pushes the body into a yang-deficient, cold-injured state — yang qi insufficient and chilled. This state affects the womb, the spleen and stomach, and other organs, and doesn’t recover quickly. A person with sufficient upright qi catches cold once and recovers; but if your upright qi was already insufficient, and external chilling has become a habit, you finally enter this pattern with no way to pull yourself out — accumulations, lumps, cold, all kinds of problems, the body growing ever weaker. This is what the ancients meant by the cold-consumption state.

Ending: once the whole story is clear, treatment has a direction

Why go through all this? Doctor Luo makes the point at the end:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: You must recognize where your yang deficiency came from. You can’t just say “I got cold” — why did you get cold and other people didn’t? You have to analyze internal and external causes and know how to treat accordingly. Once the whole chain is clear, treatment actually becomes easy.

So how do you treat it? That’s the next lecture — how yang deficiency in women is actually regulated — Doctor Luo will walk through several formulas slowly.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I spend a little time every day talking with everyone, all free, just chatting like this, sharing knowledge of Chinese medicine. If hearing it gives you insight, if it matches what your body tells you, I think that’s a good thing. You’ll surely know how to take care of yourself. Thank you for listening — see you tomorrow!

Based on Doctor Luo Dalun’s lecture series on women and cold (the overview chapter on internal and external causes; the next chapter covers treatment of yang deficiency).

What to take away

Internal causes come first. You only get cold when your own qi and blood are already running poorly. External cold and internal weakness feed each other — the Song-dynasty classic Complete Good Prescriptions for Women already said it: “wind-deficiency fatigue cold.”
If qi and blood are strong, cold can’t touch you. People with abundant qi and blood recover quickly from a blast of AC or a cold rain — the body has self-regulating ability.
Cold harms “according to where it enters.” Entering the large intestine → diarrhea at the slightest chill; entering the womb → menstrual trouble, painful periods, even childlessness.
The internal causes of feeling cold: constrained liver qi (qi stagnation), blood deficiency, blood stasis, and heavy dampness from a weak spleen-stomach. Don’t just blame the weather.
The four external causes: ① diet — food has cold/hot/warm/cool natures; watermelon in winter is “Heaven-born White Tiger Decoction”; milk is cool (not for yang-deficient people); shellfish are mostly cool; ② temperature — iced drinks in summer injure the viscera most easily; ③ clothing — bared ankles, navel and leggings invite cold, especially in a cold-damp spring; ④ air conditioning — avoid direct blowing, use the indirect method at 25–26°C.
Who is most vulnerable? Puffy tongue with scalloped edges, full coating, lots of saliva — spleen-stomach qi deficiency with heavy dampness. Such people must eat warm food in both nature and temperature.
If cold never leaves: cold consumption. Long-term chilling ends in undigested food, abdominal accumulations, cold pain below the navel, irregular periods, aching joints, weak limbs and wasting flesh — a state many modern women already partly live in. Know where your cold comes from — then treatment has a direction.