Tai Chi and Taoism are much more than exercise routines and the philosophy behind them. Practitioners that truly want to get all of the benefits of each consider them to be a way of life. The chi develops a great deal of its power from the way that you live your life. One testament to this fact is the large number of long lived Taoists in the world. Some have been documented to have lived to 130 years. This ability is seen by some to be a quest for immortality but in fact that Taoists are simply not terribly concerned with how long they live and eliminate a great deal of stress.

The core philosophy of Taoist health practices is to live each day fully and actively, with complete attention to your connection. This keeps us flexible, strong and healthy. This is the first secret of Taoist health practices. The second secret should be obvious to most westerns because it fits the saying "garbage in, garbage out". Taoist diets are sometimes more complex that western but without a healthy diet. The secret to a healthy diet is of course balance. Taoist diets change over time to adjust to the body's changing needs. Our bodies are essentially furnaces that burn off foods by converting them to energy. Eating too much refined sugar for instance will cause the body to burn hotter and become out of balance. Since increased heat requires increased oxygen from the blood it is necessary to produce antioxidants, which slows the burn rate in the cells.

Foods such as green tea, bok, Choy, cabbage, yogurt, brown rice and plums are excellent foods for maintaining a Taoist health diet. Taoists will eat meat but not meat that was raised or killed in inhumane conditions and then only in modest amounts, usually preferring fish or chicken because they are so much easier for the body to process. The problem is that most meat that is processed in the Western world has used inhumane processes at some point, making it much harder to find the proper meats.
The entire purpose of Taoist health practices is to keep the body into balance by maintaining the body's internal energies so that these energies can be manipulated when practicing Tai Chi or Qigong. When we live each day fully, maintain our bodies with the proper nutrients in the proper amounts and maintain our set practices we automatically increase not only the energy in our body the we learn to control it to our benefit.