What if the first step in healing wasn’t a pill, a treatment, or a diagnosis—but dinner?
In this deliciously nourishing conversation we sit down with Andrew Sterman, a practitioner of tai qi and nutritional arts, lifelong musician, and author of Diet is Medicine for Home Cooks and Other Healers. We discuss how our health is shaped not only by what we eat—but how we live, digest, feel, and listen.
Andrew shares how a simple bowl of carrot-ginger soup can profoundly shift the nausea in early pregnancy, and how learning to say “no” to particular foods might unlock better digestion. He takes us through the lived reality of dietary change—from resistance to revelation—and reminds us that health isn’t just delivered in the clinic; it’s built at home.
From his intertwined career as a touring musician and Chinese medicine practitioner, Andrew weaves together insights on energy, food therapy, the role of emotions in healing, and how music and medicine are both about tuning what’s gone off-key.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- Digestion as the foundation of health
- Simplicity and food tradition as healing tools
- How dietary change evolves over time
- Food as daily, accessible medicine
- East vs West: Patient responsibility in healing
- Orthorexia, fragility, and modern food confusion
- Spiritual roots of food and mindful eating
- Music and art as forms of medicine
- Healing the broken vs seeing wholeness
- Ultra-processed food and its hidden impact
- Limits of Western research in real-life healing
- Practitioners hold steadiness as patients unravel
- Self-cultivation over tribal thinking
- Saving endangered branches of Chinese medicine
Individuals do very well once they steer away from what has been holding them back, on any level. The medicine then feels elegant and somehow simple. The vast complexities of the medicine can be seen as a great library of brilliant simplicities.
Andrew Sterman, Author, Musician
After repeated childhood incidences of what some may call mystical experiences, Andrew began searching for the ground of such experience by studying deeply in music and art, meditation, philosophy-psychology, tai chi, qigong, and in classical Chinese medicine. Perhaps because he found the ground of experience in all of these, without disappointment, Andrew’s teaching style is to welcome people as they are, and inspire everyone to use practices in diet, qigong, or spirit work to overcome blockages without self-judgment. We don’t need to become “better” people, we just need to live with true ease. The way to personal and social healing is through life’s essentials: eating, breathing, moving, and cultivating our perception. The details we can all learn; the essence is a feeling.
Andrew has studied extensively with Chinese medicine master Jeffrey Yuen, Tibetan Dzogchen master Namkhai Norbu, natural cooking innovator Annemarie Colbin, and many others. He teaches mind-body-artistry at the New School University College of Performing Arts in New York City, and is certified to teach Chinese medicine dietary practice for acupuncturist CEU’s. Andrew remains an active musician, touring internationally with the Philip Glass Ensemble, which he also manages. Andrew sees private clients over video connection and in person in New York, has two adult children, and lives with acupuncturist/author/teacher Ann Cecil-Sterman.
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