Aajonus makes an extremely sharp and emphatic distinction between what he calls true physiological stress and what modern society labels as "stress." He considers the conventional use of the word stress to be almost entirely misapplied, trivializing, and even dangerous in its misdiagnosis of what is actually a purely physiological condition.

In Aajonus's framework, true stress is the constant, unrelenting physical bombardment of the body by environmental forces, heat, cold, wind, sun, rain, temperature extremes, hunger, and the need to survive without shelter, stored food, or climate control. He repeatedly describes his own experience of living outdoors for two and a half to three and a half years on a bicycle, through deserts and mountains, through Indian tribes in the Yucatan, among Eskimos, among alligators and coyotes, and he uses that experience as his baseline for what stress actually is.

He contrasts this with what most people in modern society call stress:

For Aajonus, what people call "emotional stress" or "psychological stress" or "social stress" or "anxiety" is not stress in the physiological sense. It is instead a symptom of an underlying physiological imbalance, specifically, an excess of hormones produced for physical activity that are not being burned through exercise, combined in some cases with neurological waste products from past trauma that have accumulated and are being detoxified.

He even goes so far as to say:

And again:

Aajonus reframes the iridological concept of "stress rings", visible rings in the iris of the eye identified by iridologists, as what he calls "activity rings" or "worry circles." This reframing is intentional and philosophical:

The number of these rings in a person's iris directly corresponds to how many hours per day that person's body produces hormones for physical activity. This is a constitutional, biological fact, not a psychological failing. The rings tell Aajonus exactly how much physical activity, including exercise, a given person must perform each day to remain emotionally calm and physiologically stable.

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The primary root cause of what people experience as "stress," anxiety, irritability, and emotional volatility in Aajonus's framework is the overproduction or underutilization of hormones produced by the body for physical activity, specifically testosterone, estrogen, and adrenaline.

These hormones are designed to be burned through physical movement. If they are not burned, the body will force them to be expressed through anxiety, worry, irritability, and emotional volatility. This is not a mental health problem, it is a pure physiological necessity:

The two choices Aajonus describes are explicit and binary:

Adrenaline occupies a special place in this framework. Aajonus describes the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys, each about two joints of a little finger in size, as designed for fight or flight, which is an emergency function. All endocrine glands in his framework are emergency-response systems:

The reason people are now in a constant state of hormonal excess, with adrenaline constantly circulating, is because:

Adrenaline is produced during emotional crises, trauma, fight-or-flight responses, and prolonged fear or anxiety. When burned in muscles, as it is designed to be, adrenaline is utilized appropriately. But when it circulates without being burned through physical activity, it creates internal toxicity:

This means that even appropriate adrenaline release during trauma creates toxins that must be processed through diet and physical activity.

Aajonus specifically mentions the concept of "old adrenaline" being detoxified as a secondary source of anxiety:

This means that even without a current stressor, a person can experience anxiety and irritability purely from the body's process of detoxifying previously stored, excess adrenaline. The solution is the same: exercise, specific diet, and specific binding foods.

Aajonus references extensively the research of Elnora Van Winkle, a neuroscientist who worked at Milhauser Laboratories at New York University (also referred to as Columbia University Medical Center and New York City Medical Center in different passages) for 47 to 52 years. She catalogued every chemical and compound in the brain and nervous system. She wrote a paper called "The Biology of Emotions", both a highly technical version and a layman's version, both available on the internet.

Van Winkle's key finding as Aajonus applies it:

When the body produces hormones during trauma, emotional upset, or extreme stress, those hormones leave behind waste products, byproducts, that store in the body just like any other toxin. These byproducts do not leave the body easily. They accumulate in storage. Later, when the body begins to detoxify them, the person re-experiences the same emotional state that originally generated them, even when there is no current external cause for that emotion:

Aajonus extends this with a specific case study Van Winkle described to him: A woman was inexplicably angry at her husband, who had done nothing wrong. Van Winkle said: sit down, take a nap, and when you wake up, tell me what you remember or experience. The woman did, and upon waking she remembered an event from childhood in which her father had betrayed her, promised something to her and given it to her sister instead. This single event had generated two years of resentment toward her father as a child. The byproducts of those two years of emotional hormonal production had stored in her body. When they began detoxifying, they triggered the same emotional response, and because the target was no longer her father, the response was being directed at her husband, who was also male.

Aajonus adds:

He also observed this in himself during his own years of trauma, growing up in a violent household, with a brother who tormented him from birth until age 15.5, a father who popped his eardrums and drove a golf club into his skull, and later living outdoors for years in extreme conditions, functioning as an autistic person who could not use language until age 22:

Aajonus is emphatic that doctors attributing disease to "stress" are missing the actual causal agent:

This is a fundamental terrain theory position: the toxins in the environment, in food, in water, in air, and from radio waves and radiation, are what drive the body into emergency-hormone-producing states. The so-called "stress response" is actually the body's response to continuous toxic loading:

When stress, particularly prolonged emotional stress in the conventional sense, such as Aajonus experienced growing up, overtaxes the nervous and glandular systems, actual physiological imbalances result. These include:

• Hypoglycemia
• Diabetes
• Thinning of neural membranes
• Thyroid malfunction

He writes explicitly

This is central to his view: no amount of talk therapy or psychological intervention will resolve stress-based conditions unless the physical body, the nervous system, the glands, the gut, is repaired through raw food.

Even when the stress is genuinely physical, extreme cold, heat, wind, sun exposure, Aajonus acknowledges it does deplete nutrients and can cause degeneration. He experienced this himself as a fruitarian living outdoors:

During this period he dwindled from normal weight down to 96 pounds, at a time when he is now 176 pounds. He was living as a raw fruitarian, eating fruits, avocados, and up to seven pounds of nuts per day, and none of it was digesting or nourishing him in the face of that level of physical environmental stress.

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Stress in Aajonus's framework sits primarily in multiple interconnected principles:

Root Cause / Terrain Theory: The fundamental position that environmental toxins, not germs or mental states, drive the hormonal emergency responses mislabeled as "stress."

How to Live: The daily management of activity rings, exercise protocols, singing, sex, diet modifications for stress hormones, and the importance of sunlight and physical contact with nature.

Detoxification: The process by which stored neurological waste products from past trauma are released, causing temporary re-experiencing of emotional states, this is a detox event, not a psychological relapse.

Raw Food / How to Eat: The specific dietary interventions, raw meat during trauma recovery, raw cream for immediate relaxation, nut formulas to bind neurological byproducts, cooked starch with raw fat, vegetable juice, eggs, that support the nervous system under stress.

Cooked Food: Cooked and processed foods as drivers of hormonal imbalance, neurological toxicity, and the states that are mislabeled as stress.

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Aajonus completely reframes anxiety not as a psychological condition but as a physiological signal:

The anxiety is the body's way of forcing the expression of hormones that were built for physical expenditure. If the person will not exercise, the hormones will be spent through the emotional system instead, through worry, irritability, relational conflict, and volatile behavior.

He also clarifies that irritability specifically can be addressed through diet:

For thin people who are pale, anxious, and irritable, what he describes as "type A" or "over-achiever" types, he begins them on fish before red meat, to alkalinize the system first, then transitions to red meat.

Aajonus makes an absolute distinction between anxiety and depression:

When a person is inexplicably angry, upset, or emotionally reactive without an external cause, Aajonus interprets this as the body detoxifying stored neurological byproducts from past trauma. This is a detox event:

Aajonus observes that modern humans, himself included when he was sick, are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature changes, wind, cold, and sun, compared to what healthy animals and indigenous peoples can withstand. He uses Eskimos who needed only one layer of fur to stay warm in extreme Arctic conditions as his baseline for what healthy humans should be capable of:

This hypersensitivity is itself a symptom of poor health and nutritional deficiency, it is not a normal human condition.

Aajonus actually frames crying as beneficial because of what it does to stored neurological proteins:

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This is the fastest food-based intervention for an acute stress state. Raw cream buffers the nervous system and slows hormonal activity.

He specifically recommends fish when someone has gone through an acute emotional crisis or trauma:

Fish is used first for those who are thin, pale, anxious, and irritable, in order to alkalinize the system. Then red meat can be introduced once the system is more alkaline.

For those who need red meat constitutionally, people with weak red blood cells, he transitions from fish and poultry toward red meat, but carefully.

This is listed as a standard protocol element alongside raw meat and raw cream.

The nut formula is Aajonus's primary food technology for binding and removing the stored neurological waste products from past trauma that are causing emotional volatility, irritability, and stress-like states:

The nut formula as described: - Nuts (specifically providing starch from the nut) - Combined with fat and eggs and honey to neutralize the phytic acid

He explains why nuts are included even though he does not generally advocate nuts as a digestive food:

The starch in the nuts is the operative ingredient, it binds with the neurological byproducts of stress hormones:

In his first book (published 1997, written through 1996), Aajonus included cooked starch with raw fat as a formula for binding neurological waste products. He has since refined this toward the nut formula, but the original formula was:

The fat, raw fat, is essential even in the cooked starch version, to prevent the starch from doing harm on its own. The ratio is equal amounts of raw fat to cooked starch.

Eating in the morning to ensure the body makes glycogen, described as brain fuel and nervous system fuel, is part of the stress-prevention protocol. The process Aajonus describes:

• Protein source (pyruvate) → emits glucagon → creates pyruvate carbohydrates → generates glycogen
• Advanced glycation concentration at 70%, reaching 112% with proper diet
• No sugar overload → brain and nervous system fluid stays thin and steady

This keeps the nervous system stable and prevents the kind of blood sugar swings that lead to stress vulnerability, depression, irritability, and manic behavior. He personally experienced all of these effects:

When the stress state manifests as depression rather than anxiety:

The bacteria in high meat are already broken down into the finite molecules that feed the brain and nervous system directly, without needing gut bacteria to process them first.

For physical stress situations, athletic competition, strenuous work, outdoor exposure, Aajonus developed a sport drink that includes:

The formula maintains electrolyte levels and prevents the dehydration and energy crashes that competitors experience when drinking plain water. Competitors not using the formula were "chugging down half gallons and gallons of water, weakening."

Aajonus specifically notes that avocados can contribute to calming, though he warns that vegetarians who rely heavily on them without adequate protein will become "weakly calm", calm from debilitation rather than from genuine health.

Without the nut formula or cooked starch-with-fat protocol during periods of neurological detox:

The person will experience the full emotional re-experience of the original trauma, potentially displacing it onto current relationships and people who have no connection to the original cause.

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The case Van Winkle described, of a woman detoxifying two years of resentment toward her father, took eight weeks to fully clear:

This is offered as a reference point for the duration of detox from a significant emotional trauma accumulation. The process is faster if supported with the nut formula, which binds the byproducts and prevents the worst of the emotional re-experiencing.

Aajonus documents his own extreme recovery from living in the elements as a malnourished fruitarian (96 pounds) to functional health (176 pounds at the time of speaking), but this required not only going off the road and stopping the extreme physical environmental stress, but also transitioning from fruitarian to raw meat eating:

The number of activity rings determines the ongoing daily maintenance protocol indefinitely, not just during recovery. This is a constitutional fact:

• 2 stress rings: 45 minutes of exercise per day
• 4 or 5 stress rings: 1.5 hours of exercise per day
• 6-7 stress rings: Up to 3 hours per day
• 7-14 stress rings: Full-time athlete level; need physically demanding job or training program for most of the day

The Primal Diet Newsletter gives a ratio of 1 activity ring = 1 hour of activity or ½ hour of exercise daily.

For people who are too fatigued, too ill, or in too much pain to exercise:

Sex is ranked second:

These alternatives allow the body to burn activity hormones through different channels when conventional exercise is not possible. Opera singers are offered as physical evidence, Aajonus notes he does not know a working opera singer who is thin, because singing burns so many nutrients and so much hormonal energy.

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