Exercise

Aajonus used iridology as his primary diagnostic tool for determining an individual's required activity level. The activity rings, visible as concentric circles within the iris, correspond in his framework to the quantity of hormones the body produces each day for physical movement. He stated that one activity ring corresponds to approximately one hour of activity per day, or half an hour of dedicated exercise.

People with zero activity rings, as he said he had, required no deliberate exercise at all. People with three to five rings, which he described as the average range, needed approximately three to five hours of activity daily, though this did not have to mean structured exercise. For a mother engaged in household tasks, childcare, cooking, and movement throughout the day, that threshold could be met without ever entering a gym. People with seven to fourteen activity rings were in the range he associated with athletes, and he was unambiguous that people in this range needed to be physically active eight to ten hours a day, or perform several hours of intense, concentrated exercise each day to achieve the same effect.

He described the choice facing high-ring individuals every day in binary terms: anxiety or activity. He used the image of two doors, and he said that if a person produced those hormones and did not burn them through movement, the body would discharge them emotionally, producing restlessness, irritability, an inability to sustain satisfying relationships, and a chronic state of dissatisfaction that no amount of conversation or therapy could resolve. He noted that athletes who go on spring break and stop training often end up in fights, in bars, beating their partners, precisely because nobody had told them that the hormones requiring physical output do not take a holiday when the team schedule does. A day off from team practice was not, in his view, a day off from exercise for someone with seven to fourteen activity rings.

The hormones Aajonus most frequently cited in connection with exercise necessity were estrogen, adrenaline, and testosterone. He said that these hormones, when produced in quantity, force the body toward physical activity. When a person with high production of these hormones does not exercise, the hormones do not simply dissipate; they are redirected into emotional channels. He described many skinny men and women who were chronically dissatisfied, unable to be happy in relationships, always looking for something they could not name, and he attributed this pattern almost entirely to the failure to burn physical activity hormones through movement.

He was specific about adrenaline in relation to his own situation. He said his body did not produce significant adrenaline for physical activity. He described how, when he did undergo an extended exercise program in the late 1970s, he had to force himself, because the physiological drive that makes exercise feel natural or rewarding simply was not present for him. He said the only hormone he produced in any quantity for physical activity was testosterone, and only in response to sexual attraction.

For people with anxiety that they believed had no cause, he recommended first examining whether they had been meeting their activity requirement. He stated that ninety percent of anxiety is connected to not exercising when the body produces hormones requiring physical output.

One of the more specific and repeated claims Aajonus made about exercise concerned singing, particularly operatic or controlled tonal singing. He said that twenty minutes of singing was equivalent to one hour on a treadmill, and he described singing as the most strenuous exercise the human body can perform. His reasoning was that singing requires simultaneous and precise control of the throat muscles, the mouth aperture, the diaphragm, the chest, the pitch, the tone, and the breath, and that this coordination engages the brain and the full respiratory and musculoskeletal systems in a way that no other activity matches.

He used the physical appearance of opera singers as evidence. He pointed out that a truly skinny opera singer essentially cannot exist at the professional level because the fat and energy demands of producing sustained operatic sound are so high. He contrasted this with rock performers like Mick Jagger, who he described as eating eight meals a day and still unable to maintain body weight because he was simultaneously singing and performing physical choreography with fourteen activity rings' worth of hormonal demand. Singing was, in Aajonus's view, one of the most complete and accessible forms of exercise for people who needed to discharge activity hormones but were unable to do vigorous physical work, and he particularly recommended it for people whose physical condition, illness, or circumstances made conventional exercise impossible.

He phrased it as not needing to be good at it. The requirement was to learn to breathe and mobilize the voice, to produce tones and control pitch, and that alone would discharge the hormonal energy built up each day for physical activity.

A central demonstration Aajonus returned to repeatedly was the condition of his own body as evidence that raw food, especially raw meat and raw fat, could build and sustain muscle mass and physical strength without any exercise program. He described his muscles as solid and flexible simultaneously, contrasting them with the perpetually rigid muscles of bodybuilders who consumed protein powders and cooked protein, whose tissue was dense but stiff and whose muscle would begin to sag and melt within six months of stopping training.

He cited an incident at a medical cardiac gymnasium where researchers put him through a battery of exercise machine tests despite his not having worked out since 1979. On leg press machines he reached 210 pounds before showing strain at one point in the account, and 230 to 280 pounds in other described sessions. On the bench press he reached 196 pounds. On foot exercises his blood pressure went up to 253 without cardiac stress. The attending physician compared his results to those of a champion weightlifter who trained continuously, and told him the weightlifter did not perform as well. His heart rate normalized within three minutes of stopping exertion. He noted that the physicians and researchers were consistently astonished by his results given that he had done no exercise in over two decades.

He also described lifting a 280-pound metal art sculpture at a gallery, having picked it up reflexively out of curiosity, not realizing what it weighed, and lifting it without difficulty. The gallery attendant came running and told him the weight only after he had already set it back down.

He connected the mechanism of muscle quality directly to fat consumption. He explained that when eighty to ninety percent of dietary fat is consumed alongside meat, specifically beef, buffalo, lamb, chicken, turkey, fowl, or seafood, the fat stores throughout the muscles rather than accumulating subcutaneously. This gives the muscles both their density and their energy reserve. He stated he was carrying approximately twenty-two to twenty-seven percent body fat despite appearing lean, and attributed this to the fat-with-meat eating pattern, which distributed fat throughout the muscular tissue rather than pooling it visibly around the abdomen or elsewhere.

He was explicit that two and a half times more energy is derived from fat than from carbohydrates or proteins. When the body uses pure fat for energy, including for muscle function, it has 2.5 times the energy and endurance compared to when energy is derived from carbohydrate or protein converted into acetate or acetone. He used this to explain why weightlifters in the Olympics carry significant body fat, why sumo wrestlers are built as they are, and why you cannot have a truly skinny weightlifter. The fat is the energy source, not an aesthetic defect.

He described a client named Tony Plan who had done significant physical training and then stopped, and who maintained his muscular development without working out because of his raw meat consumption. He summarized the principle: once you reach a certain muscular development on raw meat, the muscle does not simply dissolve when you stop training the way it does on cooked protein or protein powder supplementation.

Aajonus described one extended period of deliberate exercise in his own life, beginning when he was eating raw meat for the first time, roughly from late 1977 through April 1979. He had spent years previously unable to participate in any sport or physical activity due to illness, weakness, and poor coordination. After beginning raw meat consumption and beginning to recover, he found himself with a kind of physical capacity he had never experienced and described wanting to explore it, which led him to begin running.

His first attempt to run ended within a block. Within a month he was running a mile. Within three months he was running five miles. Within six months he was running thirteen miles a day. He ran barefoot on gravel at Hollywood High School and on the Hollywood Track. He described running backwards in sprints, sideways, and in patterns that astonished onlookers who were sprinting forward while he maintained their pace or exceeded it going in reverse. His heart rate returned to normal within three minutes of stopping, which he noted again as a benchmark repeated across multiple accounts.

During that same period he was doing 250 push-ups a day with his feet elevated significantly off the ground, going all the way down until his cheek or nose touched the floor rather than stopping partway as he observed most people doing. He was also doing fifty to one hundred handstand push-ups against a wall daily, and approximately thirty chin-ups at a time without stopping, going through full extension on each repetition. He climbed Mount Chastain barefoot in snow during this period.

He described having to force himself through this exercise program because his body did not produce the adrenaline that makes exercise feel naturally rewarding. He said all of his glands produced well except the ones responsible for physical activity hormones. His sexual glands at the time overproduced, and he described masturbating five times a day, but the adrenaline pump required for athletic motivation was never present. He had to impose the discipline consciously. He said he was sleeping heavily during the first six months of that period, often crashing for two to two and a half hours after exercise sessions.

He ended the program in April 1979 and described it as his last formal exercise regimen, aside from six weeks of water rehabilitation he performed on his leg after an injury in later years. He said at the time he decided that he could be using his brain and creativity instead, that the intellectual and artistic life excited him more than the athletic one, and that without the hormonal drive, maintaining an exercise program was something he had to continually override his natural inclinations to sustain.

Aajonus described one extended protocol of exercise specifically for healing a severely injured leg. After sustaining an injury that destroyed the knee and required a cast, he refused surgery and undertook rehabilitation through water-based movement. He was able to use a hotel pool in Antigua because he convinced the owner to stop adding chlorine for five or six days. In the pool, with the water at chest height, he walked with essentially no weight on the joint, performing the motion of walking without gravitational load on the healing structures.

When algae began growing in the chlorine-free pool and the hotel owner stopped cooperating, he moved across the street to the ocean. He would go into the ocean on crutches, throw the crutches back to shore once he reached sufficient depth, and walk a mile in each direction twice daily, morning and evening, using the water's buoyancy to reduce the weight on the leg while still generating the full range of motion. Within six weeks he was walking without crutches. Within three months he was on the island of Antigua and ran a quarter of a mile at a fast sprint.

He described the knee as still not returning completely to full flexion at the time of the workshop, but said he expected it would in another couple of years. He noted that he had not had a formal exercise program since 1979 except for those six weeks of water rehabilitation.

Aajonus made a specific and counterintuitive point about exercise and detoxification. He noted that most people assume heavy sweating during exercise helps the body expel stored cooked fats and similar toxic lipids from the tissues, but he said this is largely ineffective because body temperature during exercise, even vigorous sweating exercise, does not exceed 100.2 degrees Fahrenheit. He said most bodies will not exceed 99.6 degrees even during intensive sweating exercise. These temperatures are insufficient to melt the waxy, plastic cooked fats that accumulate in the lymphatic system and connective tissue, because those substances require higher temperatures to become fluid.

He contrasted this with the hot bath protocol, in which water heated to a specific temperature penetrates the skin and raises internal tissue temperature sufficiently to begin melting those deposits. He recommended drinking a preparation of pineapple, coconut cream, and animal fat before or immediately upon entering the hot bath to provide circulating fats that would keep the melted material fluid as it moved through the lymphatic system. After the bath, when the body had cooled somewhat, he recommended a slow walk of thirty to forty-five minutes in warm, layered clothing to maintain circulation and prevent the melted material from re-hardening as the body temperature dropped. He was explicit that running or jogging was neither required nor advisable after a long hot bath; a slow walk was sufficient. The purpose of the walk was circulatory maintenance rather than exertion.

He said that doing this bath and walk protocol once or twice a week over years would gradually open lymphatic channels that had been blocked by hardened cooked fat deposits. He used this to explain why exercise alone, despite producing perspiration, was not an adequate detoxification mechanism for people carrying large burdens of previously stored cooked-food fats.

Aajonus described multiple athletes who came to him or whom he advised, and he consistently positioned the raw diet as dramatically improving athletic capacity, recovery, and longevity.

He described a fifty-nine-year-old martial artist who had come to him two years before a particular workshop, whose primary training involved jump roping. This man jumped rope on Monday for 2,700 jumps in approximately thirty minutes, on Wednesday for 7,200 jumps in forty-five minutes, and on Saturday for 12,400 jumps in one hour, continuously without stopping. Aajonus tracked his cardiac and performance data after the diet transition and described measurable improvements.

He described a marathon runner in New York City who showed significant improvement after three and a half years on the diet.

He described Walker Kehrer, the number one high school tennis champion in the United States, who had asthma when first brought to Aajonus at eight years old, and who achieved his athletic rank on the raw diet.

He recommended for athletes, or for anyone engaged in high-output physical activity, eating heavily the day before and the day of intense exertion. He specifically mentioned fowl, red meat, seafood, and large quantities of fat. He said that for activities like soccer or other high-end sports, finishing eating at least twenty minutes before the activity was advisable.

For managing lactic acid buildup and post-exercise soreness, he described his personal protocol from a period of heavy hiking and physical labor in the Philippines, cutting through jungle with a machete, climbing, and other sustained exertion. He said that eating half a banana with the equivalent of a stick of butter, approximately eight tablespoons, was sufficient to prevent all muscle soreness and allow sustained heavy activity day after day. He said the first day he did not use the banana and butter combination he was sore, and after beginning it he had no soreness through continuous days of intense work.

He also noted that for athletes who work out, consuming tomatoes with cream provided significant strength and hydration benefits, reducing the desire to drink large quantities of water while increasing strength and energy output.

He noted that people on the raw diet with even a few activity rings can produce a degree of energy and athletic output exceeding that of people with more activity rings who are not on the diet.

Aajonus described the relationship between food and exercise in terms of the body's energy production hierarchy. The citric acid cycle, he said, is approximately eighty percent fat-derived, fifteen percent protein in the form of pyruvate, and five percent carbohydrate. Pure dietary fat produces 2.5 times more energy than fats synthesized by the body from carbohydrates or proteins. This is why, he said, you cannot have a skinny weightlifter who actually lifts heavy, and why opera singers cannot be genuinely thin at the professional level.

He described his own weight fluctuations between his sedentary life in the United States and his active periods in Thailand, the Philippines, and Asia, where he climbed mountains, rode horses, herded cattle, shoveled, hoed, swam daily, and performed sustained physical labor. During those periods he went from a thirty-seven inch waist to a thirty inch waist, losing roughly forty pounds over four months of heavy activity on a restricted diet. When he returned to his sedentary life and resumed his full raw diet including large quantities of fat and meat, he rebuilt back up to his heavier weight. He maintained three wardrobes, one at each location, because the size differential was large enough that clothes for one weight did not fit the other.

He described needing to be at approximately thirteen to fifteen percent of body weight in fat to maintain stable health and homeostasis. He personally preferred to be fatter than that baseline and described twenty-two to twenty-seven percent body fat as his comfortable range.

Aajonus consistently emphasized that people should only engage in forms of exercise they genuinely enjoy. He described his own experience of forcing himself through push-ups, handstands, and running as ultimately unsustainable because the intrinsic motivation was absent. He said he loved swimming, loved dancing, loved certain kinds of physical work on his land, but had no interest in exercise performed purely as exercise. He said he loved work but hated exercise when exercise was the point of the activity.

He mentioned dancing specifically as something that engaged him completely when music came on, describing his experience at a small tribal gathering in the Philippines where the music took over his body entirely. He described sex as the only form of physical exertion that consistently motivated him. He named these not as universal prescriptions but as illustrations of the principle that the form of exercise matters, that if a person dreads an activity, they will not sustain it, and that finding a form of movement that feels natural and desirable is more important than following a prescribed regimen.

He mentioned hatha yoga postures as appropriate for people who feel physical tightness but do not want strenuous exercise, describing yoga as suitable for stretching when the body is tight but the motivation for intense activity is absent.

Aajonus placed breathing exercises within the category of exercise and described proper breathing as very often the most important exercise a person can do. He said breathing exercises increase both oxygen and carbon dioxide utilization, and that increasing the efficient use of these gases increases the health of both body and mind. He described this as a form of exercise distinct from cardiovascular or resistance training but potentially more fundamental in its effects.

During his own period of running, he described breathing slowly and steadily regardless of exertion level, keeping the breathing slow in and out while exercising, as a key reason his performance exceeded people who trained four and five times a week. He contrasted this deliberately controlled breathing with the rapid shallow breathing most exercising people default to.

Across multiple transcripts Aajonus stated the formula consistently: one activity ring equals one hour of activity per day, or half an hour of exercise. He distinguished between activity, meaning all physical movement including making the bed, cooking, walking to the car, lifting chairs, and carrying things through the day, and exercise, meaning deliberate physical exertion. Exercise counted as double. He gave the example that if a person has seven activity rings and exercises for one hour, they only need five additional hours of ordinary activity that day rather than six, because the hour of exercise substitutes for two hours of ordinary activity.

Athletes with seven to fourteen rings need to be active seven to fourteen hours per day at minimum. People with three to four rings need three to four or five hours of ordinary activity. He noted that a mother engaged in active childcare and household management easily meets the three to five hour threshold without any formal exercise.

He said the determination of how much ring-associated activity one has should be done by looking in the iris and counting the rings visible around the pupil, and that people could do this themselves with sufficient attention.

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