Fasting

Aajonus documented several extended fasts he undertook personally, all of which occurred before he developed the Primal Diet and during a period when he was severely ill, suicidal, and searching for a way to die or heal. When living near the Salton Sea in the desert below Palm Springs, on land he described as an old Indian burial ground, he began fasting on water with the explicit intention of dying. He drank half a gallon to a gallon of water per day and performed enemas to manage headaches from retained fecal matter. He described growing progressively weaker over the ten to twelve days he was there, becoming so debilitated that even standing up too quickly would drop him into a low blood sugar crisis. He had to move in slow motion to avoid passing out.

His formal extended fasts included one of 37 days on water alone, one of 42 days on urine, and a 45-day fast. He stated that every one of these required two years to recover from. The 45-day fast was notable in comparison to an earlier period when he fasted and went down to 123 pounds, from which he said it took two and a half years to recover rather than the two years the later fasts required. He presented these figures as evidence that even slight improvements in fasting practice did not make the fundamental problem disappear.

The physical aftermath of these fasts was vivid in his descriptions. For months following each fast, he could not stand up quickly without losing blood sugar stability and blacking out completely, falling to the floor, losing consciousness, and waking later on the ground. He described having to sit or get down to the floor immediately whenever the dizziness began. This prolonged blood sugar instability was the residual damage from the red blood cell loss sustained during the fast, and it represented one of the clearest clinical demonstrations he could offer of the long-term cost of fasting.

One of the most specific and frequently repeated claims Aajonus made about fasting was the five-hour threshold for red blood cell cannibalism. He stated that if a person does not eat within five hours, the protein level in the blood drops to a point where red blood cells begin consuming other red blood cells for protein. This is not a condition that affects only thin or malnourished people; he explicitly stated that it affects everyone, including people who are significantly overweight.

The reasoning he offered was that the bloodstream has its own protein requirements that cannot be met by drawing on fat stores or muscle tissue in the same way that red blood cells need circulating protein from food. When that circulating protein is absent, the blood cells begin to self-cannibalize, and the effect compounds over time. One night of not eating, he said, costs 24 to 36 hours of red blood cell reproduction to correct. A dry fast, meaning no food and no water, costs three days of red blood cell reproduction time per day fasted.

This is why he recommended that people eat during the night, waking to eat if necessary. He advised hyperactive people who wake after five hours to eat something at that point rather than try to sleep through it. He described setting an alarm for three hours into sleep for hyperactive people who could not go back to sleep after eating, so that they would eat at the three-hour mark, giving them five more hours to sleep before needing to eat again.

Aajonus described the physiological cascade during fasting in considerable detail. The body, lacking incoming protein from food, draws first from the bloodstream, then from other bodily tissues. Red blood cells begin consuming other red blood cells. The body starts eating its own liver. The progression, he said, is one of accelerating anemia, because every red blood cell lost to cannibalism reduces the total red blood cell count and the body's capacity to carry oxygen and nutrients.

He compared this to a situation where one person at a table, being hungry, simply eats the person sitting next to them. The consequence is a kind of vegetarian-type anemia, the same kind he observed in people on plant-based diets with no animal protein. The rapid weight loss associated with fasting, which many practitioners present as the goal, he reframed as the visible sign of this tissue destruction: a person is not losing stored waste or excess tissue cleanly, they are losing the structural components of their blood and organs.

Extended water-only fasting also produced extreme blood sugar instability in his personal experience. He described the blood sugar rising abnormally and then crashing, creating cycles of near-diabetic hyperglycemia followed by sudden hypoglycemic collapse. Even standing up could trigger a blackout after extended fasting.

In one of the more specific observations in the source material, Aajonus described a comparison he either conducted or observed between people fasting on water alone and people fasting on urine alone. In a 30 to 31-day comparison, the people who drank only water became severely anemic, extremely weak, and developed chronic fatigue by the end of the period. The people who drank only urine maintained approximately one third more body weight than the water-only group, did not experience the same level of fatigue, and did not develop the ringing in the ears or the high blood sugar problems.

He explained this difference by noting that urine is largely composed of red blood cells with a small amount of ammonia. It is, in his framing, a way of recycling the protein, vitamins, and other nutrients the body has already processed. He noted that in India, people who could not access meat were told to drink urine because it recycles the body's own nutrients and allows the blood to remain richer in usable compounds. Despite this relative advantage over water fasting, he did not recommend urine fasting. His fasting on urine for 42 days still required two years of recovery, making it damaging even if it was somewhat less catastrophic than water fasting.

Aajonus was specific that what many practitioners call a juice fast is not a fast at all. He called it a juice feast, using the word deliberately to distinguish it from a true fast. The same terminology applied to egg-based protocols: he called those egg feasts. He did not present this purely as a semantic correction; the distinction carried practical meaning because it clarified what the body was actually doing during each approach.

A juice feast still provides carbohydrates and some nutrients but contains no protein. Without protein, the body will still begin consuming its own red blood cells after five hours, and will also begin digesting the liver and other protein-rich organs. A juice fast therefore does not avoid the cannibalistic dynamic; it only adds sugars and some minerals while the destruction continues.

An egg feast, which he described as the closest thing to an acceptable fasting protocol, involves eating one egg every five hours. He stated explicitly that this is "not really a fast, it's an egg feast," but it is the approach he would use if someone was committed to doing something like a fast. The egg provides just enough protein to interrupt the five-hour cannibalism cycle without burdening digestion significantly, since eggs digest in approximately 27 minutes.

Aajonus addressed the Natural Hygiene tradition directly when asked about prominent proponents of therapeutic fasting such as Herbert Shelton, Arnold Ehret, and T.C. Fry. The questioner noted that these figures had helped and healed thousands of patients and appeared to do well themselves, combining fruit fasts with lifelong diets of raw green vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds. His response did not dispute that they helped patients in some cases, but he described what he observed of their personal conditions.

He stated that anyone who knew these individuals personally would have found them difficult to be around. They were hyperactive, impatient, frequently irritable, and sometimes scattered in their thinking. He attributed these characteristics directly to the absence of fat in their bodies, which he said prevented natural relaxation, and to excessive sugar in their systems, which over-excited the nervous system. He also stated that all of them had forms of osteo-degeneration. The visible productivity and apparent health of these figures, in his reading, masked the progressive physiological deterioration that a high-fruit, high-sugar, no-animal-fat diet produces over time.

Although Aajonus rejected fasting categorically, he described a weight loss protocol that shares structural features with intermittent or modified fasting while avoiding the protein-deprivation problem. This protocol involves alternating between juice and eggs, or juice and small amounts of meat, waiting until genuinely hungry before eating again each time.

The protocol works as follows: the person drinks vegetable juice, waits until very hungry, then sucks an egg or eats a golf-ball to egg-sized amount of meat. They wait again until very hungry and repeat the cycle. The format varies by individual: some people alternate one day of juice-egg cycles with one day of juice-meat cycles; others do two consecutive days of juice-meat and one day of juice-egg; others do two days of juice-egg and two days of juice-meat. He advised having a glass of milk every four days if a person felt destabilized or unwell during the protocol.

He explicitly distinguished this from fasting. The person is eating protein at each cycle. They are not going without protein for extended periods. Crucially, the instruction is to wait until very hungry but not to wait until the brain stops functioning or the body begins to shake; those signs indicate the person has gone too long. He described waiting until hungry in the stomach, not starving in the body, as the correct calibration point.

Milk was to be limited, not absent: a small amount every two to four days was permitted for people who felt imbalanced. Cream and other dairy were generally excluded from the weight loss protocol to keep fat intake lower and allow the body to access its own stored fat, while protein continued to come in regularly to prevent the cannibalistic dynamic.

On the topic of meat-only eating, which some frameworks describe as a form of carnivore fasting or extended meat-only periods, Aajonus took a clear position: fasting on meat is not fasting, it is feasting. He found this approach was working in situations he could not deny, and began recommending cutting out most fruit and reducing carbohydrates significantly. He described this as working incredibly well in most situations. The person eats nothing but meat and drinks water. Because protein is continuously provided, the red blood cell cannibalism cycle does not occur, and the body is not destroying its own structural components.

One of the more unusual and specific recommendations Aajonus made was to eat during the night, which directly counters the conventional advice to fast from the last meal of the day until breakfast the next morning. He stated that one night of not eating costs 24 to 36 hours of red blood cell reproduction capacity. The reasoning is identical to his broader anti-fasting argument: the body cannot go even a standard overnight period without beginning to cannibalize its own protein stores.

He advised eating in the middle of the night for everyone, and gave specific protocols for doing this. For most people, waking after five hours to eat something was the correct approach. For hyperactive people who could not go back to sleep after eating, he recommended setting an alarm for three hours into sleep, eating at that point, and then sleeping the remaining five hours, which would be within the safe window before cannibalism begins.

The foods he suggested for nighttime eating included raw milk, eggs sipped or sucked from the shell, and milkshakes. These are all relatively easy to consume in a semi-wakeful state and do not require significant digestion to begin providing the bloodstream with protein.

Aajonus acknowledged that fasting does produce detoxification, but he argued it produces that detoxification at an unacceptable cost to structural tissue. His position, stated in his book, was that gradually detoxifying the body through good nutrition is a more caring and sustainable method. Fasting detoxification takes too long and requires greater self-control than most people can sustain, and even when completed, it damages the body's red blood cell populations, organ integrity, and nervous system stability in ways that require years of repair.

The Primal Diet's approach to detoxification relies on raw foods that support the body's own cleaning mechanisms while simultaneously providing the building blocks to replace damaged tissue. This allows the body to detoxify without entering the cannibalistic state that fasting induces. Cheese, for example, acts as a poison collector in the digestive tract, pulling toxins out of circulation without requiring the body to go without food. Vegetable juices provide alkaline minerals that buffer the byproducts of detoxification. Fat provides the medium through which fat-soluble toxins can be bound and eliminated.

Aajonus's view was that people who are drawn to fasting are often drawn to it because they have heard or read that the body cleanses itself during food deprivation, which he agreed was true, but he argued that the same cleansing happens continuously on the Primal Diet without the destructive cost.

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