Grief

Van Winkle's research, which Aajonus cited directly, showed that when a person undergoes emotional trauma, the body produces specific hormones as part of the neurological stress response, and those hormones generate waste byproducts as part of their chemistry. In a person who is exceptionally healthy and on an excellent diet, these byproducts may not accumulate. But in virtually everyone else, they store in the body just as other metabolic waste products do. When the body later detoxifies them, the same emotional experience that produced them in the first place is reproduced in the blood chemistry, and the person feels the associated emotion again. Aajonus used the example of becoming inexplicably angry at a husband for no apparent reason and traced that feeling back to a childhood trauma with a father, with those stored hormonal byproducts now circulating during a detox cycle and generating the same chemistry that existed during the original event.

He was clear that starches are the only substances that can attach to these waste products during detoxification, in the same way that starches bind other metabolic byproducts for removal. This is one of the reasons he occasionally allowed limited amounts of cooked starch in specific protocols, particularly for people going through intense emotional detoxification cycles, because the starch provided a binding vehicle for those compounds to be cleared from the body.

Aajonus gave crying a specific physiological function within this framework. He stated that crying changes the toxins present in the brain and actually converts them into endorphins, which are then discharged through the tear ducts. In his reading, crying is not simply an emotional release in a vague or symbolic sense but a literal transformation of neurological proteins. He referenced Elnora Van Winkle's work as support for this mechanism, describing the process as one in which those neurological proteins are "dumped in a nice favorable way," meaning the body clears them through the tears rather than having them continue to circulate or cause damage.

He acknowledged that crying has value and that the release feels good, and he spoke from personal experience. He described how crying in private was for many years his only release from childhood traumas and that he continued to tear up from pain, joy, tenderness, and anything that touched him deeply well into adulthood. He did not pathologize this response or treat it as a weakness. At the same time, he drew a distinction between crying that arises from genuine detoxification of stored trauma compounds and crying that is being driven artificially by blood chemistry altered by dietary inputs, particularly beet juice and fruit.

Aajonus found that certain foods amplified the emotional detoxification process to the point of dysfunction. Beet juice was one he identified specifically as a problem because of its high sugar content, which he found created or worsened crying, weeping, martyrdom feelings, and victim states in the people he worked with. He had used beet juice more extensively in earlier practice but moved away from it after observing this pattern. He was direct about the relationship between the chemistry and the experience: "When you're feeling a victim, you are a victim," he said, acknowledging that the feelings generated by that blood chemistry are genuine and real to the person having them. But the root cause, in his framework, is the diet-altered blood chemistry rather than an actual victimizing circumstance in the present.

Fruit more broadly was something he observed driving tearfulness and emotional cycling. In one passage, he told a person that if they simply cut out fruit, the crying and emotional instability would likely resolve significantly, because fruit was altering the blood chemistry in ways that triggered those neurological proteins to circulate and reproduce their associated emotional states. He did not dismiss the person's suffering or suggest they were imagining it, but he located the driver in the blood chemistry and pointed to the dietary adjustment as the corrective.

Cooked starch, used carefully and in combination with raw fat and fresh fruit, was something he himself had used during a period of extreme neurological and emotional difficulty following chemotherapy and radiation. He described a period lasting over three years in which he felt dead inside, lost all pleasurable sensations, felt destructive and chaotic, and frequently wanted to die. He could not feel connection to nature, colors had no effect on him, and he had to eat every two hours to maintain any semblance of equilibrium. He eventually found that a small amount of cooked starch combined with raw fat and fresh fruit could control the depression and rage, and he connected this observation to the understanding that starch binds those trauma-related byproducts and facilitates their removal.

Aajonus dealt with grief around death, both his own anticipated deaths and the deaths of patients, in ways that reflected his broader framework of the body and spirit. He described facing his own expected death multiple times with something closer to acceptance or even relief than terror, largely because he had three near-death experiences and understood what leaving the body felt like: euphoric, painless, full of what he described as unconditional love stretching infinitely. He was not indifferent to death but had a relationship with it that was shaped by direct experience of the dying process rather than fear of the unknown.

When patients were close to death, he did not always push them to fight or extend life at any cost. He described a woman with tumors throughout her system who faced three years of severe vomiting and detoxification to have a chance at recovery. He told her plainly that if he were in her position at 56 years old, he would leave the body and pick up another rather than endure the suffering. She chose to try, found herself getting stronger, and then one day said she was going to leave. She died four days later in her sleep, and before she died, she called Aajonus to thank him for giving her permission to go. He presented that death as peaceful and right for her, and did not frame it as a failure.

He described another patient, an elderly woman in her late sixties with breast cancer that had spread too extensively for full reversal, whom he put on the primal diet knowing it would likely give her another year to a year and a half of functional, happy life rather than a cure. She worked until the day she died, and her daughters called afterward to thank him for the quality of life the diet had given her in that final period. The grief in those cases was not something Aajonus treated as a medical problem to be resolved but as a natural response to loss, one whose biochemical component could be supported through diet while the human experience of mourning was acknowledged without pathologizing it.

He also described his own grief responses in personal terms, including moments of weeping in group settings where others joined in, which he presented without embarrassment and with recognition that shared emotional release has its own value. He described himself as a person who could cry or tear up from pain, joy, tenderness, or anything that touched him deeply, and he treated this as evidence of emotional health rather than fragility.

Much of what Aajonus described about the grief process was rooted in the accumulated traumas of childhood. He spoke extensively about the violence, fear, and emotional neglect of his early years, including a brother who tortured him from infancy, a father who popped his eardrums and put a golf club through his skull, and parents who consistently dismissed his attempts to communicate that he was being hurt. These experiences generated the trauma compounds Van Winkle described, and their storage in the body meant that their chemical residue persisted for decades, periodically cycling back through in detoxification waves.

He connected the emotional instability of his early adult years, including the depression, rage, and manic behavior he experienced after his chemotherapy and radiation, to a combination of the direct neurological destruction caused by those treatments and the ongoing detoxification of stored trauma compounds from years of violence and fear. The blood sugar crashes and adrenaline surges he described were part of the same picture, as biological habits the body had developed from chronic fear and violence, and these expressed themselves as emotional volatility that he could not fully control through will alone until the underlying chemistry was addressed through diet.

One related mechanism Aajonus described was the experience of feeling nothing, which he distinguished from grief but understood as part of the same landscape of disrupted neurological chemistry. After his chemotherapy and radiation, he lost most of his pleasurable sensations. He had previously felt a deep connection to every living thing when he walked in the woods, and colors moved him the way music evokes feelings. After the treatments, he felt nothing from colors or nature and described himself as "dead and in hell." Noise drove him into panic and fury. He had to force himself to be kind when he felt destructive and chaotic.

He understood this disconnection as a neurological consequence of the destruction wrought by the medical treatments combined with the nutritional depletion caused by years of stress and poor diet. The restoration of feeling, including the ability to grieve, to feel joy, to feel connection, was something that came back gradually through raw food nutrition. The raw fats, raw meats, raw eggs, and raw dairy provided the materials the nervous system needed to regenerate, and as that regeneration occurred over years, the emotional and sensory life returned. He described himself as "mostly happy again" almost six years after the treatments, having triumphed over that period of deadness without being left permanently crippled neurologically.