Instinctive Eating

In its formal application as practiced by the Instincto movement, instinctive eating means consuming only raw food that appeals first to the sense of smell and then to taste, stopping when the food no longer tastes pleasant. The underlying logic is that an appealing smell signals nutritional need and a shift to repulsion signals satiation of that need. Only one food is eaten at a time, which matches how most animals in nature eat. Aajonus acknowledged this behavioral pattern in wild animals as accurate: most animals that thrive on instinct do eat one type of food at a time.

The sensory appeal mechanism is meant to function as a direct read on biochemical need. If the body requires a particular nutrient profile, the food carrying it will smell and taste good. When enough has been absorbed, the food will stop tasting pleasant or will become actively repulsive. This is a real biological phenomenon that Aajonus did not dispute in principle. His dispute was with its reliability in damaged human beings, not with the underlying mechanism itself.

Aajonus tried the raw instinctive diet for six years and was involved with a community of people following the same approach. He described the experience in detail. The group ate only foods that appealed to their senses of smell, taste, and fullness. Because sweetness appealed to all of them, they ate a lot of fruit. They felt better in a general sense, but too often suffered severe symptoms: over-emotionality, hyperactivity, and irritability. He noted that those experiences were no different from what they had experienced on the standard American diet. They had assumed instinctive eating was superior because it was natural, but the results did not support that assumption clearly enough to dismiss the problems.

The decisive moment for Aajonus personally was when his teeth began to rapidly decay. That was when he began to doubt whether instinctive guidance on a fruit-heavy diet was actually serving the body. Someone suggested he try a modified raw diet that restricted high-carbohydrate foods including carrot juice, sweet fruit juices, and sweet fruit. He was appalled at the suggestion because he loved sweet fruit, but the tooth decay had made him willing to experiment. That experiment eventually led him to the Primal Diet.

Aajonus described a community called Pangaea as a concrete demonstration of what instinctive eating produced in group practice. The members had been practicing Instincto eating until approximately January of one year, meaning they ate what appealed to their senses first, which resulted in roughly 60 percent of their diet being sweet fruit. By the time Aajonus visited the community in August or July of that same year, the members had widespread staph infections, sores on their bodies, impetigo, and severe emotional dysregulation. The person who founded and built the community had left because he could not handle the people. Social cohesion had broken down entirely.

When the community switched to Aajonus's diet, the change was described as dynamic. The group became emotionally settled, happy, and cooperative. The founder returned and restored the community. Aajonus presented this as a direct consequence of the dietary shift, with the fruit-dominant instinctive approach having produced the infections, the emotional volatility, and the social breakdown, and the structured raw meat and fat diet having resolved them.

Aajonus cited two specific individuals whose deaths he attributed directly to switching from the Primal Diet to the Instincto approach.

The first was a woman who had recovered substantially on the Primal Diet, gaining fifty pounds after entering the program looking, as Aajonus described it, like she came out of Auschwitz. She was doing well. Then she was intellectually converted to the Instincto diet by someone who persuaded her it was superior. Because Instincto means eating what you have smell and taste for, she began eating 60 to 70 percent sweet fruit, which Aajonus said is what everyone gravitates toward on that approach because everyone wants something sweet. She lost all the weight she had gained and was dead within a year.

The second case involved Dr. Elnora Van Winkle, a scientist who had cataloged chemicals within the nervous system and who had been following Aajonus's diet for approximately two years after extensive work studying its effects on cancer. Her results with cancer remission were, in Aajonus's account, statistically valid. She then concluded that Instincto was preferable to his diet. Because Instincto means eating nothing unless it appeals to the sense of smell, she began eating lots of fruit, 60 to 70 percent by his description. She became very thin and was dead within a year of switching.

Aajonus used these cases to make a categorical point: the instincts of most people in modern conditions are not good, and following them uncritically is dangerous. Sweet fruit appeals to damaged human instincts because of sugar cravings rooted in conditioning and biochemical dysregulation, not because the body actually needs that proportion of sugar.

Aajonus's explanation for why human instincts fail in the context of modern disease was multipart. The core issue is that nutritional deficiencies and toxicity have accumulated to a degree that distorts every signal the body generates. What a person craves or finds appetizing reflects the chemistry of their damage as much as any genuine biological need.

He was explicit that most people's instincts cannot lift them out of the realm of disease. The concentrations and combinations of fats and meats that are actually needed to reverse disease actively contradict decades of conditioning that fats and meats are dangerous. A person following instinct in that state will avoid the very foods most needed for recovery and gravitate toward the sweet, carbohydrate-dense foods that worsen the conditions driving their illness.

Aajonus also identified the specific mechanism behind the universal appeal of sweetness: it is not a signal of nutritional need but a deeply conditioned preference shaped by the industrial food environment, processed sugar consumption, and habituation. He said flatly that if you listen to your instincts or your taste buds, you will end up eating things that are not necessarily good for you. He included himself in this: he acknowledged that he could smell cooked burned meat and salivate, experiencing a genuine craving for it, while knowing that eating it would cost him three days of poor sleep and reduced energy. He chose not to follow that craving despite its vividness.

Aajonus's mature position was that following a precisely structured dietary protocol, even when it does not appeal to instinct, produces far better results than trusting the body's sensory preferences. He was transparent that he had evolved toward this position gradually. In his first book he said he was still not entirely sure, but after spending fifteen years on raw meat eating, with the first seven years following instinctual approaches and the last seven years disregarding people's instincts and telling them to eat on schedule and eat when not hungry, the outcomes shifted dramatically. He described reversal of disease rates moving from the mid-70 percent range to the 90 percent range, with significantly less stress on the process.

He said directly: "I do not listen to my body as much because I know more than my poor sick body does." He acknowledged that took a long time to understand. His point was not that instinct is valueless in principle, but that in a sick organism, intellectual knowledge of how the body functions best must override sensory preferences most of the time. He described doing this himself, eating foods he did not want and choosing not to eat foods he craved, and finding that the outcome justified the discipline.

He also described occasionally being more instinctive during periods of better health, and less instinctive and more intellectual during periods of acute illness such as when he was going through meningitis, precisely because during illness the body's signals are even less trustworthy. He described his evolved personal diet as approximately one piece of fruit per day, very little carbohydrate, during fall, winter, and early spring, having found that more carbohydrate tended to make him manic.

The fruit issue was central to Aajonus's critique of Instincto eating and came up repeatedly across his discussions of it. His position was not that fruit is inherently poisonous but that the proportion instinctive eating produces, by following sensory appeal in damaged humans, is consistently too high and produces specific, predictable harms.

When following instinctive principles, people eat 60 to 70 percent fruit because sweetness appeals to virtually everyone. That level of fruit consumption produces over-emotionality, hyperactivity, irritability, ADD-like states, and instability in social relationships. It depletes weight, creates or worsens inflammatory conditions, and in the cases he described, contributed to death by driving the body into a state of progressive wasting.

Aajonus made the point that humans are not made for a fruit-primary diet, referencing their digestive anatomy, their putrefactive bacteria, their hydrochloric acid, and their cutting teeth as evidence. He observed that fruitarians are hyperactive, nervous, and cannot sit still, comparing them unfavorably to the mental and physical stability produced by a meat and fat centered diet. He noted that some tribal groups, including the Maasai, prohibit fruit entirely because of the behavioral disruption it causes, and that they recognize this from direct observation.

Aajonus's assessment of Instincto Therapy as a formal system was that it has genuine merit under conditions that almost no one in modern civilization meets. He said explicitly: "If we were completely healthy and we weren't enzyme deficient, Instincto Therapy would be the absolute, because we wouldn't need anything unless it actually appealed to us." The logic of eating only what appeals to a perfectly healthy organism is sound. The problem is that the prerequisite does not exist in the target population.

He also identified a structural limitation beyond individual health status: the combinations needed to reverse serious disease require concentrations and combinations of fats and meats that a purely instinct-driven approach will systematically underweight, because those foods do not carry the same immediate sensory appeal as fruit and sweet foods for people whose instincts have been shaped by carbohydrate addiction and fat phobia.

He described Instincto as having "so many limitations" and noted that things are absent from the approach that are needed, including specific combinations that do not arise naturally from sensory-guided selection. Instincto eating, as he understood it, works best as a maintenance and refinement tool for someone who has already achieved good health, not as a therapeutic protocol for someone trying to recover from disease.

Aajonus was precise about the difference between genuine instinctual signals and cravings that arise from habituation, conditioning, or addiction. He did not believe in mental cravings as a category, calling the concept a psychologist's framing designed to manipulate people. His view was that every craving has a biochemical origin, but the biochemical origin may be rooted in damage, deficiency, or addiction rather than in actual nutritional need.

He described his own experience of craving cooked burned meat from the smell alone, feeling genuine salivation, while knowing intellectually that eating it would cost him three days of impaired sleep and reduced energy. He did not follow that craving. He also described how over time, many cooked foods that once appealed to him had become repulsive by smell alone, including cooked vegetables and heavy pastries. This shift in sensory response he attributed to the body's own adaptation as it healed, suggesting that instinctive responses do evolve toward greater reliability as health improves.

He also described the experience of craving an onion like an apple while carrying a tapeworm, eating half of it and then being repulsed by the second half, and passing forty-seven feet of tapeworm within six hours. This he presented as an example of genuine instinctual signaling operating correctly: the body needed something the onion provided to expel the parasite, and the craving arose precisely to serve that function. When the need was met, the appeal vanished.

Aajonus addressed the question of children and instinctive eating specifically. He observed that children in the context of the Primal Diet community often automatically go for meats rather than carbohydrates, which he presented as a sign that when the food environment is appropriate and the individual has not yet accumulated decades of carbohydrate conditioning, the instinct for animal food can operate more cleanly. He described one baby who would only eat fresh steak and would not eat it off a plate, insisting on eating it off the grass. He called this pretty primal.

At the same time, he acknowledged that instinctually, children in the general population go for carbs and sweets, and that managing a child's diet cannot be simply a matter of following their preferences. The same principle applies as with adults: sensory preference in a damaged or sugar-conditioned individual reflects the conditioning, not the body's optimal need.

Aajonus drew a consistent distinction between wild animals, whose instincts operate in a nutritionally complete and unpolluted environment, and domesticated animals whose instincts have been distorted by cooked and processed food in the same way human instincts have been. He pointed out that wild animals may go five or six months without drinking water and will only seek out minerals from salt lakes or clay patches during drought. They are not running around craving water the way a domesticated animal on processed food would. The domesticated animal's craving for water reflects dehydration from food that has had its water content destroyed by cooking and processing, not a clean instinctual signal.

He extended this to observations about wild animals eating rotten meat, which they find deeply appealing because the predigested proteins and fats are highly assimilable. To a human with a non-adapted sensory framework, the smell is repulsive. To a wild carnivore operating on intact instinct, it registers as the most desirable food available. Aajonus took this as evidence that human disgust responses around food have been shaped by cultural conditioning rather than biological accuracy, and that many of the foods that register as repulsive to modern humans, including raw meat, high meat, and raw organs, are precisely the foods the body most needs.

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