Panic

Aajonus described the medical profession's final training as taking place in emergency wards, where every situation is extreme, every patient is in a drastic state, and the trained response is urgency and worst-case interpretation. A doctor trained in that environment learns to think the worst of every symptom and transmits that interpretation to the patient in the form of dire prognoses. The patient, now terrorized, becomes compliant. They take the prescribed chemicals instead of food, behave like laboratory animals, and continue funding the system.

The pharmaceutical industry, in Aajonus's account, finances university research to ensure that drugs are understood as the mechanism of healing and that food is excluded from any medical or therapeutic framework. The medical profession believes what it is funded to believe, and that belief system is transmitted to patients as fear. He connected this explicitly to the political use of fear, noting that the same emotional mechanism used to justify the Iraq war, the specter of Russian invasion, and the threat of religious extremism is deployed by the health industry to keep people afraid of their own bodies and dependent on institutional intervention.

He called this "medical terrorism" and described it as the worst terrorism in the world, precisely because it operates inside the most intimate relationship a person has, the one with their own body.

Aajonus was explicit that the Primal Diet does not stop detoxification. Every episode of illness or disease, in his framework, is the body attempting to expel stored toxins, whether from its own degenerating tissue or from environmental and dietary pollution accumulated over years. These detoxification episodes can last weeks or months, can be intensely uncomfortable, and can produce symptoms that look alarming to anyone trained by conventional medicine to interpret symptoms as disease rather than as cleansing.

The specific danger of panicking during a detox is that it leads directly to antibiotics. He stated that approximately 90 percent of medical treatments involve antibiotics, which he described as destroying all bacteria in the body, including the bacteria involved in digestion and every other healthful process. The result is a lower overall state of health, a body now burdened with additional poison, and the original detoxification work interrupted or reversed. The person ends up worse than before, on a road toward more degeneration.

His instruction was unambiguous: do not panic, do not go to a homeopath, do not take antibiotics or any other medication during a detox. Homeopathy, he noted, is fighting fire with fire, causing a reaction similar to the existing symptoms rather than nourishing a healing process. Any intervention that is not food will disrupt the detox. The body needs time and patience, and the only job of the person going through it is to eat properly and wait.

He acknowledged that detoxifications could last longer than anyone would like and that the suffering could be real and significant. His advice in those situations was to eat properly, to call him if the person genuinely could not figure out what to do, and to test improvement in function, vitality, and general wellbeing several months after the detox rather than expecting overnight results.

Aajonus gave a specific physical account of why thin people, or people without adequate dietary fat, are prone to panic. He illustrated this with a detailed account of his date with Twiggy at the premiere of the film Butterflies Are Free in 1972 or 1973. Twiggy, he said, had no fat on her body and nothing to buffer the information traveling to her brain. When the group found themselves in a back hallway of an unfinished multiplex theater, with the door potentially closing behind them, she panicked catastrophically. She screamed at the top of her lungs, could not stop, had to be physically shaken by Aajonus and his companion Justin for two to three minutes before she could calm down, and was not calm again for the rest of the evening.

He described the actual duration of the potential problem as no more than two minutes, since the limousine driver knew where they were and the theater manager was with them. The panic was entirely disproportionate to the situation, and he attributed it directly to the absence of fat to buffer nerve signals. With no insulation, every sensory input, every perceived threat, every uncertainty hits the brain at full intensity. The person has no physiological capacity to modulate their response.

He generalized this observation to describe thin people as volatile across the board, noting that they have buttons that are easy to push and that they overreact because there is nothing, no fats, to buffer the information in the system. He said this applied to 85 to 90 percent of thin people he had encountered.

Aajonus connected paranoia, fear, anxiety, and instability directly to poor intestinal bacterial environments, particularly low levels of E. coli in the colon. The bacteria in the intestines, especially E. coli, are responsible for breaking down proteins and fats into the forms that feed the brain and nervous system. When those bacteria are depleted, through colonics, enemas, antibiotics, eating whole vegetables that damage the bacterial environment, or simply a poor diet, the brain and nervous system stop receiving adequate nutrition and the person becomes anxious, paranoid, depressed, and unstable.

He distinguished between anxiety and depression in this framework. Anxiety is caused by excess activity hormones that are not being burned off through physical exercise. Depression is caused by insufficient E. coli and other bacteria to break down and deliver the nutrients the brain and nervous system need. Both states can feel like psychological problems but are, in his framework, purely biochemical events driven by specific deficiencies.

The remedy for the bacterial component of panic and paranoia is high meat, meat that has been allowed to pre-digest through bacterial action, which smells foul and functions in the body the way that healthy E. coli activity functions. He reported that high meat and high eggs produce changes in emotional state within 10 to 20 minutes, moving a person from fear, depression, or paranoia to calm and happiness in the same time frame that psychiatric medications take hours or days to produce any effect, and require daily maintenance to sustain.

He described a client who had been taking psychotropic drugs for 27 years. She was resistant to trying high meat and called him at 11:45 at night in a state of panic after finally eating it, convinced the bacteria were going to take over her body and kill her. He did not answer the phone. He waited as she called repeatedly through the night. By 5 o'clock in the morning she was laughing and whistling. He answered the phone at that point, they spoke briefly, and she went to sleep. She subsequently ate high meat twice a week and that was sufficient to manage her condition.

The third biological root of panic and anxiety in Aajonus's framework is the accumulation of unspent hormones produced for physical activity, specifically testosterone, estrogen, and adrenaline. The body produces these hormones in quantities that correspond to its activity level and constitution. People with many activity rings in the iris need to exercise a great deal. If they do not, the hormones accumulate and drive the person into anxiety. He said 95 percent of anxiety is created by inadequate exercise relative to the body's hormone production.

For people who are too ill or in too much pain to exercise, he specified singing as a complete substitute. He stated that 20 minutes of singing is equivalent to an hour on a treadmill in terms of physical exertion, because singing requires controlling air, tone, and pitch simultaneously and engages the brain and the whole body at once. He observed that opera singers are universally well-built because the activity requires such enormous energy output. If the person cannot sing comfortably in front of others, he suggested singing in a closet or bathroom, using earplugs for household members, or doing anything that allows the permission to be well and out of anxiety.

He was explicit that this anxiety has nothing to do with psychology. A person can be highly evolved meditatively, deeply trained in yoga and mental discipline, and still experience anxiety driven by excess activity hormones. He noted that during his own years as a raw vegan, when he ate large amounts of fruit and little to no animal fat, he spent hours every day plotting political violence, consumed by rage and anxious energy he could not stop. When he began eating raw meat and cut out the fruits, he became, in his own description, an entirely different person who approached everything without anxiety and anger. The change was dietary and biochemical, not psychological.

Aajonus spent considerable time addressing the specific panic people experience when beginning to eat raw meat or other unfamiliar foods on the Primal Diet. He described his own 13 years of eating raw meat while fearing every single time that this would be the occasion he would contract a brain fluke. Every time he heard someone warn him about parasites, viruses, or bacterial contamination, he absorbed that fear and carried it forward. He ate pinworm-infested salmon. He ate food with fecal matter on it. He ate raw meat several times a week for 13 years while worrying each time, and never had a single adverse reaction from it.

After 13 years he recognized the fear as unfounded. He had been told by doctors that he had no hydrochloric acid and was definitively at risk of death from parasitic or bacterial food poisoning, yet he ate contaminated food repeatedly and felt better each time. He called himself an idiot for spending 13 years in fear over something that never materialized. The fear had been installed by repeated media messages and social warnings, not by any actual evidence from his own experience.

He connected this pattern to media manipulation generally. A brief news clip showing a person eating raw meat and getting sick, played repeatedly, creates an associative fear that overrides any amount of personal experience to the contrary. He described encountering a woman in the Philippines who had not been afraid of raw meat until she saw him eat it and then became afraid of him, because the media had conditioned her to associate raw meat eating with monstrous behavior. He found this deeply sad.

His counsel to people on the diet was to stop eating from media-induced fear and to use their own experience as evidence. If something makes you feel good and gives you energy and stability, that is the relevant data. Fear installed by the pharmaceutical and food industries is not data.

Aajonus made one explicit, carefully bounded exception to his general avoidance of cooked starches, and it relates directly to panic. In the narrative of preparing to save his son Jeff's life in the hospital, he described eating a baked potato for the first time in 13 years. He was about to face a genuinely life-threatening situation, the kind he compared to gladiators entering an arena. He could not sleep. The adrenaline was not being arrested by raw meat or nuts. He needed to stop the panic response urgently and immediately.

He ate baked potato with lots of butter. He was explicit that this was an emergency, that it was the only time in the entire book he did this, and that he recommended cooked starch in the book only for very elderly people to slow detoxification or for people with hyperactive glands. It was not a routine recommendation. It was a last resort in an acute, high-stakes situation when the normal means of managing the hormonal state had failed.

This case study is significant because it demonstrates that even within the framework, there is an acknowledged edge case where a person in genuine acute panic, facing a situation of that magnitude, may need something that crosses the usual dietary boundaries. He did not generalize from this or recommend it casually. The context he described was exceptional.

The practical summary of everything Aajonus said about panic converges on a single instruction: do not go to a doctor when panicking about symptoms, because doing so initiates a sequence that will make things worse. The doctor, trained in the emergency ward, will give the worst-case interpretation. The patient, now more frightened, will accept treatments, most commonly antibiotics, that destroy bacterial populations the body needs. The body becomes less healthy. The original problem remains unresolved and compounded.

His books, particularly We Want to Live and the recipe book, were designed as the alternative to this sequence. He instructed people to go to those books first, look up the symptom, find the relevant food remedies, and give the body time to complete what it had started. For anyone who found it too difficult to locate information in the physical book, the PDF version at wewanttolive.com was available for searchable reference, allowing a person to find every mention of a symptom in minutes.

He also made himself available for emergencies. He took calls from 7 to 9 in the morning. Emergency emails with the word emergency in the subject line, along with a phone number and description of the problem, would receive a response with a specific callback time and number. He acknowledged that he was often traveling internationally and could be anywhere in the world, but maintained that access point for people who genuinely needed guidance and could not resolve a situation from the books alone.

His consistent position was that most people going through a healing crisis on the Primal Diet are experiencing something their body knows how to handle, and the most dangerous thing they can do is interfere with that process out of fear.