Stress

For Aajonus, genuine physical stress was defined by continuous environmental demands on the body that required constant metabolic adaptation. Living outdoors in the elements meant the body was perpetually working to regulate temperature against a 50 to 80 degree swing every single day. He described working in rice paddies under blazing sun all day with the lower body immersed in water as genuinely stressful, far more than anything experienced in a typical urban or suburban life. The wind, the sun, the cold, the heat pressing on the body every moment, every day, was the real stress that used up nutrients and caused physical degeneration if those nutrients were not replenished.

He used his own experience of living with four Indian tribes including Mayan people in the Yucatan, living with Eskimo and Inuit communities, and living alone in the American desert as his empirical reference. During his outdoor years as a fruitarian, he dwindled to 96 pounds, because the combination of genuine physiological stress from elemental exposure combined with an inadequate diet (fruits, avocados, up to seven pounds of nuts daily, none of it properly digesting or nourishing) stripped his body completely. He drew a direct line between elemental stress, nutrient depletion, and physical deterioration.

He acknowledged that physiological stress, even at this level, is not inherently fatal but does consume nutrients rapidly, meaning the body will degenerate unless nutritional replenishment is adequate. He called it "easy exercise" relative to the claims people made about psychological suffering, while still acknowledging it caused real biological consequences.

While dismissing psychological stress as culturally overblown, Aajonus did not dismiss the biochemical reality of emotional states. He drew directly on the research of Dr. Elnora Van Winkle, a neuroscientist who worked for Milhauser Laboratories (also referenced as Milhouse Laboratories at Columbia University and New York University Medical Center) for 47 to 52 years, cataloging every chemical in the brain and nervous system. She wrote a paper called "The Biology of Emotions," available in both a technical version and a layman's version on the internet.

Van Winkle found that when the body produces hormones during trauma or emotional upset, those hormones have byproducts, just as any metabolic process produces byproducts. These byproducts store in the body exactly as any other toxin stores. When the body later detoxifies them, the person re-experiences the same emotional state that accompanied their original production, even with no corresponding trigger in present life. This is why someone might find themselves inexplicably angry at a spouse who has done nothing, or flooded with anxiety for no apparent reason.

Aajonus described a case from Van Winkle's observations: a woman was furious at her husband despite him having done nothing wrong. Van Winkle encouraged her to rest and then report what memory surfaced. She woke from the nap recalling an event with her father, who had given her sister something that had been promised to her. The resentment from that childhood event had stored as neurological waste products in her body. It took eight weeks for her body to fully detoxify those stored compounds, during which she continued to respond to her husband as though he were the father figure responsible for her childhood wound. He was a male; her father was a male. This was not psychology in Aajonus's reading. It was a detoxification process.

He summarized the mechanism: you produce hormones during trauma, those hormones have waste products, the waste products store in the body, when they are later cleaned out the body re-runs the original emotional program. He noted that positive emotional states like falling in love also produce chemical byproducts, but these do not store in the body the way that trauma-derived compounds do.

Aajonus treated the hormones associated with stress, particularly adrenaline, testosterone, and estrogen in their capacity as activity hormones, as substances that must be metabolically spent or they will cause damage and behavioral instability. He described adrenaline as fundamentally an emergency hormone, as were all the endocrine gland secretions including those from the pituitary. He noted that every endocrine gland in the body is designed for emergency purposes only, and the reason people now have chronically elevated hormones in their blood is that they are continuously putting toxins into the body through food, inhalation, and absorption, keeping the body in a permanent emergency state.

He was specific about what excessive, unspent adrenaline does: it produces irritability, anxiety, volatility, and eventually violent or explosive behavior if not discharged through physical activity. He used the example of professional athletes who, during off-season when they are not training all day, behave violently toward partners and get into fights, because the hormones built for physical activity are building up with nowhere to go. He called these hormones "a drug, even though it's a natural drug."

He also described what happens in an acute adrenaline crisis. A mother who lifts a car off a child to save them uses only a pinprick quantity of adrenaline in the bloodstream to accomplish the feat, but the end product of burning that much adrenaline through the system creates something like a flu effect, similar to having had eleven cups of coffee, with a large quantity of toxins needing to be removed. Anyone who has been through an acute emotional crisis, in Aajonus's protocol, needs more protein during and after, because tissue will be damaged, and he specified fish as the best choice during trauma.

Aajonus developed a practical diagnostic system using iridology to assess how much hormonal output a person's body produces for physical activity daily, and therefore how much activity or exercise that person must engage in to avoid anxiety and emotional dysregulation. He called these markings "activity rings" or "worry circles," though most iridologists call them "stress rings."

His formula was direct: each activity ring in the iris corresponds to approximately one hour of activity or half an hour of exercise required per day. If a person does not expend those hormones through physical activity, the body will force them to be spent through emotional channels, meaning anxiety, worry, irritability, and stress. He framed this as a simple binary: "you open every day one is anxiety and one is activity, which door do you want to pass through. It's your choice."

The ranges he described:

A person with 2 stress rings needs approximately 45 minutes of activity per day.

A person with 4 or 5 stress rings needs approximately an hour and a half per day.

A person with 6 or 7 rings needs up to 3 hours per day.

Athletes typically have 7 to 14 activity rings and need to exercise for a living, or work in a physically demanding trade such as massage therapy, construction, or ditch digging.

Aajonus himself had zero activity rings and described being able to sit at a computer for 20 hours a day with no physical activity requirement, noting that the only activity that drew him was sex. He also had no activity rings in the body portion of his iris, though he noted having activity-related markings in the brain area of the iris.

He differentiated anxiety (the sign of unspent activity hormones requiring exercise) from depression (which he attributed consistently to low bacterial levels in the colon, insufficient E. coli and other bacteria to break down fats and proteins into the finite molecules that feed the brain and nervous system, with no psychological component at all).

Given the hormone-activity framework, Aajonus's primary remedy for anxiety, which he interpreted as always being a hormone-utilization problem, was exercise or physical activity of sufficient type and duration. He was insistent that anxiety almost always means a need to exercise, not a need for psychotherapy or medication.

For people who were too fatigued, in too much pain, or too depleted to exercise conventionally, he offered singing as the most strenuous activity available to the human body. He described 20 minutes of singing as equivalent to an hour on a treadmill, because singing requires simultaneous control of air, tone, pitch, coordination of the brain and body, and engages more systems at once than any other single activity. He pointed to opera singers as evidence: he said he had never seen a thin working opera singer. He recommended this even for people with bad voices, suggesting they use a closet, pass out earplugs, or find a soundproofed space.

Sex was the second most strenuous activity on his list, placing it after singing in terms of physiological work output.

For people with high energy anxiety who also had dietary issues, he recommended nut formulas with butter and honey (raw fat combined with cooked starch in some protocols, specifically to help bind and remove neurological hormone byproducts), or cooked starch with raw butter if the nut formula was not sufficient. He specified that if a person is exercising at the appropriate level for their activity ring count and still experiences anxiety, they should eat nut formulas or cooked starch with raw butter to bind with and help remove the excess hormones and their byproducts.

Aajonus identified starch as a specific nutrient category added to his dietary framework primarily because of its role in binding with neurological hormone byproducts, the psychotropic waste compounds that store in the body following trauma, anxiety, and emotional upset. He was explicit that this was an addition beyond carbohydrates, placed in its own category because of a specific biochemical function.

He described the mechanism: when trauma occurs and the body builds hormones to handle it, the byproducts of those hormones store in body tissues. When those stored byproducts later detoxify, they circulate in the blood and recreate the original emotional experience. Starch binds with these compounds and helps remove them without the person having to fully re-experience the associated emotional state. He described this as the reason he included cooked starch with raw fat in his first book.

The specific formulation: cooked starch (such as a baked potato or half a baked potato) eaten with a large quantity of raw fat (a whole stick of butter melted into the potato, for example). The cooked starch provides the binding molecule, and the raw fat protects from the otherwise disruptive effects of the cooked starch. He emphasized that the raw fat must be present in equal or greater quantity.

He also described the nut formula (nuts blended with raw butter, honey, and eggs to neutralize phytic acid) as serving a similar binding function for these neurological byproducts, specifically useful during periods of irritability, rage, or emotional turbulence arising from old stored traumas cycling out.

Aajonus described crying as a specific mechanism for transforming and excreting the neurological protein byproducts that Elnora Van Winkle identified. He stated that when a person cries, the toxins in the brain are converted into endorphins and expelled through the tear ducts. In his reading, crying is not primarily an emotional release in the psychological sense but a physical detoxification process that transforms neurological proteins into a favorable form and removes them through a dedicated exit channel.

He differentiated this from primal therapy, which he had personally experimented with through the 1970s and rejected. His reasoning: if you go through the rage again during primal therapy, you produce more of the same psychotropic byproduct compounds that caused the problem in the first place, creating more storage and keeping the cycle going. He described trying primal therapy as just keeping the momentum going rather than resolving anything. His recommendation instead was to channel the energy of anxiety and anger into something creative: singing, dancing, painting, any activity that generates positive output rather than recycling negative neurological material.

He made a specific recommendation for high anxiety states: take a walk among nature, do something that creates happiness, channel the energy constructively. His reasoning was that positive emotional states also produce chemical byproducts but these do not store in the body the way trauma-derived compounds do.

Aajonus directly rejected the conventional medical claim that psychological stress causes disease. His position was that it is toxins, not stress, that cause disease: toxins ingested through food, inhaled through air, and absorbed through skin from industrial pollution, pharmaceutical chemicals, processed foods, and environmental contamination. The stress narrative, in his view, provided cover for the true causes by framing disease as originating from the patient's own emotional life rather than from the products, foods, and environments industry was selling them.

He noted that anxiety does burn up nutrients, meaning that chronically anxious people who are not replenishing adequately will become less healthy over time. But he framed this as easy exercise, a relatively minor drain, not the catastrophic disease-causing mechanism the medical establishment presented.

He connected the hormonal dysregulation that looks like stress-related illness to a body in constant emergency state due to continuous toxic exposure, keeping all the endocrine glands chronically activated. Elevated testosterone, estrogen, adrenaline, and thyroxine in the blood were not, in his view, the result of a stressful life. They were the result of a body perpetually responding to the toxins in food, water, and air.

Regarding the question of whether stress causes detoxification, he gave a qualified yes, drawing again on Van Winkle: stress generates more hormones and more neurological metabolic waste, which accumulates during and after the stress event. The subsequent detoxification of those stored compounds produces the emotional replays described above. He noted that this can be fortunate if the person has enough enzymatic and metabolic resources to run the detox, but the process itself is driven by the accumulation of toxic waste, not by anything inherently therapeutic about the stressful experience.

Aajonus used his own history extensively to illustrate how chronic stress, particularly the kind generated by an abusive and violent childhood environment, produces real physiological consequences. He described growing up in a violent household where a brother 18 months older began torturing him the day he came home from the hospital and continued until that brother left for the Vietnam War when Aajonus was 15 and a half. His father broke both his eardrums by slapping him and embedded a nine iron golf club through his skull. He described living in constant terror.

His autism meant he could not communicate in spoken language, which placed him under continuous social stress from an early age. He described the persistent anxiety of being unable to respond to people the way they expected, the constant turmoil of wanting to communicate and being unable to, and the secondary trauma of being punished for the blank stares he retreated into as his nervous system's recovery mechanism. The combination of physical violence, neurological impairment, dietary deprivation (highly processed foods, one soda daily, stealing candy as a borderline diabetic), and social isolation created the chronic stress state that he traced directly to his later cascade of diseases.

He also described his own detoxification experience during his outdoor years, when eating inadequately while under genuine elemental stress caused him to deteriorate to 96 pounds before he eventually accepted raw meat into his diet and began recovering.

From the book "We Want to Live," Aajonus outlined specific foods for stress support. Eating cooked starch with plenty of raw fat stabilizes blood sugar and neutralizes overproduction of stress hormones. Raw meat supplies the proteins needed during stress. Fresh vegetable juice supplies concentrated vitamins and minerals needed during stress. Drinking 4 to 8 ounces of raw cream helps produce immediate relaxation.

For acute adrenaline events or emotional crises, he specified fish (white meat, light protein) as the best food during and immediately after trauma, because the tissue damage from a massive adrenaline burn requires protein for repair, and fish is the most easily digested and least provocative form. He recommended more protein generally during any period of emotional crisis.

He also described glycogen stability as important for avoiding anxiety-like states: the brain and nervous system require glycogen (brain fuel) made from pyruvate (a protein source), and when this pathway is working properly, blood sugar stays stable and the brain and nervous system fluid remains thin rather than sticky. He tied instability in this pathway directly to blood sugar crashes that manifest as irritability, depression, or manic behavior.