Walking

Aajonus drew a consistent distinction between exercise and activity. Activity meant everything the body does in the course of an ordinary day: making food, walking to the car, carrying groceries, lifting a chair, walking around an office. Exercise was something beyond that, a deliberate additional expenditure of physical energy. He counted walking as activity, not exercise, unless it was being performed specifically to rehabilitate an injured limb or to burn off surplus activity hormones that would otherwise generate anxiety.

He described his own daily walking as minimal. During seminars and workshops, which he gave standing and moving because he found that sitting impaired his ability to follow a train of thought, he might walk for eight hours over the course of a day. He acknowledged that on seminar days his leg muscles would be tight and solid, but he was careful to note that this was the exception, not a regular practice. On ordinary days, his walking amounted to carrying groceries once a week and pulling his suitcases when traveling. He repeated this description multiple times across different workshops, always as evidence that muscle density and physical soundness could be achieved through diet alone without deliberate exercise.

He made explicit that different people have different needs. The iris reveals activity rings, and those rings indicate how many hours of physical activity or exercise the body requires daily to avoid anxiety. Someone with zero activity rings, as Aajonus described himself, has no hormonal drive toward physical movement and will not suffer from its absence. Someone with three or four rings needs three to five hours of simple activity per day, which a mother caring for children easily accumulates without any formal exercise. Someone with seven to fourteen rings needs to be physically active for that many hours daily, and if they do not burn that energy through movement, the hormones will generate anxiety instead.

Walking counted toward fulfilling the activity requirement. An hour of formal exercise, by his accounting, doubled in value compared to simple activity, so that if someone with seven rings exercised for one hour, they only needed five additional hours of ordinary activity to satisfy their neurological requirement for that day.

The most detailed and specific material Aajonus provided about therapeutic walking came from his account of recovering from the Thailand motorcycle accident. The accident occurred when five tourists stepped into the street in front of him while he was riding at eighteen miles per hour. Unable to stop in time and unwilling to risk killing them, he laid the bike down on his leg. The motorcycle, weighing approximately 250 to 300 pounds, split the tibia down to the ankle, buckled the knee open at the back, shattered the kneecap, tore two tendons, and broke bone fragments loose from the top of the tibia at the femoral joint. He lay on the street for approximately 45 minutes waiting for the pain to subside enough to move.

He was hospitalized and placed in a wheelchair. For the first ten days, he was in the hotel unable to place any weight on the leg. Beginning on the tenth day, he was able to leave the hotel on crutches without exerting weight on the injured limb. By the twelfth day, he convinced the hotel owner to reduce the chlorine level in the swimming pool, and he began pool walking.

He described the pool protocol precisely. He would go down to the pool in a wheelchair, transfer to crutches, and get into the pool at the deepest end, where his body was sufficiently buoyant that the leg received very little pressure from his bodyweight. He would walk around the deep end for approximately one hour, moving the leg back and forth, giving it exercise and circulation without loading it with significant weight. He kept his bandages on and the raw meat applied to the wound during these sessions. He did this for five days, sometimes twice daily.

After five days, algae had grown visibly in the pool and the hotel owner resumed full chlorine treatment. By the sixteenth day, he was able to walk on crutches across the street, through sand, and down to the ocean, approximately 300 to 350 yards from the hotel. The beach required descending a flight of stone stairs.

In the ocean, the protocol shifted to longer-distance walking. He would walk approximately one mile down the coast and one mile back, in water deep enough that his body was buoyant enough to move the leg without placing meaningful pressure on it. He described it as "just barely touching it," the leg moving through the resistance of the water without supporting full bodyweight. He did this twice daily, once in the morning at approximately 7 am and once in the evening at approximately 5:30 pm, with each session lasting approximately one and a half hours. In one account he specified the distances as a half mile down and a half mile back, and in another account as a mile down and a mile back, with the variation likely reflecting different phases of recovery.

During the third week of ocean walking, he stepped into a jellyfish and had to pull the leg free, which he described as feeling like ripping the tendons all over again. Despite this setback, the tendons did not re-tear. He noted that the two buckled tendons had grown back within the first seven days of beginning this protocol, without surgical reconnection. The leg remained swollen, but the tendons regenerated.

He continued the ocean walking protocol for six weeks total. At the end of six weeks, he was walking without crutches, still with some pain, but functional. Four months after the accident, while on the island of Antigua, he ran a quarter-mile sprint. He was 60 years old at the time.

In a separate telling of the same events, he described the timeline slightly differently, saying that at six and a half weeks he was off crutches and walking normally, and that three months later he ran the quarter-mile sprint on Antigua. He also described spending four hours a day in the ocean in some accounts, split between two sessions, and noted that this movement helped relieve stiffness and prevented the leg from setting rigid as healing progressed.

The doctors had told him he would never walk again without surgery to remove the bone fragments, and that even with surgery the muscles involved would likely be reduced to approximately one third of normal size, and the operated leg would be approximately two inches shorter than the other. He refused surgery. Six months after the accident, he was running two steps at a time up stairs with no pain. He described this as remarkable given his age and the severity of the original injury.

The pool walking protocol Aajonus described had a specific purpose distinct from ocean walking. In the pool, the goal was to initiate movement of the injured limb as early as possible, in conditions where the buoyancy of the water reduced bodyweight sufficiently to allow movement without structural loading of the damaged bone and torn ligaments. He chose the deepest end specifically for maximum buoyancy. The duration was approximately one hour per session.

He tried to continue pool walking after the chlorine was resumed but found that even at reduced chlorine levels, within a week he was developing swimmer's ear, sore throats, and headaches, which he attributed to the chlorine. He stopped pool walking and transitioned entirely to the ocean. He had obtained the hotel owner's cooperation in keeping the chlorine out of the pool for five days initially, but once the algae became visible the owner reintroduced full treatment, ending that phase of his recovery.

The pool phase served as a bridge between complete non-weight-bearing recovery in the hotel room and the more demanding ocean walking that followed. It allowed the leg to begin movement, prevent atrophy, and begin circulating blood and lymph through the damaged tissue before he was ready to navigate the journey to the ocean.

The ocean phase was the core of his walking rehabilitation, running for approximately six weeks. He framed the ocean as superior to the pool not only because of the absence of chlorine but because of the specific buoyancy characteristics of saltwater, which reduced the effective weight on the leg more than freshwater and provided a consistent, natural medium for sustained walking.

The twice-daily sessions, morning and evening, totaling approximately two to three miles of walking per day at the ocean depth he described, were chosen specifically to maintain movement through the healing tissue without overloading it. He described the leg as moving "gingerly" through the water, with the body so buoyant that the walking was more like suspended movement than weight-bearing ambulation.

He described the electromagnetic energy generated by exercise in water as accelerating healing. In another context describing a foot injury, he noted that electromagnetic energy from exercise made healing processes work more quickly. This principle appeared to underlie his rationale for beginning ocean walking as early as possible rather than resting the limb completely.

Aajonus included a post-bath walking protocol as part of his instructions for breaking down hardened fats in the lymphatic system. After a 90-minute hot bath taken with a mixture of pineapple and coconut cream plus animal fats consumed before or at the beginning of the bath, the person would emerge from the bath, dress in wool or silk underwear to absorb perspiration, cover themselves heavily with winter clothing regardless of external temperature, and then take a 30 to 45 minute slow walk.

He specified that this walk did not need to be brisk. Its purpose was to keep the lymphatic fluid and melted fats moving through the system as the body cooled after the bath, preventing the fats from rehardening. Because the bath had raised body temperature and thinned the lymph, the circulatory systems would be moving faster than normal, and the walk simply extended this movement into the cooling phase. He noted that most people emerging from a 90-minute bath would be in no condition to run or jog, and that a slow walk was entirely sufficient.

He recommended walking out of the bath slowly, almost in slow motion, to avoid passing out from dizziness, then dressing warmly before beginning the walk. The combination of retained body heat, warm clothing to maintain perspiration, and the mild circulation from walking was designed to ensure the melted fat substances continued moving through the lymphatic network rather than re-solidifying as the body temperature dropped.

In a related discussion, Aajonus described a situation where people over 40 who exercise are sometimes unable to recover their energy afterward, finding they cannot make it back to bed after a walk. He distinguished this from the younger experience and offered the sport formula as a remedy. The sport formula consisted of half to one cup of tomato puree, one to two cups of cucumber puree, optionally half to one cup of whey (the liquid runoff from making cheese, which he described as resembling yellow urine), one tablespoon of vinegar, one tablespoon of lemon juice, and additional components not fully specified in the available passages. If whey was unavailable, the variation called for two cups of cucumber puree and one cup of tomato puree. He offered this formula as support for people whose energy was insufficient to sustain even mild walking activity during detoxification or recovery periods.

Aajonus described multiple periods in his life when walking was severely compromised or impossible. During his time as a fruitarian and later during chemotherapy for the cancers that followed radiation treatment, he was unable to walk normally or at all. After chemotherapy, he lived on the floor of his living room, unable to walk to the bathroom 40 feet away, crawling on his elbows and dragging himself across hardwood floors. He was too dizzy from the combination of neurological damage and induced diabetes to stand up without blacking out, and he had to learn to move in slow motion when rising from lying or sitting positions to avoid losing consciousness.

During his two and a half years traveling by bicycle, there were periods when he was too weak or in too much pain to bicycle and would hop freight trains instead, bungee-cording his bicycle to the boxcar and hanging a hammock across the open sliding doors to watch the scenery. He described his back pain during this period as requiring him to stop cycling every hour to an hour and a half to perform yoga postures to stretch his spine and reduce pain to a tolerable level. Walking was not a practical mode of travel during these years, as he was covering long distances and was frequently debilitated.

Toward the end of his illness, before his recovery through raw food began, he was in such a state of weakness that standing up too quickly would put him into low blood sugar and cause him to pass out. He had to move in what he described as slow motion, so slowly that observers thought he was doing yoga deliberately. He blacked out two to three times a day during his fruitarian period and had to approach all movement with extreme caution.

Aajonus repeatedly used his recovery of the ability to walk, and later to run, as a demonstration of what the body could achieve on raw food without medical intervention. When he began eating raw meat after his years of illness and vegetarianism, he started at 98 pounds and could initially run only 10 feet. Within a month he could run a mile. Within six months he was running 13 miles a day barefoot on gravel, sprinting backwards and sideways around the Hollywood High School track, and running the five-mile stretch from Venice Beach Pier above Santa Monica Pier in soft sand.

He described the post-accident recovery of walking similarly. The fact that he was walking without crutches at six weeks, running at two months, and sprinting at four months, at age 60 with a shattered leg that doctors said would never function normally without surgery, was his primary evidence that the body could reconstruct itself given proper raw materials and movement in the appropriate medium.

In a case study he cited from a woman who had written to him, she described her own recovery trajectory in which, after beginning to eat raw meat three days a week sustained by raw dairy and eggs, she eventually got to the point where she could run up to 13 miles a day, experiencing athletic capacity for the first time in her life.

Aajonus identified himself as a peripatetic lecturer, referencing Aristotle's practice of lecturing while walking. He said explicitly that if he sat down during lectures he could not follow his train of thought as well, and that standing and moving while speaking was both natural and functionally necessary for him. He described the eight hours of walking he sometimes accumulated during seminar days as his primary form of exercise in ordinary life. This movement was not deliberate exercise but the natural byproduct of working in his preferred mode.

He described the same principle operating in others. A mother who cares for children accumulates three to five hours of activity daily simply through the demands of that work, satisfying her activity ring requirement without any formal exercise program. Walking to the car, walking around an office, making food, these activities all count toward the daily activity total the iris rings indicate as necessary.

He was consistent across many workshops in describing his exercise as essentially nonexistent in ordinary circumstances. His typical formulation was that his computer keyboard was his exercise, plus carrying groceries once a week and pulling his suitcases when traveling. He rejected the idea that exercise is universally necessary, framing it as an individual requirement determined by the activity rings in the iris.

He contrasted his own lack of exercise need with athletes, who he said have seven to fourteen activity rings and must be active that many hours daily or suffer anxiety. He had zero rings and was genuinely uninterested in burning energy physically, describing sex and dancing as the only physical activities he found compelling.

When he did engage in sustained physical activity, such as climbing mountains in the Philippines, herding cattle and horses on his Thailand property, swimming in his lake, and doing farm work, he noted that he rapidly lost weight, going from a 37-inch waist to a 30-inch waist over the course of four months. He kept three wardrobes at each of his different residences to accommodate these fluctuations. He described the farm work and mountain climbing as activity he genuinely enjoyed because it was purposeful, not exercise for its own sake.