"Bad food and other stressors can degrade the whole system, producing functional rigidities similar to those resulting from a bad up-bringing, but if a person has a hint of the way things could be, the system can recover, sometimes with a change of diet, or climate, or of mental context-possibilities, or a missing hormone. If a person has a very rigid idea of how existence is supposed to be, the changed metabolism from taking thyroid, for example, making energy flow strongly, can seem as unpleasant as being in a foreign culture." -Raymond Peat
When you discover that you can genuinely de-stress your metabolism from the inside out, you could expect many good effects. Depending on how long you have had an adrenalin/cortisol-and-inflammation dominant metabolism, your shift from frenetic to esthetic can be smooth and relatively short, or it can be a long-term project, like getting a whole new education from the beginning. A whole new education is not always possible because the metabolism is already slow, time and focus are low, and the postindustrial work and social systems we live in militate against it. You’d have to unlearn and relearn a great deal. It takes time to wake up properly. Sometimes you can do it yourself.
When I set out to de-stress my hormones and metabolism I discovered a spiral-like developmental improvement over time, but I also discovered underlying discomforts and distress that required some serious evaluation about my disposition, my living conditions, what could change and what needed to be left alone. So far, I have learned a few basic preparatory principles of recovering an oxidative metabolism from an adrenalized, serotonized, estrogenized drive.
1. Relief from the “wired and tired” state begins immediately, but gains are not steady or linear. If you are looking back on your life and thinking that virtually all of it has been high-strung and fraught with adrenaline-driven anxiety and grief, then a long-term plan will present many challenges. Progress is likely to be uneven. Gains may seem like they come “out of nowhere” and they aren’t reproducible. At least not right away. I have written about the 30 percent rule of recovery in a post on principles.
The stair-stepping nature of metabolic improvement, monitored roughly by temps, pulse, and blood pressure can be frustrating but it doesn’t mean that you aren’t making progress. You are de-adapting your metabolic pathways. You are un-training the body at the same time you are re-training for sugar-burning and the production of CO2. Just like your cells, which under good conditions organize and then expend energy for work, then collapse to some extent [“melt” as Peat has characterized], then build potential, then organize again—so does your whole organism. But more slowly.
As far as I can tell, good progress on a long-term plan means a few good days accompanied by many bad-to-middling days. The good days become more and closer together as the bad days become fewer and farther apart. What were at first “epic sleeps”—sleeping unconsciously like a peaceful child—become less “epic” and more matter-of-fact as they come more often. There are periods of greed for relief and the comfort of knowing that your body has the capacity to sleep, eat, imagine, help you enjoy yourself, and just be in a state of deliberate engagement where anything can happen. It’s stimulating to be engaged in real life instead of executing a program. Eventually, thriving in the environment is a matter of being resourceful and agile with your energy and the supports you use for it. The nature of living is rhythmic and oscillating.
The best starting place is to review your life and try to estimate your stressors. Review your family life, your mother’s health when she was pregnant with you, and your early family life. Include how you were treated when ill and what foods your family ate when you were young. If you came of age before PUFAs were introduced widely into the food supply, then you are probably old enough to have had developed a solid foundation for an oxidative metabolism. Young people have the opposite problem: more toxins in their formative environment.
2. If you are going to experiment on yourself with nutrition and mild supplements, then you will need an independent disposition, extraordinary patience, unusual resourcefulness, and a capacity to be responsible for whatever you find out about yourself. Going slowly will give you a knowledge base about your metabolism, you’ll build confidence, and if you keep good records you should be able to make some rough predictions.
When I started experimenting with Ray Peat’s suggestions for diet and supplements I soon had to review how independent of popular, prevailing opinions, expert authority, institutional and social systems, my past, and established methods I was willing to become. This is no small thing because virtually all institutions of American society are designed for developing individual compliance and passive motion. Some customs are worthwhile. We don’t push aside old people in front of us in line at the supermarket. But some customs are based on a virtually superstitious expertise. This is not anti-science. This is anti- commodification of research, the findings that approach produces, and the people who do it when they become driven by promotion instead of enlightenment. When science is overtaken by politics, then its results become less trustworthy. “There are some professors you don’t want to get an A from.”
I underestimated how big this question would be to me. And I can’t say I have taken moral high ground always, or ever. I wanted to think as concretely as possible. What would I do if I developed very bad pain, debilitating dehydration, or a lump? Answer: I’m trying to avoid exactly these conditions. But I’d prepare ahead of time. I might seek relief and opinions at urgent care, an ER, a trusted EMT, understanding my risks. I might avail myself of diagnostic technology. It can be sensible under some circumstances. If I were broken in an accident I might be admitted to a hospital. But this doesn’t mean that I’d be endlessly committed to surrendering my capacity to make decisions about the conditions of my own care, suffering, and of course, death. [Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis.] As I get more experience, my judgment about what is threatening and what is not could be expected to improve a lot. The more I read, the more I prepare.
Having thought about this ahead of time makes the decision to get diagnostic help less fraught with burdens about autonomy. Connecting with like-minded people can pool experience when it’s done responsibly.
It doesn’t take much time to do this and the effort is worth it. Get a notebook and record your daily temps, blood pressure, and pulse. Most peatarians use Cronometer to track food because it has a pretty good micronutrient accounting. There are some graphics that have been created to demonstrate the main food groups in peating. These can be good at first. But most of the food choices are aimed at minimizing PUFA, tryptophan, phosphorus, iron while optimizing high-mineral carbs [fruit or fruit juice], calcium, salt, magnesium, zinc, caffeine, protein from dairy and shellfish, CO2. Sugar from fruit or sucrose is used to lower stress and provide the raw material for mitochondrial respiration. There is controversy within the community about the use of starches such as potatoes, rice, and corn. This is a summary. Summaries aren't where the real knowledge is.
3. The world will have gone mad while you were getting a good night’s sleep. When I successfully lowered my stress hormones through nutrition and strategic use of supplements, my world started to calm down. My focus improved and everything began to take on a fundamental unity. I had a grounded sensation. For me it was a spatial sensation: everything was where it should be. Everything was the perfect color, shape, and texture. At the same time, I noticed that some other people seemed highly adrenalized and rigid, or depleted and desperate. They often seemed in a hurry to talk too much. They seem to be in a battle to exist until exhaustion takes over.
I looked back at my formerly highly adrenalized self and I wondered how driven I had been, especially when I had made bad decisions, exhausted myself, or ruined relationships. I had gotten the Cushing’s fat distribution. It took about 3 years to develop, but that was after a dozen years and more of skipping meals and a lot of all-nighters studying. I understood what it meant to have been very thin and hypothyroid.
I could see that many people with good constitutions could live long, relatively happy lives substantially adrenalized, serotonized, estrogenized and in a state of sub-clinical shock the whole time. As I read Ray Peat’s articles I became convinced that adrenaline drives people to impose themselves on their environment as a way to prevent their environment from cannibalizing them through a lack of differentiated function: the chronically adrenalized organism would have to continually narrow its function in order to simply live. The fuel for life has to come from somewhere. We see this happening and call it aging. “I just can’t do the same things I used to do.” [The problem of Alzheimer’s disease as a clue to immortality—Part 1 at raypeat.com.]
If stress hormones and feedback were suppressed, and a robust oxidative metabolism restored, then theoretically the body could live stress-free and with perfect regenerative capacity indefinitely. [Regeneration and Degeneration: Types of inflammation change with aging at raypeat.com.] I wondered if the adrenalized people I met could live longer lives disease-free if they shifted to a slightly fast metabolic rate, burning more sugar than fatty acids, de-stress and letting their organism integrate with the surrounding environment in novel ways. But you can’t measure what might be.
The existential benefits of metabolic efficiency from a peatarian view are the ultimate benefit you are after, in my view. When you change your metabolism you are changing the way you meet your environment. The health of the GI tract gets a lot of attention from peatarians because this is the place that “outside” becomes “inside.” As soon as you can reliably lower your stress hormones the world will start to look different. This can be pleasant or it can be shocking, or just unfamiliar. It can bring on new kinds of anxiety, a kind of secondary evaluation of your situation. This is an invitation to expand your social, natural, intellectual, and play environments. This would be a good time to start a new activity you enjoy but haven’t done enough of. All the better if it keeps you outside for hours at a time. If you could actually move to a tropical climate a year or two in, all the best. Choose higher elevation for the CO2-retaining benefits if you have a choice.
4. You may start by reading a lot about a bio-energetic view of how stress cascades, inflammation, and shock work in your body and a little about how to mitigate the effects of stress. You may end up embarking on a wonderful and euphoric journey. This view turns out to be more than a view of biochemistry, or a diet, or even stress relief. You may end up taking on a new worldview that is deeply satisfying, engaging, and enriched by every kind of beauty. Or, you could just treat your anxiety.
The physical effects you are accustomed to in your everyday life are enough to get a conceptual understanding of the difference between cellular structures that yield energy that is produced from nutrition versus energy that is produced from hormonal imperatives such as cortisol or adrenaline. As a professor once told a class I was in, “we run out of energy before we run out of ideas.” If we nourish ourselves better with the substances that the body recognizes as raw material—fruit sugar, low-stress protein, saturated fats—then maybe our ideas can be animated by genuine cellular respiration rather than fermentation.
People who want to be taken seriously are hesitant to connect physical health to mental capacities. Dualism dies hard. And for a lot of people this may not seem to matter because they just want to feel better. But as they feel better their judgment will improve. That experience alone is profound for others. It's not so crazy to think that there is one organic cause of degenerative diseases. Not as crazy as thinking degenerative disease is an infinite, indefinite puzzle of unrelated causes.
There are some experienced people in forums and chat rooms to help with interpretations, but their judgment is only as good as your sense in using it. You will be making your own decisions about how you will implement food and supplements to ease your stress and get back to real life. Be prepared to be very patient.
It’s good to have some reading skills when you approach Ray Peat’s articles. Most people arrive at a peatarian approach when they are driven crazy by adrenaline and insomnia, among other things. Your focus might fail you just when you need it most to read his articles. But just because he can explain his physical biology views at the mitochondrial level doesn’t mean you have to be a trained biochemist to understand the principles at stake. The main problem isn’t understanding chemistry. The main problem is that Ray Peat is demonstrating views about conditions at the cell-level for which there is no adequately developed language in wide use. This is why the condition of cells is so important to his work: the language hasn’t crystalized yet so that flexibility in thinking is still possible; but it takes extra time to clarify what he, and we, understand to be true. It’s a perfect problem to have. This is what makes reading Peat’s articles exciting, the image is a genuinely alternative way of thinking. It takes a new use of your faculties.
Your environment on an oxidative metabolism will feel just as exciting and full of potential. The proportion of finger-on-the-pulse motions [I almost said “antics”] will be balanced by engagement with real people where they are, real nature as it is, your artistic talents, your loved ones, your past, present, and your future. Peating is not to be underestimated, but the benefits can make all the pieces of life take their place. As far as I can tell it’s a very happy condition.
5. You will find that some of the metabolic substances we have taken as good effects or signals of health for at least a generation in both the popular and professional medical media are only good because they protect us from imminent destruction. In this view endorphins, serotonin, estrogen, low cholesterol, cortisol/adrenaline, nitric oxide, prolactin, marathons, and some others are suspect because they are products of neuro-psychological or physical stresses. Especially with regard to the rollover from short-term to long-term adaptation to stress. This view of physical health is disturbing to some people because they have not been taught how to evaluate their own conditions or solutions, and appealing to authorities without conviction leads to battling authorities. It’s overwhelming to be sick and confused.
Having a Gestalt switch about good health and environmental integration requires an agile mind and a self-trusting nature. Most people have capacities for this, but are untrained. Feeling bad makes it hard to think. Even a poorly trained mind senses that something is not right about prevailing popular medical views of health and wellness. It’s not about calling everything that was thought to be “good,” but in the peatarian view is “bad,” over the past 50 years in popular health. It is that Ray Peat has pursued a view of health that has comprehensive implications and looks accurate according to the facts of diagnostic cases, such as toxemia, sub-clinical shock syndromes, and degenerative disease symptoms.
In peating it’s good to start with food first to relieve stress. Supplements can be helpful, but only if they are used with some idea of what you reasonably expect out of them. Most of the peaty supplements are available and inexpensive. They can be safe if used cautiously and for the shortest time possible. While you are rehabbing your metabolism you can fill in the bigger picture with some study time to re-learn why a stress metabolism has been marketed as a healthy metabolism for at least 50 years. Some of this bait-and-switch is inconvenient and can be easily corrected, like buying better milk. But some of it arises to the level of positive harm, with negligence in between. It is good to have a conviction of what Ray Peat is trying to do when you try to eat like or live like he suggests. You can’t be Ray Peat. But you can use what he has freely made available to be the best you.
There is a lot of un-learning that has to be done in order to learn things of great worth. [Children could learn unhindered by adults optimizing their environment, but this so rarely done that it is more often now that we ruin their capacities before they get a chance to use them.]
The physical biological view of health is no exception. The general switch has to do with how and how much the modern person living in a post-industrial society is adapted to a metabolic scaffolding that is providing survival, but not thriving. Endorphins, estrogen, and adrenaline feel very good. And you could live to a fairly old age in some basic functional capacity on a stress physiology, but it won’t be the best you might do. And the degenerative illnesses you would be likely to get would be attributed to aging independent of a degraded food supply or work stress. That’s just the most basic problem of deception you have to walk back if you are going to lose your stress and gain a life that is metabolically authentic.
When I read Ray Peat’s articles I know I have to be prepared to be on the wrong side of most popular opinion about health and well-being. I gained weight at the beginning, which rendered me untrustworthy by other people about how I was handling my health. Stress exacts its toll, it's only a matter of whether it is sooner or later. I could tell them that the popular views are the result of ideological marketing and popular momentum, and not sufficiently scientific, complex views of organisms that have their own intelligence and position in the bigger environment.
About half the time in the first 18 months I didn’t even feel that well because when I took down my adrenaline and cortisol I felt incredibly miserable. I was convinced of Ray Peat’s views and my commitment gave me super patience. But if you decide to do this, be advised: it’s a powerful, fundamentally different kind of existence you are embarking on. It can be beautiful, unified, and euphoric. There are a lot of simple, cheap supplements that can help a de-adaptation and re-adaptation to sugar-burning, mitochondrial respiration. I cannot stress enough how you should go slow and use great caution for best results. OTOH, not following his suggestions is riskier but conventional. The techniques are not to be trifled with because you are dealing with your metabolism on its own terrain and you can’t outsmart it. You can benefit from respecting its ways. It has short-term cycles and long-term cycles. What works in the short-term may have bad long-term results. You want to analyze, but not too much. You want to engage, but not exclusively. You can only be open to the lessons it has to teach you about living richly.
©Celise Schneider 2016
Image: slon_dot_pics, pexels.com