Thank You, Dr. Ray Peat
Maybe you’re like so many humans these days and find yourself with the label of being “chronically ill.” Perhaps despite following protocols perfectly, cleaning up your diet, and seeing all the experts, you’re not getting better.
Doctors refer you to more doctors for further testing and scans, naturopaths pick out piles of supplements and send you home with a “plan” to remove all your favorite foods and opt for pills and potions to eradicate the candida while cycling seeds for your hormonal health and capsules to keep you “calm.”
Meanwhile, after rounds and rounds of testing, functional medicine doctors place you on a low fodmap-AIP-gut-healing protocol before planning to detox the mold, chelate the metals, which will then allow you to bust through biofilms, kill all the parasites, and target any lingering co-infections.
All you think about it getting better. All you think about is how when these symptoms go away, THEN you’ll be able to relax.
Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, your parents and therapist listen patiently and warmly, also confused as to why you’re still as sick as you are. Your binder of bloodwork and hair tests and urine tests and stool tests grow: your confusion & overwhelm expands accordingly.
This is the healing saga I fell into from 2012 to 2020.
This trajectory is what the majority of my clients find themselves swimming in, and maybe you, dear reader, find yourself in, as well. I’m on the other side now, currently living in the healthiest body I’ve ever been in, thanks to finding Ray Peat and all of the information he shared so generously. I’ve been meaning to publicly thank him for quite some time now. I’ll plan to do so continually.
(Also, thanks to Brandon Trean, Danny Roddy, Georgi Dinkov: thank you all for getting the word out about Ray Peat’s ideas and knowledge. I can’t thank you all enough for bringing his work to my attention and sharing Ray’s research so freely.)
Perhaps you’ve found yourself trying diet after diet after diet hoping, desperately, that this “healing protocol” will be the cure to your chronic fatigue, digestive worries, mood irregularities, sleep issues, anxiety attacks, and maybe, just maybe, if you nail down your mineral balance and optimize your light environment, THEN you’ll start healing?
After the constant struggle to fix, to one day feel better, many of you are feeling burnt out. Pooped. Completely frustrated that you’re still dealing with the soup of dysfunction and imbalances you find yourself in. If you’re experiencing a journey similar to mine, you may have found yourself simultaneously hopeless yet still hoping that someone would be the one to save you.
Dr. Ray Peat delivered the hope I needed at a critical moment of feeling completely done with trying to fight.
In fact, I had decided it was time to go, as life did not feel worth living if it meant being in a creature-like bundle of bones & thinning skin, unable to perform the basic functions of digestion, elimination, sleeping, or feeling safe enough to experience anything close to relaxation.
When I first heard about Ray, I was 79 lbs, surviving on the Physician’s elemental formula, hoping that hyperthermic treatments and the “perfect” diet would “cure” my Lyme disease & co-infections and get me back to living the life I thought was promised to me.
The hyperthermic treatments actually made matters worse. I then shifted to a strict, all-meat carnivore diet, which you can read about here.
Ray spoke of coffee, orange juice, sugar, coconut oil, carrots, ice cream, gelatin, milk, and saturated fats as therapeutic and restorative for the organism: all of the things I found myself craving but unable to process without massive fatigue & histamine reactions.
At first, I couldn’t possibly imagine how these foods could be healing… or if they were even “allowed.” Weren’t al these foods the cause of disease, I asked?
Without intending to, I found myself canceling my remaining IV infusions & instead, reading every one of Ray’s articles, consuming every Generative Energy podcast, every KMUD interview with Ray I could track down.
Some of what he mentioned sounded too good to be true, as I still questioned how something as “inflammatory” as sugar and milk or as “toxic” as coffee & ice cream (or so I was told) could play a role in healing.
Despite my skepticism, intrigue took over. Intrigue & hope. Curiosity. The what-if there IS another way to heal, that doesn’t involve rigidity, removal, and white-knuckling through? What if most everything we’ve been told about “inflammatory foods” and “healing diets” was maybe…wrong?
The first non-meat foods I added back in after my 3-month all-meat diet shifted things that very first day. I speak a lot about motility because having lost it, I experienced firsthand what systemic poisoning from the inside out does to a system. I started eating Ray Peat’s famous carrot salad (which you can read about here) and for the first time in over a year, I felt myself believing, “maybe I will heal…”
"I don't have an eating plan, other than to be perceptive and to learn about your physiology, so that you can adjust things to your needs." Ray Peat (2019)
For those of you reading who feel like you’ve tried everything only to feel traumatized by the medical system and confused about what to do next, this isn’t about me convincing you to do what I did or follow a “pro-metabolic” diet, which I feel is an oversimplified and corrupted take on what Ray was really talking about.
If anything, this is a gentle (and loving!) invitation to consider that much of what is being sold as healing might not be what is therapeutic for you. If anything, this is a gentle (and loving!) invitation to consider that what might be most healing could be simple, enjoyable, stress-reducing, intuitive, balanced, with the added benefit of being backed by cellular biology and what a cell truly needs to thrive.
In the same manner that Peat inspired me to pay attention and curiously tinker with my physiology, I hope the same for you. This is what opened up new possibilities and eventually fueled the work I do now: helping people remember they can heal even when they doubt it.
What if the healing you seek awaits you by tuning out the noise and maybe for the first time in your life, asking your body what it needs?
The gratitude I feel for Ray Peat’s influence on my diet, my mindset, and what I earnestly feel saved me from an early death is something I try and appreciate and pay thanks to daily . This blog post is a way for me to remember, honor, and share some gratitude for Dr. Ray Peat, his ideas, his embodiment of generosity, critical thinking, and to me, my reason to choose hope, to remember that we came here to play, to connect, to create, to help one another out, to find joy, and yes, to find euphoria living out what we each find meaningful.
It sounds dramatic written out but it really feels true: There wouldn’t be a Theresa writing this if not for finding Ray and finally feeling, down to each and every cell, that healing is indeed possible, no matter how far gone or hopeless our brains might think we are.
There wouldn’t be a Living Roots Wellness, this blog, a Tapping with T, or the “Heal Yourself Podcast” if not for Ray’s knowledge providing the tools, tricks, and templates for me to try on and eventually, heal myself back to wholeness.
Something Ray emphasized, in many ways, was the importance of experimentation and experience as the truest sources of knowledge. Despite what studies (often funded with conflicts of interests and pharmaceutical involvement) might show, your body, your thoughts, your ideas, your subtle curiosities, your direct experience will guide you toward what is “right” and what is healing if you are willing to let go of what you’ve been told and instead, play with what has felt right all along.
I’ll leave it at that for today. If this sparked any interest, I highly encourage you checkout Ray’s website and read through any/all of his articles. You might be surprised how things finally start making the right kind of sense.
