What Made You Believe In Ray Peats Work?

DKayJoe

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After about 4 years of deteriorating health in general, my interpretations of his ideas are the only ones that have ever seemed to have real benefits for me. I'm not where I want to be yet, but some days (becoming more often) I feel like the clock has been turned back for me health wise, as if I'd woken up as an 18 year old again.

Most other diets I followed made me actually feel worse or had no effect, yet I kept implementing them because they were general common sense. It makes me smile the amount of people in work who say to me "You can't drink that much milk every day!" and when I reply with why, the answer is always..."Because it's bad for you!" to which I reply again with why, to which the answer is always the same..."Because it is!".

I think the most valuable thing I've ever interpreted from Peats ideas is to get in touch with your body and listen to it...if it's saying something is bad, it almost always is, your body is much smarter than your brain when it comes to such matters.
 

gretchen

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miko said:
It's easy: Ray negate all what's in mainstream media/medicine/propaganda. It's visible to all that mainstream medicine does not go forward - there is more and more deahts from cancer and other neurodegenerative diseases, so something must be wrong with the way we eat/work/etc.

Pretty much this.
 

Gl;itch.e

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More salt and carrot fibre made a huge difference for me. So much so that I dived even deeper and got hooked on how much influence we can have over our own physiology. No longer did I believe that things were hopelessly predetermined and genetically programed. That we indeed do have the tools to help ourselves.
 

taylor108

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The fact that I feel better than I have since probably childhood. I was extremely skeptical when I first came across his ideas on a paleo forum-the sugar and Mexican cola was an instant turn-off-but I slowly began to try some of his ideas, and now here I am. Almost everything is better- digestion, mood, I never get sick, I eat to satiety and don't get cravings, etc. My life is totally different than it was a few years ago. I've tried many "common sense" ways of eating and they all worked for a bit and then went downhill, or didn't work at all. I've been following Peat the longest and can't foresee myself drastically changing anytime soon, unless my health starts dramatically deteriorating.

His ideas go against all "common sense" and mainstream ideas of health. But obviously, the mainstream ideas of health are not working for people. And his ideas have helped me enormously.
 

ilovethesea

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I knew Ray was legit as soon as I landed on his site.

For a long time I had been trying to understand my hormones and why I was having certain symptoms - premenstrual acne, low energy (had to always nap if I went out during the day), increasing irritability and inability to handle even small stresses. I was going to an ND who couldn't give me satisfactory answers. I had long given up on GPs, way back in my teens. The last straw was my ND giving me plant estrogen supplements. Well even I knew that estrogen was bad. And at that point I had already tried many useless diets, supplements.

When I found Ray's site suddenly everything made sense. Nobody had even come close to connecting my issues to low thyroid, and high estrogen/low progesterone, etc. (even though I only have half my thyroid!!!) and I had been seeing "the best" ND in my country as well as endocrinologists before that. I knew Ray had the truth right away, even before I started experimenting on myself with his recommendations.

I love this quote from the Vision & Acceptance interview also:

"More than 50 years ago, I realized that the US culture had become effectively totalitarian, with decorations, and even the decorations were being fixed by the specialists (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example). I went through a series of graduate studies and projects looking for places where reality could influence the culture, rather than being obliterated by it. The academic culture, though, was rapidly changing for the worse. Over a period of a few years I happened to see a few people recover immediately from what doctors had considered incurable problems, using simple and inexpensive methods, and then I realized that some people were willing to discard their old ideas when those conflicted with useful facts, especially when the useful facts could save their life." - Ray Peat

Ray is about so much more than health.
 

SQu

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I realized his recommended foods were the ones I grew up on. My family is very healthy and I used to be too.
I appreciate and value not being talked down to. Have stopped reading /listening to those who do.
I love the freedom from health clutter and theories. Now that I know something about how the body actually works I no longer need to waste my time considering theories not based on physiology. And can spend my time finding out more of the truth which I believe sets you free.
 

tomisonbottom

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I'm interested in how you came to trust and believe in Ray's work. I assume you didn't just jump in, naturally there would be some hesitation since his work is very against the mainstream. Was it keeping an open mind and slowly incorporating his ideas and seeing positive results?

Applying his work has totally cured my arthritis, anxiety and learned helplessness. It's completely changed my life. I was jumping from diet to diet every year for the last decade looking for a solution, but since I found his work and haven't had a single arthritis issue.
 

keith

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For me it was that he was the first person I read who could explain why I had such strong cravings for things like sugar and salt and ice cream, and why they made me feel so much better when I ate them. Just before I discovered Peat, I was coming to the conclusion, on my own, that restricting these things was unhealthy, despite everything else I had been taught, but I didn't trust my own instincts enough to act on it. Once I read Peat, I instantly saw so many connections between what I observed in practice and what he was writing, and it just made sense to me, and gave me the confidence to start listening to my body more, and I've seen regular improvements ever since.
 

milk_lover

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For me, when I saw bag breathing and coconut oil make me breath heavily with pink face :joyful:
 

kiran

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I had bad reactions to fish oil, and Peat was the only one arguing against it at the time on some obscure mailing list...
 

Lilac

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I heard about Ray Peat in the Mark's Daily Apple forums, so I took a look at his articles. I was deeply struck by what Ray said about hypothyroidism being the cause of all the degenerative diseases, because even though I felt pretty good and was as slim as I had ever been, my feet were ice-cold at night, my heart rate was low (60), and my hair was falling out. I self-diagnosed and fixed my hypothyroidism myself, using Ray's ideas. There is no going back.

I often say to my mother, who has been greatly helped by Ray, "What would we have done if we hadn't found Peat?" At the mercy of the medical system! Eating the canola oil! It's a scary thought.
 

denise

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Oct 18, 2013
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I knew he was on to something when I pretty much cured my hypoglycemia simply by drinking OJ first thing in the morning.
 

dbh25

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What I was doing wasn't working for me, so I started making some minor adjustments based on what I've read on the science and comments here. I'll see where it leads to.
 

Pet Peeve

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I got diabetes like symptoms on a paleo diet and this puzzled me so much that I sat down and searched for information for hours on the net. Also could not understand why seal oil felt like poison.
 

Sheila

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Nov 6, 2014
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Many, many years of trying to figure out what underlying principle I was missing led me to Dr Peat. Why did some things work for some people and not for others? Then, slowly, very slowly the fundamentals became clear and then the hard work of application, trial and error, understanding and misunderstanding, piecing it all together, joining the dots, really began. Oh and did I mention it revolutionised my own health, thinking, perspective as a bi-product! And I no longer tell people what to do any more. I can not begin to express my gratitude to Dr Peat and the amazing pieces that I have gleaned from this wonderful forum. Truly life changing.
Sincerely
Sheila
 

DaveFoster

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The improvement in vision with serotonin antagonists, PUFA avoidance, and thyroid supplementation made me trust Peat's serotonin hypothesis.
 

CoolTweetPete

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I was losing my hair and has pretty much given up hope. I was on the brink of taking a razor to my head, when I saw some mention Roddy / Peat on the Bulletproof Diet guy's forum. People were laughing and making fun of the ideas, but in my desperation I read Hair Like A Fox twice in one night. I was baffled.

Being on keto and listening to the Bulletproof guy's podcast / reading all his articles had taught me a lot about biology, so when I read the book, I understood a lot of the things he was talking about, and the ideas were very cohesive with the information I already had.

I feel like Dr. Peat's work is for anyone who's tried everything else, and learned along the way. I'm sure it seems overwhelming to someone who eats fast food all the time and has never considered themselves 'health conscious', but to an amateur nutrition researcher, it was eye opening and I had to dig deeper. The more and more I read, the more I found ideas that fit perfectly with ones I had already read about. It was like I had an incomplete puzzle, and Dr. Peat's work filled in all the gaps.
 

chispas

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Dec 4, 2014
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I think Ray Peat is absolutely right, and that poses a lot of problems for both humanity, society and the medical system.

I think the PUFA stuff is dead on the money. I mean, they are fragile oils that heat up and oxidise in the body. It's basic. Even wheat farmers know that the oils they extract from oats, etc go rancid the more PUFA content is in the oil. Yet, we have the global heart foundations pushing this stuff like a confederacy of gangsters. I would donate money to a terrorist group to destroy the heart foundations of the world. It would be a philanthropic act.

As for the cancer stuff, that is the most depressing. How long will researchers ignore metabolism? How much longer will people needlessly die? For how much longer will chemo continue? I hope Ray is wrong, because the truth is horrible.

Thank God be recommends eating sugar, I would be too serotonergic and depressed by the authoritarian reality of our crummy society to function. Ray's sugar advice was the best thing for my anxiety, coupled with a bit of salt, brought my long term adrenaline issues under control.

...I feel like I should start publishing pamphlets of Ray's writings and promote efforts to overthrow the dominance of the medical system. I'm shocked even the radical left aren't more interested, no independent journalists are looking to explore Ray's assertions at all. It's seen as a conspiracy, but it is in plain sight. It's an ongoing horror.
 

chispas

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I've had this strange feeling recently that when I speak to friends about health or medicine, it's like I'm in a dream, and no one around me is making sense, and I try to raise a question, or introduce doubt, and there is just silence or confused faces looking at me like I'm insane or not completely following the direction of the conversation.... I felt like I should probably see a psychiatrist, because Ray's writings and way of thinking about the world is so clear and reasonable and logical (and evidenced!) that to be in a conversation with dogmatic people makes me feel insane. I feel like I need to go off into the mountains for a while.
 

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