The Raw
Field Guide
to a body that
actually works.

A lot of mainstream nutrition advice is downstream of 1970s propaganda and food-industry marketing. Eggs were demonized to sell cereal. Butter was demonized to sell margarine. Raw milk was criminalized to protect industrial dairy.

This course leans on independent researchers — people who looked at the actual biology instead of repeating the food pyramid. You're free to disagree. You're not free to skip reading them.

The fitness industry sold you a lie: that 150g of protein a day is the golden metric. Meanwhile your magnesium tank is empty, your vitamin D is in the basement, and you can't focus through a 45-minute class.

Your body doesn't build muscle from protein alone. It needs magnesium to relax tissue, zinc to synthesize testosterone, retinol to repair skin, and B vitamins to actually turn food into usable energy. Without the micronutrient layer, protein is just expensive calories your body can't fully use.

Ray Peat and Weston Price both emphasized this: traditional diets were nutrient-dense first, protein-adequate second. A small portion of liver delivers more real nutrition than a pound of whey isolate.

If you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, oysters would keep you alive the longest. They're not just seafood — they're a complete nutrition package that no synthetic multivitamin can replicate.

Ray Peat called shellfish "the most nutrient-dense animal food available." Weston A. Price documented coastal cultures eating them raw and thriving. For a teenager building a brain, a body, and a hormone system, oysters are the closest thing to a cheat code.

Raw is best. The heat-sensitive B-vitamins and fragile lipids survive intact. If you can't do raw, gently steamed is acceptable. Canned oysters in their own juices still retain most minerals. Avoid deep-fried or heavily breaded — you're eating the coating, not the medicine.

Everyone tells you to "just relax." Nobody tells you that stress is a hormone — cortisol — and it hijacks every system that matters for a teenager: testosterone production, sleep quality, gut health, and the ability to think clearly.

You don't need a meditation app. You need to understand that cortisol has a chemical address, and you can starve it with sunlight, real food, and rhythm. The benefits of low cortisol are immediate: deeper sleep, sharper focus, stable mood, natural muscle gain, and skin that clears on its own.

Aajonus Vonderplanitz treated bathing as a recovery protocol, not a luxury. He recommended hot baths with raw milk, raw cream, or raw butter added to the water — and he warned against the modern obsession with ice baths and cold plunges.

I've been taking baths at least twice a week for my entire life, sometimes every single day. But I don't just sit in tap water. Municipal water is loaded with chlorine, chloramine, and fluoride — chemicals your skin drinks in and your lungs inhale as steam. Using the right filters turns a bath from a chemical soak into actual therapy.

I tore my pec my freshman year of high school because I was overtraining. I thought more was better — more sets, more days, more intensity. What I learned is that the gym rewards consistency, not martyrdom.

That injury taught me the most important lesson in training: if you get a bad night of sleep, stay home and recover. Pushing your body past what it is meant to do may feel cool in the moment, but a torn pec is not cool. It is months of regret.

I healed that torn pec with a peptide called BPC-157 — back when peptides were barely even heard of. It worked. I condone responsible peptide use, and I will say this plainly: peptides are trending because they work. In the next few decades they will become mainstream medicine — especially compounds like retatrutide that burn fat and apparently fight off cancer cells. Once peptides are put into capsules, even more people will take them. And they should.

Before processed food, before reservations, before the industrial diet rewired every culture on the planet — Native Americans lived in a way that modern medicine is only now beginning to understand. Their diet was wild, nutrient-dense, and seasonal. Their movement was constant and natural. Their stress was acute and recoverable. Their sleep followed the sun. And their health was extraordinary.

Weston A. Price traveled the world in the 1930s documenting traditional diets and found that indigenous populations eating their native foods had perfect teeth, wide dental arches, strong jaws, and almost no disease. When the same populations switched to processed Western foods, the deterioration was visible within a single generation — crowded teeth, cavities, narrowed faces, and the chronic diseases we now consider normal.

The modern Native American health crisis is not a genetic failure. It is a dietary displacement. The body that evolved on bison, wild salmon, berries, and roots cannot thrive on soda, white flour, and seed oils. The return to traditional foods is not nostalgia — it is biological necessity.

Every dollar you spend at a grocery store splits between the store, the distributor, the packager, the trucker, and finally the farmer — who gets the smallest slice. When you buy direct from a farm or a local butcher, that same dollar goes almost entirely to the person raising the animal. The quality goes up. The price often goes down. And you stop funding the industrial system that brought you feedlot meat and pasteurized, homogenized milk.

The math on a half cow is shocking. Grocery store ground beef averages $6–$9 per pound. A grass-fed half cow from a local farm, processed and vacuum-sealed, runs $5–$7 per pound — and that price includes every premium cut: ribeye, tenderloin, brisket, short ribs, and organs. For a family eating 10 pounds of beef per week, that's roughly $3,000–$4,700 a year at the store. Buying half a cow upfront drops the same amount of meat to $2,600–$3,600 — a savings of $400–$1,100 annually, with better quality and zero middlemen.

Apply the same logic to raw milk. A gallon of organic milk at the store is $6–$8. Raw milk from a farm-share is $8–$12 per gallon — but it's living food with intact enzymes, and your money keeps a small farm operating instead of disappearing into a corporate balance sheet. Eggs are even clearer: $7–$9 for true pasture-raised soy-free at a farm, versus $5–$6 for misleading "cage-free" labels at the store that still come from warehouse hens.

Hormonal birth control is the only drug in modern medicine that's prescribed to perfectly healthy people, often for decades, starting in their teens, to break a system that's working correctly. Ovulation isn't a disease. The natural cycle is what makes a woman feel like herself — confident in the follicular phase, magnetic around ovulation, calm and grounded in the luteal phase. Synthetic hormones flatten all of that into a chemical monotone.

Women off the pill consistently report the same thing once the fog lifts: clearer thinking, real libido back, deeper sleep, stronger attraction to their partner (or, sometimes, the opposite — and they finally see why). Mood swings calm down instead of getting worse. Skin and hair improve after the initial detox months. They say it feels like meeting themselves again.

Non-hormonal options exist and work: fertility awareness with a basal thermometer or device like Natural Cycles, copper IUDs (with their own trade-offs), barrier methods, or simply tracking the cycle. Doctors rarely mention them because the pill is the default prescription. It shouldn't be.