Mikhaila:
>Peterson told me it took several weeks for her to get used to the beef-only approach, and that the relief of her medical symptoms overpowers any sense of missing food. If even a tiny amount of anything else finds its way into her mouth, she will be ill, she says. This happened when she tried to eat an organic olive, and again recently when she was at a restaurant that put pepper on her steak.
>“I was like, whatever, it’s just pepper,” she told me. Then she had a reaction that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.
Iordanu:
>“Well, I have a negative story,” said Peterson. “Both Mikhaila and I noticed that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren’t supposed to, the reaction was absolutely catastrophic.” He gives the example of having had some apple cider and subsequently being incapacitated for a month by what he believes was an inflammatory response.
>“You were done for a month?”
>“Oh yeah, it took me out for a month. It was awful ...”
>“Apple cider? What was it doing to you?”
>“It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I seriously mean overwhelming. There’s no way I could’ve lived like that. But see, Mikhaila knew by then that it would probably only last a month.”
>“A month? From fucking cider?”
>“I didn’t sleep that month for 25 days. I didn’t sleep at all for 25 days.”
>“What? How is that possible?”
>“I’ll tell you how it’s possible: You lay in bed frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours. And then you get up.”
>(The longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is 11 days, witnessed by a Stanford research team.)
