Quitting the PMO hell hole: Going 100% Hunter Gatherer Mode

Month 14 Year 2

Introduction

I want to start this thread, mainly for me, but also for anyone out there who - like me - thinks of NoFap as being a lot more than just giving up masterbation.

My background is that, after being addicted to pmo for 30+ years, I finally quit the addiction by embracing total lifestyle change. I really mean total: philosophy, diet, exercise, attitude, everything. I realised it isn't enough to just want to not masterbate or watch porn. You gotta want more than this - you gotta want it all. See the guy in the movies who seems to have everything? Well, that's going to be you. That's how much you have to want this. That's how much quitting this sick addiction means. PERMANENTLY.

The #1 thing I realised is your life has to change. It MUST change. I never get tired of saying this.

You want to spend the rest of your days looking at pixels on an iPad while playing with your penis? Fine. Just carry on.

You want to become the person you know you can be - spiritually, mentally, and above all physically? Then you better accept you are going to need to change. BIG TIME!

Ok, so we all accept we need big, big, mega change. That change is comin' down the tracks, we ain't gettin' out the way: it's going to roll right on over us. We are then going to be hoping on and riding that steam train on down the line. But is this enough?

Well, it's one thing to accept change, but what change? What are the specifics, what are the details? What *exactly* is the change required? Well, this was (not 'is') the major sticking point for me. I did a lot of head scratching, a lot of reading, a lot of thinking. I am a rational guy, I don't often take advice: I like thinking things out for myself, looking at the evidence, coming to my own conclusions, and critically - ACTING on those conclusions. If I get things wrong I blame no one, NO ONE, but myself. Simple as that. I want to share these conclusions here, in this thread.

My thesis is that pmo addiction is fundamentally caused by our degenerate 21st century lifestyle. It is a symptom, not a cause. So if you want to quit pmo you need to quit that degenerate lifestyle. You need to ask yourself just one question. That question isn't, oddly, 'how do I quit pmo'? The question is this:

How was I meant to live?

My answer, as an evolutionary biologist, is to go back in time 3000+ years. Before civilisation even took off, before farming, before organised religion, yes - before porn. Back to the time of the hunter gatherer: THAT is the lifestyle your body is designed for; THAT is the life that your brain is wired for; THAT is the lifestyle we need to beat pmo.

This thread is about going Hunter Gatherer Mode.

 

Thanks. I will add my next chapter before the end of this month - only planning to add a chapter a month.

 

No paleo.

 

Re Masterbation: in some isolated hunter gatherer societies, there isn't even a word in their language for masterbation. Says it all really.

 

Month 15 Year 2

Chapter 2: Known benefits of hunter gatherer communities

I want to start by just summarising some things I have read about hunter gatherer cultures. Everyone knows that our ancestors are thought to have lived as hunter gatherers up until the domestication of plants/animals about 3000-5000 years ago (depending where these folks lived). The classic model of the hunter gatherer community is of a small grouping that survive on the resources around them. Population density is low - no tv, no internet, no books, indeed no time for recreation. These communities would have lived life on the edge. Survival is limited by three things essentially, in this order: #1 food, #2 disease, #3 war. These societies would have relied a lot on the natural environment and what that could or could not provide for food. To find that food, a lot of physical hard work would have been needed. Obviously hunting was a big deal, but surprisingly it is thought meat was not the main food in the diet. There would have been great variety - heavy reliance on various plants and plant derived products. Plants don't run away, and exploiting them for food relies on knowledge more than brawn. Obviously no modern refined products would be available - like white flour, sugar, refined fat's - thus dopamine releasing foods would rarely be eaten. Complex and heterogenous energy sources would be the norm. Another big element of the hunter gatherer lifestyle would have been exercise: a lot of it. What type of exercise? Well undoubtedly walking. A lot of walking. Yes running, yes strength based exercise too, but a lot of walking.

How do we know all this? Well there are still isolated communities around today who live hunter gatherer lifestyles, and luckily anthropologists have studied these communities. Many are found in places like Africa and Indonesia still. Why study such communities? Well, many of these cultures seem to have, typically, physiological traits that modern medicine associates with high life expectancy/low mortality (refs to be added later). For example, some general observations are that these communities:

1. Tend to have low incidence of many of the big killers in affluent modern societies - heart disease, cancers. These people die of infection rather than traditional diseases of modern affluent societies, as they don't have modern medicine to fall back on.
2. Individuals have body mass index values that we know are also associated with low incidence of modern diseases - men BMI of c21, women of c20. Lower than many other modern communities on average.
3. Coupled with 2., many of the individuals in these communities have low body fat - men for example are less than 15% body fat typically.

So there is some nice evidence that hunter gatherer communities are 'healthier' than many people in affluent societies - imparting resistance against modern diseases, and that it is down to lifestyle, not genetics.

There is one other thing I learned though that really got me thinking. Masterbation is rare in hunter gatherer communities! Indeed, it is so rare, that there are example of isolated communities that don't have a word for masterbation in their local language. Holy shit! Eureka!

So this thunderbolt realisation got me thinking: Perhaps modern sexual behaviours are also linked to degenerate lifestyles - far removed from the hunter gatherer lifestyles of our ancestors, the lifestyles our bodies are designed for, that we can argue our bodies are really optimally setup for? Could the desire for pmo be linked to the way we live, by what we eat, by what we do in our spare time? It seems obvious, but is there any evidence for this?

If the above is true, maybe we can look to the hunter gatherer lifestyle for clues on how to best approach a pmo free life? This was the basis of the ideas that started my journey, and where I developed my plan, to live like a hunter gatherer...and what a journey it has been.

 

Hi @Wolf2019.

Yes, mainly diet and exercise. Also, I think though that 'how we look at ourselves' is important. When we think about our bodies and the way we respond to environmental stimuli in terms of our evolutionary past, it makes it a lot easier to rationalise things e.g. If our hunter gatherer ancestors were walking 1+ hrs a day, each and every day, just to survive, then it isn't perhaps suprising that when we don't follow this level of exercise things start to go wrong - including with our brain, not just the rest of our bodies. This is the approach I have taken.

I hope to get chapter 3 up here soon on the hunter gatherer diet.

 

I think this is a good point. Doing explosive power anaerobic exercises - in combination with aerobic - has to be good thing.

Humans have to be considered specialised 'walking machines' from a physical perspective. We are 'set up' for walking, this is clear from looking at hunter gatherer communities in countries like Namibia, who still live this way today. These small, very lean people will walk 10+ miles a day. Every day.

However, you are right, there is no doubt explosive powerful would have been critical, both in hunting and in war. I now also do weight training 3x a week on top of my walking 6-7x a week, for this reason. Both aerobic and anaerobic exercise are needed.

Your dog is a specialised carnivore. His wolf ancestors would hunt in packs. Again though combining a lot of slow walking/trotting with explosive hunter killing episodes.

For me, the cat is the king of the carnivores. When I look at a cat, I look at over a billion years of evolutionary perfection. Move over T-Rex, Sylvester is coming through. Everything about the cat makes it the perfect hunting machine. Even its eyesight is geared towards being the perfect killer. An incredible animal.