I survived solo in the wilderness for the TV show ‘Alone UK’. Here’s what I learned

If you are not familiar with the show, the concept is pretty simple. 10 people get dropped completely alone in different locations deep in the Canadian wilderness. There is no film crew, you have to film everything yourself. Each person may take 10 survival items with them from a predefined list and sustain themselves for as long as possible, catching and foraging their food and building shelter. Surviving. You can give up at any time and call the sat-phone. Whoever doesn’t give up wins £100,000.

I went in really excited to put my bushcraft skills to the test and see how I would fare.

What I had not factored in was that I was embarking on an experiment to live a simple palaeolithic existence, and get clean baseline data of how you really feel when removed from the trappings of modern society. Here’s what I learnt:

I had 7 weeks to prepare before the adventure. I trained in the gym, adding muscle, but mostly I got as fat as possible. In nature, fat is money in the bank, so, of course, I started by drinking shots of olive oil… This was not pleasant, its peppery taste burns the back of your throat, so I switched to coconut oil and poured 300ml into my morning smoothie every day. That was 2,500 calories straight away. I added double cream and sugar to every cup of coffee, I forced down burgers before bed etc. It was fun for a time, until my reward centres stopped firing quite so much and it genuinely became quite an effort. In those 7 weeks, I added 20kg/44lb. 22% of my body weight.

Anyway, I’m sure most of you are not looking for tips on how to get as fat as possible as quickly as possible.

When foraging for your calories, firstly you realise how scarce calories are in nature and how insanely abundant they are in the modern world. In the wilderness, every decision I made was an equation of how many calories it will cost me. For example, building a chimney for my shelter was perhaps my biggest optional caloric outlay. I would estimate it cost me 12,000 calories. Would this yield a sufficient return on investment in warmth and as a mental boost? I knew that winter was coming, and temperatures were heading to -30C/-20f, so if I was going to win, I would need a fireplace and chimney (pic below). Plus, you can’t beat the companionship of a crackling fireplace in your shelter.

We know dopamine is the incentive mechanism to motivate us to sustain ourselves. We also know in the modern world it is cheap AF and everywhere!

When you remove all the noise of modern life, and live the wild, you distil life right down to its essence. It became very clear that (much like a pet cat) dopamine release revolves around little else than catching and eating food.

Whenever I felt bored, I spent my time fishing. Fishing was my entertainment, it was thrilling. From a brain chemistry perspective, it felt like a trip to the casino. I fished with a lure made from brightly coloured paracord and brass snare wire. Each cast of the line, akin to a spin of the roulette wheel, each nibble or bite offered a rush of almost winning, and then wow, landing a fish. JACKPOT! Fuck me, it felt so good.

And it was not just dopamine, but oxytocin too. My only source of it, other than just appreciating nature, was a 20-minute medical examination every 7 days. The pleasure you receive when starved of human contact is palpable. Many people apparently quit the show the day after their medical, the oxytocin come down proving too much.

Our Palaeolithic brain chemistry struggles with the modern world. It’s easy to forget we are animals with simple programming to ensure that we eat and reproduce. 

Society has changed dramatically around us, but our brain chemistry has stood still. Anxiety and depression are skyrocketing and for me this mismatch is the crux of our problem. This quote by the American biologist Edward O. Wilson puts it beautifully:

“The real problem of humanity is: We have Palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and godlike technology.“

I believe most of our challenges can be explained, very simply, by our attempt to hammer our square palaeolithic peg into the round hole of modern society. 

My diet consisted of berries, a lot of boiled fish, a few edible leaves, roots, some seeds, and a mouse. However, after 25 days a DUCK got caught in my net by complete accident. I plucked and gutted this stunning gift and slow-roasted it in my cast iron pot, with coals on top of the lid.

Now, even on a regular day at home, roast duck is amongst my favourite dishes, but when you have only eaten boiled pike and leaves for 25 days and you dine on a whole roast duck, my god, the pleasure centres go through the roof. As I opened the lid, and just smelled the heady scent, I wept! Eating that duck was up there as one of the highest highs I have ever felt in my life, the intensity of flavours was ineffable. It will forever be better than any triple Michelin star experience, because hunger is the best sauce.

I don’t have a picture of the duck, and sadly they did not include this in the show, but here I am about to cook a mouse I caught in a makeshift trap. Mouse, incidentally, I would not rate so highly. Mine was more like an overcooked chicken wing. Still a solid 6/10 at the time.

Before even eating the duck, I was already starting to appreciate parts of fish that surprised me. I started to crave the liver (undoubtedly due to my body already seeking trace minerals and vitamins it was beginning to lack). I began to enjoy the cheek meat most of all, perhaps it held more fat. You become more mindful. Your senses heighten. 

It’s not just taste and smell, you start to hear more acutely, and notice more movement, as the aperture of your senses, now required again, opens up. 

The most striking example of this for me was when the competition ended, and I returned to the hotel. Talking with people was exhausting, I was unable to last more than 5 minutes and when I tried to sleep that evening (for the first time in over a month) It was as if my brain was on amphetamines. It took me five hours to get to sleep. Only after I had opened the window, turned off the fridge, and improvised some earplugs out of tissue paper, I eventually slept. 

Of course, if we lived in cities with our senses set so acutely we would go insane. However, I think it’s interesting to recognise we all have this within us, and it does not take long for them to heighten. I imagine a silent vipassana retreat, for example, will achieve similar results.

The simple diet (and lack of stress) healed my body. I was disgusting when I went in, getting so fat in 7 weeks had started to take its toll, my blood pressure had jumped from 120 to 150 and I started to get heartburn and acid reflux. So, once I switched to a simple palaeolithic diet, of boiled fish, leaves, seeds, berries and teas, it was little wonder I felt better within the first couple of days. However, my healing went well beyond this. Maintaining this exceptionally clean and natural diet I began to see other benefits. 

The biggest benefit, I believe, was a gut biome reset. For as long as I can remember I have struggled with IBS, bloating etc. I am confident that whilst I was out there my gut biome was entirely reset. My IBS went away and, remarkably, has not returned 12 months later. 

NB: I would have loved to have had my biome tested before and after. I did have blood work done, my liver enzyme markers were elevated beforehand, likely from the ‘getting fat’ diet, and they returned right back to a healthy range. My blood pressure also dropped from 150 to 110 in 35 days.

Secondly, I believe that, through the reduced calories and intermittent fasting, my body entered autophagy (Latin for self-eating). I’m not so hot on the biohacking stuff, but, when glucose and insulin levels drop considerably your body starts a spring cleaning of cells, reusing old and damaged cell parts. My body felt so much better afterwards, I was less inflamed and I’m confident the two are linked.

Finally, I noticed my mouth was not furry in the morning. Despite having no access to toothpaste, I believe, for a time, my oral biome changed. I found this article, which supports the idea that, until the neolithic dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry shifted our diets, we had great oral hygiene. 

I’m sure there was likely lots else at play here, but these are my deductions. Who knew that if you ate the exact diet we evolved to eat for 99% of human existence, our body would appreciate it so much…

These two photos are 35 days apart:

In the first few weeks my brain was a petulant brat, seeking entertainment and stimulation. It would venture deep into the recesses of my mind plucking out people and conversations I thought I had long forgotten about.

I now reflect on this time as a long overdue deep ‘defrag’ of my mental hard drive.

I’m told some contestants left due to unresolved mental demons that were brought up and that they could not overcome. We seldom allow the time for unfriendly thoughts to enter our brain, and certainly don’t take the time to examine and work through them. We numb them with a good old phone scroll, booze, or a panoply of other distractions. Typically, it’s when we cannot sleep that they have a chance to get to us without distraction.

Three weeks into my time in the wilderness, I reached a state where my physical needs were met (shelter, water, fire and food). I eased into a familiar and consistent routine (us humans love routine). I began to feel a happiness inside me greater than anything I had previously experienced and I’m already a happy guy. 

I’m not a meditator (I know now more than ever I need to be), however, without distractions and stimulation, I naturally meditated. I would sit for hours watching and enjoying nature around me or watching my fire crackle and spit with a blissfully empty mind. 

Unlike ‘normal’ life, it was easy to achieve. I had no cheap distraction or stimulation at my disposal, I was not even allowed a pen and paper.

I’ve since read how meditation produces theta and alpha waves, which are the brain wave frequencies associated with enhanced learning abilities and overall mental well-being. These are good shit, and I want more of them in my life. I’m also acutely aware that it’s not just the reduced stimulation that helped my mind, the clean diet undoubtedly played a part, as well as the immersion in nature, light exposure, and other factors. They came together beautifully to rewrite my happiness scale. I now have an awareness that it goes beyond what I previously thought was possible.

When your goal is to live in the wilderness for as long as possible and boredom is one of the enemies, finishing your shelter becomes a scary prospect. The devil makes work for idle hands and all that.

In my ‘normal life’ I am guilty of rushing to complete a task as quickly as possible so I can move on to the next, this is how most of us are programmed to work. In the wilderness, I enjoyed the process. I quickly got the functional element of my structure completed, a roof! But then I would work mindfully and slowly, enjoying the process. 

I would then add new elements, perhaps a nice stone flooring, or the fireplace (pics below).

It made me muse about how boredom and time nurture creativity. It’s little wonder then, when we find artefacts like bone handle knives they are beautifully engraved and adorned to melt away those numerous hours sat around the campfire each night. 

I think we can benefit from slowing down and allowing boredom to creep in to stimulate our creativity.

When foraging I was lucky enough to find peppermint to brew litres of peppermint tea each day. That being said, if I wanted a cuppa, I obviously could not just flick a switch on a kettle. Everything is a lengthy process, you have to first walk to collect firewood and tinder, squat down and start the fire, then walk to the river over uneven rocks (using core stability) to collect water. Walk to collect the peppermint, boil the water. You get the idea. I would squat down to my fire numerous times, walk over uneven surfaces, I would use my body!  Most of us aren’t labourers and increasingly few are active in jobs and so have this tremendous exercise imbalance. I will refer to this as a ‘gym gap’. We all must all bridge this, otherwise, you will likely develop a myriad of illnesses and die young. Particularly when combined with our unnatural diets.  I know this is not revolutionary news but found the perspective helpful to reinforce this for myself.

And once more it’s not just our physiology but our mind too. Historically nothing ever came easy, if we went hunting, we possibly got fed. Our mind rewards our effort through endorphins. Dealing with constant challenges and adversity is built into our operating system. We’ve evolved to basically require it.  Michael Easter covers this imbalance well in his book ‘The Comfort Crisis’.

We are told we need hundreds of things to make us happy, in reality, you can count them on your fingers: food, water, shelter, purpose, connection, health. 

Many people look up to the lofty heights of level 5 of Maslow’s hierarchy, searching for self-actualisation, which is awesome! However, spending time at level 1, the foundational physiological layer (our basic survival) can be seriously beneficial. 

Down here there is a lot of good shit to garner, from perspective to resilience. After my time in the wild, I experienced a deep gratitude reset. You return with an accentuated appreciation for modern convenience and the abundance of calories and variety we now enjoy. Just as one example, after such a visceral appreciation of how scarce calories are in nature, I can never look at 5* hotel breakfast buffet in the same way. It blows my mind.

After only 35 days solo, I was told I was the last person in the wilderness. I had won. However incredible as it was to win, I felt genuine disappointment too, to be leaving so soon. As an avid fan of the US show, the average win was 60 days+ and I had steeled my mind to be there at least this long and suddenly I was told ‘you have 1 hour to say goodbye to your land’. My life was about to change dramatically but I was not ready for the adventure to end. I had a 20-fillet cache of smoked fish to see me into winter and had built this chimney that I had not used. I so desperately wanted to see the river freeze up and the landscape transform into a winter wonderland.

Most of all, I was genuinely sad to miss out on the opportunity to push to my limits and find my breaking point. We know it is only outside of our comfort zone we find growth, and I had travelled along the way to get out to the edge of it and not get the chance to test it further.

All in all, despite ending earlier than I hoped, it was amongst the best months of my life, I feel immensely privileged to have had the opportunity. 

By the end, I had lost 18 kg/40lb in 35 days despite eating relatively well each day.

I know a lot of what I have shared might seem obvious, but that’s its beauty, it’s really simple stuff. We are told we need thousands of things to make us healthy and happy, in reality, less is more.

I felt amazing in the wilderness because I lived extremely close to our palaeolithic design.

• My diet was aligned to our gut’s evolution, plus no alcohol, caffeine etc.
• I moved my body each day to its intended purpose 
• I disconnected from cheap dopamine and my brain chemistry was aligned to its programming
• I received high amounts of (low level) sun exposure, getting the right amount of vitamin D and setting my circadian rhythm. I slept INCREDIBLY WELL, almost an unbroken 9-10 hours each night (apart from when mice invaded my shelter and ran across my face)
• I slowed down and lived in the present, enjoying a naturally meditative existence away from the complexity of society
• I was immersed in nature which numerous studies have shown to be healing (see Japanese forest bathing and hospital bed view study)

• Be sure to fill your gym gap, start with a quick win like a standing desk
• Try intermittent fasting
• Think about how your diet related to what food was available during the Palaeolithic era. Does it look like food? Be more aware of calorie density, processed oils and sugar
• Get more sunshine in your life
• Leave your comfort zone – book a desert island adventure : )
• Meditate/disconnect/slow down. Allow time for reflection
• Disconnect more from your devices. Don’t check your phone when you first wake up, allow Dopamine to regulate better. Use an app like’ Present’ to be more mindful of device usage
• Remember, you are a smart chimp divorced from nature. Make time to be in nature more. Just sitting in the park without your phone for 20 minutes a day is brilliant
• Have more adventures in life- the tougher, the better, to really shift your perspective.

Cheers for reading, and please AMA,

 Tom