Tom Williams wins Alone UK I Desert Island Survival

16 September 2023

Watch this video on YouTube

Below, a summary of the video:

Good morning, castaways and castaways to be.

It happened. I won Alone.

I mean, it has sunk in because it was 11 months ago that it happened. But it’s a great achievement. I’m really, really proud to have won. It was the icing on the cake to win, but the real joy of it was the experience out there.

It was amongst the best months of my life. I loved the simple existence of having a clear mind, thinking of little more than where is the next meal coming from? It was mentally cathartic.

I think our Palaeolithic brain chemistry is wired that way. We’re not meant to have quite such complicated lives, to just live this simple life, living off the land.

My physiology changed as well, I think just from living on pike, and leaves and few berries.

It wasn’t just my health, my gut biome had this total reset. I used to have IBS and bloating, but that hasn’t come back a year later. I have less inflammation and stuff like that.

Who knew that living simplistically of nature would be so good for us?

So, If you have any other questions about the experience, please reply and let me know. I’m going to record a number of answers and have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) answering questions that you might have about the experience.

There’s so many things that aren’t in the edit: I caught 36 pike out there and a duck, and they didn’t show me eating my duck!

The duck was hands down the best meal of my life. They say hunger is the best sauce, and it’s true, it’s hard to describe how extraordinary it tasted after just eating fish leaves and berries each day. After that long in the wild your senses are heightened you smell more, you hear more, so everything is accentuated!

I roasted this duck in a Dutch oven, put coals on top and opened it and the smell of this duck was the most heady. I was eating this perfect roast duck that was falling off the bone and weeping. I think I wept. That was insane.

They didn’t show that.

They didn’t show that I had 20 smoked fillets of fish stashed away for winter.

I was really getting ready for winter to come in and wanted to see that place turn white. And really go test my limits. But there we go. It ended.

Only 10 days after the competition ended, the temperature had dropped to minus 22. The river was partially frozen.

It would have been a significantly different challenge at that point with calories becoming increasingly scarce, but there we go.

If you have any questions about things I was eating out there, how the logistics work on a show like that, and the inside scoops I can share with you, please fire away, and I’ll put them together with other ones that I get from Instagram and such.

All right. Cheers.

Thanks for all your messages and support, and hope to see you on an Island trip soon.

All the best.