Before I launch into extended articles surveying our lives I should attempt to lay the foundation for which it will all become a part.  Every association, group, religion, etc has a set of core beliefs or at least a framework from which it operates. If I am to be taken seriously, by others and by myself, I should also produce a similar skeleton so that the pieces may begin to fall into place as they are laid down.  The following Tenets of Being a Caveman, is my attempt to summarize and select the most overarching categories of life, under which our daily actions fall and our success is based.

The idea is simple, I believe if you get these principles right, if you live and act in a way that optimizes these tenets, that you cannot help but be successful in life.  Success is open to personal interpretation but can be generally reduced to that which makes you: happy, healthy and wealthy. Do not be limited to the notion that wealth is only a descriptor of money.  It almost goes without stating but the steps required to execute on these tenets are done so without the violation of other’s natural rights. In other words, you have the power to autonomously create a beautiful, abundant and meaningful life for yourself, you need only will it into existence.

While I have worked on this for a couple of weeks I feel it is incomplete.  This is the very basis of what The Caveman’s Cupboard believes and by definition what I hold as a personal ethos as well.  I will post it on the website to provide clarity for those who happen upon it and wish to understand what underpins my values; but I will consider it a live document, allowable to changes as things become more understood to myself.  While some days with perfect ease I can imagine all the components by which I live, when it comes to coherently writing them some things escape my memory.  

As I understand and have internalized them thus far and without further preamble we shall review the Tenets of Being A Caveman:

EAT. SLEEP. THINK. MOVE. CREATE. BE…IN NATURE.

EAT.

“One cannot think well, love well and sleep well, if one has not dined well” – Virginia Wolf

The amount of information that has been produced regarding this category is beyond overwhelming.  The number of diet books alone that are published each year would stun a person. When it comes to food, with many people I have noticed a few things

1. Some treat it like a religion, incorporating both the positive and negative elements of this.

2. Everyone thinks they are an expert, most are not (this includes me).

3. Our increase in knowledge regarding food and diet seems curiously proportional with our rates of sickness and disease, i.e. we are smarter but sicker*

4. Folks tend to cherry pick from within diets which lead to skewed results.

All of this leads to widely varying opinions, plans and ultimately a huge financial industry that purports to want to help people but may not alleviate much but a bulge in their wallet.  Alas, my take on food is both based on the substance itself as well as the energy (sun) that creates it.

The story of food is the one most quickly examined by people as they begin to fix their health.  What you put into your body has an immediate effect on how you feel, so naturally one should become aware of what one eats.

Personally, I have followed a modified version of the Paleo diet for over a decade and have had very good results.  My results have been focused on how I feel and look, but never have I received extensive lab work to verify biochemical improvements.  However, it was not until learning of Dr Kruse that the whole story of food unfolded itself. That is a conversation all about light (i.e. the sun) which he has written and spoken on extensively. I will write much more in depth on this topic, but the basic principles of the Sun : Food relationship are as follows.

• We as a species are bound to the same rules of nature as everything else that exists, all flora and fauna, because we all exist on the same earth.

• Everything that is living on this earth is controlled by the sun (plants don’t grow inside in dark rooms and neither do humans).

• All the programs that exist and operate in your brain/body are controlled by the sun.  These are all your hormonal, cellular, electrical, biochemical etc processes.

• All food is broken down into electrons and protons in order to be delivered as energy to our cells.  They are not broken down into fats, carbs and proteins.

• ALL ELECTRONS ARE CONTROLLED BY THE SUN

• We are designed to eat what is available in our light (sun) environment.

• If it can’t grow where you are, when you are there, your body doesn’t know how to interpret the electron signals you are sending it when you eat it.

Although he doesn’t want to focus on food as a primary influencer for health, preferring to focus on mitochondria and its interactions with Light, Water and Magnetism, Kruse does become extremely specific when he discusses what we should eat.  DHA, the omega-3 fat found in seafood, is the primary substance he encourages us to eat as it strengthens our ability to relay the communication of the sun, through our eyes, to our brains; thus improving our entire operating system. Alternatively, he would tell us not to eat any foods (plants specifically) that can’t survive in your current light environment.  Depending on your latitude, proximity from the equator, you should only eat the carbohydrates that can grow that time of year. Animals are good to eat ALL THE TIME.

Certainly the story of food and what you should eat has many chapters and widely varying opinions. I support a paleo/keto style of diet that mimics what our ancestors ate.  Ancestral Eating would be a good term for it…or…Eat Like A Caveman. Duh.

If I had to make a list, without getting into the supplements, minerals, etc and just focusing on whole foods:

• Seafood

• Wild Game

• Beef, Bison, Lamb, Pork (grass-finished, pastured, old school ranching is best). The philosophy of eating any animals is Nose-To-Tail consumption.  This is fundamental in obtaining optimal health and nutrition from animals.  I’ve ranked as follows because I understand there to be greater nutrition in the first two and we are consistently not eating them in our culture.  Shame on us!

  • Organs first. 

  • Bone Broth second.  

  • Meat third.

• Raw Dairy

• Eggs. Eggs. Eggs.

• Coconut oil. Grass fed fat/ghee/lard.

• Seasonal Fruits and Vegetables.

• Fermented foods and raw honey.

The biggest thing missing from this list is ….WATER. This is more crucial than any of the foods that you eat.  It’s a reason it’s one of the 3 pillars of Dr. Kruse’s teachings. You should drink Glacial or Spring Water. Reverse Osmosis water is excellent if you are going to filter it.  Typically avoid any tap water given the nonsense that is used to “clean” and purify it, especially wanting to avoid fluoride and chlorine. The story of water is much bigger and complex, deuterium depleted water is the best, but if you drink what I suggested you’re doing great!

SLEEP.

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.” – Homer

I vacillated on including Sleep into the tenets.  The reason being, while sleep constitutes a third of our life, mathematically it might be the most important tenet on the list.  Yet, it is also a rather passive activity, which means there isn’t as much to write about it. Certainly there is a yet unknown treasure of information to be learned about our brains while we are sleeping, some of which would fall under the tenet of THINK, but insofar as giving advice and writing articles this will be more limited.  I would recommend reading Mathew Walker’s Why We Sleep or at least listening to him on a podcast to help cement for you the extreme importance of sleep on our health.  

The period when our bodies and brains recover and rebuild should not be overlooked as the quality of our sleep is directly linked to our health and likelihood of disease.  There are definitive things that should be done to help ensure revitalizing sleep.

• Manage your circadian rhythm. This is a cornerstone of good mitochondrial health (i.e. Dr. Kruse).  

  • This is the reason I tell everyone to watch the sunrise. Preferably naked and drinking bone broth! 

• Avoid light after dark and wear blue-blocking glasses if blue light is on around you.  This includes: 

  • light bulbs (especially LED’s), 

  • all screens (TV, phone, computer).  

• Use red bulbs or salt lamps or candles at night.  Yes, it can be done. You will get used to it.

  • Remember, we have only had the electric power grid for 150 years.  We have been our version of ourselves for about 200,000 years. Stop thinking you can outsmart our quantum engineering and use fake light at night. Nope!

• Grounding/Earthing helps a bunch!  Purchase a grounding sheet and improve its effectiveness by sticking the wire directly into the earth.

• Eliminate EMF (ElectroMagnetic Forces) exposure  – 

  • turn your phone off or airplane mode when you go to bed.

  • Shut off the breaker to your bedroom.  

  • Turn your WiFi-router off

I can’t reinforce this enough, your exposure to blue light (and non-native EMF’s) after the sun goes down is probably the biggest factor affecting sleep and your health in general.  Just like I say you should mimic your eating like our ancestors, you should also sleep like them too. Huge bonus points if you actually sleep on the ground!

THINK.

“What you think you become. What you feel you attract. What you imagine you create” – Buddha

Thought is the seed that creates the outcomes in our life.  

Our mind is our greatest resource.  From every person that I’ve studied and listened to I’ve come to the conclusion that our mind is the single greatest, most advanced and highest potential thing in the entire universe.  This fleshy mass in our head is the most advanced supercomputer, ever, and we have the ability to manipulate it to bring us health, wealth, and happiness.

I don’t want to leave out the thinking/brain capabilities of  our guts and our hearts either. We now know there are 40,000 neurons buried in the center of our chests and that we do in fact have a heart intelligence.  THINK incorporates all areas of our body that are involved in this process, not just the brain.

What we can control with our mind is absolutely stunning and most of us are limiting it.  There is a litany of folks from which you can refer, whether they are in the modern self-empowerment camps like Bob Proctor, Og Mandino or Eckart Tolle,, or those that predate them like Napoleon Hill and Raymon Holliwell.  Or you can look towards men like Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton to learn of epigenetics and our ability to affect physiological changes in our bodies through the power of our thoughts. Everyone is coming to the same conclusion.  Your thoughts have immense power, you should learn to use them to your benefit.

Whether you want to call it The Law of Attraction or the scientific Reticular Articulating System, the premise is that whatever we put into our thoughts we will attract and create in our life.  If you focus your thoughts to positive and desired results, then you will manifest these results. Alternatively, if you pour negativity into your mind your world will be shaped as thus.

Thoughts have energy.  Consider Roger Banister and his running a sub-4 minute mile.   No one was able to accomplish this feat until he did so in 1954.  It was considered impossible. And yet Bannister, an amateur athlete, used the power of visualization and thought to accomplish what was otherwise impossible.  Once he defeated this he proved it was the mind, not the body, that was limiting people. The record was broken again only weeks later.

Create for yourself a worthy ideal, a mission supported by your vision and values. Write it on a piece of paper, a small goal card, and carry it with you.  Believe in yourself and live every moment with certainty that you will achieve it and this will filter what information your subconscious holds on to to achieve your worthy ideal.  As the Greek author Plutarch said “what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality”. Your thoughts, in essence the food of your mind, has a direct effect on how you feel and your feelings will create your actions, your actions the results you achieve in life.

This tenet includes the subcategories of MEDITATION, GRATITUDE, READING and JOURNALING.  I’ll lump all of those here for now and only say that these items are excellent methods to practice the power of your thoughts and do not require too much time.  I personally try to do some if not all of these every day. Among ice baths, breath work and thought exercises [all ideally outside of course] I’m hard pressed to pick a favorite or most important.  

THINK is also the tenet that would include my understanding on SPIRITUALITY which I have been denoting in my videos already with the word TROG. This requires much more elaboration, but, I believe in a power higher than myself, a source from which I came.  I will use the word TROG to refer to this entity.

Live your life in tune with your subconscious and you will be limited by nothing.

MOVE.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” – Lao Tzu

After food, exercise is probably the most written and discussed topic in terms of health on which people focus. I won’t spend a lot of time on this one but I will highlight the things that I think are most important.  When in doubt, do things that would have been ancestral movements. It is only after the industrial revolution that we have experienced a massive shift in the time we spend to tend to ourselves physically, freeing up time to be spent doing other things.  What does this mean? We used to have to labor [outside] to feed ourselves, so our ancestral movements follow those related to a) doing things outside during the day and b) movements and actions related to hunting, gathering and protection.

I am not going to get into a critique of different exercises or movements. However, if there is one exercise I would recommend above all others, it is walking. Even Hippocrates is quoted as saying “walking is man’s best medicine”. Preferably barefoot and definitely NOT indoors on a treadmill.  The most typical movement of our early brethren, particularly the hunter-gatherers was walking. This is directly opposite of what most of us do: sit, indoors and under blue light. That’s the trifecta of stupidity and bad health. Walking [outdoors] may be the single best exercise we can do because it takes us back outside and incorporates our entire body.

If you think you don’t have time to walk you simply haven’t created an appropriate lifestyle to accommodate it.  I try to walk every morning with the dog, hopefully soaking up some early sun exposure as well. I’ve cycled on and off of coffee and found that drinking a cold glass of spring water and going for a walk first thing goes a long way in staving off perceived coffee cravings and allowing my body to enter into its natural energy cycles.

I personally also like to lift heavy things on occasion and play sports.  These are as much a benefit for my body as my brain, whether for the neurotransmitter effects or the social aspects and the sense of bonding and community, i.e. tribalism. Movement is a prerequisite for our survival and is hard wired into us.  If possible, avoid going indoors to the gym and spend your time moving outside. I don’t really care what you do once you’re out there so long as you don’t try to bring your screens with you.

This tenet has embedded into it the power of BREATHING.  Breath work has been foundational in cultures throughout time and while it certainly can fall into THINK, I prefer to nest it here.  The person popularizing breathing the most today is Wim Hof and I would encourage you to check him out and start incorporating his method into your daily/weekly routine.  Simply piggyback this exercise during your morning sunrise exposure and you’ll be destined for a wonderful day.   To summarize the power of our breath scientifically, Wim has been able to demonstrate that you can: voluntarily influence your autonomic nervous system, positively influence blood circulation and enable your immune system to fight symptoms of diseases.  Plus you feel really freaking good after doing a few rounds of it; light, happy and stress free.

CREATE.

“As I have been created, so too shall I create” TROG proverb.

As far as I am convinced, we, humans, are the highest form of creation that we know to exist in the universe.  Barring unproven theories about alien life forms, we are the most advanced creatures to exist, past or present.  Wow. What a goddamn honor to be a part of such a small select group of sentient organisms.

This is the tenet that explains our purpose as humans, what outlines our fundamental meaning of life.  Regardless of how you explain our existence (evolution or creation), which is in itself another topic; there remains one truth: we do exist.  While the how is still being worked out, and there is a lot of interesting information being discussed that counters Darwin’s theory of evolution for homo sapiens, I feel confident in the why.

“As above, so below” and “created in his image” are expressions that many are familiar with.  The essence of these statements suggest that from wherever or whatever we came, we embody aspects of that from which we came.  What I boil this down to is this, if we were created, then our highest calling is in turn to create. For anyone and everyone looking for meaning in their life, the answer is to CREATE.  This is so widely open to interpretation there should not be a single person who cannot conceive of something to create.

You can understand this to mean the creation of: wealth, art, love, jobs, music, babies, cars, happiness, abundance, literature, smiles, harmony, ideas, etc.

There is no evil in material possessions or money so if you desire wealth then you should create it.  The creation of wealth for an individual is intrinsically connected to the creation of other goods and services for other people. “A rising tide lifts all boats” is an expression I am fond of.  Whatever we seek to do, whether it be for our benefit or the benefit of others, creates a sum that is greater than the parts that go into it.

We have been given unlimited resources and capabilities to CREATE whatever we can conceive in our imagination.  We are limited only by our thoughts and our time. When we CREATE we bear to fruition not only positives for ourselves and those around us but we also demonstrate an achievement of using all of our faculties.  There is no greater thank you to TROG than to CREATE.

I will borrow a quote that puts it perfectly. Think of the word God to mean any higher power than yourself with which you associate.

“God’s gift to you is more talent and ability than you will ever use in one lifetime. Your gift to God is to develop and utilize as much of that talent and ability as you can, in this lifetime.”

BE…IN NATURE.

“Look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better.” — Albert Einstein.

This is for me, the most important of all tenets. It is what ties them together and binds everything cohesively.  We are fundamentally a product of nature and have only recently moved ourselves indoors and away from the mother source and are experiencing a massive trade off of convenience and comfort for deleterious health effects.

I intentionally wrote the tenet in a way that looks like one or two tenets simultaneously.  It is both. The “BE” refers to the recognition of our existence. I touched on this in CREATE but it is here that I can include the idea of Love.  Just as I believe our survival is inextricably linked to our relationship with nature, I believe that the emotion/energy of love is equally necessary for ourselves to exist and achieve maximum potential.  The tenet of BE reminds us to recognize who and what we are, express gratitude and internalize our existence. I believe we not only exist as a product of our environment but as a manifestation of love itself.

Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am.  For me this means that we are here and we have purpose.

As for NATURE itself, the single most important aspect about being outside is our sun exposure.  I mentioned the sun in EAT because of the misunderstanding we have about our food and the sun. What I didn’t mention was that our relationship with the sun, that is, how we derive energy from the sun wirelessly via photos (sun rays) beamed down on us through our skin and our eyes, is such that the more sun we get the less food we need.  Remember how I told you food = electrons = energy, well, the sun = electrons = energy…so…more sun = the need for less food.

It’s all about electrons and how they are shared with our mitochondria.  This is a much bigger topic but I can’t stress enough the importance of being in nature because of your exposure to the sun.  It is the single most important thing you can do for your body and your health.  Fucking period.

We are not designed to live indoors any more than the plants and animals that all live outdoors and have been for billions of years. You don’t really need science to tell you that, just common sense. History suggests it takes less than 2 generations for anything to be accepted as fact and previous traditions (no matter how old) to be forgotten.  So it’s no surprise that despite our 200,000 years of existence and interactions with this earth, people have forgotten where we came from and what is actually natural to our existence. I am 34 years old and grew up as a child without a cell phone.  Yet kids today pretty much assume they pop out of their mothers holding an iPhone.  

The point is that our ability to change our environment through technology happens so quickly and without enough pause for thought that it not only becomes accepted as fact, it is done so without regard to our health and without our bodies’ ability to adapt to these changes.  Darwin’s theory of evolution itself is based on hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of generations to exhibit changes, i.e. to evolve. And here we think we can create technologies that disrupt us on a cellular level with impunity and willing to accept the trade offs.

But why do we live indoors and create such technologies? Because as I mentioned we are the most advanced creatures in the universe.  We have such a powerful computer in our head that we can create and build technologies that generate massive conveniences and comforts for us as a society without adequately informing us of the extensive harms.   Not a single creature in the ~3.6 billion years since life started to exist sought to clash with its default programming of life as it pertains to the sun and nature. We are the first to build homes and make clothes.  I wouldn’t have much of an argument with those technologies but we are pushing the boundaries. Our latest technologies are distancing ourselves from nature and creating imbalances with our quantum programs.

The answers to our health lie in the environment in which we surround ourselves.  The best environment is the one that has already been created for us.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on Cold Thermogenesis (CT) which was coined by Dr Kruse.  I’m talking about ice baths. If it’s easier you can think of CT as Cold Therapy.  This topic deserves a lot of explanation but considering the natural version would happen outside in a cold lake or river, it seems appropriate to put it here, under the In NATURE section.  

Due to where I live and for the desired convenience, I recommend what was recommended to me: buy a chest freezer, fill it with water and plug it in (except when you’re in it).  You can keep the water temperature at whatever you like but Kruse tells us the benefits are at 55 degrees. Off the record he talks about colder temps, I personally get into my ice bath around an average of 36 degrees. I stay in for 5-10 minutes. The benefits are so numerous it’s ridiculous.  All of that is for another article, what you need to know now I will explain with a borrowed metaphor.

If you think of your body as a car, imagine yourself as a Ferrari.  The degree to which that Ferrari has its engine tuned to the best level is a huge indicator in how it will perform.  Even if you use the worst grade of gas (i.e. fuel) it will still be an incredible machine if tuned perfectly. Now, if you let the Ferrari sit and never work on the engine, it will perform poorly even if you use the highest grade of fuel.  CT works on the improvement of your engine (i.e. mitochondria), food works on the fuel. Even the best fuel cannot overcome a poor performing engine.

For those that can’t live on the metaphor alone here is the basis: water expands when it’s cold and shrinks when it’s hot (the opposite of almost all other things).  Water is in your cells and surrounding your mitochondria. When you are subjected to cold, your body responds by releasing InfraRed (IR) light in the form of heat. This heat shrinks the water in your cell and allows certain proteins to move closer together.  When they come closer together they have less distance to travel which improves the efficiency of the entire process. This efficiency relates to your entire body, all of your engines are now performing like a fine tuned Ferrari. Blue light and nnEMF’s destroy this process and make you perform like a rusted out Ford.

Nature has blue light, it’s in the sun.  But the sun has the whole spectrum so you receive the blue in balance with the other colors.  The story of light is incredible and I won’t linger here today except to fixate in your mind the power of NATURE.  This rock we call earth has been around for ~4.6 billion years with our sun being with it since its inception. The earth and the sun have worked in unison for so long and have created the very systems by which we live and the laws that govern our survival and ability to thrive.  

Stop thinking you can outsmart mother nature.  Our health will suffer if we don’t understand the implications of our environmental effects on our mitochondria.  Mother Nature provides everything we need and if we only reduce our own chatter and listen to her we can live a healthy life.  

I’ll finish by saying this.  I’ve been a food guy for over a decade, I’ve been a movement guy since I was a kid and I was born into a Christian household.  And while I had the basic foundation of the typical belief of optimal “diet, exercise, spirituality” equation I was lacking something.

Two years ago I got exposed to new paradigms that refocused my understanding of health on physics and quantum mechanics (Dr Kruse) and our true interaction with the universe (Bob Proctor). Within a few weeks of listening to these guys (and many others since) I made the biggest shift in my life. Previously hidden pieces of the puzzle appeared and a new path revealed itself.  I believe understanding our linkage with nature and our source, in short our connection to TROG, is the key to nirvana, self-actualization, enlightenment – heaven, on earth.

The journey is just beginning…

Caveman