#RIPPEDAT50: A Journey to Self Love (2024)

Troy Casey, the Certified Health Nut, is a true eccentric. I first saw him in a documentary on modern-day hippies. A middle-aged man talking to a young, impressionable woman, he was shirtless, heavily bearded, deeply tanned, and drinking his own piss. Yet he was also, despite or because of his visible, confident strangeness, very charismatic and energetic. I was intrigued.

That said, I'm not sure what I expected from this book. Did I seriously hope to glean new, actionable health insights from a man who drinks his own piss? No. Most likely I was driven by pure curiosity to understand the psychology of someone who, like the Certified Health Nut, lives every day with passion and vigour. Few people are as flamboyantly energetic and strange and proud and virile and opinionated as Troy Casey--2 others who come to mind are 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, and the founding father of the Beat Generation, Neal Cassady--and, having read biographies of both the aforementioned men, I also wanted to get inside this man's abnormal mind.

And boy, is his mind abnormal! Not only does Troy Casey drink piss, he also wipes it on his face, ages it, ferments it, and squirts it up his ass as an enema. He believes in sacred geometry, numerology, barefoot grounding which, and he repeats this 3 times word for word, "will take out the positively charged toxins", Platonic solids, the Akashic records, sound healing, electromagnetic frequency healing and DNA repair through Schumann resonances and Solfeggio frequencies (man-made EMFs, though, for reasons not given, are absolutely bad and should always be avoided), and so much more.

He says that pasteurised dairy has zero nutritional value whatsoever but doesn't provide any evidence. For the record, calcium is not affected by pasteurisation. He also says that lactase persistence, the evolved ability to digest lactose, doesn't exist. He believes everything that Indigenous peoples tell him: ayahuasca visions reveal objective truths about the world and the stones and rocks of ancient Mayan complexes house the memories of dead civilisations. Sounds like bunkum, right. Well, not to Troy Casey: in his own words, who is he to disagree?

He also believes that oil spills can be cleaned by broadcasting certain sound frequencies over them (is that why they played Barney's theme song in Abu Ghraib?), that eating whole foods provides better sun protection than sunscreen, that soy is inflammatory, that nuts, grains, seeds, and legumes are unhealthy because they contain the anti-nutrient phytic acid, that coffee stays in your system for only 10 hours---or was it 12?--he isn't sure as he says both, and thinks he cured mould sickness with "movement", i.e., walking, yoga, QiGong, and Tai Chi (hey, when mould made me sick, why didn't my doctor tell me to just walk it out???). He doesn't know, or never cared to learn, that the Amazon consumes almost all the oxygen it produces, he chastises clients for not doing their gratitude journals mere pages after admitting that he doesn't do it anymore, either, he quotes a long-dead Nobelist who said that cells are immortal despite this view being decisively proven wrong by the discovery of the Hayflick limit, and he thinks that he got 6-pack abs, not by eating right and exercising, but by doing breathing exercises such as pranayama and holotropic breathwork, and more!

The man is a loon. He never says it with these words, but he'll believe anything he wants to, evidence be damned. As proof, I quote verbatim: "Did they work? I thought and believed they did, so they did". And: "Was it real or just some placebo effect? Did it matter?"

It's sad that this man is so looney. He has a great life story, is clearly very passionate, driven, open, and authentic, and surprisingly is quite a good writer. If only the vast majority of what he said wasn't either hackneyed summaries of well-known research or else completely batsh*t nonsense that'll turn off the vast majority of otherwise sincere and interested readers. Read if you're after a one-stop-shop of contemporary wellness insanity. Avoid if you're after anything else.

Take-home: I will experiment with adding a brief cold shower to my morning ritual. Wake, glass of water and supplements, boil kettle, cold shower, coffee, To-Do list outside in the sun. He's right: a cold shower first thing in the morning really shocks you right awake!

I have followed Troy's journey and presence through some of his online work for 7 or 8 years.
In that time, I got to feel he is a very passionate human, searching for the authenticity that our species is capable of over and above the way things currently are and the paradigms of system and structure that currently exist.
I have done and am doing much the same.

So, it was a pleasure to read this overview of his progress as well as to confirm that he has actually achieved a very real success at dissecting how we work and what we can do to correct imbalances within our being, and within our species when we extrapolate those out.

In a very open way, graphic and real in content and context, Troy's telling of his own story is a true reflection of who and what he is. It was an easy read, very enjoyable, and I felt many overlaps with information and themes I have also been through, making it very relatable and giving me some things to work on as well.

I recommend the book highly to anyone, but perhaps especially to men who need to take a deep look at their own energies and authentic expression.