Trek

Americans, increasingly, are becoming less than svelte, and thus it is no surprise that each year seems to bring its very own new and improved method for losing weight.  One of the most recent strategies, dubbed the Paleolithic diet, suggests that to be truly healthy we should eat more like our distant ancestors.  Part of the logic behind Stone Age eating is that humans, supposedly, have not had enough time to adapt to modern dietary realities, such as agriculture and the domestication of animals.  We would be healthier, the thinking goes, if we ate more like cavemen:  lean meat, coupled with plenty of raw fruits, vegetables, and nuts. 

Like almost all dietary guidelines, my family has utterly ignored this advice in our own home, although we now feel slightly less bad about eating cocky chickens.  To compensate for our lack of self-discipline, however, we have actually introduced some Paleoesque lifestyle choices into our family dynamics, most of them to questionable effect.

Our ancestors, as you well know, survived by hunting and gathering.  Due to advances in shopping cart technology, however, this practice is difficult to mimic.  We believe we have come close, however, by doing what we call Paleo-TRECing.

Before moving on, now seems a reasonable time to say thank you, good citizens of TREC, for basically making a sidewalk from my front door all the way to Culvers.  We love it.  And now that we know it’s unlikely we will be shot while walking the trail by anyone except ourselves, we love it even more.

Continuing, the first step in Paleo-TRECing, pun intended, is to walk into the woods with small children.  Have them ride their bikes, even.  If the weather is nice, travel for miles, preferably in good spirits. 

Then turn around, because this is where it gets Paleolithic.

If the small children you are using are anything like the ones we have, they will most likely begin to not move very quickly. You will find that much of the spunk that characterized the initial jaunt has been replaced by pouting and malaise.  They will begin to sob and perhaps even throw themselves on the ground entirely.  This is actually good, because in order to get home before dark, you will have to physically pick them up and carry them down the trail. 

What makes this task Paleolithic is that it somewhat parallels what our ancestors must have done when they dragged their fresh game out of the wilderness.  It’s especially good exercise if the children thrash around like a wounded gazelle, for example, as this is tremendously good for your core.

Oh wait!  We forgot the bike, didn’t we?  They don’t ride themselves.  Now you get to physically scoot the toy through the woods while your delicious pretend meal wiggles on your shoulders.  For a mile.  Isn’t being a caveman fun?

Now, before continuing, my wife has suggested that even loosely comparing our children to prey, even for the sake of amusement, is in bad taste, and that I should at least point out that I am a loving father who reads to my kids almost every night and that they also hug me a lot.  Or else.

So, that takes care of the hunting part, you say, but what about the gathering?

Well, again, small children—and you can borrow mine if needed—come into play.

Go to your nearest grocery store.  Get a cart.  Argue, loudly, with the youngest child about sitting in the cart while the other one sprints to the toy section.  Shop.  Gather.  Ungather the stuff they put in the cart when you aren’t looking.  Pretend not to notice the curious expressions the cashier gives you when you accidentally purchase seven packs of gum.  Growl like a caveman.

Repeat weekly.

This is basically gathering in the 21^st century.  Granted, our ancestors ate a lot of poisonous things during centuries of trial and error, but I would not recommend tasting things until you leave the actual store, unless they are offering free samples, in which case you know it’s not good for you, anyway.

Considering that our ancestors occasionally lived to the ripe old age of thirty, that is something to keep in mind.