The New Age Cavemen

[Bowden]

Entire article available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fa...d=1&ref=health

The New Age Cavemen and the City

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Published: January 8, 2010

LIKE many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable ??? just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.

The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.

Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.

Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant???s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon

Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University and the author of ???The Paleo Diet,??? links the movement to a 1985 New England Journal of Medicine article, which proclaimed that the ???diet of our remote ancestors may be a reference standard for modern human nutrition.???

Another source of paleo converts is CrossFit, a fitness program known for grueling workouts combining weightlifting and gymnastics. CrossFit trainers, who teach at more than 1,200 gyms and other affiliates across the country, generally encourage clients to follow either a caveman diet or the Zone diet, which requires tracking calories. ???Some of the gyms have hardcore paleo folks, and if you???re a member of that gym then you???re paleo, while other gyms are hardcore Zone,??? said Anthony Budding, who manages the content on CrossFit.com.

 

[Doublebase]

Rad.

 

[Little Wing]

nice. deermeat is awesome but i hope he cooks it.

 

[maniclion]

If they wanted to be real cavemen they'd cast off their trendster clothes, for buckskin pants and a fur poncho and head out into the woods with a bow and arrow or a spear and track down their food and then kill it themselves....these guys may be getting the benefits of a healthy diet, but they aren't getting the spiritual cleansing that a week long romp in the wilderness will give them...

That is what my father and I would do on at least one of our deer hunts for the year, pack our pup tents, big bag of trail mix, a couple canteens each, water purification tabs, our little pot and pan, and a small cooler with pre-peppered steaks, dozen eggs, butter and a small bottle of whiskey.... The first morning before we'd set out we'd go to this diner and eat a huge breakfast, stuff ourselves to the gills, I'd always wrap a few biscuits up and stuff them in my pockets, then we'd drive way back down an old lumber road until it became a fire road rendered impassable by a mound of dirt, so we'd get out clear some brush along side the road and back our truck into the spot, then we'd set out, find our campsite, drop our packs cover them and head out until about noon, then go back to the campsite clean it up, collect wood and then head back out for the evening hunt, the next morning we'd hunt a couple hours and then spend the next 6 hours hiking deeper into the woods, find our spot and pitch the tents, and hunt....next day we'd hunt the early morning and then hike all day to our final campsite, we'd collect firewood and then hunt that evening, then that night we'd skewer our steaks, rub them with butter and cook them over the open flames, my dad would give me a few nips off the whiskey, I'd feel the alcohol warm my blood, then we'd eat our steaks right off of the skewers, those were always the best tasting steaks... A couple more nips on the bottle then I'd read the book I'd brought and dad would sit there poking at the fire, sipping whiskey and talking about some tracks or droppings he'd seen while out that evenin', then he'd popup and soak a piece of gauze with doe urine and set his boots on it, then tell me goodnight and crawl into his little tent...then I would close my book and lay there looking up at the stars and the few stray orange ones from the fire thinking about my friends whose fathers never take them hunting let alone camping, only ever on family outings to Disney Land or some lame place....as I laid there I promised I'd get my friends to come along, not on the week long trip no this one was special for Dad and I alone, no they'd come for one of the 3 day trips where we pitched the big 2 bedroom tent and had a propane grill and a huge cooler full of steaks and eggs and bacon, and a radio and my guitar....

 

[Hoglander]

hahaha

That's what I'm talking about.

veggies and meat diet & workout like your life depended on it

very nice

I however come from a slightly later era where beer(the first bread) was also available.