Consider the following construct: If you eat like a normal person, you are normal. If you eat like an idiot, then you’re an idiot. But if you eat like a caveman, you’re not a caveman. What the fongool? Let me explain.

I do not look much like a caveman—yet I am a man and I do live mostly in my man cave. While I do not wield a large Fred Flintstone club, early last Friday morning I did shoot a brontosaurus in my pajamas. How it got in my pajamas is a matter of public record, although honestly, the police report reeks of unprofessional cynicism.

The weapon I used was a powerful, clip-fed Rapidstrike CS-18 blaster. (To its detractors: a stupid nerf gun.) I waited three days for a police background check before buying, yet no one ever said I was good to go. So I went anyway. If you can’t buy a CS-18 to keep a thieving creature from 500 million years ago from stealing your PJs without Uncle Slim’s approval, then I say we live in a hull, rivist välja maailma. Pardon my Estonian.

The police made a huge deal of finding no wounded or dying brontosaurus in the neighborhood. They performed the most perfunctory of searches, “…and even then we felt like idiots.” They did find my pajamas in the backyard. But just because I was standing naked beside them, holding my blaster, they suggested I was under the influence of some dangerous substance–possibly the zest of a Brussels sprout.

Their ultimate conclusion: “No dinosaur—pre-historic or imaginary—would be caught dead in this guy’s Big Bang Flash jammies (with the attached feet).”

What’s the connection to the caveman diet? Well, I’ve experienced such moments of hallucinatory, light headedness over the past 23 days. I attribute them to my self-inflicted Whole30 diet,* sometimes known as the caveman diet. Or the paleo diet—named for the Paleozoic era. That is when men ate badly barbecued mastodon steaks and, in frustration, launched the first of the legendary gravy boats: The beginning of man’s never ending search for sauce.

Whole30 is a free, 30-day elimination diet. Aimed not at eliminating yourself, it restricts for 30 days all foods that might cause potholes along the delicate network of secret tunnels that connect your pie hole to daylight at the southern end of the trail. (Known on the street as “the light at the end of the sigmoid intestine.”)

One by one, after 30 days, you reintroduce a food into your diet. With new bio-wisdom, you assess its attitude toward your once indiscriminate inner garbage disposal. If it passes the gut check, you can return it to your diet. If it runs a ‘tude, escort it to the curb.

The downside: Whole30 temporarily eliminates from your diet all that makes life worth living: Kit Kat candy food, Cherry Garcia ice cream, Philly Cheese steaks, cookies, milk, cookies and milk, fudge, cake, pie, cannoli, pizza, pepperoni, pasta, bread, beer, wine, legumes, lagumes, lolagumes etc. Any processed food with ingredients you can’t pronounce. Anything with wheat, rice, corn or gluten. Also anything without wheat, rice, corn or gluten. No Cocoa Puffs, but you can eat the box.

To keep from starving you eat like a caveman–no manners, no napkins and no place to wash up before Spring. It’s a high-protein, all-you-can-spear diet. Yes there’s fruit, squash and sweet potatoes, but mostly slabs of sabre-tooth tiger, hedgehog, anteater, Big Foot, sloth or anything with saurus in its name. On Thanksgiving it’s roast pterodactyl stuffed with dogs, cats and lizards. Can you say “Good-eats?”

No, I can’t. But on Day 23 what I will say is “Goodbye 15 pounds; just seven more days.”

*whole30.com

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2014, all rights reserved