Low-Carb Living

Lesson 6: Weight Loss

Dietary Practices

To lose weight on the paleo diet, you do not need to count carbohydrates, calories, or fats. You will improve your overall health simply by eliminating unnatural foods, thus reducing unhealthy fats and high-glycemic carbohydrates that lead to obesity and other chronic diseases. You will lose weight while eating all you want of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, without suffering the hunger and cravings of unnatural, restrictive diets.

Perhaps the most important change you can make to your diet to promote weight loss is to include lean animal protein with every meal. Lean animal protein raises your metabolism causing you to burn more calories, it satisfies your appetite so you don’t overeat, and it improves insulin sensitivity. Remember that the combining of plant proteins required to provide us with complete protein significantly raises our carbohydrate intake, so animal proteins are more efficient for weight loss. All calories are not created equal. Our bodies burn calories from carbs and fats at a much lower rate than those from protein.

It is also important to eat adequate fat. Fat provides the fatty acids necessary for proper cellular and brain functioning, and it allows us to metabolize nutrients from other sources. Like protein, fat also causes us to feel full and so helps with appetite control.

“If you are trying to lose weight you are trying to metabolize your own body fats. As your own fat is animal fat, it is important to trigger this metabolic process by ingesting animal fat.”–Ray Audette, author of Neanderthin.

While limiting of healthful foods is not required in the paleo diet, take care not to overindulge in high-fat domesticated meats and eggs as well as high-calorie nuts, seeds, avocados, healthful oils, and dried fruits. Also, take care not to overindulge when including “forbidden” foods in your open meals. Level III of the paleo diet, in which only one open meal is allowed, is the weight loss level. See pages 152-158 in The Paleo Diet, for a two-week sample menu plan for level III.

Keep your foods as close to their natural state as possible. Limit to open meals, products that combine nut or root flours, dried fruits, honey, and oils into unnatural, high-carbohydrate foods despite the fact that they were created using paleo foods.

Treat food as what it truly is–fuel. If you eat for reasons other than nutrition, you will carry excess weight. So, eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. The paleo diet of fresh, natural foods allows you to more easily sense when you are full than do artificial foods that combine high-fat and high-carbohydrate.

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