I recently read the book named in the subject.  It was aimed at endurance athletes, which I am not, but it does point up a possible problem with the paleo diet, one which I wanted to throw out here for discussion.   The problem is simply that if you're a very athletic person, you're going to be burning a lot of calories.  For the typical athlete, most of those would come from carbs.  On the paleo diet, you've got to work at it to keep the carbs up.

Now like I said, I'm not an endurance athlete.  I do recreational weightlifting and various cross-training type activities for a total of about three hours a week.  However, I find it hard to keep my calorie intake high enough *not* to lose weight at a fairly rapid pace.

So here's the question.   When you're trying to keep calories up, as I see it you have three choices:

1)  Increase overall quantities of food consumed.  This has built-in limitations.

2)  Increase fat consumption.  This can increase calories fairly well without increasing the food bulk too much.

3)  Increase carb consumption.  This is really hard to do without invoking #1 above, or adding in foods that are not paleo approved.

The third approach is the one suggested in the book.  But here's the problem:  I am mainly interested in the paleo diet for the health and longevity benefits.  If I take the book's advice and include some targeted carbs (like oats, potatoes, yams, etc targeted around workouts), would that be giving up the long-term benefits of being on the diet?

Are there other (non-endurance) athletes on this list?  What are your experiences?

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   Robert Kesterson
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