>not quite.  if you eat carbs it will increase insulin levels.  you cant get
>fat out of your cells into your blood stream in the presence of insulin or
>amino acids into the cells in the absence of insulin....

This is true, but you need to look at total area under the curve, not at
peak insulin values. I find that eating concentrated carbs only once per
day greatly accelerates fat loss, simply because there is only one insulin
pulse per day and the other 22 hours are in fat burning mode. The area
under the curve is limited because I only care to eat a certain amount of
carbs at one sitting. However, keep in mind that the Level Two calories are
ALL being burned for energy. On a weight-reduction diet, even if they are
carbs they will not cause sufficient insulin release to prevent you from
obtaining the balance of your energy requirements from your stored body fat.

I do agree that it's easy to eat more concentrated carbs at one sitting
than you can process and store as glycogen. This in itself is a good reason
to avoid concentrated, processed foods. If you overeat carbs (or protein)
the excess calories are converted into fats for storage. I also believe
that you burn stored body fat at a much higher rate while fasting, that is,
during a period from about 2 hours after you eat until the next meal.

Another gotcha is that our assumptions about the insulin produced by
proteins, fats, and carbs is incorrect. Look closely at the insulin scores
for isocaloric portions of various foods in the chart in this article.
http://www.zonehome.com/zlib0025.htm All Bran and eggs produce the same
insulin response. Fish, lentils, whole grain bread, brown rice, popcorn,
potato chips, apples, and oranges are about equivalent. Beef and cheese
produce more insulin than pasta.

Cyclic carb diets have the advantage that you can slightly undereat carbs
on a regular basis, thereby avoiding the problem of converting them to fat.
However, it leads eventually to depeletion of liver glycogen stores, which
can have the side effect of lowering thyroid levels -- and thus lowering
your metabolic rate, defeating your goal of eating less than you burn. But
with the cyclic diet you periodically replenish glycogen (and perhaps
overdo it a bit, storing a small amount of fat, but not too much because
it's only one or two meals). This can reset the 'starvation response' of
the thyroid. As you suggested, it also is probably a pretty good model of
paleo eating.