On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Erik Hill wrote:

> Well, how did the paleo people handle this situation?
>
> I'm fairly sure they didn't go on weight-loss diets.  And I can't
> believe that they just happened to get exactly the right amount
> of excersize and food to keep their figures exactly in line. I
> have heard that h/g's for example measured about 5-10% bodyfat
> (men, I assume) pretty consistently.

One possibility is that some of us are "metabolically damaged" in
some permanent way that the paleo people were not.  Much as we
may like to believe that paleo diet reverses the effects of years
of bad diet, it may not be so.

Another possibility -- the one that I favor -- is that a number
of lifestyle factors contributed to the leanness of paleo people.
One of them would be that "impulse eating" would have required
more work than just going to the refrigerator.  That is, I think
there would not have been much food lying around to be consumed
on a whim.  If I feel peckish I can open a bag of pork cracklings
and get 500 calories in a matter of minutes.  If I had to go
catch and kill something and skin it, well, I might just wait
until I was a bit hungrier.  I might go and find some nuts or
berries, or dig up some roots, but all of these things involve
considerably more work than opening the refrigerator, a bag, or a
jar.  In that kind of an environment, I think people would get
used to eating what they need and not much more.

In contrast, in the civilized world our food supply is radically
disconnected from our activity patterns.  One can do sedentary
work and yet have a home stocked with massive amounts of food --
even paleo food.  Every dieter knows that there is a strong
psychological component to food cravings, perhaps explicable by
our paleolithic eating patterns of long ago.  The more stuff
there is in the kitchen, the more we have the urge to eat it.
If it's not there, the craving usually passes soon enough.

In my case, I generally don't get such cravings until the
evening, hours after dinner.  In a paleo world, I would be
asleep.  But instead I am sitting up reading a book.  I think
about that bag of pork cracklings sitting in there.  They'd taste
pretty good, and they're *paleo*!  I hypnotize myself with the
lie that I can't gain weight eating paleo foods, and I go have
the snack.

This is not a scenario that a paleo person would have to deal
with, I think, but it is a part of my life every night.  If I
want to lose weight I have to resist such urges.

Todd Moody