On Aug 01, 2008, at 11:21 pm, Ron Hoggan wrote:

> The weakness and
> dulled thinking that one person attributed to their experience is more
> suggestive of a shift into ketosis or a cycling in and out of  
> ketosis. Those
> symptoms, as I understood them, are entirely consistent with that
> possibility.


Hi Ron,

That was me.  It definitely *wasn't* the initial shift into ketosis,  
this was months into me eating paleo, and I was eating a LOT of  
fruit.  It wasn't ketosis cycling either, I've done that several times  
since and it gives me a headache but not muscle weakness.

At one point I had a temp job as a postman, and I'd take pieces of  
chicken and fruit for breakfast.  I was agonisingly hungry during the  
walk, and sometimes it was a huge physical effort just to keep  
walking.  Now admittedly, sometimes I have days when I feel like that  
anyway, but this was day in day out.  Often when I got home my main  
meal would be a turkey leg (virtually no fat at all) and some veg, and  
the first thing I'd do after eating one would be to raid the fruit  
basket to satisfy the crucifying hunger it gave me.  When I started my  
first permanent job (in an office this time), I used to binge on dried  
fruit to try and get some energy, but I would still have days where it  
was a physical effort to get out of my chair.

Aside: I have seen this problem in someone else - a girl I knew years  
back that went on the Lighter Life diet (a 6-month liquid food diet  
that re-introduces solid food slowly).  She told me she had been  
recommended to eat chicken breast salads and other similar lean meals,  
and I told her she'd last about two weeks before the agony started.   
This really upset her, and she really mouthed off at me, telling me I  
should be proud of her achievement (she did lost a lot of weight, even  
if she may have destroyed her adrenals in the process).  But the next  
time I saw her, she was complaining about the same constant hunger,  
and kept going to eat lean meat in a (failed) attempt to satisfy it.   
Knowing what the problem was, I made her a meal with a few chips and a  
lot of cottage cheese - hardly my first choice, but it was all she had  
in that would make a satisfying meal.

Anyway, back to me.  Eventually I abandoned the lean meat idea.  It  
was pretty scary, seeing how everyone was (and is) saying that eating  
animal fat will give you a heart attack down the road, but I figured  
if the Inuit lived healthily off a diet of almost pure meat and fat,  
the fat-heart theory *must be wrong*.

So I started eating loads of mince meat, fatty pork leg joints etc.  I  
went way out the other way - I'd hunt through every pack of meat in  
the supermarket looking for big slabs of fat, and anything I fried got  
soaked in dripping.  Result - no more hunger or muscle weakness.

Maybe for some reason I have higher fat requirements than most people  
- my metabolism isn't in the best shape, although it's a lot better  
than it was.  But I'm absolutely certain that it was lack of fat that  
was doing it, and not in any way related to ketosis.  And the lack of  
fat was solely down to following Cordain's recommendation of eating  
lean meat.  Hence (a) my cautious attitude to his interpretation of a  
paleo diet and (b) my almost fanatical habit of reminding anyone  
embarking on a paleo (or low carb) diet to EAT FAT.

Ashley