Nice post. Yes, it seems like our bodies are attuned toward a high meat consumption, low carb diet. I'm trying to lose a bit of weight now and went on a short term carnivore diet and am down 5 pounds in 4 days. Another 10 pounds or so to go. It's kind of a hard diet to maintain long-term, though (at least that I've found). Of course, there are lots of other issues with our food supply today including ubiquitous use of high-omega 6 industrialized seed oils and all sorts of weird chemicals and microplastics in everything...
Thanks. I've found those first 5 pounds drop off fast, too, when I first embark on low carb eating (again) for a while. I understand, though, that quite a bit of that initial rapid weight loss on such a diet is due to the body's immediate use of its normal muscle (and liver?) stores of water-heavy glycogen (therefore a whole lot of peeing goes on during the first part of such a dietary change). Fat per se only starts getting more slowly used up and lost after the low-hanging fruit of glycogen weight becomes depleted -- about the time your leg and arm muscles first start feeling a bit tired because they're starved of glycogen and haven't yet geared up (again) to burn fatty acids.
Having recently read Simpson and Raubenheimer's "Eat Like An Animal", I've come to suspect that so-called high protein low carb 'Paleodiets' are only hard to maintain for a long time because the amount of fat in most modern commercial meats (not game meats, not fish -- these are all relatively low in fat) is so much higher in concentration than what we evolved to consume, so a long term 'Paleodiet' doesn't match that closely what we evolved to eat, after all. Rather than getting a roughly equal amount of carb calories, protein calories, and fat calories like the Eaton-Konner Table 2 indicates is the evolutionary mode, modern 'Paleodiets' are instead low carb high protein high fat diets, kind of a variation of the low carb high protein low fat diets that causes "rabbit starvation" (https://lionheadrabbitcare.com/rabbit-starvation/). I suspect it's the nagging metabolic effects of the so-called high protein, high fat, low carb modern 'Paleodiet' that leads people to eventually return (sheepishly) to their more familiar modern eating habits. We've got a winter roadkill deer in the freezer now, and I'm going to do more fishing this year -- so maybe I'll be able to determine if the Eaton-Konner estimate of the macronutrient distribution of the human ancestral diet is more 'doable' and satisfying over the long run than the low carb high fat high protein Atkins-type approximation of the human Pleistocene eating style.
Nice post. Yes, it seems like our bodies are attuned toward a high meat consumption, low carb diet. I'm trying to lose a bit of weight now and went on a short term carnivore diet and am down 5 pounds in 4 days. Another 10 pounds or so to go. It's kind of a hard diet to maintain long-term, though (at least that I've found). Of course, there are lots of other issues with our food supply today including ubiquitous use of high-omega 6 industrialized seed oils and all sorts of weird chemicals and microplastics in everything...
Thanks. I've found those first 5 pounds drop off fast, too, when I first embark on low carb eating (again) for a while. I understand, though, that quite a bit of that initial rapid weight loss on such a diet is due to the body's immediate use of its normal muscle (and liver?) stores of water-heavy glycogen (therefore a whole lot of peeing goes on during the first part of such a dietary change). Fat per se only starts getting more slowly used up and lost after the low-hanging fruit of glycogen weight becomes depleted -- about the time your leg and arm muscles first start feeling a bit tired because they're starved of glycogen and haven't yet geared up (again) to burn fatty acids.
Having recently read Simpson and Raubenheimer's "Eat Like An Animal", I've come to suspect that so-called high protein low carb 'Paleodiets' are only hard to maintain for a long time because the amount of fat in most modern commercial meats (not game meats, not fish -- these are all relatively low in fat) is so much higher in concentration than what we evolved to consume, so a long term 'Paleodiet' doesn't match that closely what we evolved to eat, after all. Rather than getting a roughly equal amount of carb calories, protein calories, and fat calories like the Eaton-Konner Table 2 indicates is the evolutionary mode, modern 'Paleodiets' are instead low carb high protein high fat diets, kind of a variation of the low carb high protein low fat diets that causes "rabbit starvation" (https://lionheadrabbitcare.com/rabbit-starvation/). I suspect it's the nagging metabolic effects of the so-called high protein, high fat, low carb modern 'Paleodiet' that leads people to eventually return (sheepishly) to their more familiar modern eating habits. We've got a winter roadkill deer in the freezer now, and I'm going to do more fishing this year -- so maybe I'll be able to determine if the Eaton-Konner estimate of the macronutrient distribution of the human ancestral diet is more 'doable' and satisfying over the long run than the low carb high fat high protein Atkins-type approximation of the human Pleistocene eating style.