Great article. It all sounds natural, and it's great to back up intuition with research.

I haven't really looked much into it, but I don't get the fixation on food reward as a cause for making people fat. I mean, I get that you might expect someone to eat less if the food is bland, but it seems like it would be a secondary concern at best: if you eat nutritionally void food, let it be something you don't even like. Of course I wonder why you'd even be eating it in the first place.

Simple experience shows that eating "paleo" without exaggeration is not hard at all. Unless of course you're metabolically damaged or something like that, but then it seems to me things would get much more complicated. If you stay hungry because you can't really absorb or use the nutrients on food, it's not very clear to me that simply eating less wouldn't be equally harmful.

I look forward to the discussion on this area. So far you've done a great job on explaining how humans function and tying it up with discussions on how to not break this mechanism, but fixing or managing it after it's broken sounds harder.

Oh, I love the reference of taste as being a drive for a sin. Some time ago I heard someone say, talking about marrow: "Well, you just know something this good has to be a guilty pleasure." It's common knowledge, and it just makes no sense.

This series has been wonderfully thought out, referenced and constructed. Lots of very useful concepts. Thank you for sticking with it to the end!

I think you have not only up-ended the standard food reward theory, but also the obesity set point theory. Ie- if there are "set points" or homeostatic processes at work, they are probably not around a certain weight or number of calories, per se, but around a sufficiency of necessary nutrients.

Once my eyes are closed it makes no difference to me if there's any residual pinkness from the infernal sodium vapor lights in the city. When I was hiking the PCT in the summer time I frequently fell asleep before the sun was down and woke up again in the faint light of dawn. I'm a master sleeper. I usually get 9-10 hours of sleep, an hour of which is usually me fighting to stay awake long enough not to be made fun of.

Tess, I'm with you. I'm tired of reading about 20-something guys with pounds melting off saying people like me must be doing something wrong. Obviously we are doing something wrong, but it's not what they think it is. I'm not cheating. What reason do I have to cheat when I'm so desperate? I guess on some level I'm okay with being a fat old lady for the rest of my life, but I was really hoping to have a stunningly victorious outcome to make my man change his ways. He's going to kill himself. He's degenerating into all the SAD diseases of middle age. I really hoped my own success would cause him to drop the pills, step away from the pudding and get himself healthy. But alas, all I have given him is fodder to believe I'm the one who is going to get sick and die.

No diet sweeteners. No sweet anything. No snacking. Trying my best to do 2 meals a day, although yesterday I thought I would try splitting breakfast in half and having half for lunch so I wouldn't be so hungry 2 hours before dinner. Today I'm going to try no breakfast and no lunch and just have coffee with cream. Dinner is meat, vegetables, 1/4 sweet potato or 2 bacon and 3 eggs and a glass of red wine. Stopped eating cheese before dinner (I'm starving by 4-5pm). Giving up the wine because it tastes funny now. Stopped putting a small handful of macadamias and other raw nuts in my breakfast. Breakfast has been homemade plain yogurt mixed with creme fraiche or coconut milk. I'm getting tired of it and don't know what to try next.

I hiked fasted last weekend 8 miles with 2000ft elevation gain, a typical hike for me. I run at lunch 4-5 miles (slowly) 3-4 times a week and walk the days I don't run. I don't lift weights though, unless you count holding up my fiddle and running the bow across with my wap-wap arms for several hours.

I lost some of the love-handle business in the first week and now the last two weeks, nothing. It's frustrating to see the same belly in the mirror every day and to have my clothes fit no different. I don't have a scale I'm going only by feel. I can see now that to lose weight at age 46 and female, no matter what you eat, you must starve. No other way. Well, I don't know that yet because it hasn't worked yet.

When I was hiking the PCT I was starving out on the trail despite eating as much as I could. I would have this strange sensation when I got into town while eating my first meal of real food. I would see the whole world change from black and white to in color again. Something inside me would wake up and I'd feel emotions again. I'd end up sobbing over my meal sometimes as I came back to life. I feel that I'm walking around in that black and white emotionless state right now. Gosh I hope that something changes, that a flip gets switched and whatever is broken inside me fixes itself so I can be normal like all of you.

@Diane

Calorie-restriction, even in a carbohydrate-restricted diet, will slow, and eventually stop, fat-loss. It's important that you eat to satiety whenever you are hungry.

Also, three weeks isn't enough time for you to have adapted to a low-carbohydrate diet. It can take six weeks or longer to complete the transition from using primarily blood-sugar to using fat and/or ketones as fuel. Strenuous exercise during this period of adaptation Is likely to be an unpleasant experience, and will make it more difficult to adhere to your diet, especially when combined with calorie-restriction.

If you can't avoid exercise, you're likely to experience some hunger for carbohydrate in order to replace depleted glycogen stores. Don't fight the feeling. In order to be successful, it isn't necessary that you stick to a low-carb regimen at every waking moment, just that you do it often enough so that whatever carbohydrate you consume goes to glycogen rather than fat.

Ok, so if I'm understanding things, my problem is that I'm not yet keto-adapted (which is pretty obvious to me by the strong smell of my urine and how hard it is to walk up stairs and mountains) so at this point I probably can't possibly burn off fat no matter what. Do I have it right? What worried me was that it appeared I was putting fat on two weeks ago, after the first week of this. I think the weight loss in the first week was actually due to the weeks before where I ate salad after dry salad for two weeks. I'm ending week 3 of low carb now and going into week 4. P.S. I like the running. It gives me time to think, gets me out in the noon-day sun and I don't have to pay any money to do it. P.P.S. I couldn't resist breakfast today which was served to me: chorizo and eggs. I think I found something better than bacon.