Cold Turkey for 30, avoid the high fructose and dried when you return and youll see what they do to you... but without cold turkey... youll only create cravings by trying to ingest very small amounts.

if you absolutely cant go without, eliminate dried and focus on the lower fructose scale/sour fruits.

LOL. I was just visiting family one of my relatives has a serious dried fruit addiction. I ate a bunch of it too and I definitely gained weight. I think the secret to avoiding it is to only buy it for travel. My relative had a bunch of it just in the house and snacking on it was irresistible. Fresh fruit is much better for you overall and you are much less likely to overeat it. You can make better fruit choices by substituting berries for bananas/apples/other high sugar fruit.

If you can't give it up cold turkey, my advice would be to at least give up the dried fruit. It's way too easy to pop too much fruit like candy when it's dried. After that you can wean yourself off fresh fruit gradually.

I cut back on fruit drastically, although I was never really eating a high amount of it in the first place. I was having a couple pieces a day, and now it's a few a week.

I try and eat just that amount which I realistically would have picked had it been in the wild (for fresh fruit) and I try and avoid dried fruit altogether, because I can easily eat a giant bag of raisins or any dried fruit for that matter, and I get a serious rush when I do (and subsequent crash). I do occasionally have dried fruit in a cooked dish, but avoid eating them as a snack on their own. Their just too damned irrestible. I just need to learn to apply this to nuts and seeds....

I don't have a problem with fresh fruit. I eat some and then I feel satiated and I don't crave any more. I don't buy dried fruit unless I am going camping. The one that I do avoid, though, is dates. Those things are super sugar bombs! I only eat those if I am at someone's house or venue and they prepared them, which is maybe a few times per year. And I only eat one or two. I think a few hundred calories of fruit is fine if your metabolism is in decent condition. It provides good nutrients and the sugars help restore glycogen in the liver and muscles. However, if you are trying to lose weight and are stalled, cutting back on sugars can help with weight loss. One thing that works well for me is to pick one meal of the day only where I eat that item and don't eat it for any other meals. Like maybe just allow fruit for breakfast or lunch.

In the past, I was eating lowcarb but not paleo. In that diet, I did not eat any fruit for a long time, at least 8 months. On that diet, I lost a lot of weight but did not feel as good as I do now on paleo. I think maybe the level of carbs was just too low for me back then. I often would feel really tired after lunch. I actually was not eating much processed food back then and was never a big fan of grain oils, so even then, my diet was not too far off from paleo. The main difference was I eat more carbs now, in the form of fresh fruit only.

Try only using dried fruit as a garnish or a condiment to something else, e.g. sprinkle some craisins on a salad with pecans etc.

Better yet, do 30-days without them in your diet, substituting regular fruit (limited intake). When you try eating dried fruit after 30 days, you'll feel the rush of sugar and it'll amaze you that you ever ate so much of it. (It's what I did to kick the habit).

I totally had the same problem, with fruit and starchy veggies. A lot of people mentioned 30 days cold turkey, but I had to ween myself of it, because it was just too large a part of my diet to just drop it instantly. I had smaller and smaller portions of it at each meal, and then restricted it to only a little after dinner, and now, I rarely eat it at all. Doing it that, I've seen what I huge effect fruit sugar has on messing with my concentration, making me sluggish, and making me hungry all day long.

For dried fruit, I really recommend buying your own dehydrator and making it yourself. I have an Excalibur. Then you can at least control that no added sugar goes into it. I never realized how much added sugar, or sometimes frying, goes into store-bought, processed dried fruit until I made it myself and saw what a more natural product looks like.

simply don't buy them. :-/