I find that most of my food is just a fat-delivery device.

I will usually add olive oil or coconut milk to white meat chicken. It's hard for me to choke it down otherwise.

We need to get a paleo public service announcement put on TV: "This is your brain. Now, this is your brain on healthy and delicious fats. Doesn't it look great! Any questions?"

I think your on the right track Rob.

The book "The Perfect Health Diet" makes a compelling argument for adding Saturated Fats (butter, coconut oil, animal fat, etc) and Monounsaturated fats (olive oil, avocado, animal fat, etc) to meals to keep a 2:1 ratio of fat calories to protein calories and about 65% fat total in the diet. These are their recommendations for longevity, but perhaps not as optimal for athletic performance or maximal leaness.

I never add fat just for the sake of adding fat. I add fat according to what I have a taste for eating. Typically, a meal just feels lacking without a certain amount of fat in it, so I add until I feel I am satisfied. Then I stop adding. There is a space where I feel there is a good amount of fat, but not so much that I am getting sick of it. That's how much I want to eat, no more and no less. I don't yet see any actual strong evidence that force feeding myself a lot of fat is more healthy than just eating a decent amount, so for now I will be sticking with keeping decent levels according to my instincts. By government standards, my diet would probably already be considered a high fat diet, but by paleo standards, probably not.

I am older now and really not that interested in fighting my body unless I have reason to feel I have good reason to do so. I know there are a lot of lean wiry people out there that are trying to gain weight and bulk up, but on some level, I can't help wondering how paleo that desire really is. I mean, if your body is naturally lithe, lean, and wiry, is it really all that paleo to try to stuff down more calories and bulk up those muscles? Or is that more of a cultural conditioning thing? Seems to me, many of us spend large portions of our lives trying to fight against our natural genetics and become something that we were really not designed for.

I add coconut oil, schmaltz, suet, ghee, and/or olive oil to just about everything I eat. I don't track my caloric or fat intake, and I'm not trying to gain or lose weight- I just add as much as I feel by the meal. I've found I eat and think about food much less often than before I started liberally eating fat. I've even found that eating out isn't very satisfying anymore because the food isn't fatty enough!

Yes. I am also trying to gain weight, so it's the only way I can get enough calories (too many starches, even potatoes and such, make me feel poorly). If I wasn't trying to gain I probably wouldn't bother to load so much extra butter, cream, bacon fat, tallow, lard, coconut oil, or EVOO onto everything... but I'd still eat plenty of fats, because they are delicious and good for you.

Not trying to gain weight...actually trying to shed the last 5 pounds. I eat coconut oil by the spoonful when I'm hungry and am (as I type) cooking a rosemary balsamic butter sauce to pour over my grass-fed steak.

I have trouble keeping on weight as well, and I do a similar thing: I eat a meal and have cheese for dessert as my extra fat. It's not paleo, but it's French, and they may not run around in Vibrams but they're just as slender and healthy as us modern day cavemen. It's similarly easy to eat excess carbohydrate or fat, but fat is the healthier choice: you won't ruin your body's hormonal homeostasis and you'll have healthy cell walls and a powerful brain. You're doing it just right :)

Most of the time. When I cook with coconut oil or ghee, I'll usually sneak a spoonful or two for myself.

My favourite is BBQ suet or pan-fried, really good when crunchy.

I add it to my cooking, pop a spoonful of coconut oil from a spoon in my mouth plenty of times... but I don't gain weight that way.