If you want to lose weight, you should be able to lose. One of the common misconceptions on paleo is that you don't have to watch your portion sizes--this is true for maintenance, but not true for fat loss. Think about it: the whole system was based on maintaining body composition. Cavemen didn't get fat, they also didn't get super skinny--if you stay in "fat loss" mode forever, you die.

Weight loss on paleo usually involves tailoring the program slightly. Fatty cuts of meat are great for satiety, but there are degrees of this. Instead of eating heaping portions of pork shoulder, try a slightly leaner cut of red meat, or chicken (but add fat because chicken is so lean it won't fill you up). And watch your portion sizes, at least until you're done losing weight.

The whole "your body has a set point," "your body is adjusting," etc. is a bunch of excuses. It is possible to lose fat. And be honest with yourself about how much sugar/carbs you're really consuming. A "bit" of BBQ sauce may be enough to get in your way if you're doing it on the reg. Also watch for fruit, you may want to scale back on that too during fat-loss time.

I cannot offer much more than what Rachel Mac and Allie already have other than encouragement. I'm a guy so I know it's a bit different for us, but I hit the wall for weight loss at about 5 weeks and stayed there until just recently - a span of about 10 additional weeks. I've actually lost 3 more pounds since getting to my client site on June 14th ;-)

I definitely need to get more INTENSE with this, as I have not been tracking portions and all that yet. My primary focus here at the beginning (started late Feb. 2011) was to fix my "bad blood" numbers, which I have done...

What Going “Paleo” Has Done For Me!

(The numbers represent: February 22* > June 1 > Difference)

Cholesterol: 231 > 170 > 61

Triglycerides: 249 > 76 > 173

A1C: 6.3 > 5.5 > 0.8

Weight: 189 > 168 > 21

• Full blood panel done by primary care physician; he wanted to prescribe statin drug and refer me to a dietician to address pre-diabetic condition; instead, I started monitoring blood glucose levels and changing what I eat on 02/27/2011.

I am just finishing up a 3-week project living out of a hotel next Friday, so I'll be back at the home office and can bust a move!! Thanks to Rachel Mac and Allie again for the gentle reminder that I am as yet still QUASI Paleo. :-)

i have not lost any weight either...my brother is a crossfit/paleo fanatic and he says it takes about a month for your body to adjust and you also have to make sure to get enough calories each day or your body will "hold the ones you do eat hostage" thus preventing weight loss. also you need to make sure you are sleeping enough.

Here is some information:

http://paleohacks.com/questions/46722/how-do-i-lose-weight#axzz1QKHebIWG

Getting out and walking and getting sleep are both really important.

I started January 3rd and lost 40 pounds by mid April. I haven't lost a pound since then. I'm also not close to what I consider ideal body. I'm not really tracking weightloss although it's nice to see it and I'd be lying if I said I didn't want that. But,I am just using the size of clothes I wear and the size of my muffin top as a guide to if I consider myself skinny or not. I'm not there yet and still have a ways to go. I think I'm about at the mid way point. It's frustrating that when I do weigh myself that I haven't gone down on the scale. My clothes are still fitting the same way so I'm pretty sure I haven't lost anything since mid April. I'm not really sure what to do and I think that I am fairly restrictive on my intake. I started fasting (skipping breakfast and not eating until 3pm) every other day. I also started exercising in small amounts daily. I know I am much healthier and I am happy with my lifestyle choices. I want to be thinner but I'm also not going to give in due to the scale not showing me what I want. I know that over time things will work out. I guess my advice would be to keep the faith and continue to live healthy.

From my experience with my weight loss, it wasnt until the 3 months mark that I was able to budge the scale. You might just need to give your body a chance to adjust to all the changes, especically if it hasn't been working right in the past.

Watch your calories carefully, use fitday.com, this was key to movement on the scale for me. I was only loosing about 1/2 lb every 2 wks, it was slow going but i was seriously noting changes by month 4, mostly inches.

Also if you aren't in ketosis you might not be burning fat correctly yet.

Give it time, check your calories and consider checking for ketosis. Adjust and readjust every 2 wks until you start to see some success. Could take a few months of tweaking but then you'll be rolling!!!

Don't be afraid to experiment in both directions, not just stricter (cutting the BBQ sauce)

It's been a surprising experience for me. First 10 lbs came off about 1lb per day. Then I was frozen for about a month. I traveled to visit family and was taken to eat huge portions -- all you can eat Chinese buffet and then homemade dinner of steaks AND ribs both. I stuck to meat at the Chinese buffet but still stuffed myself utterly (and for several consecutive meals). Expecting to massively gain over that weekend, I somehow spontaneously DROPPED 3lbs.

My most recent unexpected thing that seems to cause .5lbs loss per day is eating 1 lb of beef roast and nothing else for lunch. It has even been working with strawberry-loaded full fat yogurt for breakfast and carbs at dinner (tacos with corn shells that are 20g carb each).

You might post what you eat in a typical day/week before and after going Paleo so people can give their opinions on that. If your diet didn't have a lot of sugar and gluten beforehand, you might not experience much of a difference in weight after you "go Paleo", unless you are also cutting carbs and calories. Often it is the people who ate a LOT of sugar and starch beforehand that see dramatic weight loss when they first go Paleo.

If that isn't you, then in my opinion, you need to get the weight loss ball rolling by aggressively cutting carbs (very low or zero carb at first), and some fasting (skip one or two meals a week and try to work out fasted) along with the other advice here (plenty of sleep, plenty of fat but still with reduced calories, balance your omega 3 and 6 fats, try to walk at least 30 minutes per day).

I think that being strict Paleo lowers my blood pressure (in my case a good thing, I was very slightly high beforehand), which can lead to dizziness when I stand up suddenly, especially if I haven't eaten in a long while. What I don't get is the cranky blood sugar crashes that I used to get and never liked.

Others report dizziness when they are in ketosis, which can be brought on by going very low carb and your body burning stored fat. I am not sure about the whole ketosis thing, but it would make sense that changing your diet in a way that makes your body change how it stores and burns energy would have some unpleasant effects on you at first.

Good luck... post back in a while and let us know how you're doing.

The recent posts on food reward by Stephan Guyenet, which are influenced by all of the Shangri-la Diet posts by Seth Roberts, should be helpful here.

As a concept, weight set points should not be viewed as an excuse, but rather as a tool for you to exploit. If you manage to set or hack your setpoint lower, then your body will use mechanisms like appetite signalling to get you to that weight. The most obvious way to make this happen is to consume calories with low food reward.

Roberts' approach is to consume 1-400 calories of extra light olive oil in the middle of a two-hour flavorless window. This means that you cannot consume or encounter any flavors either an hour before or an hour after administering the ELOO. So anything with flavor like food, toothpaste, coffee, gum, etc are out. But flavorless things are okay, so drinking plain water is fine. It also makes sense to stay away from strong smells while in the window.

A more general and intuitive approach is to eat food with low food reward. So, for example, eat a big plate of meat and veggies cooked without seasoning or added flavor. By forcing yourself to do this you will lower your body's weight set point, which will lower your appetite for around a day after eating it. I think you'll find that this is pretty easy to do when you are actually hungry. (By using the adjective 'actually' here I am trying to distinguish simple hunger from cravings for food reward, which usually overlap with hunger.) It also makes sense to avoid rewarding snacks (this might explain why snacks like nuts and dark chocolate seem to stall weight loss for many Paleohackers).

Some ideas include drinking coffee black (if you dont already), eating a large plate of steamed broccoli (with no fat, which is rewarding, despite the fact that we know adding fat is better for us because vitamins are fat soluble), choosing actual cuts over sausage (which has a lot of rewarding flavor added to it), or letting your ground beef cook past the temperature you usually prefer (again, not necessarily better for your overall, but it makes sense while you are trying to lose weight), etc.

Paleohackers typically recoil at the thought of eating foods that aren't tasty - indeed, one charm of the paleo diet is that we can eat a bunch of really tasty food and not get fat. For weight loss, though, you want to turn this on its head. Purposefully eat a large, bland meal to start your day. Then eat whatever paleo fare you desire for the rest of the day. Unconsciously, effortlessly, and naturally, your appetite should decrease, along with your daily caloric intake, and hence your weight - i.e., to the extent that your energy expenditure remains constant.

It's all been said in these answers, but I would reinforce that it surprises me how much sleep matters. If I go a few nights with 4-6 hours of sleep my weight doesn't budge. A few nights of 7-8 and the scale starts ticking down again. It's really shocked me how much this matters.