I was once frutco-phobic, but I've since realized that it is a massive red herring and that the majority of hominin evolution involved substantial fruit consumption. We never lost that ability. Eating an orange is not the same as drinking orange-flavored soda. The nutritional loss from total fructose avoidance is more harmful than the theoretical gains proposed.

Fat loss is simply a matter of balancing bodyfat oxidized against net energy stored as bodyfat. There are a million ways to do it. Fruit isn't very energy-dense, but it's also not very good for satiety. Overall, it's a wash.

A lot of people create this untouchable amount of energy in their diet with Glorious, Healthy Fat and then add more energy via fruit or whatever and stop losing and blame the fruit. It all comes down to energy balance and it just so happens that fat has a negligible (0-3%) metabolic cost for storage.

Eat 6000kcal of fruit, gain weight

Eat 1000kcal of fruit, lose weight

So it absolutely depends on the entirety of the day's food.

Coming at it from a different angle, I'm discovering fruit is a real problem for me in that it leads to more fruit, moar fruit and then EAT ALL THE FRUIT and then I end up with a handful of Ghirardelli caramel squares, backed into a corner snarling like a deranged honey badger at my poor husband.

Yeah. This just happened last night.

I think I need to swear off the sugars for a while. I normally only eat fruit seasonally and last night's binge started innocently enough with a pomegranate.

I think most paleo-folk do eat fruit in some amount; it just really depends on the person and the goal. I don't eat it every day because I'm just not a big fruit person, but I don't think I would gain weight if I did. Yes it has sugar, but it is real food, and most people shouldn't have to be afraid of eating it regularly. I'd give it a try and see how it goes. It sounds like you're thinking paleo=zero carb, but that isn't really the case; some do paleo that way, or low-carb, or high-carb. I'm a believer in taking the path of least resistance- zero-carb can be tough, and you may find you don't even need that level of intervention. Good luck, and congrats to your cousin! :)

my first thirty pounds of weight loss include about one third of my calories in the form of raw fruit. now that we are in the dead of winter my raw fruit consumption is down and i lost another 15 pounds. i think that so long as the food is raw and unprocessed by machines thereby reducing the particle size and therefore absorption rate that fruit can be nutritious and healthy. in nature and in chemistry, reaction rates are in proportion to particle size. we were designed to chew food to a certain size, not blend or cook it into nano sized portions that are immediately absorbed as if it were pure sugar. So, i vote yes to whole apples and no to apple sause.

I've eaten as much fruit as I want for the entire 8 months I've followed the lifestyle. "Unlimited" is tricky, though, because you may want to eat more or less than I usually do.

When I was losing weight steadily, my typical fruit intake was 2 whole grapefruits or 1 grapefruit and 1 banana. On maintenance, I've probably doubled the daily volume.

I also have a leafy salad almost every day and I think the salad is a weight-loss device for me because I eat it before the main meal of meat and vegetables and it reduces how much I eat of the other foods.

Some folks are skeptical of fruit because they feel fructose strains the liver; I share concerns about HFCS but I am skeptical of a diet without fruit because I just don't feel right without it. But then I come from a fruit-loving family.

EDIT: I do agree with those who say fruit should be a seasonal food (I do the same with starches, eating them only in deep winter.) When I was a kid, you gorged on strawberries, blueberries and raspberries when ripe then gorged on melons and finally you gorged on apples and pears. There were no limits or serving sizes and no one gained weight from fruit. We never gorged on starches but we did eat hard squashes and tubers in winter.

I feel better when I eat fruits and salads,but only later in the day.Eating them for breakfast or lunch makes me a grumpy, tired,sugar gobbling mess.

There is nothing wrong with eating fruit, and most paleo folks do. However, it sounds like your goal is fat loss, and fruit probably won't help with that.

Check out what Jimmy Moore, who knows a thing or two about losing weight, has to say about fruit & fat loss:

"Fruit is nothing more than candy that God made. Maybe some people can tolerate it better than I can, but I GAIN weight eating it regularly."

That's from this thread on his site: http://www.livinlowcarbdiscussion.com/showthread.php?tid=4685

You could get a blood glucose monitor and test your response to fruit, if you want to see how it affects you.

I only eat fruits I feel are beneficial to me, such as, pink grapefruit, guava, starfruit, pomegranate and mangosteen. I avoid melons-too much yeast and I avoid oranges, red apples, pears and grapes-too sweet for me. I also eat berries of many kinds. I drop cranberries or blueberries into my stews occasionally. And a dried prune into my soup. I feel these are ok for me and not overdosed, then I can still loose weight.

Not everyone has the same metabolism. Mine tends to pack on the pounds on anything sweet, so I have to stick to VLC and get most of my calories from fat, and some protein. That said, I do occasionally eat some fruit, mostly berries. YMMV.

Be careful of which fruits you do eat. It's very easy to eat some now, then get cravings for it later. It's the same mechanism as eating Chinese food - you're hungry half an hour later because of the high carb content (rice, noodles, etc.) Be certain to avoid juice as it's very easy to drink tons of calories without realizing it.

You can use this webpage to compare what servings of fruit are to sugar cubes and grams of carbs. (Sadly, it doesn't show berries.)

That's why I stick to only berries, and pomegranate when I can find it, and don't eat those every day.

I only do a glycogen re-feed after very intense workouts, these are limited to no more than one/week, sometimes less, and after those I either eat a sweet potato or if I don't have any a banana.

Mind you this is a multi-hour work out, while fasted, specifically designed to deplete all glycogen and induce autophagy. I only refeed with carbs about an hour or two after this workout, and only because I find that if I don't, I feel like a zombie until the next day. (If you go very low carb, you become insulin resistant temporarily to spare glucose for red blood cells and the parts of the brain that don't have mitochondria.)

That said, fructose can be dangerous. All fructose has to be shunted to the liver for processing, as with any poison such as alcohol. Personally, I'd rather have the alcohol than the fructose. The liver can convert it to glucose, upto a point, after which it turns it into fat and you'd eventually get NASH (Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis) if you stay in this pathway. You probably won't get there by eating just fruit. You'd have to abuse your body with soft drinks or Agave Nectar (which is higher in fructose than high fructose corn syrup.)

Fructose is also a more efficient glycator of proteins leading to AGEs than glucose. As this is endogenous it's very dangerous. I suspect we're probably evolved to deal with exogenous AGEs because we discovered fire over a million years ago, but we don't know for sure. However, glycating proteins is known to be harmful to us.

So between fructose and glucose, I'd tend towards glucose. As I said, I do eat some fruit occasionally, but only in small amounts, and to be sure, I don't want to exceed my liver's ability to convert it to glucose/glycogen.

Those of us whose ancestors evolved in non-tropical regions had access to high sugar/fructose fruits only at the end of the summer. We adapted to pack on fat as a signal via fructose/carbs in expectation of the coming winter. I suspect since we more readily give up unused muscle tissue than fat, that this is the case. So we'd feast on ripe fruit in August and September in order to be ready for the lean times of winter. I suspect this is why I readily gain weight from carbs and other people do not, again, YMMV.

I eat fruits 2-3 times a day and am losing weight.

I eat fruit every day - 3-4 pieces - and have consistently lost weight. It is not the bulk of what I eat in a day but I do eat quite a bit of it. (Just finished an apple, and I have a pomegranate (sp?) sitting next to me!!)

I don't eat fruit often, b/c i look at it as a dessert (raw or w/cream). In the summer I eat a lotta berries b/c I'm far more physically active & it feels good to my body to eat the fruits - in a limited amount (it's not all i eat).
In the winter time, I rarely eat them... if I do it's an apple or orange maybe twice a month - more if i feel i'm coming down w/something.

i eat mostl fruit and have meat only in a while. so im 80procent fruitarian and 10 paleo or WAPF.....

things for consider eating fruit

have fun exercise relax play sleep enough rest eat fully ripe fresh yummi fruits eat some greens with it drink enough water

There is room for fruit, even in a low carbohydrate diet. Paleo isn't specifically a low carb diet, but it does tend to be lower in carbohydrates than the standard American diet.

A good approach is to consider how hungry you get after you eat something. If you are ravenously hungry two hours after eating a banana, then maybe you want to eat something else during your weight loss phase.

I've been weight stable for two years. I don't see any weight gain from eating fruit, even when I get stupid and buy medjool dates, pears, dark chocolate, and whatever other stupid sweet thing that I can find that doesn't have grains, legumes, and dairy in it. Possibly this is because eating like that for too long makes me feel terrible far faster than I can accumulate fat.

When I was very low carb and losing weight/fat, eating fruit temporarily halted the weight loss or put on a little weight. My main fruits are apples, bananas and blueberries. I love blueberries, and over the summer we picked 11 pounds of them at a farm (which are now in the freezer), and every so often I go crazy and have them twice a day for a while (blueberry binging?). I will gain a pound or too and bloat up a tiny bit, but this goes away when I stop eating them.

In moderation or occasionally, I think fruits are good for you, especially berries, and from an evolutionary perspective, binging on berries and/or fruits for a brief time is probably exactly how our ancestors ate them (i.e. hunter/gatherers stumbling across a berry patch and gorging on them while in season). If you are strict low carb and/or trying to lose a lot of weight, I would avoid them, except perhaps as a brief respite or cheat from your diet. But if you are at a healthy weight, I think the occasional fruit binge is fine.