Each week, I'm receiving more e-mails and comments from people who are successfully losing fat by eating simple (low reward) food, similar to what I described here. In some cases, people are breaking through fat loss plateaus that they had reached on conventional low-carbohydrate, low-fat or paleo diets. This concept can be applied to any type of diet, and I believe it is an important characteristic of ancestral food patterns.
At the Ancestral Health Symposium, I met two Whole Health Source readers, Aravind Balasubramanian and Kamal Patel, who were interested in trying a simple diet to lose fat and improve their health. In addition, they wanted to break free of certain other high-reward activities in their lives that they felt were not constructive. They recently embarked on an 8-week low-reward diet and lifestyle to test the effectiveness of the concepts. Both of them had previously achieved a stable (in Aravind's case, reduced) weight on a paleo-ish diet prior to this experiment, but they still carried more fat than they wanted to. They offered to write about their experience for WHS, and I thought other readers might find it informative. Their story is below, followed by a few of my comments.
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