The main reason many people find the paleo diet to be such an effective method for losing fat is that it turns your body from a primarily carb-burning machine in to a fat burning machine.

Here’s how it works:

Your body’s preferred source of energy is fats. Fat is a much slower burning fuel, and it’s more efficient for your body to use. However, due to the abundance of carbohydrates that we consume on a daily basis in the western world, our bodies burn the carbohydrates rather than fat. So, when we take in more carbohydrates than are needed for energy, our bodies stores the rest as fat for later “just in case” (this process is left over from when we needed to store fat in case we couldn’t find food for weeks).

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), most people will never really be in danger of “not eating”. We almost never have to resort to using our fat stores for energy, so instead of us eventually burning the fat we’re storing in our bodies, we simply add to it, over and over and over again. This is a pretty good explanation of why there’s such an obesity problem in the United States and abroad.

The paleo diet changes a lot of this by doing one simple thing: removing a lot of the simple carbohydrates from your diet.

When this happens, your body can no longer get away with using cheap carbohydrates for energy, and it’s forced to use the fat stores. That’s good! This is how it works:

Without the constant influx of cheap carbohydrates being turned into sugar, your blood sugar drops to a normal level, and your insulin levels begin to regulate. Regulated insulin levels allow a process called lipolysis to occur. Lipolysis is the process of your body releasing triglicerides (fat stores) to be burned as energy. That’s a bunch of big words which basically means that, by reducing the amount of cheap carbohydrates in your system, the paleo diet allows your body to start the process of burning fat. Thanks paleo!