Dragonwolf,I would love to know what length of time you have been consistent with paleo/primal(without cheats).
I feel a million times better but I rarely lose eating this way.
I am losing loads of inches from lifting and running but the weight stays the same.
I believe the reason I am not losing "weight" is because every 6 weeks to 3 months I break from paleo,eat a load of sugar and then start again.It never really lasts more than a week or 2 but was curious to here more of your non weight loss story

Due to:

1. Being the only person in my household fully Primal (hubby's getting there, but he's having a harder time cutting out wheat).
2. People at work obsessed with bringing in bread-based goodies and in generally being wheat/carb heavy (doesn't help there are a lot of veg*ns). We have a "take me counter" that I have to walk by every time I go to get water or go to the rest room, which makes life very difficult, especially when hungry.
3. My own humanity and being content with 80/20 ("it's not a staple, just don't have it often; I seem to be able to tolerate a little bit once in a while")

I've only gone a couple of months entirely without "cheats." However, my "cheats" usually aren't "gorge on sugary stuff until I'm sick" or even "screw this, I'm just going to eat SAD again" or whatever. It's usually caving to a slice of pizza (hubby's a pizza fanatic and I have a hard time resisting it when it's fresh from the shop), or conceding to having a tortilla wrap instead of lettuce because the place only has shredded lettuce and I'm not in a position to eat it in salad form.

I actually found out on the last weekend of September, when I went to my mom's and helped her with the bake sale for the local carnival, that I can do a lot better around sweets. My mom makes a number of really awesome goodies, my favorite of which being buckeyes (chocolate covered peanut butter balls). I already decided that I would let myself have some treats that weekend, in part because I knew that I'd be doing a lot to burn off whatever I ate, and I had "earned" it by being more strict both in what I ate/didn't eat (ie - all Primal) and in how I ate (ie - keep carbs down and fat up), but I also decided that I would do what I could to stick to eating the good stuff. Overall, I did well and only had a few pieces of some of the goodies, and still largely avoided the grain-based stuff (save for a wrap and the breading of some homemade cheese sticks). This is a far cry from how I used to be, where I'd raid the stash of buckeyes nearly daily in the time leading up to the carnival, and when that type of food was available, I'd eat enough to make myself sick at the end of the day/night.

That said, I've been solving #1 slowly, but surely. Hubby's been on board with it for a while, but giving up the wheat stuff is hard for him. He's starting to see benefits of it, though, as he's cutting out the worst of what's left and minimizing the rest.

#2 is a day-by-day thing, but I've found I can pretty much ignore just about everything as long as I'm not hungry. Primal Egg Coffee in the mornings helps tremendously with that. The hard part is the afternoon, largely because I have a hard time getting enough fat in at lunch (or sometimes just enough food, it's hard to gauge how much I'll need to eat at lunch when I'm packing it in the morning).

#3 has pretty much solved itself the last time I had wheat and my eczema flared back up. That pretty much clinched that one for me.

That said, I haven't had any "screw this, I'm eating SAD" type of "cheat" since last holiday season. I was dealing with a number of difficult things, including having lost my martial arts home, dealing with doctors that basically laughed at me and told me that I "just wasn't doing it right" when I asked to have the PCOS tests run again, and was frustrated at not being able to lose any weight. For about 6 weeks, I didn't really care about what I ate. I tried to keep how much reigned in, but I felt that if I was going to be miserable and not lose any weight, anyway, I might as well eat what I wanted and have the holiday treats and have one less battle to fight. I ended up gaining 20lbs in that span of time, and felt miserable by New Years.

So, I redoubled my dietary efforts, looked for a new martial arts school, and, later in the year (after my GP dismissed what she thought was a burst cyst, instead of even considering linking it with my PCOS), found a new doctor.

After this time, I've seen more that it's paid off in other ways, especially with going more HF/LC. My skin, which I've dealt with unrelenting acne since I was a teenager (not as severe as some, but nothing has been able to clear it up) is clearing up. It takes a while, but it's getting there. As I mentioned before, the eczema that recently developed on my hand (on the palm side, where the fingers meet the hand) and that my doctor dismissed as "contact dermatitis" (aka - "you got into something that your skin is reacting to"), but never really cleared up or stayed cleared up without the use of a corticosteroid cream, cleared up on its own and stayed that way until my last "cheat time." I also rarely have headaches anymore, where I used to have them nearly daily, and I don't need to take Tums every single night for heartburn. I call that list a win, and it's largely what keeps me going in lieu of weight loss.