Are you eating Paleo, and yet often still hungry at the end of a meal? If so, it may be due to low blood sugar. One of the body’s responses to low blood sugar is to make you feel hungry. Why might your blood sugar so low? One possibility is that you are eating too much protein. The protein will cause insulin to be released, which will then lower your blood sugar (the opposite of what you need at that point). Another is that you had carbs at an earlier time in the day, and that after the initial spike in blood sugar, your body has over-corrected into a blood sugar low. This is “hypoglycemia,” and is very common.
The solution is to cut back on protein and carbs. What happens when you cut back both protein and carbs is that fat, as a percentage of total calories, needs to go up; fat also tends to be very satiating.
This type of diet change does take time. However, once your body enters fat-burning mode (which is indicated by being in ketosis), one benefit is that most people tend to get hungry much less often; for example, I can generally go at least 15 hours between meals without feeling hungry. That also means less cooking. Being in ketosis also means that your insulin levels are at their lowest, which will minimize blood sugar swings, which is part of why it helps resolve hunger issues. You do have to be careful about increasing fat without also decreasing carbs. If you don’t cut back on carbs, the resulting high insulin levels are a pretty sure-fire way to gain weight; yet most people will actually lose weight on a high-fat, low-carb, low-protein diet. In addition to controlling blood sugar, insulin also acts as a “storage hormone,” which causes excess calories to be stored as fat.
