When Catherine Johnson, co-author of Animals In Translation, saw The Shangri-La Diet in a bookstore, she remembered the Freakonomics column about me. Her 19-year-old son Jimmy Berenson is autistic. Because of his autism, he takes a drug that causes weight gain. Over the last few years, it made him obese. In July 2006, Catherine started him on SLD (first 1, then 2 tablespoons of ELOO/day). Here is what happened:
Seeing is believing: One of Catherine’s neighbors was skeptical about SLD, even when told of Jimmy’s results. Only when she saw Jimmy’s results, as graphed by Catherine, did she decide to try it. There is more information at Catherine’s blog.
Thanks to Andrew Gelman for his comments on this graph.
wow!
That’s beautiful!
The other terrific aspect of Shangri-La is that we’re managing to stick with it through the holidays and winter months.
It’s as difficult to “diet” another person as it is to diet yourself, perhaps more so. At various points over the years of Jimmy’s weight gain we’ve tried to put him on a calorie reduction diet and keep him on it.
Always, we’ve failed.
The winter months sap our energy and motivation, and we found ourselves getting sloppy with the ELOO, forgetting on weekends, seeing the return of nighttime eating ….
When Jimmy’s weight loss leveled off we feared the worst.
But we were able to muster the energy & conviction to adapt. That would not have happened with a more complicated regimen.
We fiddled with the ELOO doses, switched to sugar water, dumped the sugar water & returned to ELOO….all this while operating on reduced-battery strength. Shangri-La is a forgiving regime.
Jimmy’s still losing!