At the Shangri-La Diet forums, karky, who has lost 75 pounds on SLD, wrote:

In July I experienced a plateau, and wrestled with the same 5 lbs all month. At the end of July, I donated a pint of blood. WooHoo! Weight loss is back! I think to myself, hmmm… coincidence. In November, another plateau, wrestling with 3 lbs. I donated a pint of blood Monday. Today is Wednesday, I have lost 5 lbs since Monday, 3 lbs Tuesday morning, 2 lbs this morning.

Chrianna replied:

you certainly make a good argument for donating blood!

Which made me chuckle.

I cannot come anywhere near explaining karky’s observation. But maybe I can explain — someday, not right now — why Chrianna’s reply amused me. I once wrote down about 50 laugh-inducing sentences I heard on the the sitcom Cheers, looking for patterns. Several were obvious. For example, many of the laugh-inducing sentences were insults. Maybe I should resume this quest.

It is a good way to pass the time. A few days ago, I heard the following on a Chevrolet radio ad:

Male voice: With Pilates, three kids, and a house full of laundry, Diana is too busy to think about fuel economy.

Female voice: I’m sorry. Did somebody say something?

Funny! I was driving. I turned off the radio and thought about it for the rest of the trip. What’s the rule? What general pattern is it an instance of? I couldn’t figure it out. I’m not the only one interested in this question. In an interview I can no longer find, Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, said he wanted to write a scientific paper about the patterns he saw in New Yorker cartoon caption contest submissions. Which reminds me: I have written about patterns in New Yorker cartoon captions and talk-show monologue jokes.

The most interesting recent posts on the Shangri-La Diet forums have been from Roger Garrett (id Fastneasy), who has come up with what seems to be an especially potent version of the diet: He has a three-hour food window every day that starts when he eats his first meal; the rest of the day, he drinks sugar water and doesn’t eat anything else. He takes weekends off.

He’s 36 years old. Starting weight: 269 pounds. After about a month, he writes, “I’ve lost 24 pounds so far. This has been incredibly easy! No hunger, no struggle, and tons of energy.” He did almost the same thing eight years ago with one difference: no sugar water.

The difference between then and now is [now] I’m shedding the fat at three times the speed and with no anguish and fatigue that’s associated with the fasting. I’m not hungry, my stomach doesn’t growl. I have tons of energy and feel great in the morning. Also the funny thing, after waking in the morning after fasting for 21 hours, I’m not starving. I remember with the fast before I would wake in the night stomach growling and ready to eat. When I would wake up, I could kill to eat.

Two days ago I was on the David Lawrence Show, which Mr. Lawrence produces in his own apartment, in Burbank. This was the second time; the first was in June. The show lasts three hours and consists of three interviews. Between my first and second appearances on his show, Mr. Lawrence stopped doing regular shows to concentrate on acting. He now does new shows now and then.

During my second appearance, he told me that radio was going downhill even faster than network television. That may be, I said, but your show had a much bigger impact on interest in my diet than almost any other interview I’d done, TV or radio — and I’d done about 50. He was surprised. Really, I said, I’ll make a graph and send you a copy. Later he asked me to compare his show to the other radio shows I’d been on — what was the percentage difference between the impact of my show and the other shows, he wondered. “2000%” I said. “20 times?” he said. Yeah, I said, maybe even 50 times. He looked surprised.

Here is the data.

This shows the maximum number of people reading the Shangri-La Diet forums at any one time for each day. (This is an easy-to-compute proxy for the number of distinct visitors.) The first media to have a big effect was a 35-minute interview on the Dennis Prager Show, which was replayed twice. The next was a Woman’s World article. The third was the first David Lawrence Show interview.

It is stunning that the David Lawrence Effect was of the same order of magnitude the effect of the Woman’s World article. Woman’s World, of course,is a huge operation, with millions of copies sold each week.

After the David Lawrence effect wore off, the function continued its steady climb at roughly the level you would extrapolate from before the DL effect started. My interpretation is this: As persuasive as that show turned out to be, and as large its audience — its effect was small compared to the total effect of word of mouth, which is what is pushing interest up.