After three days of the Shangri-La Diet, kitty-cat did a little experiment:
I tried something last nightÂ
I really tried to eat much of sweets and chips and stuff like this … I couldn’t!!! I had a little bit and then quit because I felt … I don’t know … full – more than
As far as I know, the Shangri-La Diet is the first weight-loss method to produce this effect quickly. Most diets, such as the Atkins Diet, ban “sweets and chips and stuff like this”; early in the diet you would have no trouble eating them. After a long time on the diet you won’t want to eat them but only because they’re no longer familiar.
Long before SLD, Michel Cabanac did experiments about a related laboratory phenomenon. As you eat, Cabanac found, food becomes less and less pleasant. That’s why you stop eating. You say “I feel full” to explain why you stop eating but your stomach isn’t actually full. Cabanac also found that this effect depended on your set point. If your set point was high, the decrease in pleasure slowed down. It took longer to reach zero (= no pleasure) so it took longer to stop eating.
It follows from Cabanac’s work that if your set point is unusually low — lowered by SLD, for example — then you will stop eating unusually soon, as happened here. The paradox is that you can feel “more than full” from a tiny amount of attractive food.
As long as we’re noting anecdote: a man who has never worried about his weight (runs in the family: I have 5-10 years left, then I get a paunch), I can eat 2 or 3 dinners if I want (and often have two, only rarely three). All three if I have that many are tasty, but at a certain point in each, even the first, I have had enough of what I am eating, period. The second or third had to be different.
Seth,
Here is another side effect which you may have noticed:
https://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/2009/08/scent-of-glass-of-wine.html
Cheers,
Igor.