A woman named Melissa Francis recently thanked me for helping her quit smoking. I was surprised. She said she had applied the ideas behind the Shangri-La Diet to smoking. At the center of SLD is the idea that we learn to associate the flavors (smells) of foods with the calories they contain. If you reduce your exposure to those associations, you lose weight.
Francis took this to suggest that the reason people smoke has a lot to do with the association between the flavors (smells) of smoking and nicotine. If she could reduce her exposure to those associations, it should be much easier to quit. So she did two things: 1. Smoked nicotine-free cigarettes (brand name Quest). 2. Used a nicotine patch. The second thing corresponds to ingestion of smell-free calories, such as sugar water or extra-light olive oil or any food nose-clipped (classic SLD). The first corresponds to exposing yourself to the flavors of foods without swallowing them, an experience whose effects you can read about on the SLD forums here and here. Learning researchers know that uncorrelating the CS (e.g., smell) and US (e.g., nicotine), as Francis did, is a great way to reduce the association between them.
Francis had previously tried to quit using nicotine-free cigarettes alone. She had failed. She had previously tried to quit using nicotine patches alone. She had failed. With the combination (Quest 3 and 21 mg patch), however, she was successful. “I stopped smoking the cigarettes pretty much altogether within a week or so. From that point, I just stepped down on the patch over the course of five or six weeks,” she wrote. How easy that sounds! My college advisor told me that quitting smoking was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Francis had been smoking twenty years and smoked about a pack a day. She’d quite for two years about fifteen years ago.
Francis had the idea herself and hadn’t heard of anyone else doing this. The closest precedent seems to be the work of a Duke researcher named Jed Rose, for example this study.
wouldn’t that kind of logic imply that eating calorie-free food with a lot of flavor would help you lose weight or help SLD along? i’m not saying it does or doesn’t, but i haven’t heard anyone say they had this experience.
q, no, it doesn’t imply that. The flavor-calorie associations I’m talking about are not between flavor in general and calories (e.g., “a lot of flavor” –> calories), they are between specific flavors and calories (e.g., basil –> calories). You need to eat calorie-free food with the same flavor as your calorie-containing food to weaken the flavor-calorie association that your calorie-containing food has created. When people do that, as the links I gave show, they do lose weight.
Seth, something does not seem right about that. If it were true, wouldn’t people lose weight by drinking diet soft drinks?
Tom, they might, if they drank their diet sodas at least an hour or two from having consumed any calories. I doubt most people try this, and likely often the diet soft drinks accompany a meal. Thus, the calories (from the meal) and flavor (from the soft drink) are paired, not unpaired as required by the theory and empirically validated.
i see seth’s point here. i don’t think that diet sodas taste exactly like non-diet sodas so they aren’t a good example, and anyway the aspartame in diet sodas is a drug anyway so it is going to have effects of its own.
one of the things i’m happy about with SLD is that i almost completely stopped drinking diet sodas. i didn’t set out to do it, but i stopped wanting them. i used to drink a can or two per weekday (they are free in my office) and now i open maybe two cans a month and drink half.
they are an interesting case maybe. the less you drink, the worse they taste. i can’t think of any other ‘food’ that has that property.
I think nobody ever has, or ever will lose weight because of sugar-free, but artificially sweetened, soft drinks.
For christ’s sake, how could anyone ever seriously think that artificial sweeteners, which for decades have been successfully used to _fatten_ up livestock, could make you thin, of all things?