David Mandel, CEO of Alliance United Insurance Company, asks a very reasonable question:
Despite all the success stories [on the Internet] regarding the Shangri-La Diet, and the mainstream media stories in 2006 after the book publication, the diet never picked up and seems almost unknown today.
Whether this is right or wrong depends on expectations. In December, SLD got a great push from being on the website of Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Body under the attractive title “Alternative to Dieting”. Tim’s book was published in December and registrations to the SLD forums jumped dramatically. Yet even before that, forum traffic was growing. Traffic of course grew when the SLD book came out, later shrank, and now — surprisingly — is growing again. My interpretation is that the initial growth was caused by mainstream publicity and blogs. The current growth is caused by word of mouth.
If I google “Shangri-La Diet” I get about 800,000 hits, a decent amount. “Sonoma Diet” — the book came out the same time as mine — gets 200,000 hits. “Eat Right For Your [Blood] Type” and “Eat Right 4 Your Type” get a combined 150,000 hits. That book was a huge hit when it came out in 1997. The usual pattern is Google hits go down, but SLD hits have gone up over the years.
On the other hand, given that my book contained a new theory of weight control that made about 100 times more sense than the usual ideas and led to counter-intuitive new ways to lose weight that actually worked and that obesity is often considered the world’s #1 health problem — yeah, it is “almost unknown” compared to what one might have expected.
I was wondering if you had any insight as to why it did not go viral, if nothing more from word of mouth from success stories sharing with everyone who will listen to their excitement. It seems all but impossible to me that something this simple, and universally successful which can benefit the masses has managed to not go mainstream in all these years. I am utterly baffled, and assumed there must be a big downside, but all my searching online has revealed nothing but the success stories and initial feedback, mostly from 2006 and 2007, and little since. I am just overwhelmed with curiously as to how this did not become the norm for everyone.
When my agent circulated the proposal for the book, one editor regretfully declined to bid on it because she said the book was “15 years ahead of its time.” Perhaps she was just being nice, but when people tried the diet, and it worked, they wouldn’t tell other people because the diet sounded crazy. Which means it really was far ahead of its time. Good Morning America filmed me for a short Freakonomics-related segment and they played it for laughs: crazy professor.
So that’s my explanation for why it has spread more slowly than one might have expected: fear of ridicule.
fear of ridicule from whom? the media? or people won’t try it because they are afraid someone will make fun of them for doing it?
i can think of one reason it hasn’t taken off. from anecdotal evidence (i did it, lost 25+ pounds and am no longer overweight, now sometimes on and sometimes off) a lot of people are disgusted by the idea of drinking oil. the idea of this turns off a lot of people, and still others try it and give up quickly because they don’t like the feeling. (if someone asks me i can say “well you can do this with sugar or any other food if you noseclip” – but that’s not the primary message out there.)
in fact it’s difficult to find a concise and clear description on the web of how to do shangri-la. it’s so simple, but it’s hard to find the rules anywhere.
Fear of ridicule from the person you are telling about your success (“you did what?”).
Were I to write the book again I would say you can do the diet three ways: 1. drink sugar water with no smell. 2. drink an oil, such as extra light olive oil, with no smell. 3. eat any food nose-clipped. I’ve done all three and I vastly prefer eating butter with a bit of meat nose-clipped. Butter alone is not so pleasant but butter with a bit of meat is fine.
Personally, i reckon it has more to do with the lack of support networks than the nature of the diet itself.
Take weightwatchers, for instance. They have a weel-known brand and meetings everywhere, and these meetings are probably a major factor in helping people to lose weight. Conversely, the shangri-la diet does not have this kind of group around it, so people may feel isolated on it and thus not stick to it as much (or at least not talk about it).
With wieghtwatchers, its respectable and people feel free to attribute their success to it. Just my two cents anyway.
Hm, self reflection without any self critique? I mean, really… its just not successful because its “too far ahead of its time”? Can it get more self congratulating?
I love your blog. I find much of what you write very interesting. But many other things are seriously odd – and cant be true when thinking 5 minutes about it. I can imagine it’s this dichotomy that turns people away from the good parts of your ideas.
Oh, and disgruntledphd’s point is very good.
“Can’t be true when thinking 5 minutes about it” — such as?
Hi Seth,
One thing that appeals to me about the way you made SLD public is that you didn’t try to monitize it by gimmicking it up. A less scrupulous, intellectually honest, and curious person might have tried to create a whole “lose weight now, ask me how” type pyramid scheme from it. You might have sold flavor free but calorie-laden products to sell to people with a lot of other paraphernalia and a marketing machine to push it on people. Instead you took a more open source approach. As a result, you learned a lot from the crowd.
I agree that it takes some courage to explain it to people in a peer-to-peer kind of way. When I first did it, I patiently explained it to many people and got a lot of sh*t for it. Finally I gave up. It wasn’t worth the trouble. It seemed that most people weren’t willing to try it with an open mind anyway. If I explain it to anyone now, it’s only if they seem open minded and intellectually curious enough to give it a shot.
David
I think almost any diet that challenges the “calories in, calories out” chant has a low shot at becoming a “revolution.” In mainstream world, the only thing that helps (other than simply “reducing gluttony and sloth”) is fiber, because it “fills you up.” Very few people care or “absorb” why/how certain diets work: they just want an authoritative figure to give them a list* of rules to follow. And because there are so many authoritative figures that use the above chant(s), other diets will be dismissed as quackery or unscientific [in the sense that they somehow imply defying the laws of thermodynamics].
To me, the main problem with low carb, or at least high [animal] fat, is that the marketing is geared toward eating foods that are popularly considered terrible like butter and bacon and steak. While this catches a lot of peoples’ eyes, most will still “know” it’s complete crap. I think a better angle to take is a long term traditional diet route, but, as I said above, very few will be swayed, even when confronted with good evidence. Maybe “paleo” has potential to reverse popular animal fat beliefs, as it seems to have an attractive veganism-like mystique.
*For example, directing someone to Kurt Harris’ site (as he does have a list and is a medical doctor) is the only way I’ve ever seemed to affect someone’s diet (obviously I choose Kurt because his advice is good).
Sorry, this wasn’t that specific to Shangri-La.
I believe the answer may be to team up with a capable company who can produce and market a “healthy” flavorless shake, which can be marketed as a miracle diet and possible meal (lunch or breakfast) replacement with simple instructions to “consume one per day with no other food or beverage for at least an hour before or after”, while leaving the concept as a new breakthrough, and the theory a mystery. With proper marketing, enough will try it, and then with the success, the product would go viral, reduce obesity, and make the marketing company a fortune in the process.
There’s an intelligence level, or maybe just an ability to be consistent level, required for SLD. The bar seems low, just take in unflavored calories; how hard could that be? And yet, just think about what contraception is likely doing to the human race. Those who are ‘smart’ enough to take the pill everyday pro-create less than those who aren’t, so we’ve got to hope there are enough smart people who won’t take the pill for moral reasons. Otherwise there will be a generation upon this earth incapable of managing the simple daily task of taking a freaking pill!
Anyway, the thing is, those who are smart enough to apply SLD tend to be those who’ve been indoctrinated with the mainstream message. These people are looking at me, seeing a very obvious success, and just deciding I’m crazy- or perhaps more politely, that I am too extreme (especially since I follow a low-carb paleo diet and don’t want to eat the sweets that appear at practically every social event).
One of the troubles with being smart is that you can rationalize the crap out of things, especially if you feel emotionally invested in something, and there are multi-billion dollar industries out there ‘helping’ you rationalize. Meanwhile, SLD is really something you have to try; you don’t really get the theory until you experience its effects. Naturally, those who are willing to try SLD tend to be those least invested, and subsequently not very authoritative in the modern social structure. Now, if you manage to convince someone to try it and they succeed, well, that actually makes a sort of social structure, and the idea begins to look a lot more inviting to more people because they now have an alternative (however small) to whatever social structure it is that’s feeding them the bad info. Also, for many people, this alternative social structure has to appear in their world, not just on-line.
I did the oil-drinking for a couple of weeks, and it made me feel a bit nauseous during the day, and then my liver (I think it was my liver) started to feel sore. I started munching a lot of carrots and apples and stuff, and it went away. I can’t prove the correlation, but I was playing on the safe side.
I still use the principle, though, noseclipping my protien shakes in the morning.
I think the oil drinking meets some resistance for a basic “eww” factor and the persistence of the lipid hypothesis in the public mind.
I have a few thoughts on this subject.
When I first set out to try the diet about a year-and-a-half ago, I couldn’t find any single source of information that described the diet in a concise, “user friendly” format. (Yes, I suppose I could have bought the book, but I was impatient — I didn’t want to wait for the book to arrive in the mail.) Some sites had fairly impractical variations, such as the guy who advocated getting up in the middle of the night to drink oil.
The forum is hard to find and is difficult to navigate.
Some of the featured promotional blurbs are over the top and inconsistent with my own experience (for example, someone named Kathy Sierra wrote, “Within three days I was actually forgetting to eat”).
About 20% of the reviews on Amazon.com are negative (one or two stars).
Having said that, I think Seth is onto something. Most people think I’m nuts when I describe the diet to them (despite the fact that I’ve lost approx. 28 pounds on it). One of my friends did say that he was going to try it, but that was about six months ago, and he hasn’t mentioned the subject again.
Here’s the summary of my experience with the diet:
https://www.astrocyte-design.com/shangri-la-diet/index.html
I haven’t updated the page since last July (July, 2010). I’m currently hovering around 195 pounds, though my weight oscillates by about 3 pounds, depending on how strictly I adhere to the diet.
Actually, I think Seth is right about the fear of sounding crazy. I started the diet with the oil in September. I’ve lost 52 pounds as of this past Saturday, almost all of it without even trying. (301 lbs. – 249 lbs.) I learned about the diet from reading a comment on a blog that openly wondered if Seth’s theory might be correct when the poster noticed their weight drop slightly after eating tasteless nuts for a daily snack. I tracked down the book and decided, in a very skeptical mode, to give it a shot. To say I’ve been pleased with the results would be an understatement.
Who have I mentioned it to? Surely, I should be writing a Gospel of Seth where like a lion’s voice crying out in the desert I begin with Seth buying a flavored French soda in a cafe. But I am not. Only my wife really knows and I told her because you can’t hide anything from wives, especially gulping Extra Light Olive Oil ever morning. I’ve been asked a few times what I was doing, but I just answer with watching calories (which is true) and walking more (which is also true). The only other person I told was my doctor. It went like this:
Doctor: You’re doing a hell of a job. What are you doing to lose all this weight?
Me: Well, nothing really. Just watching what I eat. Trying to avoid snacks.
Doctor: Don’t tell me that’s all you are doing. (His face grows concerned that my weight-loss might be a sign of a health problem)
Me: There is one thing I’m doing differently. I’ve added more fat to my diet.
Doctor: More fat?!
Me: Yes, I’ve been taking two tablespoons of olive oil in the morning. (Doctor looks confused.) It helps supress the appetite.
Doctor: So you’ve been eating less.
Me: And I’ve been walking.
Doctor: Ah ha!! That’s what’s been doing it. Walking is great exercise…… (digression into the best way to use walking for exercise.)
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d only walked in October and had just started up again the week of my appointment in February. So, no, the walking didn’t lead to the weight-loss, but what was I going to do, argue with him?
There is one more thing I should admit that stands in the way of my preaching the glories of Shangri-La, and that is a part of me that is worried that it will stop working. Every dieter knows about the rebound. The losing of the weight and the putting it back on. So in the back of my mind there is this thought that its going to loose its effectiveness and my current success will be temporary. I don’t want to go around telling everyone about my amazing success and how they can follow in my footsteps only to find that it turned out to be fool’s gold and I started the rush.
In addition, I think Q is also right, my wife knows about the diet, she sees the success, she needs to lose weight – she can’t bring herself to start drinking the oil with me. She is more open to it right now than she was, but she isn’t read to start yet. But I suspect she’ll eventually jump on the wagon as well.
The obvious conclusion is that the diet isn’t, as claimed, “universally successful”. The success stories in your forum are a self-selected sample – the people for whom it seems to work stick around and post to the forums, the people for whom it doesn’t might post to one of your many “it’s not working” threads but then eventually fade away. Some discuss it elsewhere. For instance:
https://lesswrong.com/lw/a6/the_unfinished_mystery_of_the_shangrila_diet/
https://ask.metafilter.com/90366/Shangrila-diet-have-you-tried-it
There are oodles of celebrities/actors/bodybuilders who are *hugely motivated* to try anything that might help, no matter how goofy the idea. If SLD were the panacea portrayed, it would have caught on with these people and we’d be hearing about it via Enquirer headlines. So maybe the problem is one of these:
(1) it doesn’t work for everybody,
(2) it works for a while, then people hit a plateau short of their goals, so although it works it only solves *some* of their problem
(3) it works for a while, but usually the effect wears off
(4) it works for most people *if* they keep at it, but many/most people find it too difficult to keep doing for the rest of their lives.
In short, it could ultimately be a fad diet.
FWIW, I tried SLD a few times, told lots of people about it, blogged about it, tried to fix the parts that weren’t working for me, but ultimately gave up and stopped using it. I never lost more than about 10 lbs while on SLD. To make it a true panacea worthy of the name, you’d need to do a real scientific study, *verify* your hypotheses about how it works, and figure out what factors there are in common among the people for whom it works/doesn’t work so those can be addressed.
I concealed the fact that I was doing the SLD diet from everyone. It is heresy, and a somewhat sinful heresy.
The chart Alex Chernavsky linked above brings up an excellent point. Here’s somebody who lost ~25 pounds on SLD…but whose goal was to lose 45. This person has been taking oil instead of lunch for a year and a half, making no *new* progress after the first 6 months. So did SLD “work” in this case?
So maybe that’s the question to ask people in the forums: “have you achieved your goal weight?” Not “have you lost weight” but “have you been able to lose *all* the weight you wanted to?” If the answer to that question were yes, they would be telling the world about it. But if the answer is no then people who are on SLD are merely *less* overweight than they might be without it. But they’re still overweight, still in search of a more complete solution, still inclined to drop SLD if something better-sounding comes along.
Glen, I don’t think a comparison with perfection is going to tell you much. It is obvious from the incidence of obesity that no diet is anywhere close to perfect. A more helpful comparison is with what already exists, with other diets.
I never thought that SLD was perfect, I wrote the book because I thought it was better than what already existed, at least in its conceptual basis. I believed that writing a book about something imperfect would help everyone find better ways of losing weight. That’s what happened: because of the book, the noseclipping idea came along, which is a big improvement. You can eat an unlimited number of calories noseclipped and they can be as healthy as you want them to be. For example, I eat a lot of butter noseclipped. I suspect Alex could lose more weight if he started noseclipping.
My two cents: I’ve never tried the diet, because the idea of eating/drinking something tasteless turns me off. It makes the whole diet sound bland and unappetizing. Also, I think someone else had said somewhere that it took some effort to change up his diet frequently enough to keep the food “unfamiliar”.
I eat a fairly high-carbohydrate diet (bread, pasta, potatoes, and particularly chocolate & other sweets) — so I think I’d probably lose more weight if I ate a higher proportion of protein and fat. I may start to add macadamia nuts and coconut oil to my diet.
i can pose another answer based on anecdote.
people i know who have tried fad diets or atkins are usually obnoxiously vocal about it. not just that, it’s part of their personality to be annoyingly vocal about personal matters.
people i know who have tried SLD are generally loners and introverts.
i have no idea why this is, or if it is something general or just confined to my circle.
Jill, I once wondered if white fish cooked plain would cause weight loss. I couldn’t eat it for more than a day or two so I share your view that bland food is unappealing. However, I have no trouble at all eating butter & meat noseclipped. Because of the nose-clipping, it has no flavor; but I enjoy eating it because of the protein and fat. We have protein and fat receptors in our mouths. Food without smell can also be pleasant to eat due to crunchiness.
I was planning to tell lots of people about this diet when it worked, but it isn’t. I bought the book at the beginning of March, got really excited and started doing about 3 tbs of canola a day. I’ve fiddled with the amounts (2 or 3 1/2 tbs) and the times I’m taking it. I am a bit less hungry, I guess, but my weight has been mostly stuck in one spot all month and today am up a pound and a half. I suppose I’ll try it for another week or so… Any tips? I am finding it impossible to look up specific advice on the forums. I need to lose about 40 pounds, but at this point I think I’d be thrilled with five.
I wonder if part of the problem is that the usual ideas about weight loss involve the drama of resisting temptation. While it isn’t easy for a lot of people to get around to nose-clipping and consuming tasteless calories, those don’t seem to have the visceral intensity of not eating food that one really wants and/or is generally considered very tempting, or of exercising when not exercising would be much more comfortable.
Admittedly, this is an ad hoc theory– Atkins has the alternate drama of eating food one isn’t supposed to, and getting at least some of the rewards which are supposed to go to low fat/deliberate calorie restriction.
At the same time, SLD is more work than the dream of effortless weight loss.
I am a regular reader of the blog. Months ago, I tried holding my nose for a few days, but I didn’t like not being able to breathe through my nose and my nose clips were slightly painful. Today I tried a way of eating which minimizes the sensation of taste by consciously closing off the connection between mouth and nose. As Seth mentioned above, food can be pleasant even without the full use of the nose.
Anna, canola oil often doesn’t work well, for unknown reasons. I suggest you replace it with butter eaten noseclipped. I do 1/2 stick of butter per day (1/4 stick twice per day). I cut the 1/4 stick into 6 pieces and eat each piece of butter with a small piece of meat.
Mark L, some of the noseclips I’ve seen allow you to adjust them so that they are comfortable. You just bend the metal.
Thanks Seth. That’s kind of awesome – hopefully one day I’ll be able to respond to questions of, “How have you lost so much weight?” with, “Oh, I eat a half a stick of butter a day. With a fork.”
I have noticed my balance is better, by the way. I don’t have a scale – I weigh myself on the wii fit. I used to have to concentrate to stay balanced during the balance test or I would lean to the right. Lately, I’m always almost dead center. I also want less coffee and diet coke.
Also a lot of people don’t get the concept even after you’ve explained it to them. To me it made intuitive sense. Your body learns what has calories and when that food is around. Some people just don’t get it and if they don’t get it then it really seems weird and like a gimmick.
Anna, I too noticed my balance was better when I tried using flaxseed oil (high in omega-3). Then I did a heap of experiments confirming the balance effect and showing there were other mental benefits, no doubt due to the omega-3. Canola oil, for all its problems, is high in omega-3. Butter is not. To continue the omega-3 benefits and get even more SLD calories, you might want to take 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil, nose-clipped. Your gums should greatly improve as a result. I have posted about the visible benefits of omega-3 many times.
I’ve always been thin and my weight varies very little. I also have a fairly poor sense of smell. I can smell things — but it seems to me not as keenly as other people.
I wonder if these things are related. Perhaps there is some test of sense of smell out there that could be correlated with body weight?
If I may say so, your book often seemed condescending and angry. Those are not traits that make people want to take your advice.
I also felt that the mechanism (flavor-calorie learning) you described in your book seems incomplete. It is at best one of many forces making SLD work. For example, we know that eating carbohydrate without protein triggers the selective uptake of tryptophan into the brain, leading to an increased production of serotonin (see “The Serotonin Power Diet has an easy-to-follow explanation of this, plus experimental verification). Increased serotonin lowers appetite. We also know that fats trigger a hormone response that suppresses appetite and causes the sphincter at the end of the stomach to close (YOU On a Diet has a tedious lay explanation, plus cartoons and lame jokes), causing you to feel full faster. It seems more likely to me that this is how appetite suppression occurs on SLD.
Sadie, I found that 300 calories/day of sugar water produced roughly the same effect as 300 calories/day of extra-light olive oil. This equivalence is hard to explain if the sugar water and olive oil suppressed appetite in two different ways. Nor would your two different mechanisms explain why a third way of applying the theory behind SLD — namely, noseclipping — also appears to work.
I bought the book on my Kindle and got up at 5 AM to finish reading it because I just know it will work. My husband who is naturally thin has always had a sugared drink between meals and he only eats two meals a day because of it. I who struggle have always avoided sugar and I am hungry all day long.
Today I had one tablespoon sugar in hot water like it was tea. Wonderful. I have no urge to snack. I also take flax oil seed capsules as well. I am calm and free of my usual nagging hunger. Let’s see what happens. I would be happy to lose ten pounds. Could it be this easy?
I think whenever something seems too easy or too good to be true, it turns off many people from taking a diet (for one example) seriously or even giving it a try. I’ve always tried to have an open mind when it comes to matters of health and wellness in particular. So many so called “fads” ended up being the answer over the years. It wasn’t so long ago that anyone who thought that diet had anything to do with cancer was considered uninformed or worse. I always thought it was the other way around, how could anyone NOT think that diet and cancer were linked?
As far as your diet is concerned, it works no matter what anyone thinks. The thousands of people who have been successful with your plan are proof of that. The lucky ones with open minds, willing to give yet another diet plan another try. This one’s different though, because it’s not really a diet and it does really work.
What I have found personally is that I am able to control how much I eat without using the sugar water or oil every day. The carry over is significant. And although the weight loss is slow, it’s been significant about 25 lbs and I wasn’t really overweight to begin with.
Thanks again Seth!
Geraldine, BC Canada
There is a psychological problem with tricks.
The idea of conditioning etc. Is not directly about nutrition (eat less eat differently) but a way around. And it does not register very well.
This is clearly a cognitive distortion. As tricks can be as useful or more than “straight” corrections.
I think that the very question in the headline assumes rationality and following logic. Ts is nit how human mind and public psyche works.
The question builds in logic. Here is problem. Here is highly doable solution. Do it. But the sequence does not work in most humans.
Just started the SLD a week back, I am using sugar water …..so far the results are not showing but yes my appetite has become less…..I am having aruound 4 tbs of sugar in half ltr water…..hope I am going in right direction in terms of following the diet….
I think there is a lot to the “loners and introverts” comment. Yeah, those who have less invested in the standard belief system (e.g., “calories in calories out”) have less to lose by challenging it — by trying something that violates that system. But because they are outsiders, they are less influential than people firmly in the mainstream. So they don’t make good evangelists. This is related to another claim in this line of comments — that I say things here that “5 minutes thought” would show to be untrue. This means I too am not a good evangelist.
Can you replace the olive oil with coconut oil?
You can replace olive oil with coconut oil if you hold your nose shut when you drink it.