Category: self-experimentation

New Way to Lose Weight?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At the Shangri-La Diet forums, several people are trying a new way to lose weight: Drinking a flavored calorie-free drink between and with meals. The first few weeks of experience suggest it works at least short-term. Here’s what Jenn does:

I am drinking about 1 1/2 to 2 litres of splenda sweetened kool-aid or iced tea/juice mix in water. You know those little packets that you add to a 2 cup water bottle. I have them with meals and then sip on them all day in-between. Sometimes I actually drink the whole bottle in a 1/2 hour (cause it tastes so good). I also add some olives and an occasional pickle to some of my meals and then if I want a little snack, I have a few of them between meals. This seems to really work too. . . . I never had that kind of AS [appetite suppression] or success with oils or SW.

Jenn has lost 6 pounds in a few weeks.

Why might this work (assuming my theory of weight control is true)? Flavor signals must linger in the brain because it takes several minutes (15 or more?) to get a some idea of how many calories a food contains. To forget the flavor in a few seconds wouldn’t work. If you eat a piece of ham and follow it with a sip of raspberry lemonade, the lemonade may reduce (erase) the memory of the ham flavor. This should have two effects: (a) reduce how much the ham flavor raises your set point and (b) reduce how much the ham flavor is associated with calories. You can think of the lemonade soaking up the associative energy that the ham calories produce. If the lemonade is also drunk (a lot) between meals, any lemonade-calorie association will disappear.

The interesting prediction: To get the effect, you must drink the calorie-free flavored drink with meals and between meals.

Neat Freak

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In today’s Freakonomics column, Dubner and Levitt write:

we can’t think of a single person who, since the invention of the washing machine, practices “laundry for fun.”

Look no further: I do. And not just laundry: For my tenth high school reunion I listed my hobbies as “doing the dishes.” Yes, I enjoy doing the dishes. Long ago I hired someone to clean my apartment (including laundry) not because it was dirty but because I was spending too much time cleaning it. More recently, because of the growing success of The Shangri-La Diet (which Dubner and Levitt have everything to do with), I decided I could go back to cleaning a bit more so I hired someone to clean my apartment but not do my laundry.

Before watching faces in the morning I suppose I was as messy as a typical guy. The mood elevation produced by faces suddenly changed me: I discovered I enjoyed cleaning, and I started to spend lots of time (about an hour/day) doing it. It would be harsh to say that messiness is a sign of depression but I think that a very messy room or office — not to be confused with extreme hoarding — is a indication of the sort of problem that when it becomes extreme we call depression.

Life-Size Faces

Seth Roberts25 Comments

My long self-experimentation paper (Example 2) describes how I discovered that seeing faces in the morning improves my mood the next day. At the time I used TV faces. I tried different-sized TVs and found that the TV that produced the most life-size faces also produced the biggest effect. I also found that distance mattered: A conversational distance produced better results than a larger distance. The faces need to be looking at the camera. Clearly the TV faces were replacements for what our Stone-Age ancestors saw when they chatted with their neighbors soon after getting up. The faces/mood effect, I believe, is produced by a mechanism whose function was to synchronize the sleep and mood of people living together. It is hard to work with someone who is (a) asleep or (b) in a bad mood.

I needed 30-60 minutes of faces to get a big easy-to-notice effect. At first I used a variety of talk shows, then concentrated on two C-SPAN shows, Booknotes and Washington Journal. However, Booknotes is only once/week and Washington Journal is pretty boring. Soon after I wrote to C-SPAN suggesting they re-air old Booknotes, they started doing just that. Encore Booknotes was a regular feature of Book TV. But I still had to watch a lot of Washington Journal and I wasn’t as interested in politics as Brian Lamb.

Then I realized I could look at my own face in a mirror. This had the advantage that the face was exactly life-size. I listened to books or interviews or other stuff at the same time. Lately I have been listening to Authors@Google talks.

Today I realized I could also use the vlogs on YouTube, the ones where people speak right at the camera. I’ve known about them — who doesn’t, I suppose — for a long time but there have always been two problem: 1. Boring. 2. Too small. Today I came across a long series done by LucyinLA (a struggling actress named Laura Segura) and discovered that some of them were not boring, such as this one. There was still the problem that her face is a little too small. Then I realized I can increase the size of anything on my screen by increasing the display resolution (go to the Display icon on Control Panel).

Here’s an example of the right stimuli:

I still need to find enough non-boring vlogs but that shouldn’t be too hard. Whether I will switch to YouTube faces I don’t know but you, Dear Reader, can now see for yourself without any special equipment. You should look at the faces soon after you wake up in the morning.

Addendum: Nansen’s comment about using a cheap mirror shows that I think of a $5 mirror as “special equipment” and an internet-connected computer as not special. It’s true, I do. As for the best time to see faces, all I know is it’s quite early. I figured it out for myself by trial and error.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (more memory results)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Several weeks ago I compared flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) and olive oil (low in omega-3). I’ve posted results from a balance task and a memory-scanning task. I also measured what is called digit span — the number of digits you can remember perfectly after one presentation. It is a widely-used measure of short-term memory. In my test, the digits were shown one by one for 1 second each on my computer screen. A few seconds after the last one, I had to write them down in order. If I was 100% correct the next trial had one more digit than the last. If any of my answers were wrong, the next trial had one fewer digits than the last. The test continued until there had been six “reversals” — right answers after one or more wrong answers, or wrong answers after one or more right answers. The measure of performance is the mean of the six reversal points. It estimates the list length at which I have a 50% chance of being correct.

Here are the results:

flaxseed oil vs. olive oil

Performance was better with flaxseed than olive oil (t = 2.5, one-tailed p = 0.01). The difference — the omega-3 effect, you might say — was quite a bit weaker than what I saw with balance and memory scanning. My guess is that the relative insensitivity of this task comes from two features: 1. Binary measures. Each trial is measured right or wrong; whereas with the memory-scanning and balance task, each trial yielded a duration (many-valued). 2. Slow. Each trial takes about 30 seconds; it takes about 10 minutes to get six reversals.

Guide to my omega-3 posts.

Guest-Blogger Timothy Beneke on Self-Control (part 2 of 2)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I continue to struggle — not terribly — but still struggle with compulsive eating. The forces in me that caused me to gain 100 pounds between 1982 and 1996 still exist in my personality. When I am stressed, I want to eat. I probably have gone about 35% tasteless in the last 2 years. I would like to get skinnier, to push my blood pressure down as much as within reason, and get rid of the fat on my belly; my waist is around 39 inches — I am 6 feet and of moderately large athletic build. I have the tendency, when I want to go mostly tasteless for a day to impulsively give in and overeat. I was misconceiving this as an issue of will.

What I’ve discovered lately is that I was confusing “willpower” with technique. Low blood sugar can manifest as depressed mood, lightheadedness, vague disquiet, and more obviously food fantasies. It can be subtle. If I attend carefully to my mood when I am trying to go tasteless, attend to my hunger levels and always have the mush and water available, I can manage my blood sugar levels and not have sudden attacks and fantasies of food. If I anticipate times when I may be experience such attacks I can preempt them. The conjunction of being around available food and having blood sugar drops leads me to eat compulsively. So now, I keep the mush next to my computer when I work, have it with me wherever I go and if I notice a sudden sign of blood sugar drop that may lead to compulsive eating, I consume a small bit of mush.

I would like to take this experiment as far as it will go but have not yet had the motivation to do the requisite work. I would like to see how thin I can become — within reason — using the method. It’s a matter of going predominantly tasteless for 3 months as I did in the summer of 2005, when I went from 210 to 177. I’m at 188 now. Time will tell whether I can pull it off…

Part 1.

Where Do Useful Discoveries Come From?

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From Andrew Gelman’s blog:

On page xxi [of Nassim Taleb’s new book The Black Swan], Taleb says how almost no great discovery came from design and planning.

I said something similar to a graduate student last week: Really useful discoveries are almost never the result of trying to do something useful; they are almost always due to accidents. Penicillin, for example. If you notice something by accident, it must be a big effect otherwise you wouldn’t have noticed it. That’s a great place to start: A big effect you didn’t know about.

I’ll have to see what else The Black Swan says about this. It makes self-experimentation look really good: (a) It’s much easier to to do a self-experiment than to do a conventional experiment so there is more chance of accidents; and (b) because we pay close attention to ourselves, it’s much easier to notice the unexpected with self-experimentation than with conventional research. Every useful finding in my long self-experimentation paper — breakfast, morning faces, standing, morning light, sugar water — came from an accidental discovery. In four of the five cases, the accident happened during a self-experiment; I varied something to see if X would change and noticed that Y changed. The exception was sugar water, whose appetite-suppressing effects I noticed while traveling. Hmm. Maybe travel is a type of self-experimentation. Or self-experimentation a type of travel. Certainly they are closely related.

Guest-Blogger Timothy Beneke on Self-Experimentation (part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

[Timothy Beneke, an Oakland, California writer, was one of the first to try Shangri-La Diet. — Seth]
First, let me say that just as Seth can list a remarkable number of positive effects — related to sleep, mood, weight, balance, and even gum health — from surprising methods of self experimentation, I can do something similar. Here are the two biggest examples:

  • Following Seth’s advice, by getting sunlight in the morning and going to bed earlier — around midnight instead of 3:30 a.m. — my mood has gotten better; I’d estimate a 2 point improvement on a 10 point scale — which is a lot. It led to an awakened passion for music and dancing, better functioning, and to put it mildly, a lot more joy in my life. That baseline improvement has formed the basis for other improvements of mood as well.
  • Using Seth’s weight loss theory, I’ve lost about a third of my body weight — from 280 to 190. I’ve kept 30 pounds for 6 and a half years; 70 for 3 years, and 90 for approaching 2. I went from 280 to 250 eating weaker tasting low glycemic index foods; from 250 to 210 consuming about 350 calories of extra light tasting olive oil a day, and trying to avoid strong tasting high GI foods. Then, applying Seth’s theory, I invented a way to get as many calories as I wanted taste free. I liquified lots of fruits and vegetables in a blender, added rice, bean, nut, soy, non-fat milk, flax, oat, and at times other powders to the liquified fruits and vegies, added water, cooked it in a microwave until it’s moderately hard — not crusty, but not liquidy either. And then take spoonful of the mush, put it in my mouth, and gulp down water and float it down my throat.

    Using this method, I went from 210 to 177 going about 70-80% tasteless for 4 months; in the last 20 months, my weight has oscillated between 177-190, perhaps a little higher — I don’t weigh myself often for strategic reasons.

    • Science in Action: Omega-3 (flaxseed oil vs. olive oil, continued)

    Seth Roberts3 Comments

    I posted a few days ago about the different effects of flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) and olive oil (low in omega-3) on my balance. There was a big difference. If omega-3 affects one measure of brain function (balance), it should affect many other measures of brain function. The whole brain is made of the same stuff (neurons, etc.).

    Which brain measures are most sensitive to omega-3? The more processing/time the better, I assumed; so I looked for tasks that, like balance, involve continuous processing for most of the test period. This led me to try a paper-and-pencil version of Saul Sternberg’s memory-scanning task. (Sternberg’s use of this procedure is described here.) On each trial I memorized a list of three digits (e.g., 2, 3, 7); then as fast as possible marked each of 100 digits (20 digits/row in 5 rows) according to whether they were in the list or not. I made a line under the digit if it was in the list, through the digit if it was not. I did five trials per day.

    Here is an example of the test materials and my marks:

    example of memory-scan test

    The other side of the page had two more sets of digits.

    Here are the results from the same flaxseed/olive oil experiment I discussed a few days ago:

    flaxseed oil vs. olive oil

    There was a huge difference between the flaxseed oil and olive oil condition: t > 7.

    Curiously the time course is different from the balance results. In the case of balance, when I switched from flaxseed to olive oil my balance slowly got worse. Nothing like that is apparent here. This might reflect a different mechanism or it might be due to the vast difference in how much practice I had had with each task. When this experiment began, I had had far more practice with the balance task than with the memory-scanning task.

    Science in Action: Omega-3 (flaxseed oil vs. olive oil)

    Seth Roberts17 Comments

    As I’ve described in previous posts, flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) seems to improve my balance. As I increased the daily dose, I found that 4 tablespoons (T)/day had almost the same effect as 3 T/day. To measure the effects of omega-3, I plan to use 3 or 4 T/day flaxseed oil — which presumably produces near-optimal omega-3 levels — as a baseline for measuring the effect of other things.

    For my first comparison I chose olive oil: widely believed healthy, but low in omega-3. (And recommended by me in The Shangri-La Diet.) I used an ABA design: several days flaxseed oil, several days olive oil, several days flaxseed oil. In all conditions, I took 2 tablespoons of the oil at about 10 am and 2 tablespoons at about 10 pm each day. I measured my balance at about 8 am the next day. Each daily test consisted of 30 trials. Each trial consisted of balancing on one foot on a board atop a metal cylinder (pictures). The score was how long before I lost my balance and put the other foot down.

    Here are the results.

    flaxseed oil vs. olive oil

    While drinking the olive oil, my balance slowly got worse. When I returned to flaxseed oil, my balance quickly returned to its previous level. Very clear difference between the oils, F (2,40) = 18, which corresponds to a tiny p value and t about 5.

    A possible explanation is that when the concentration of omega-3 in the blood is low, the omega-3 in cell membranes slowly “evaporates” into the blood. When a cell’s membranes lose omega-3, it doesn’t work as well.

    Omega-3 and Arithmetic (several analyses)

    Seth Roberts4 Comments

    In a recent post I described Tim Lundeen’s arithmetic data. He found that increasing his daily dose of DHA seemed to increase the speed at which he did simple arithmetic. Here is the graph:

    Tim Lundeen's arithmetic data

    I didn’t bother to do any statistical tests because I thought the DHA effect was obvious. However, someone in the comments said it wasn’t obvious to them. Fair enough.

    If DHA has no effect, then the scores with more DHA should be the same as the just-preceding scores with less DHA. There are practice effects, of course, so I analyzed the data after practice stopped having an effect: After about Day 40. (And I left out days preceded by a gap in testing — e.g., a day preceded by a week off.) Thousands of learning experiments have found that practice makes a difference at first and then the effect goes away — additional practice doesn’t change behavior.

    If I do a t-test comparing low-DHA days (after Day 40) with high-DHA days, I get a huge t value — about 9. If you’re familiar with real-life t values, I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a staggeringly high value for a non-trivial effect. The model corresponding to this test is indicated by the lines in this figure:

    Tim Lundeen's data

    The red (”more DHA”) points don’t fit the line very well, which suggests doing an analysis where the slopes can vary:

    Tim Lundeen's arithmetic data

    There is still a huge effect of DHA, now split between two terms in the model — a difference-in-level term (t = 4) and a difference-in-slope term (t = 3).

    But this analysis can be improved because based on thousands of experiments I don’t believe that the less-DHA line could have a positive slope, as it does in the model. Or at least I believe that is very unlikely. So I will constrain the less-DHA line to have a slope of zero:

    Tim Lundeen's arithmetic data

    Now I get t = 8 for the difference in slopes and t = 4 for the difference in level. This is interesting because it implies that more DHA not only caused immediate improvement but also opened the door to more gradual improvement (indicated by the slope difference). DHA changed something that allowed practice to have more effect.

    That’s a new way of thinking about the effects of omega-3 — actually, I have never seen any data with the feature that a treatment caused a practice effect to resume — so I have to thank the person who claimed the difference wasn’t obvious.