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.

If you read Japanese you can read about the Shangri-La Diet here:

https://www.suda.tv/archives/2007/03/post_580.php
https://ameblo.jp/pb-038434/entry-10044923240.html
https://groundhogday.seesaa.net/article/7497773.html

And even if you don’t read Japanese you can appreciate the excellent illustration here:

https://dietxdiet.ojaru.jp/Shangri-la/

and the great blog name (my nonsequitur) and banner here:

https://www.owl-tottori.jp/diet/jijou-bn/shangriradiet.html

Thanks to Pearl Alexander.

John Tukey once said that a good way to have new ideas is to tell others the ones you have already. This was part of why I wrote The Shangri-La Diet: It would be much easier to get better ideas about weight loss if I told people the ones I already had. Call it open source weight control.

I think it’s working. In the SLD forums, Sean Curley, who tried SLD before the book (thanks, Levitt & Dubner!), made this brilliant post:

Two years ago (before the book came out), I lost about 27 lbs on SLD, using fructose water. In hindsight, I probably lost too much weight going from 183 lbs to 155 lbs (I’m male, 6′ 1″). I stopped doing what had worked, and got sloppy about SLD in general, and put most — but not all — of it back on over the course of a year or so. So, now I’m doing it again, but having read about how hepatoxic and lipogenic fructose is, started doing oil instead — ELOO, Walnut Oil and Canola, usually mixed in equal parts, and usually not breathing through my nose when I drink it to avoid any flavor at all.

My MO, historically, and what worked well for me, was doing — don’t gasp — 750 calories/day of SW (previously) and then oil (more recently). Both worked well, although truth be told, I think SW worked even better. Because of my concerns about fructose, and sugar in general, that’s not really an option for me anymore. My one concern about SLD has always been, am I replacing too many regular, “nutritious” calories with calories that aren’t? (Although I am aware of the healthy benefits of the oils.) I have tried various protein powders — whey, rice, and some soy — with noseclips followed by a mouth rinse, but haven’t had good AS with that (maybe negative AS, actually). Not sure if it’s too much residual flavor, too “simple” in its form, but for whatever reason, they just didn’t work well for me. Also tried Tim Beneke’s flavorless mush balls, but too much of a hassle, and just a little awkward for me.

I’ve always wondered if “real” protein in some flavorless, non-processed form wouldn’t be even more effective, but for some reason, I never got around to trying it until three weeks ago. I thought that eating full-fatted cottage cheese, which is very high in protein, and pretty bland, with noseclips on, might be worth a try. And, wow, did it work! My approach to SLD has always been to have the first 750 cals of my day as flavorless, going to dinner time on nothing but flavorless calories — as needed, in 50 calorie “doses” (oil or SW), and then allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted after that. But, it usually took 750 calories to get me there, sometimes a little less, but not usually. So, 750 flavorless calories was my “benchmark.”

The first day I tried the nose-clipped cottage cheese, It took only 420 calories to get to dinner time, with a MUCH greater feeling of fullness and AS than I had ever experienced on SLD. That effect has held consistent for the last two or three weeks, sometimes needing as few as 360 cals to dinner, but never more the 560, although usually 425 is the number. That’s a substantial reduction (43%) in the number of flavorless calories required to get the same (probably better, actually) AS effect. Then, two days ago, I thought: I wonder how bland, plain chicken breast meet would work? (again with noseclips). The answer, after two days, appears to be even more effective –more on the order of 360 calories required to get the same effect.

In both cases, I use nose clips, and typically eat about 60 cals at a time, as needed for hunger, AND I rinse my mouth out two or three times before I take the noseclips off to wash out any residual flavor.

For me the effect of going from oil to flavorless “real” protein has been as remarkable as the effect I got from going from pre-SLD to SLD originally.

As I posted there, the theory behind SLD is all about regulation of energy storage. You want to store neither too little nor too much — and you want to store more when food is cheap. But food is more than energy. It is also building blocks. Which means protein, mostly. So it is quite plausible that there is a whole regulatory system designed to get the right amount of protein. Sean’s observations suggest exactly that.

Besides the conceptual plausibility the details of the new method are excellent:

1. The raw materials (cottage cheese and chicken meat) are readily available and easy to eat.

2. The notion of eating the first calories of the day flavorless and then anything for dinner matches what’s clear about self-control: We have a lot more earlier in the day. This method uses self-control when it is plentiful and not when it is scarce.

I’m not going to stop drinking flaxseed oil (nose-clipped). But I am going to try adding chicken meat (nose-clipped).

Gary Taubes responds to Gina Kolata’s review of Good Calories, Bad Calories. The scientific article by Leibel et al. that Taubes and Kolata refer to.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

The number of visitors to the Shangri-La Diet forums has been growing. This graph shows, for each day, the maximum number of people accessing the forums at one time. (When you load a page, I guess you are considered “at” the forums for some length of time.)

“Most online” has steadily increased since January. These values are closely correlated with the number of visitors in a day, for which I have less data.

Here is another way to look at the most-online data. Each most-online value is divided by the value from one week earlier.

Perhaps the rate of increase is increasing but it isn’t clear.

Will it live?

Michael Blowhard has an especially vivid description of Life With SLD:

It took about a week for the appetite-suppression part of the Shangri-La experience to kick in. . . . It was a funny and bewildering moment when it did. I reached out for the usual additional forkful — and my hand stopped in midair. Nope, didn’t feel like it — and back my fork came, empty. My brain was thinking “What the hell?” but my body was saying “Had enough.” My instincts were speaking — only they were saying something different (”Enough”) than they usually do (”More! More!”).

I drink 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day. But perhaps I could go higher:

Anjum always cooks with safflower oil (similar to sunflower oil), but admits that “butter goes really well with lentils” and even, unfashionably, puts in a good word for ghee (clarified butter). “I think modern science has it wrong and soon they’re going to say ghee is healthy.” At an Ayurvedic spa in Malta last summer she was put on a ghee detox. “I was like: Are you crazy? I wanted to lose the baby weight.” Given increasing doses for breakfast, by the last day she could happily swallow nine tablespoons of pure fat. “I looked, like, six years younger.”

From here.

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

It’s been almost two weeks since I started The Shangri-La Diet. I am down about ten pounds total. . . I’m all of a sudden some sort of health guru to the ladies at my office. As of this morning, there are six co-workers that are participating in the SLD in one way or another.

All they heard me say was, “I lost weight by drinking oil” and they all ran out and bought a bottle of oil to start losing weight.

I should’ve told them that I was drinking my own urine.

From Tayster’s World. After one week.