From the SLD forums:

I hoped it [the Shangri-La Diet] will work but still surprised it really does! . . . I had a piece of chocolate in the afternoon but not as much as normal.

Nicely put. I feel the same way — hopeful but still a little surprised. Hope and surprise go together. If you were sure something was going to happen, you wouldn’t hope for it, you’d expect it.

Curiously, hoping for something is more pleasant than expecting it. Compare “I hope to get a sweater for my birthday” and “I expect to get a sweater for my birthday.”

A man named Mullaney, living in Scottsdale, Arizona, made a charming video about SLD as part of a vlog.

He has lost seven pounds since mid-July. He is a semi-serious poker player who recently moved to Arizona from New York City, apparently to take care of his father. I deduce that he learned about SLD from Freakonomics.

In a generous act of reciprocity (to me) his face fills the screen in his vlog introduction.

Addendum: My deduction that he learned about SLD from Freakonomics was correct.

Well, I hope not. This webpage (about a psychotherapy that on its face consists of talking with the dead) gave me pause. Easy to ridicule, right? But what if it works? Like SLD.

Actually, the Shangri-La Diet is engineering, not science. The theory behind it is the science.

A fascinating thread in the SLD forums about unexpected reactions to your weight loss:

As I’ve lost a significant amount of weight and really started looking different, I’ve started noticing more . . . unsupportive behavior. One of them has started offering little biting comments about my size. . . . The other has started getting very upset with me as I approach her weight. . . . When one of their husbands commented on how nice I looked I thought I might be murdered in my sleep.

I had a friend once tell me I was a “traitor” when I lost a lot of weight.

The dragon used to have an issue with my weight, now I’ve lost a lot, she still has an issue.

Addendum. The discussion wandered slightly:

I used to have hair down almost to my bottom & was used to getting lots & lots of attention…..i just thought men liked me…then I cut my hair quite short…whallah….where did all the men go? Very interesting & sobering experience.

From the SLD forums:

I stumbled on SLD when I, after a sinus-infection, lost my ability to smell and therefor also taste the flavor of the food I was eating. I could only tell if the food was sweet, sour or salty. I was devastated especially after reading that it could very well be permanent. During those days I noticed how much the flavor of the food means to me but also how my appetite was affected. I just didn´t want to eat. After 3-4 days my ability to smell started to return slowly and to my great joy so did my appetite.

Of course, you can simulate loss of smell by closing your nose with swimmer’s nose clips ($4) when eating. By what factor is that easier, cheaper, faster, and safer than bariatric surgery? One million?

I have done 40-odd radio interviews about The Shangri-La Diet. A few of them noticeably increased the number of visitors to the SLD forums. The forums software measures number of visitors with a statistic called most online: the maximum number of simultaneous visitors to the forums, computing the maximum over one day. Until recently, the interview with the most impact was with Dennis Prager (May 2006). For the five days before the interview, most online = 54 40 43 53 48. On the day of the interview, most online = 231. For the five following days, most online = 72 82 44 52 74. This was the general pattern: An increase caused by an interview lasted one day or a little more.

On June 28, I was a guest on The David Lawrence Show. This one was different. For the 10 days before the show, most online =

52 38 35 44 47 44 48 40 42 44

On the day of the show (live), most online = 148. On the following days,

137 119 164 281 88 95 207 89 130 128 164 96

A much longer increase than usual. And the maximum value so far (281) happened days after the show. To make it clear how unusual this is, here is a graph of most online for the whole history of the forums.

Why was the David Lawrence interview so different? I can think of four possibilities: 1. The SLD forums have become more persuasive. Because they are more persuasive, new visitors come more than once. 2. David Lawrence listeners were more likely to be persuaded by the forums. 3. The David Lawrence Show gets lots of listeners via the website, where the interview can be downloaded. These downloads happened over many days, so the effect of the interview was spread out. 4. Something was different about the interview itself.

Another measure of forums activity is provided by the hosting service: unique visitors per day. This is more interesting, of course, but harder for me to record. Only recently did I start recording it. Here is a graph of visitors per day:

These data support the idea that the David Lawrence interview had a long-lasting effect, yes — but why the decrease in variability?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Andrew Gelman astutely noted that the three researchers (Michel Cabanac, Anthony Sclafani, and Israel Ramirez) whose work I used the most to come up with the Shangri-La Diet were not at Harvard or Yale or Rockefeller University. Isn’t that where breakthrough research is supposed to come from? This wasn’t the only way that development of the Shangri-La Diet was not quite “right”:

1. The research of Cabanac et al. got little recognition. The set point idea arose in the 1950s, or even earlier. In the 1970s, Cabanac saw very clearly that your set point depends on what you eat. With Rabe, he did an excellent experiment supporting this view. Not one weight-control researcher took note. No other lab built on this work.

2. I was not a weight-control researcher. In graduate school, I studied animal learning. Weight control is not just a different field of psychology; it is usually studied in a different department (nutrition or physiology).

3. The research I did was not funded. Given my lack of credentials and previous experience, it is not obvious it could ever be funded.

The hard-core defender of the system would say: SLD is rubbish. Just another fad diet. The open-minded defender would say: What do you want? You were a tenured professor at Berkeley. You published your work in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It is well-recognized that really new ideas often take a while to be appreciated. The open-minded critic would say: All three points are correct. In addition, why isn’t Israel Ramirez still a scientist? After all that brilliant research. What a loss. The hard-core critic would say: SLD reached the public as a self-help book. Why give the system any credit? Lots of non-scientists have published influential self-help books.

The hard-core views ignore reality. The SLD forums make it clear SLD is not rubbish. The notion that the system should get no credit at all ignores the fact that I made a living as a scientist at a well-respected place and published my work in a well-respected journal. The open-minded views, however, are both reasonable.