Category: Shangri-La Diet

Shangri-La Success in Detail

Seth Roberts3 Comments

An Indianapolis man named Hugh, who goes by Nufftin on the Shangri-La Diet forums, has been blogging about his weight loss (including graphs) at increments of 10 pounds lost (he writes a post when he’s lost 10 pounds, 20 pounds, etc.). So far he’s lost more than 50 pounds and is close to his goal weight, which is near his weight in college.

I decided to read all the entries and note what I learned. He started more than a year ago.

November 2011. He’s been gaining weight for a long time. He is about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs more than 200 pounds, giving him a BMI in the 30s. He does not explain why he decided to try it. He has nice clothes that no longer fit.

April 2012 (10 pounds down). It took a long time to lose the first 10 pounds because he started just before Thanksgiving and Christmas, big eating holidays, and he gave up. He started again January 1 and gave up again. Then he started again in February. Daily weight spikes can be as much as 4 pounds (he weighs 4 pounds more on Tuesday than he did on Monday), but that only happened once (New Year’s Party?). After he becomes consistent with the diet (in February), the graph of his daily weights is enormously convincing that the diet works.

May 2012 (20 pounds down). Here’s exactly how he does the diet: “a shot glass full of extra-light tasting olive oil in the morning, with no eating for an hour each side; two heaping tablespoons of table sugar dissolved in as much water as it will take to dissolve it in the evening.” (You can see why I would write a rather short book about such a diet.) He also does 15 minutes of exercise most days but I won’t describe it in detail since it doesn’t seem to matter — he stops exercising but keeps losing weight. Some old clothes now fit again. Only two people have commented on his weight loss. Maybe everyone notices but intentional weight loss is so rare it could be he’s dying. (Which is what one of my Berkeley colleagues thought about my weight loss. He actually said, “Are you dying?”) No one wants to hear that.

July 2012 (30 pounds down). The diet does require some effort. “I lost concentration for a couple of nights and, BOOM. To be fair, it was due to two great dinner parties (feta cheese hamburgers and The Descendants at one, Cuban sandwiches at the other).” These two “losses of concentration” did not have long-term effects. After 5-6 days — how long it took an unusually large amount of food to pass through his body and his salt balance to return to normal? — after those parties, his weight returned to its usual downward line.

September 2012 (40 pounds down). One of his shirts is now too big for him. He gained 6 pounds during a two-week trip. The gained weight comes off quickly (in about a week) but this time there is a noticeable long-term effect: Weight loss resumes at the same rate as before but the function is shifted by two weeks. He stops his 15 minutes of exercise and nothing happens to his rate of weight loss.

January 2013 (50 pounds down). It has taken 15 months to lose 50 pounds. There was one serious plateau, from December 2012 to January 2013, where he did not lose weight. Almost all of his pants are too big. He can take off his shirt at the pool.

 

Impossible Things That Are True: The Shangri-La Diet and the Behavior of Goldman Sachs

Seth Roberts7 Comments

It simply cannot be that drinking sugar water causes weight loss. Sugar caused the obesity epidemic! It simply cannot be that eating fat will cause weight loss. Eating fat is why we’re fat! Everyone knows this. It simply cannot be that whether you smell a food while you eat it makes any difference. Weight loss is all about calories in, calories out. The Shangri-La Diet says all three things are true. I cannot think of an historical precedent. Science has uncovered all sorts of unlikely stuff but nothing so surprising that is also immediately useful.

I thought of the Shangri-La Diet when I read this description by Michael Lewis of what Goldman Sachs has recently done:

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm [Goldman Sachs] conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

“The theory that we cannot live without them” was advocated by some of the most prestigious economists in the country.

What Goldman Sachs did — impossible-seeming, but it happened — is a sin of commission. Visible, at least to Michael Lewis, and capable of being pointed out (as Lewis does here) and marveled at.

The Shangri-La Diet seems like a bizarre thing, the diet from outer space, the crazy diet, whatever. It can’t be true, but it is. Yet the Shangri-La Diet, strange as it sounds, is actually the only visible sign (at least, visible to many people) of a massive sin of omission: failure to do good research about health. Obesity has been a major health problem for a very long time, more than a hundred years, and an overwhelmingly large problem since about 1980, 30 years ago. Yet conventional thinking about it is so bad – because mainstream research is so impotent — that people still take seriously ideas that date back to the 1950s and before, such as calories in calories out. A weight loss method discovered more than a hundred years old (cutting carbs) is still a big deal. It is as if people were still marvelling at electricity.

The commonality of the two situations (Shangri-La Diet and Goldman Sachs) is that the people who are supposed to understand the world (health scientists in the case of SLD, economists in the case of Goldman Sachs) have in both cases so bungled their jobs that truly terrible things happened. In the case of SLD, the obesity epidemic happened. (Not to mention epidemics of depression, diabetes, auto-immune diseases, and so on. ) A slow-moving unmissable worldwide epidemic that has made hundreds of millions of people feel ashamed every time they look at themselves. In the case of Goldman Sachs, what happened was the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent poor recovery and the fact that the “solution” to the crisis left in place what had caused it.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Are Low-Carb Diets Dangerous?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

A link from dearieme led me to a recent study that found low-carb high-protein diets — presumably used to lose weight — associated with heart disease. The heart disease increase was substantial — as much as 60% in those with the most extreme diets. (A critic of the study, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, called the increase in risk “ incredibly small“.) Four other studies of the same question have produced results consistent with this association. No study — at least, no study mentioned in the report — has produced results in the opposite direction (low-carb high-protein diets associated with a decrease in heart disease).

I find this interesting for several reasons.

1. I learned about the study from a Guardian article titled “What doctors won’t do”. A doctor named Tom Smith said, “I would never go on a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet like Atkins, Dukan or Cambridge.” Fine. He didn’t say what he would do to lose weight. The psychological costs of obesity are huge. The popularity of low-carb diets probably has a lot — or everything — to do with the failure of researchers to find something better. I have never seen people who criticize low-carb diets appear aware of this. I disagree with a lot of Good Calories Bad Calories but I completely agree with its criticism of researchers.

2. There has never been a good explanation of the success of low-carb high-protein diets (why they cause weight loss), although this has been well-known for more than a century. (A good explanation would be a theory that made predictions that turned out to be true.) Such diets require a big change in what you eat. A big change is likely to have big health consequences in addition to the weight loss, and those side effects could be either good or bad. It now appears bad is more likely. With a good theory of weight control, you should be able to find a much smaller change that produces the same amount of weight loss as a low-carb high-protein diet. Because the change is much smaller, it should have much smaller side effects. Much smaller side effects (unknown whether they are good or bad) are much less likely, if bad, to outweigh the benefits of the weight loss. I have never come across a low-carb advocate who seemed to understand this (that we don’t know why they work and it would be a very good idea to find out).

3. The Japanese are remarkably healthy (live very long), slim, and have very little heart disease, yet eat lots of rice. Which makes absurd the notion that all high-carb diets are unhealthy or fattening.

4. The comments on the low-carb study are mostly critical and the criticisms are terrible. For example, Dr. Yoni Friedhoff, who blogs about weight control, says, “The paper’s basing all of its 15 years worth of conclusions off of a single, solitary, and clearly inaccurate, baseline food frequency questionnaire”. The authors of the study correctly reply that inaccuracy would reduce the associations.

5. Until nutrition scientists do better research, our best source of nutritional guidance may be what we like to eat. Evolution shaped us to like foods that are good for us, at least under ancient conditions. We like carbs and we don’t like foods high in protein (lean meat is barely edible) so a low-carb high-protein diet is on its face a bad idea. This is why I find it plausible that the low-carb high-protein association with heart disease reflects cause and effect (low-carb high-protein causes heart disease) and that in particular a high-protein diet causes heart disease. (Too little of the right fats?) We very much like fat. Under ancient conditions, the fat people ate was mostly animal fat and, before that, if you believe in aquatic apes, fish oil. It is quite plausible that lactose tolerance spread so quickly throughout the world because at the time everybody was starved of animal fat — high-fat mammals had been hunted to extinction — and dairy products were a good source of it.

 

 

Best Introduction to the Shangri-La Diet?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A long thread at Mark’s Daily Apple may be the best introduction to the Shangri-La Diet. It is dramatic (people object, people say the diet is crazy), varied (many voices, many sorts of data), responsive to feedback (questions and objections are answered) and no doubt more convincing than my book (because it isn’t by me). The helpful elements include:

1. An introductory success story (from a woman named heatseeker) that I have already blogged about.

2. Someone makes a common Paleo objection — it works because of macronutrient ratios. “You have stumbled on the perfect macro ratios for you!” Heatseeker says this is unlikely because she barely changed her macro ratios. She answers many other questions and objections (e.g., “how do you choke down the coconut oil?”).

3. Someone says it didn’t work for them (“neither did anything else”).

4. Link to a talk by me (“You Had Me at Bacon”) that puts the diet in the context of my other work, such as the effect of pork fat on sleep.

5. Link to Alex Chernavsky’s results, which are most impressive in context.

6. Emphasis that the flavorless calories can be anything so long as they are flavorless (i.e., have no smell, which can be achieved by eating them nose-clipped). As heatseeker says, she lost weight via flavorless fat, I lost weight via flavorless sugar, so the success cannot be due to the fat. It is more complicated than that.

7. A confident naysayer: “I started eating less and now I’m lean for life. It really is that simple.”

8. Link to a scientific paper by me about the underlying theory.

9. Heatseeker says: “I would say that after four years of eating according to TPB [The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson], and 2-3 years of really strict adherence, absolutely every promise made by Mark came true–EXCEPT the fat loss.” That Diet X works better than a credible alternative (in this case, TPB) is more interesting than the observation that it works better than nothing.

10. A link to me talking about “ what food makes my brain work best“. More context.

11. “Has been incredibly easy to follow, even while at work,” says someone who is not heatseeker.

12. Independent discovery: “38 years ago our gym teacher had one of the overweight girls (we had 2) in gym class doing this! By the time we hit our Christmas break she had lost most of her pudge!! This is a true story. I remember because the girl’s parents were not informed and the gym teacher almost got fired for ‘experimenting’ on the said pupil. What saved her was people finding out that the girl had been caught by the teacher barfing up her lunch in an effort to lose weight (bulimic) so to keep her from going down that path and to gain her trust as a confidant etc she helped her by showing her a method she herself had used to control hunger which was eating a fat source between meals. Fantastic eh??? I had never heard anything quite like this until I read this thread.”

13. Bonus side effect: “Last night I slept through the night! Completely! I did not even slightly stir for any reason. . . . I have not slept through the night in YEARS!!!!!!” More reason to think that lack of certain fats impairs sleep.

14. Psychological effect: “What is happening here with the SLD? I feel calm and neutral to food.” You may remember research that suggested self-control is like a muscle. One similarity is the more you use it the stronger it gets. Several people have said that as soon as they started SLD, they were able to overcome other addictions, such as smoking and coffee. Maybe this is because years of struggling with food, day after day, had left them with very strong self-control. Before SLD, their self-control was exhausted pushing away urges to eat. As soon as SLD got rid of those urges, their very strong self control made it easy to quit smoking or whatever.

15. Two reluctant yea-sayers: “I coincidentally started trying this as a gesture of support for a desperate friend of mine . . . The whole concept is ludicrous and it’s probably just placebo effect . . . I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that this has worked for me. 10 lbs down” (Person 1). “If there weren’t so many people saying this works for them, I’d think it was the stupidest thing in the world” (Person 2).

 

Success on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Over at Mark’s Daily Apple forum, someone named heatseeker posted this:

I hesitated to post a thread about this because I feel like these forums have been overrun with “fad” diets and hacks lately–and because it’s honestly so bizarre-sounding that I feel a little silly admitting it–but my success on the Shangri-La Diet has been such that I felt I should share. I’ve had serious body fat setpoint issues since, oh, college, I guess–six years–and after watching my setpoint slowly creep up throughout my 20s with absolutely NOTHING making any difference, I’m finally losing weight steadily. I’ve lost 13lb and it’s still coming off like clockwork. Nothing else in my diet or exercise regimes changed, and I’ve experienced no strength losses (I’ve continued to make gains, actually).

I use refined coconut oil, 2tbsp/day. I was using unrefined at first but the flavor was too strong.

Has anyone else done the SLD, and had success? I just felt like I should spread the word, because I know there are some other setpoint-challenged people on these forums, and this has been a big breakthrough for me.

“I haven’t heard about it,” responded zoebird. Then someone posted several links.

Is Jimmy Moore’s Ketosis Diet the Shangri-La Diet in Disguise?

Seth Roberts17 Comments

I have recently encountered three examples that suggest low-carb diets don’t work well long-term:

1. Alex Chernavsky tried a low-carb diet in 2002. Starting at 270 pounds, he lost 70 pounds. A year later, he started to rapidly regain the lost weight. He stopped the diet.

2. A “medical professional” started at about 260 pounds (she’s 5’3″). After reading Wheat Belly, she gave up wheat. “After several months of being wheat free I lost 10 lbs. But that’s where it stopped.” Then she did full low-carb. “From May to July I did what basically was Atkins induction. I lost 20 lbs but then the weight loss stopped.”

3. Jimmy Moore lost a lot of weight eating low-carb. Starting in 2004 at 410 pounds, he lost 180 pounds. Then he gained half of it back, ending up near 300 pounds in early 2012.

The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet (SLD) says unfamiliar food will cause weight loss because its smell is not (yet) associated with calories. As the food becomes familiar, its smell becomes associated with calories. Weight loss due to unfamiliarity will disappear. Going low-carb usually involves eating unfamiliar foods. They become familiar. This explains low-carb weight regain. The theory explains partial low-carb success (e.g., Jimmy Moore didn’t regain all the lost weight) by assuming that the high-carb foods (e.g., soft drinks) given up produced stronger smell-calorie associations than the low-carb foods (e.g., steak) that replaced them.

Recently Jimmy Moore has been losing weight again. Starting at 306 pounds, over 7 months he has lost 60 pounds. He believes that to lose weight with a low-carb diet, there must be sufficient ketones in your blood — you must be at the optimal level of ketosis. “In order to be fully keto-adapted and to start burning stored body fat for fuel, ketone levels must be between 0.5 to 3.0 millimolar,” he wrote. To be fully keto-adapted, he began measuring his ketone level regularly. His first test showed that his ketone level was 0.3. “Holy cow, that could be one of the reasons why I’m not seeing my weight go down!” he wrote. He began adjusting his diet to put his ketone level between 0.5 and 3.0 millimolar, which involved changing protein intake as well as carb intake.

He changed his diet in various ways (mainly protein reduction) and started losing weight. In what I’ve read, he does not describe his current diet or earlier diet in detail, but does say this:

I will tell you that I’ve drank liberal amounts of water and 2 Tbs Carlson’s liquid fish oil daily along with my regular daily vitamins during this experiment.

Which sounds exactly like the Shangri-La Diet. Alex Chernavsky lost considerable weight and has kept it off doing almost the same thing with flaxseed oil.

My guess is that he is losing weight because of the fish oil. The theory behind SLD makes two predictions: 1. If Jimmy stops the fish oil and continues the ketone level adjustment, he will stop losing weight. 2. If Jimmy stops the ketone level adjustment but continues the fish oil, he will continue losing weight.

I asked Jimmy for comment. Here’s what he said:

It’s an interesting theory, but not one I want to particularly test out since I’m still doing so well at accomplishing what I am aiming for right now–fat loss, mental acuity and great overall health [all due to the fish oil, I believe — Seth]. Perhaps once this period of testing NK [nutritional ketosis] is over in May, I can add in your suggestion as another testing point.

The theory behind low-carb dieting has never made any correct predictions, as far as I know. It does not explain why the lost weight is often regained. If it turns out Jimmy Moore’s weight loss is due to his ketone adjustment, that will be the first correct prediction of the theory.

In contrast, the theory behind SLD led me to five new ways to lose weight (eating bland food, eating slowly-digested food, drinking unflavored sugar water, drinking oil with no smell, eating food nose-clipped). That’s roughly the same as five correct predictions, two of them (drinking sugar water, drinking oil with no smell) counter-intuitive.

Jimmy Moore’s weight loss may eventually show you can lose weight via SLD even when you don’t realize you’re doing SLD.

Shangri-La Diet Tip: How to Drink Flaxseed Oil

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A good way to do the Shangri-La Diet is to drink flaxseed oil between meals. It pushes down your setpoint and also supplies omega-3. Alex Chernavsky, for example, has had success with this. You will probably want to make the flaxseed oil smell-less. Here’s how:

I read something on Amazon by one of the people who reviewed your book and it’s worked for me. I take a small sip of water and keep it in my mouth and then take the tablespoon [of flaxseed oil] with my nose closed with the water in still in my mouth and swallow. Then I take a another drink of water and then I swish my mouth out with water and after all of it is done I have no residue of flax oil taste. It sounds like a lot to do but it really isn’t.

Lately I’ve been doing the Shangri-La Diet by eating a daily bowl of yogurt, ground flaxseed (50 g), honey and fruit with my nose clipped shut. It tastes great because it is creamy, sour and sweet and has a variety of textures. It has a fair amount of calories (400?) so it’s good for weight loss. I have to push myself to drink flaxseed oil but I have no trouble eating this.

Bayesian Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In July, a Cambridge UK programmer named John Aspden wanted to lose weight. He had already lost weight via a low-carb (no potatoes, rice, bread, pasta, fruit juice) diet. That was no longer an option. He came across the Shangri-La Diet. It seemed crazy but people he respected took it seriously so he tried it. It worked. His waist shrank by four belt notches in four months. With no deprivation at all.

Before he started, he estimated the odds (i.e., his belief) of three different outcomes predicted by three different theories. What would happen if he drank 300 calories (2 tablespoons) per day of unflavored olive oil (Sainsbury’s Mild Olive Oil)? Aspden considered the predictions of three theories.

I called my three ideas of what would happen [= three theories that make different predictions] if I started eating extra oil Willpower, Helplessness and Shangri-La. (1) Willpower (W) is the conventional wisdom. If you eat an extra 300 calories a day you should get fatter. This was the almost unanimous prediction of my friends. Your appetite shouldn’t be affected. (2) Helplessness (H) was my own best guess. If you eat more, it will reduce your appetite and so you’ll eat less at other times to compensate, and so your weight won’t move. Whether this appetite loss would be consciously noticeable I couldn’t guess. This was my own best guess. (3) Shangri-La (S) is your theory. The oil will drop the set point for some reason, and as a result, you should see a very noticeable loss of appetite.

More about these theories. His original estimate of the likelihood of each prediction being true: W 39%, H 60%, S 1%. He added later, “I think I was being generous with the 1%”. After the prediction of the S theory turned out to be true, the S theory became 50 times more plausible, Aspden decided.

I like this a lot. Partly because of the quantification. If you were a high jumper in a world without exact measurement, people could only say stuff like “you jumped very high.” It would be more satisfying to have a more precise metric of accomplishment. It is a scientist’s dream of making an unlikely prediction that turns out to be true. The more unlikely, the more progress you have made. Here is quantification of what I accomplished. Although Aspden could find dozens of online reports that following the diet caused weight loss, he still believed that outcome very unlikely. Given that (a) the obesity epidemic has lasted 30-odd years and (b) people hate being fat, you might think that conventional wisdom about weight control should be assigned a very low probability of being correct.

I also like this because it is the essence of science: choosing between theories (including no theory) based on predictions. The more unlikely the outcome, the more you learn. You’d never know this from 99.99% of scientific papers, which say nothing about how unlikely the actual outcome was a priori — at least, nothing numerical. I can’t say why this happens (why an incomplete inferential logic, centered on p values, remains standard), but it has the effect of making good work less distinguishable from poor work. Maybe within the next ten years, a wise journal editor will begin to require both sorts of logic (Bayesian and p value). You need both. In Aspden’s case, the p value — which would indicate the clarity of the belt-tightening — was surely very large. This helped Aspden focus on the Bayesian aspect — the change in belief. This example shows how much you lose by ignoring the Bayesian aspect, as practically all papers do. In this case, you lose a lot. Anyone paying attention understands that the conventional wisdom about weight control must be wrong. Here is guidance towards a better theory. If not mine, you at least want a theory that predicts this result.

 

 

 

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Alex Blackwood and Bryan Castañeda.