Category: Shangri-La Diet

Good Thinking

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I heard about [the Shangri-La] diet from someone on a discussion group I’m part of and it sounded like total bunk. . . . This person pushes my buttons, so I decided I would test the diet. If it worked, I’d lose some unhealthy weight (three pregnancies combined with the stress of recent years left me 40 pounds overweight for my height), and if it didn’t work, I’d have the satisfaction of proving her wrong. It was a win/win.

I chuckle every time I read this. It continues:

I eliminated my two daily Cokes . . . from my diet and replaced them with the equivalent amount of liquid and calories from sugar water. I’ve been less hungry and losing weight ever since. Damn her!

Speaking of SLD and blogs and good writing. This has nothing to do with SLD.

Learning to Write Better

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From the SLD forums:

I just had a great victory. My daughter is having her friends over so we are making friendship cookies. . . . I was feeling miserable for the first time since starting SLD [Shangri-La Diet] like I wanted to eat a whole bunch of them and totally binge out. I ate a few crumbs that fell off and couldn’t get them out of my mind (I haven’t had this problem in 6 wks.). I went ahead and decided to eat just one of the yummy delights. . . . After one I was so very full I actually didn’t want anymore! DO YOU REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS? I mean, wow! I can actually have just one cookie. I never ever ever have been able to do that before.

I like to think the Internet is improving my writing by showing me many examples of how to do it. This quote is half of a well-written few paragraphs. The other half would be the general rule that Michel Cabanac discovered: If your set point is lower than usual you will feel full sooner than usual, as this quote illustrates. (The Shangri-La Diet had lowered her set point.) Interesting idea + emotion-charged example = good writing. Blogs are another example. As I’ve said before, they are full of good writing. You don’t blog about stuff you don’t care about.

Books — part of the great wide non-Internet — suffer by comparison. I recently started reading a book about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. I was favorably disposed: Chez Panisse is a great achievement, I am very interested in food and changes in food, it took place near my house, I had attended a nice reading given by the author. In spite of all this, I stopped after a few chapters. The book is very well written in a nuts-and-bolts way. However, it lacks emotion — the author didn’t care passionately about his subject and it shows. The book had come about because Alice Waters’s assistant had approached him and asked him if he was interested in doing such a book. He took a long time, he did a careful and thorough job, but no amount of time or care or editing could fix the problem that he didn’t feel strongly enough.

The Dog-Food Diet (part 1)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From craigslist:

I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again . . . I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete.

Not absurd. Sclafani and Springer (1976) compared two groups of rats: (a) rats given rat chow (which resembles Pal nuggets) and (b) rats given rat chow plus human food (e.g., salami, cheese). Both groups could eat as much as they wanted. The second group gained a lot more weight than the first. I suspect rat chow is less fattening than human food because it is more bland and digested more slowly. This is one of the experiments that led me to the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet.

SLD Musings

Seth Roberts9 Comments

On her MySpace page, Janice writes:

I have been on [the Shangri-La Diet] for a month and I have lost 12 pounds! It is the easiest way to lose weight.

During this month she started riding a recumbent bike. I am struck by how often this happens: After people start SLD they start improving their lives in other ways. (Didn’t happen to me, by the way.) Does cessation of struggle with food (which took “energy”) leave more “energy” for other forms of self-improvement? I wasn’t struggling with food when I started SLD so I would fit that theory.

This wouldn’t explain why SLD causes non-caloric cravings (such as for coffee and cigarettes) to go away. Maybe they go away because they are triggered by hunger. Speaking of cigarettes, Gary Skaleski, who invented SLD nose-clipping, suggests that maybe you can quit smoking if you clip your nose while you smoke. You get the nicotine needed to remove the craving but the lack of smell removes the possibility of addiction. No one becomes addicted to plain sugar water, which has no smell. Fascinating idea.

Shopping Notes

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1. At a Vietnamese take-out place near Berkeley I got a can of sugar-cane juice. Some flavor, but very close to sugar water. From Taiwan. Which makes sense: In a Hong Kong store I saw cans of pure sugar water.

2. At Trader Joe’s I bought a package of trail mix called “Omega Trek Mix with Omega Fortified Cranberries.” (A new use of omega, by the way.) It contained “500 mg Omega-3 Fatty Acids Per Serving.” Sold only by Trader Joe’s. Not saying which omega-3 fats is a problem; so is lack of refrigeration. I could do a bio-assay, I realized: using the tests I have blogged about, such as balance and arithmetic, I could determine how much of the mix I had to eat to have the same effect as 1 tablespoon of flaxseed oil.

3. At Trader Joe’s I asked the checkout clerk what parts of her job she liked the best. “If we card a secret shopper, we get $15 for lunch,” she said. Lunch here? I asked. Lunch anywhere, she said. Whereas Dell employees detest secret shoppers. A tiny glimpse of a better future.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 4)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I was interviewed today by a writer for Wired Online. She said the Shangri-La Diet forums resembled open-source software. It’s a good point; at the SLD forums, a large number of people from all over the place are slowly but surely improving the diet (which is essentially an engineering problem). Because of their improvements, the paperback is about 10% different from the hardback. I’m not a weight-control expert; the people who contribute to the SLD forums are even less so.

The SLD forums can also be compared to a clinical trial of the diet. A large chunk of SLD forum posts are about how well the diet is working, which is what clinical trials are about. A clinical trial of the Shangri-La Diet (or almost anything) requires experts. Only weight-control experts could raise the money (hundreds of thousands of dollars) and have access to the necessary facilities. Anyone can start a forum.

Which is better? In two ways, a clinical trial is better than forums evaluation: 1. (major) You keep track of everyone who starts the trial. 2. (minor) Better measures. More accurate scales, blood tests, standardized food tracking. In six ways, forums evaluation is better than a clinical trial. 1. (major) More realistic. For example: the diet is more flexible, each dieter uses his or her own brain power to figure out what to do. 2. (major) Better reporting of side effects (both positive and negative). With forums, more brainpower goes into their detection. 3. (major). More transparent. Anyone can read the forums to find out what happened. Raw data from clinical trials is almost never available. 4. (major) Speed. Forums are much faster. 5. (major) Cost. Forums are much cheaper. 6. (major) Openness. Anyone can report his/her results on the SLD forums. Clinical trials, on the other hand, are closed to almost everyone.

I use both Firefox (open source) and Internet Explorer (not open source). But I use Firefox far more.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Indonesian version of The Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts1 Comment

dust jacket of Indonesian edition

The dust jacket of the Indonesian edition of The Shangri-La Diet. What does “diet tanpa diet” mean? What’s this about diabetes and cholesterol? Uh, take my book — please.

And I mean it. Because I am stunned and happy to have written a book that anyone in Indonesia could possibly care about.

Addendum: By staring at the cover, I have figured out that tanpa means “without.”

Science in Action: Flavor-Calorie Learning (simple example)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The Shangri-La Diet is partly based on the idea that we learn to associate flavors and calories. A food’s flavors become associated with the calories in the food. This association makes the flavor more pleasant.

I would like to learn more about this associative process so I have been studying it. Here is a simple example. At intervals of a day or so between bottles, I drank 4 bottles of a lemongrass-flavored soda. I chose that flavor because it was unfamiliar. Each bottle had 50 calories of cane sugar. I rated how pleasant each bottle tasted on a scale where 40 = slightly unpleasant, 50 = neutral, 60 = slightly pleasant, and 70 = somewhat pleasant. I drank the bottles between meals — far away from other food.

Here are the ratings.

The flavor gradually became more pleasant.

Will It Last? (part 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I posted earlier about the recent increase in hits to the Shangri-La Diet forums. Here is an updated graph.

hits vs date

My shallow data analysis failed to show me the most interesting thing: An increase in the rate of change. To see rates of change, I plotted ratios: hits today/hits one week before. I used one week because there are strong day-of-week effects: Sunday is different from Monday, etc. Here is a graph of these ratios.

change in hits vs date

The green line is no change. Points below the green line indicate decreases; above the green line, increases. The red line is from loess. Here is a close-up that shows the red line more clearly.

change in hits vs date (close-up)

Since November, the rate of increase has been increasing. 5%/week would be huge; the rate is now 10%/week. This thrills me. It is a sign of what the Chinese call “word to word.”

The Future of SLD

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In a Pottery Barn yesterday, I noticed some air “fresheners” with names like Tupelo Honey, Paper White, Pomegranate, and Mandarin. Like an incense stick or scent candle, they add a pleasant smell to the air. The display included testers, similar to perfume testers, that produce a fine spray. I tried a few. They were an easy way to alter the flavor of one’s food, I realized. I asked a clerk, “Can these be sprayed on food?” He tried to find the ingredients but couldn’t. “Is this the strangest question you’ve been asked today?” I asked. “No one has ever asked me this,” he said.

If you carried in your purse a few small sleek canisters of “food perfumes,” you could easily make any food at any meal less recognizable and thus less fattening. Randomly using two or three perfumes per meal might provide enough diversity to last a lifetime. The SLD forum term for this is crazy-spicing. At least one person has lost a great deal of weight (80 pounds?) doing nothing else. You can still eat all your favorite foods; depending on the dose of food perfume, they will still taste good (if not out-of-this-world delicious). In this post, Peter Merel describes his discovery that slightly-altered favorite foods no longer trigger binges.

a little slice of mud cake … I know if I start I’m going to be inhaling that stuff big time. No question. Serious ditto for me.

Do you think lemon juice can cut that?

Only one way to find out. Into the microwave and then a squeeze of lemon juice on top. I’ll admit the lemon juice didn’t help a chocolate cake. But it wasn’t bad either. I mean I’d have it again like that if this actually worked.

This Actually Worked!

I have also posted many times about the benefits of flaxseed oil, which I believe derives from its high omega-3 content. The benefits are so large, fast, and repeatable I suspect almost everyone is suffering from omega-3 deficiency. The Shangri-La Diet of the future, I believe, will have three main parts:

1. Some sort of oil for weight loss and other benefits, including better sleep, better skin, and omega-3s. If it has flavor, you close your nose while you ingest it.

2. Elegant little spray cannisters of food perfumes to vary the flavor of your food.

3. (For hot weather) Ice-cold fructose water. I think it’s a viable product, like ice tea.