Category: Shangri-La Diet

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.

SLD in Paperback: What’s New

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The paperback edition of The Shangri-La Diet was published last week. The feedback I’d gotten, mainly from the forums, suggested many changes, so I was glad to be able to revise it. The main revisions are:

1. A foreword about events since hardback publication.

2. More emphasis on flavorless oil, less emphasis on unflavored sugar water.

3. New case studies (to match the emphasis on oil).

4. Data from the Tracking Data forum about how fast people lose.

5. New sidebars about omega-3, combining SLD with other diets, and how to drink oil.

6. Nose-clipping as an important new way of doing the diet.

My thanks to all SLD forum contributors and others who provided feedback.

A Stanford Nutrition Professor’s Explanation of SLD

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A Palo Alto resident found SLD so effective (lost 10 pounds in 1.5 months) that he told others about it. “Everyone I speak to about the diet laughs at me or just shakes their head,” he wrote. (Which is good.) A tenant of his, a Stanford medical student, asked his nutrition professor how such a crazy diet could possibly work. The professor, Dr. Clyde Wilson, replied:

Fats and sugars reduce hunger when consumed in moderate amounts. Fructose stimulates less of an insulin response than glucose, putting you at less risk of subsequent hunger. Flavored foods result in a greater caloric consumption. Unflavored fructose and olive oil would therefore reduce hunger during a subsequent meal. Any small healthy snack will provide the same result. A small healthy snack would be, for example, a whole grain cracker with some peanut butter and half an apple.

The interesting thing about SLD is not that the oil or sugar water reduces hunger — most food does that — but that it causes easy weight loss. This is what needs explaining. Why does X calories of sugar water cause you to reduce future consumption by more than X calories? This paragraph doesn’t explain this.

Since fructose, sucrose, and unflavored oils all have the same effect, it cannot be due to a special property of fructose.

As for the prediction that a small healthy snack will have the same effect, that has not been my experience. I’m pretty sure that weight loss would not be such a big problem if one could lose substantial weight (such as 10 pounds in 1.5 months) by eating as many small healthy snacks as you want.

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.

Blogger Alert: Paperback SLD Available

Seth Roberts4 Comments

If you have a blog, would like a copy of the paperback edition of The Shangri-La Diet — which is substantially better than the hardback, I like to think — and are willing to review the book on your blog, please contact Katherine Wasilewski (X.Y@ us.penguingroup.com where X = katherine and Y = wasilewski). She has 50 copies available. Please put “SLD review copy” in your subject line.

Addendum: The earlier version of this notice failed to say that these copies are for bloggers who will review it. I will soon post how the paperback is different from the hardback. The main difference is it incorporates lessons learned from forum feedback.

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.

    • Effects of SLD and Flaxseed Oil

    Seth RobertsLeave a comment

    A reader (Josh Mangum) writes:

    The flavorless calorie diet lets me drop weight whenever I need to. I was usually 10-15 lbs overweight and up to 25 lbs when under stress. Both my parents are overweight so I was worried that I would put on weight under stress and not take it off. My dad especially has followed the pattern of gaining a few pounds a year his whole adult life and is now about 75 lbs overweight. Besides the obvious advantages of losing weight now it’s really nice that I don’t have to worry about being very overweight in the future.

    Flax oil is more subtle. I think it’s improving my sleep and mental ability. For sleep I’ve noticed being rested and having more vivid dreams. There seems to be a dosage effect. One night I tried 6 tbls of flax oil, had very vivid dreams and felt very rested the next day. The other thing that seems consistent with it working is that I can go back to sleep for a couple hours after waking at 7 am if I’m still tired. Previously I was never able to go back to sleep whether I woke at 2 am or 7 am.

    I write software and notice that it seems easier while I’ve been using flax oil. It seems to be easier to hold large problems in my head and work though them than previously. I don’t notice much effect on how often I’m “insightful” or “clever” though. So rather than being smarter it seems like being adequately smart more often. This is subtle though and it could be the phase of the project or my outlook or just better sleep. Maybe the effects are just the result of coming out of the shorter foggier San Francisco winter days.

    New Way to Lose Weight?

    Seth Roberts2 Comments

    During the recent PBS special on obesity Fat: What No One is Telling You, a segment about surgery included this voiceover:

    Until recently it was believed that the tiny stomach [that the surgery produces] is what forces the patient to eat less and lose weight. The surprise came when researchers learned that what makes surgery work so well is the cutting of some nerves in the bowel, which changes signals which flow between the gut and the brain.

    I’m not surprised the researchers were surprised. The obvious function of nerves from gut to brain is to tell the brain food is present in the gut; and when enough food is present, to cause satiety. If this view of what the nerves do is correct, you would think that cutting those nerves reduces satiety signals and thus increases how much people eat at each meal — and thus causes weight gain. But the opposite is what happened.

    The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet, however, easily explains the weight loss: Cutting the nerves reduced the calorie signal from food, thus reduced the strength of the flavor-calorie association. (After nerves are cut, your brain thinks that a 300-calorie food only has 150 calories. So the flavor-calorie association becomes weaker.) The weaker the flavor-calorie associations of your food, the lower your set point. The observation supports the theory so well that I will try to track it down to include in a revision of my paper.

    The implication is that weight-loss surgery could consist of cutting some of those calorie-signalling nerves and nothing more. It would be relatively painless: Food would still taste good, especially in the beginning. (Because cutting the nerves does not change the memory stored in the brain.) Food would gradually taste less good as the flavor-calorie association become weaker. As flavor-calorie associations become weaker, your set point goes down. Causing weight loss without effort.