Thanks to Robin Barooah, Paul Sas, and Brent Pottenger.
A friend wrote:
Took 3 tbsp of flaxseed oil this morning and held my nose and drank the oil w/water. Â It worked! Â I had brought food for work, I didn’t eat hardly any of it. Â And I didn’t think about losing weight all day, first time in all my life….
As far as I’m concerned, it never gets old.
Unfamiliar foods cause weight loss, says the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet. If you add enough spices to a food, it will become unfamiliar.An ice cream store in San Francisco called Humphrey Slocombe has some of the world’s strangest flavors, likely to be unfamiliar until you eat them many times.
Their flavors include Eight Ball Stout, Pink Grapefruit Tarragon, Carrot Mango, Russian Imperial Stout, White Chocolate Lavender. Here’s what happened when the owners ate a lot of them:
In the store’s first few months, Godby and his business partner, Sean Vahey, scooped from noon to 9 each night, ate nothing but ice cream, traded the leftover brownies for cocktails at a dive bar called Dirty Thieves and still lost weight. Since then they’ve hired eight employees and — hazard of the job — each gained back the 10 pounds they’d lost.
Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.
Long ago Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor, wrote The Population Bomb. Yet you probably know about the demographic transition: A sharp decrease in family size when countries reach a certain level of wealth. Which implies a big problem with Ehrlich’s forecasts. You probably don’t know about three related transitions:
1. Forests. For a long time humans destroyed forests and forest area decreased. More recently, however, forests have been regrowing as people leave rural areas for cities.
2. Obesity. In poor countries, rich people are fatter than poor people. In rich countries, the opposite is true: the poor are fatter than the rich, presumably because the rich eat less factory food.
3. Fast food. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I was told that the number of fast food restaurants in Tokyo is declining.
The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet predicts that new food is less fattening than familiar food. At the center of the theory is the idea that smell-calorie associations raise the set point. New food is less fattening because its smell is less associated with calories. This prediction explained why I often lost weight after visiting foreign countries, but not after visiting other places in America.
A few days ago, I got an email from a 40-year-old man who has taken this a step further:
I’ve developed a variant of your diet which works really well for me, and which I haven’t read about so much on your blog, so I thought you might be interested. Â I live in NYC, and I’m obsessed about different foods. Â I’m constantly on the hunt for new restaurants, novel ethnic cuisines I’ve never had, etc, and NYC is a great place to indulge this hobby. Â A couple of years ago I was about 210 lbs, which on my 6’0 frame is at least 30 lbs overweight. Â I read your book, and tried the oil, etc, and it worked well for me, but it felt like a lot of trouble, and I was actually dropping weight faster than would normally be considered healthy. Â So I changed the strategy, and simply made up a rule, never to eat the same thing twice.
If I want to lose weight, I follow the rule religiously. Â I go to different restaurants, order radically different things off the menu, choose unfamiliar beers, wines, cocktails etc when I’m out at bars and clubs. Â If I follow the rule 100% of the time, I drop about 1 lb per week consistently. Â If I “cheat” one or two meals a week, I maintain my weight. Any more than that and I slowly gain weight. Â I’m currently 179 lbs, and have been between 175 and 185 for about two years. Â Although I’m active, I’m no gym rat, and this “system” is the only nod towards a healthy lifestyle I’ve made during that time. Apart from never repeating a meal, I eat and drink whatever I feel like.
The dose-response relationship (the more he does it, the bigger the effect) makes other explanations less plausible. He later added:
One thing I forgot, which is important, is I absolutely don’t eat when I’m not hungry, and I’ve never had a problem walking away from food if I’m full. Â Some people might have problems with that, I guess. Also it requires more discipline than I made it sound. Especially when you’re busy, it’s very tempting to hit the same lunch spot every day.
A woman named Melissa Francis recently thanked me for helping her quit smoking. I was surprised. She said she had applied the ideas behind the Shangri-La Diet to smoking. At the center of SLD is the idea that we learn to associate the flavors (smells) of foods with the calories they contain. If you reduce your exposure to those associations, you lose weight.
Francis took this to suggest that the reason people smoke has a lot to do with the association between the flavors (smells) of smoking and nicotine. If she could reduce her exposure to those associations, it should be much easier to quit. So she did two things: 1. Smoked nicotine-free cigarettes (brand name Quest). 2. Used a nicotine patch. The second thing corresponds to ingestion of smell-free calories, such as sugar water or extra-light olive oil or any food nose-clipped (classic SLD). The first corresponds to exposing yourself to the flavors of foods without swallowing them, an experience whose effects you can read about on the SLD forums here and here. Learning researchers know that uncorrelating the CS (e.g., smell) and US (e.g., nicotine), as Francis did, is a great way to reduce the association between them.
Francis had previously tried to quit using nicotine-free cigarettes alone. She had failed. She had previously tried to quit using nicotine patches alone. She had failed. With the combination (Quest 3 and 21 mg patch), however, she was successful. “I stopped smoking the cigarettes pretty much altogether within a week or so. From that point, I just stepped down on the patch over the course of five or six weeks,” she wrote. How easy that sounds! My college advisor told me that quitting smoking was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Francis had been smoking twenty years and smoked about a pack a day. She’d quite for two years about fifteen years ago.
Francis had the idea herself and hadn’t heard of anyone else doing this. The closest precedent seems to be the work of a Duke researcher named Jed Rose, for example this study.
In The Emperor’s New Clothes, the king is naked but only a little girl says so. The king’s advisers don’t tell him. I suppose the intended lesson was that powerful people have trouble getting frank answers. That’s pretty obvious. For a CEO, it’s said, the scarcest commodity is truth. Bosses learn this all the time. I learned it the first time I asked one of my students what he thought of the class.
Andersen’s story can be taken differently, partly conveyed by the phrase elephant in the room: Something big and important is overlooked by the supposed experts (in the story, the king’s advisers). It should be obvious — but it isn’t. Or at least no one says anything. This is how Harry Markopolos used the term emperor’s new clothes in No One Would Listen: Madoff was a gigantic fraud, his returns were (to Markopolos) clearly too good to be true, he was enormously visible (in certain circles), but no one said anything. It was as astonishing as a king parading naked. How come no one sees this? Markopolos thought. If you looked at Madoff the right way, he was naked.
That this sort of thing happens isn’t obvious at all. Yet three books — which I’ve just blogged about — have recently appeared with examples. One is the Markopolos book. Another is The Hockey Stick Illusion. Surely there’s overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming, right? Well, no. The only clear evidence was that hockey stick — and that’s a statistical artifact. (It looks like an artifact.) The third is The Big Short. It wasn’t easy to find the right sight line from which it was clear that Goldman Sachs et al. were taking on far more risk than they realized but such views existed. I call these books The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson: Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. Sometimes there’s a point of view from which they’re glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view.
This relates to my self-experimentation in two ways. First, the “best people” say self-experimentation is bad. No weight-control researcher does self-experimentation. No sleep researcher does self-experimentation. Surely they know how to do research. It’s their job. Whereas to me it’s glaringly obvious that self-experimentation is an excellent research tool, not just because of my results but also because it makes it so much easier to try new things. The best way to learn is to do, IÂ believe; self-experimentation makes doing much easier. Second, my self-experimentation uncovered all sorts of results that implied that the expert consensus on this or that was glaringly wrong. The Shangri-La Diet is just one example. Breakfast is good, right? Well, no, breakfast may wake you up too early. And so on. At first, I didn’t grasp the broad lesson I stated earlier (“Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. . . “) and was amazed by what I was finding. To me, The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy is support.
Good results.
In 2 months I’ve lost 13 pounds . . . I have even skipped days due to a hectic work schedule. . . .
I was stopped outside church on Sunday by someone who had noticed the weight loss and wanted to know how I did it. I have still yet to convince my fiercest critic — my loving wife, but at least she’s stopped calling it a placebo!
Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.
If you read Andrew Gelman’s blog, this will be old news:
The other day I was talking with someone and, out of nowhere, he mentioned that he’d lost 20 kilos [44 pounds] using Seth’s nose-clipping strategy.
