Sep 17 2007
Shangri-La Diet
I’m starting a crazy “diet.” There’s plenty of information about it on the ‘net, so I’ll spare you most of the details. Basically, you consume a certain quantity (for me right now, 2 tablespoons) of flavorless olive oil per day. Flavorless being the key. And you avoid anything that possesses any flavor for an hour on either side of the olive oil dose(s). Otherwise, you eat whatever you want. That’s pretty much it.
My first reaction to this was, of course, that it was one of the stupidest things I’d ever seen. Then I started reading the forums on the creator’s (Seth Roberts) site, and then I did some Googling. And would you believe that, in the absence of anything that I would call scientific evidence, this thing seems to work for most people that try it.
Perhaps I should explain what the intended effects are. The idea is that the diet both acts to lower your “set point” and send the body into famine mode, and acts as an appetite suppressant. “Well,” you say, “of course. Oil is well-understood as an appetite suppressant.” But we aren’t talking about an instantaneous effect here — rather, the oil consumption supposedly leads to a continuous background suppression of appetite. One so strong that many people report little or no desire to eat, much less binge. In addition to the purported physiological (set point) effects.
So that brings me back to my story. I’m 5′10.5″, male, and 203-205 pounds, depending on the time of day. That makes me pretty close to 40 pounds overweight. Five days ago I honestly believed the Shangri-La Diet to be hooey — interesting hooey, maybe, but still hooey. There are perfectly good psychological explanations for the appetite suppression: placebo effect enforced by the ritual of consuming the oil, for example. Maybe the set point stuff is bogus, and the people reporting success just needed to eat less.
I have a certain admiration for the fact that this method was developed and has been supported through self-experimentation. Combining that with the fact that most people complaining about this diet on the ‘net haven’t actually tried it, I decided I’d try it for myself and report on the results. I want to make it really clear that I approached this diet with a very healthy dose of skepticism. You should also understand that I’m a staunch advocate of the “eat right and exercise, stupid” philosophy of weight loss. I have never followed a prepackaged diet strategy.
Having said all that: it works. I do not know why or how it works, but it works. I started five days ago with sugar water, which is an acceptable alternative to the oil, because that’s what I had on hand. There were no remarkable effects except that I was a little less hungry right after drinking the sugar water — well, duh. But everyone who’s tried it says, “give it a week.”
Two days ago, determined to follow the plan as faithfully as possible, I went out and bought some “extra light” olive oil. I started taking it twice a day, which is really not as disgusting as you might imagine.
At dinner two days ago, I ate a little less than half of the food I was served at our favorite Chinese restaurant. Bean Curd Home Style is my kryptonite, but at a certain point, I stopped eating it. I was done. Done. Perhaps you won’t appreciate the significance of this if you’re not a fat out-of-control eater. At the time, I said something to K. about how odd it was for me to enjoy food in the past tense.
Thinking about yesterday, the food I consumed (ad libitum) cannot have totaled more than 1500 Calories. Add the oil and that’s 1750 or so. I’m sufficiently overweight to lose weight on 2000 Calories, even with only light physical activity.
This morning I realized that I hadn’t eaten voluntarily since about 1:30 yesterday afternoon. I just haven’t thought about it. I was conscious of not being ready for dinner when I took the oil at 4:00 yesterday afternoon, but after that, nothing.
I ate a small (and extremely delicious) Gala apple for breakfast and found myself satisfied. I enjoyed the apple, and when it was gone, I was done with it. It’s really the experience of being “done” that gets to me more than anything else. It’s not an experience I’m used to having. All of a sudden, there’s some psychological peace between me and food that wasn’t there before. Weird.
Anyway. I’m going to post updates here occasionally. I may not lose any weight; we’ll see. The scale this morning said 200.5, which is the lowest reading it’s given me in weeks, but I’m not going to believe that until it stays that way for a good long while. If it dips under 200, then I will admit that something is happening.
Freaky, ain’t it
The great part is it stays off and you don’t have to keep drinking sugar water. I approached it the same way you did exactly two years ago (used sugar water…I think I was attracted to it because of the irony of using sugar loose weight). Went from 170 to 142 in a month or so. I decided that 142 was too much and intentionally ate some foods to bring my self back to 150. I’ve been there ever since and haven’t done any sugar water since.
I’m currently about 100 pounds lighter than I was 8 years ago — from 280 to 180 (I’m slightly under 6 feet with moderate build) when I started applying Seth Roberts theory in an effort to lose weight after a diabetes diagnosis. The idea is simple: taste functions to detect calorie availability. It’s Pavlovian associative learning; your brain associates calories with tastes. Strong tasting foods make it easier to learn the association; you get hungrier when your brain “thinks” calories are available.
So if you get calories with little or no taste, your brain shuts down the hunger centers. I developed a way, described in Seth’s book to get 100% of calories without taste, and lost a lot of weight. Go here and scroll down to see before and after pictures.
http://boards.sethroberts.net/index.php?topic=2972.msg25848#msg25848
I’ve kept off 25% of my body weight for 3 years now…
Cheers,
Tim
The SLD (which I still think of as the Mary Poppins Diet, even after shifting from spoonsful of sugar to a shotglass of oil) cut my weight by five pounds–well, maybe six. That’s a real shift, not within random variation; I’d weighed within a couple of pounds of 183 (I was six feet tall, twenty years ago; probably a bit less now) for over a decade, with one several-month five-pound rise when I hurt my shoulder and stopped exercising , and with SLD it dropped from near 183 to near 177, and stayed. I expect that when the full Theory of Weight Gain/Loss is developed, Roberts’ flavor-calorie theory will play a significant role as a component that matters more for some and less for others. Maybe it matters less for those who are in reasonably good shape already? I never was an athlete… my routine includes forty pushups, forty situps, twenty pullups, and other boring stuff. Or maybe it’s simply that appetite depends on several neural mechanisms, and SLD targets one of these.
I started SLD about a month ago, and I was totally struck by the feeling of “done” that you describe. It was and is a new sensation for me, and takes some getting used to — ordering smaller portions, buying fewer groceries, etc. I’ve heard the “it’s a placebo” argument but I don’t buy it. I was totally skeptical like you when I tried it, and just used the sugar water method because I was not going to invest money in *another* diet fad. Yet the results, for me, were unequivocal: less hunger, no cravings. I have not lost tons of weight but I do feel completely rejuvinated in my life, because it is not ruled by a “feeding schedule” or other wacky diet nonsense. For many of us, SLD is a blessing.
Thank you all for your words of encouragement. I know a couple of you from lurking on the SLD forums, so thanks also for stopping by my neck of the woods. I couldn’t figure out why so many people were reading my post until I saw that Seth had linked to me on his blog.
I’m keeping pretty good records on all of this, and I’ll keep posting my results as well as anything useful that I figure out. Good luck to all of you with losing it and/or keeping it off!