Oct 25 2007
Shangri-La Is Where You Find It
Kara posted a few days ago about her decision to quit the Shangri-La diet. I’m quitting as well. In fact, I have quit — it’s been almost two weeks since I last took the olive oil.
I’m not quitting out of any particular disillusionment with the diet. The simple truth is that I stopped taking the oil and continued losing weight. I’ve lost an additional pound since I stopped with the oil. My current weight is 195.5, making my total loss so far 8 pounds.
I’m not disgusted with taking the oil, nor do I have any reason to believe it’s had any negative impact on me. Since the only negative effect the oil had on me was the need to keep track of taking it, I’m completely open to resuming taking the oil. But at this point, I’m interested to see what happens in the next week or two.
If the set point theory of the Shangri-La diet is correct, I may continue to lose weight for some short period of time, but will then cease losing or start gaining when my set point stops lowering or raises.
If, on the other hand, the set point theory is nonsense, I will continue losing weight at the present rate.
I’m not questioning the appetite suppressant effect of the SLD. For me, that was and is very real. Right now, it’s been two weeks, and I’m still almost as “not hungry” as I was when I was taking the oil. To explain this, I can imagine the following possibilities:
- Taking the oil has had direct, lasting effects on my appetite.
- Taking the oil has taught me the difference between physical and psychological hunger, which has had lasting effects on my appetite.
- Losing eight pounds has had a direct effect on my appetite.
- Taking the oil had no effect whatsoever, but put me in a favorable mindset for weight loss, which has caused a subjective reduction in my appetite (in other words, the placebo effect).
The events of the next few weeks may well shed some light on which of these is true. Personally, I suspect #2 to be the case, but I have little evidence to support that. I’ll keep posting here, and if I start inexplicably regaining weight I will definitely return to the SLD.
Nice post. Not surprisingly, I predict you will start to regain the lost weight.
Gee, thanks for the encouragement, Seth!
Only joking. To provide a little additional background: I started slipping in taking the oil due to some temporary unpredictability in my work schedule as well as a couple of other factors. When I saw that I was still losing some weight, my noncompliance with the diet evolved into the intentional experiment I explained in the post.
I’m very interested to see what does happen. I am perhaps exercising a little willpower I wasn’t when I was taking the oil, but my diet and exercise habits are the same for the most part. I intend to keep it that way to get the best result I can.
I’d really like to know if the most significant effects of the SLD are physiological or psychological. Since I feel as though the psychological benefits are still with me, I’m treating this (crude) experiment as a way of finding this out.
[...] is in quotes because I haven’t been following the Shangri-La Diet for a while (see my previous post on the subject). Basically, I stopped taking the oil prescribed by the SLD for a few days out of [...]