The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet

Any new diet will seem to work for a few months or weeks, you're losing weight and everything seems wonderful, you tell all your friends and they buy the same diet book, and then bam the flavor-calorie association kicks back in and you're back to hell. The number-one result of weight-loss science is that 95% of people who lose weight regain it.

This suggests that the important factor in weight loss has nothing to do with any specific diet. Rather the key is the sudden shock to the endocrinological system that goes along with starting a new diet. Given any stable diet, your system will adapt to keep you at a certain weight. But if you constantly change your diet, your system will never be able to adapt.

Proposal: the meta-diet. Get 12 wonder diet books. Mark each month with a corresponding diet (Jan. is Atkin's, Feb is Shangri-La, ...) Every month, ditch the previous diet without a second thought and scrupulously adhere to the new one.

After reading all the comments and getting a lot more details about Eliezer's situation and the general responses to SLA, I have a theory:

SLA works by reducing appetite. The majority of the time, if you reduce appetite that causes people to eat less. When they eat less, they usually lose weight.

The problem is that SLA won't work if that link is broken. If you already weren't eating when you were hungry, then changing your hunger levels might not change how much you eat, which would result in you eating the same amount or if adding the oil doesn't reduce that amount you eat slightly more. In Eliezer's case, he already has so much willpower that he can break the link if he wants to, so SLA didn't solve the right problem. There are other ways to unlink that don't involve willpower, as well. For these people, SLA doesn't work. For another group, the link is severed past X pounds lost so it stops working.

Out of curiousity, on the specific subject of this diet: did you try blocking your sense of smell, preferably for the entire duration of the "no flavors" period?

As an enthusiastic home cook, the first thing that came to mind for me is that the vast majority of what we interpret as "flavor" is actually an interplay of taste and smell (hence why almost everything tastes like crap when you have nasal congestion). I recall that research has shown smell as having partiularly strong associative powers for memory, so it would not surprise me to find that it's actually a smell-calorie association at work, totally independent of what you actually put in your mouth.

Ergo, I would predict that experiencing strong smells around the same time as taking the flavorless calories would sabotage the effect catastrophically. Unfortunately for the pursuit of science, I have a naturally and stubbornly low bodyweight set point, so I can't test this personally.

I'm just going to put this here because I was rather annoyed, after the fact, not to have been warned*: Drinking oil straight (which I tried for the first time this morning) is disgusting. It made me want to puke, although fortunately this had worn off by the end of the one-hour window when I wanted to eat. (Also, then I had a perfectly typical lunch which I enjoyed a normal amount and did not feel less motivated to eat than usual.)

*My model of what things are and are not disgusting to eat straight predicted this, but my model of how people talk about diets predicted that if it was in fact that disgusting, it would be a listed drawback of the diet.

So you have a theory personally developed and promoted by an enthusiastic individual, a whole slew of positival anecdotal evidence, but no actual proper experimental verification. Sound much like - ooh any complementary or alternative medical treatment you'd care to mention? Are you sure you're being fully rational here?

From Eliezer's other article:

You can never be sure in the realm of the mind... but out in material foodland, I know that I was, in fact, drinking extra-light olive oil in the fashion prescribed. There is no reason within Roberts's theory why it shouldn't have worked.

Which just means Roberts's theory is incomplete. In the complicated mess that is the human metabolism there is something else that needs to be considered. (My guess would be "something to do with insulin".)

As a diabetic (the kind caused by immunology, not the kind caused by diet), I am able to measure and experiment with insulin and blood sugar directly. I also think that Roberts is entirely wrong about why his diet works, and unless I see a study that says otherwise, I will believe that it would work equally well if you filled the olive oil with (metabolically inert) spices.

The real answer is that having fat in your system and being digested creates a buffer against blood sugar lows, which would make you feel hungry. If you eat some olive oil in the morning, the period in which it's being digested covers all three meals; on the other hand, fat eaten with dinner is mostly digested while you sleep. Normal appetite approximately matches energy expenditure, but blood sugar crash-driven eating is extra on top of that.

and we would cryopreserve anyone who got in our way. You have no idea.

I just noticed this little gem. I'm going to adopt it as my default expression when extreme declarations of uncompromising resolve are called for!

Obvious test is obvious: Does IV calories work similarly?

The Shangri-La diet maybe works by bypassing the flavour-calorie association. If the calories go directly to your bloodstream; the bypass can't really get any cleaner.

While controlled trials for SLA would be great, Roberts' advocacy of self-experimentation is awesome, and if it leads him to being biased against big studies...well...he is still adding to our collective knowledge.

Anyway, SLA kicked ass for me. I think I lost 8 lbs in the first couple weeks, 15 lbs in 2 or 3 months. But individual endocrinology varies widely and I can easily believe it doesn't work for everyone. Or maybe you're doing it wrong :). Also, even though SLA worked great for me at the beginning, it wore off over the course of months. I dunno if it was b/c I got closer to my set point, or b/c I started developing an association with the limited amount of flavor there is even in ELOO.

And yeah, like you say, use oil not fructose water.

I've seen Roberts mention once or twice on his blog that he couldn't get a controlled experiment approved by the review board. (No details.) Also he seemed open to the diet just not working for some people.

Some variations haven't been mentioned here, like adding random combos of spices to your food to mix up the flavor. What I settled on, what worked for me without any unpleasantness drawing on willpower over time, was to pour flaxseed oil on toast and eat it noseclipped.

FWIW, one of the reasons Shangri-la didn't quite work for me at first is that I had acid reflux issues. My reflux belches apparently count as "a taste" and after I started taking Zantac to control them - and also drinking less carbonated soda - it worked much better. Another problem I had is an issue S-L has in common with some other diet systems such as Eat-Stop-Eat - any encouragement to "eat whatever you want" when on the diet/regimen is counterproductive if you're eating for any reason other than hunger. I sometimes eat due to boredom or stress or habit; S-L won't stop me from doing that. And it definitely doesn't help to be parsimonious about the sugar or oil because you're afraid of calorie consumption - small amounts just don't work.

What did sort of work for me was to combine S-L with a certain amount of calorie counting - trying to make a conscious effort to cut back net calorie consumption a little, but not too much. To the degree that even that didn't work, it was mostly a matter of akrasy - the oil is nauseating and unsatisfying in the moment I take it so I often didn't feel like taking it.

It's especially hard to come to grips with the idea that even if it works, SL is something you pretty much have to keep doing for the rest of your life. It's the same problem many people have with antidepressants. You take a treatment and if the treatment works it seems like you're getting better and then that you've gotten better, so you start wondering if you really need to keep taking it. Eventually you fall off the treatment...and lose all the previous gains.

What kind of rationalists are you? There is one way to lose weight with tons of research backing it, and perfectly valid molecular explanation how it works - one ECA pill every morning until you're done, if you're losing weight faster than 1kg/week definitely eat more as that's not very healthy.

You should behave like proper rationalists now, read some pubmed, order some pills, and lose as much weight as you want. No significant side effects observed, unlike "natural" dieting which causes hunger, loss of willpower, loss of energy etc. Your appetite will be so low you'll have to use alarm clock to remind yourself to eat, but it won't hurt when you do, so no willpower expended either way. Ask any random bodybuilder for advice if you need it, they mastered the art of getting rid of fat without harming rest of the body.

I'm 79 kg (bmi 22) down from 106 kg (bmi 30) five years ago, so unlike 95% of after-diet rebouncers I know what I'm talking about.

I haven't heard any complaints from people regaining weight they lost on the Shangri-La Diet,

I've been doing informal research on diet and weight loss for 2 years now. I can say that there seems to be a survivorship bias problem. i.e. people seem to be more likely to report their early success than their later failure. Which is a problem since in diet and weight loss, long term results are what matters.

In fact, when I pester people for updates, I normally get either good news or no response. I don't recall even one person telling me that they fell off the wagon and regained everything.

Just drink two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil early in the morning... don't eat anything else for at least an hour afterward... and in a few days it will no longer take willpower to eat less; you'll feel so full all the time, you'll have to remind yourself to eat.

...and then increase the dose to 4 tablespoons if that doesn't work, and then try some other stuff such as crazy-spicing your food if that doesn't work, according to page 62 and Chapter 6 of Roberts' "Shangri-La" Diet" book. I hope you at least tried the higher dose before giving up.

A more elegant explanation of the effectiveness of the diet would be that eating a calorically-dense food in the morning knocks your fat metabolism into gear.

I would like to take measurement of body temperatures while on the Shangri-La diet; I would expect body temperature to rise significantly from its nighttime low towards maximal resting temperaturen when olive oil was consumed (oil/fat being the most calorically dense macronutrient). Fat storage is very powerful, and very mysterious to doctors. If you're body doesn't feel comfortable losing weight, you will find it extremely difficult to do so and even more difficult to keep the weight off. The most important thing is to balance the body's nutrient needs and remove stressors that would cause of enhance weight gain. Any human could run for days on end if they were able to access this fat storage without other constraints (and the point of V02 training is to increase access to this energy).

http://learnthis.ca/2011/02/how-to-boost-your-metabolism/

Other people have suggested similar things, but I'll take it a step farther: the issue may simply be fidelity of sensory input neurons, i.e. different things count as "having taste" for different people. I assure you, you could give me olive oil so lite that it glowed, and it would still have a very distinctive and strong taste to me.

This, I guess, is where the noseclip suggestion came from.

I have an (I think) better idea: "drink" the stuff by putting it in a (clean!) turkey baster, stick the turkey baster in the back of your throat, and squeeze. If you have a gag reflex problem, not so much, of course, but I'd sure be interested to find out how that works for people who have tried the diet and had it fail.

-Robin

Rethinking Thin has somewhat about what's known about the biology of hunger, satiation, and fat loss and retention. It's complicated. It's complicated even for "normal" people, and less is known about how it can vary or break.

I respect Seth's approach of self-experimentation, and I wish people for whom the Shangri-La diet doesn't work would poke around to see what weird thing they might find that works for them. However, I've seen Seth wildly over-generalize and over-recommend about the things that work for him. IIRC, he has mentioned that SLD works for about half the people who try it. I don't know if that means lowering fat to a goal level, or includes just stably losing 30 pounds.

Eliezer, do you eat more or less in response to low grade nausea? I have a hypothesis as to why the diet didn't work me for me. Mostly, the diet had no effect but occasionally I had appetite suppression with auxiliary symptoms that reminded me of the first trimester of pregnancy. In my case, the activated pathways seem to be related. I think maybe the diet works by making you nauseous, but since there's no flavor there's no obvious Garcia effect.

I'm not actually sure that the diet, as you've written it, would work even if the theory were complete. You say that an association is formed between flavor X and calories and that association with X controls the set point. But why would X be the dominant factor, when you're already eating flavors A, B, through to W whose contribution to the set point got you to the weight you started at? Does the book elaborate on how the association works?

As far as the oil diet, I tried it last year but didn't find much benefit. I had lost 40 pounds a year eralier and have kept it off since then through teeth-clenched, iron-willed, unceasing self-control. I tried oil for a few months and I can't really say it made it any easier. The oil tended to induce nausea which did suppress my appetite for a few hours, but it wasn't much fun feeling sick a lot.

You can alternatively drink sugar water in place of the oil, because sugar, in Roberts' model, does not have flavor.

By the way, "the set-point diet" is already taken - http://amzn.com/0061288675. (I tried this one and it did not work for me.)

This has been touched on indirectly in other comments, but it seems the simplest explanation of the failure mode described would be that the technique is just not being correctly performed, that there's some simple key variable that no one thinks to control for. Maybe you smell someone else in the building cooking breakfast, or brush your teeth with mint toothpaste, or use the wrong brand of oil.

On the note of self-testing vs. controlled experiment, has anyone here tried the polyphasic ("uberman") sleep cycle? Does anyone know of any controlled experiments, either self-administered or larger-scale, which I could look at? I was interested in trying it a few years ago, but dropped in in about 24 hours (before I could have really even been said to try it) due to microsleep in waking hours.

The background article for Shangri-La diet is titled What makes food fattening? A Pavlovian theory of weight control. This theory doesn't strike me as particularly Pavlovian. It might be more appropriate to call it a Powersian theory.

This post has generated a disproportionate number of comments. I think it illustrates the common struggles we all face in attempting to optimize our own behavior as well as that of others. At what point does other-optimizing become a case of trying to hard and lapsing into failure mode, a disutility loop if you will. The UC Berkeley writer Michael Pollan summed up his dietary advice in seven words: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." Or how about renowned nutritionist Marion Nestle: "East less, move more." Of course, one of the joys of living is eating. Why not let the activity provide pleasure and utility? Is it the calories we are trying to conrol, or are we attempting to achieve mastery over some portion of our or other's behavior in order to comfort ourselves with an illusion of control? Is it what you're eating or is it what's eating you, to put it colloquially?

FWIW, my diet gurus are mostly here: http://calorierestriction.org/

What I find interesting is this matches, almost exactly, the 30 pounds I lost when I decided to consistently take a multi-vitamin with every meal on the theory that hunger was caused (at least at times) by vitamin deficiencies, and maybe making sure I was flush with vitamins would help.

Worked great for a month or so - I lost (and have kept off) 30 pounds (Unfortunately that means I'm down to 310). Then it just kinda stopped - I haven't gone back up (indeed there have been moments when it acted like it might start going back down again, but so far I'm stuck in fluctuation mode).

But what it to me interesting is this is the second occasion that happened - the first time was four years ago when I started buying flavored carbonated waters, and drinking those on a regular basis - not fatty at all, and flavored (both in opposition to, arguably, the vitamins), but virtually identical results (I did regain that weight, but only at an identical rate to my previous weight gain.).

Maybe I can switch them out?

Jonnan

The diet pretty obviously works because fat plays a huge role in satiety. If you can get a certain amount of fat in the lowest caloric form possible (olive oil, most likely), you won't be have to eat massively caloric things like bacon cheeseburgers in order to slake your hunger.

Still, good diet and exercise are the keys to staying thin. Satisfy your hunger by filling up on vegetables and lean protein. Exercise harder, eat less.

"Roberts seems to think he does have the whole answer. If the diet doesn't work at first, his answer is to try more oil... "

Coincidentally, I started looking into the diet a couple days before you posted this. I saw a few examples of him saying "try more oil", but didn't follow closely enough to see if that ever worked.

You make it sound like it doesn't, but how much evidence do you have on this?

You said it explained you losing 50lbs or so, but now it doesn't work for you. Why don't you try more variations until you do find something that works for you? It seems like it would take relatively little effort to try a few things, and might clue you in to the missing piece of the theory you're talking about.

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