This spring, things started to go downhill, I gained about 10 pounds in a couple of months, due largely to an increasing amount of fast food and beer. I decided that I can’t give back all the gains that I had made. I started running in July, and slowly I made progress. Over the weeks, I’ve been able to run longer distances and my walks are now pretty brisk and long. I was getting a little fitter, but I wasn’t losing any weight.

It was time to give SLD another shot, to see if I could take off the 10-15 pounds I’d recently gained and to see if it could get me any closer to my goal weight of 155. So last week I decided to do the following:

• Get back on SLD, consuming about 4 tablespoons a day of extra light olive oil between meals.
• Cut out all soft drinks, diet or not, substituting water, sparkling water and unsweetened tea.
• Cut down on the amount of beer I was drinking (and the amount of alcohol altogether). Instead I’d go back to red wine when I wanted a drink and perhaps the occasional vodka cocktail.
• Cut out fast food altogether. (I’ve broken this a bit, but my consumption is still way down from a few weeks ago.)
• Cut out most processed foods. Instead concentrate on eating meats, fresh (and frozen) vegetables, and fruits and berries, and eggs. This is very close to my low carb diet I was on, but I’m loosening up on the fruits this time and concentrating on leaner, less salty meats like chicken, turkey and fish.

So far so good. I’ve been on it a week and I’ve lost 3-4 pounds already.

A month or two later, frustrated with my inability to lose weight on my own, I looked up Seth’s scientific paper online about what makes food fattening and tried his method. It worked! I started losing weight again.

After a few weeks of sipping sugar water and drinking olive oil, I spent a week in New York for the Del Close Marathon. I was explaining it to a friend and he responded, “Oh you mean the Shangri-la Diet.”

The next day I bought the book and found Seth’s website.

As the months went by and I lost more and more weight, my former prejudice against fats in the diet had been seriously challenged. I was losing weight not by restricting fats (like I had in my 20s), but by adding fats to my diet.

Then I read an interview of Gary Taubes on Seth’s blog. I started reading more about low carb diets.

Finally when I got my Kindle, I read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Taubes. After reading it, I switched to a low carb diet of mostly meat, cheese, eggs and green leafy vegetables, something I had already started to do gradually.

In a discussion on low carb diets on Seth’s website, I saw a reference to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michale Pollan. I downloaded it to my Kindle. I haven’t finished it, but I’m sure it’s going to have a profound affect on how I eat in the future, along with Taubes book. (Pollan chides Taubes in his introduction without mentioning him by name over his 2002 article, “What If It’s All a Big Fat Lie?,” because of what is said about bread. However, their books could easily go hand and hand. For instance, high fructose corn syrup is one of the villains in both books.)

From there, I found eatwild.com, a website with a listing of grass fed beef farms across the United States. Next Saturday, I hope to visit a farm near Springfield. And in June, I’ll be heading to the local farmer’s market in Peoria.

I certainly would not have thought that a book on economics would have so radically changed my eating habits and be responsible for me losing over 50 lbs in little over a year, but in a way, it has. One thing leads to another to another to another.

Female participants consumed two differently flavored desserts. Each was presented three times on separate days. One was formulated with a high-energy content (1882 kJ) and the other with a low-energy content (226 kJ). After training, we found little evidence for learned satiation. However, we did observe flavor-preference learning. Specifically, participants acquired a greater liking and desire-to-eat the dessert flavor that was paired with a higher energy density during training.*

* Emphasis added by me. Also, I don’t mean to suggest that the authors of this study are proponents of SLD or even that they are aware of it, only that the author of SLD cites flavor calorie association studies as early inspirations for his own ideas.

In other words,

• The more we eat high-energy content foods (HECF), the more we will crave such foods.
• The more we eat foods with the same flavor, the more we will crave those foods, as long as those foods are also dense sources of calories.

It doesn’t seem like much of a leap that eating the same foods over and over might contribute to weight gain, provided those foods had a strong, consistent flavor and dense calories. Junk food, fast food, sugary bevarages and heavily processed foods all seem to fit into this theory nicely. Seth Roberts, the author of the Shangri-la Diet, calls these foods ditto foods. I think most people would accept the idea that foods which are dense in calories are fattening. What might be surprising is how important strong, consistent flavors are.

What are some other things that might be true?

• If we eat strongly flavored, dense energy foods, the increased food cravings may make us eat more food in general, not just eat more of the specific food with the association.
• Conversely, if our diet mostly consists of bland foods or foods which are lightly flavored, perhaps we would eat less food overall.

These don’t seem like great leaps of logic. What is surprising is the idea that if you consume flavorless calories in addition to your regular meals, you become satiated sooner, eat less overall and lose weight. Intuitively, it may be hard to wrap our heads around: By adding calories to our diet we consume less overall, as long as those calories are flavorless. But that is exactly how I went from 220 pounds to 180 pounds in about 6 months, by consuming a few hundred calories a day via flavorless oils.

I changed little else in my routine. I didn’t exercise that much. I didn’t starve myself. I did try to avoid ditto foods like McDonalds, but I had already mostly cut those foods out of my diet, SLD just gave me one more reason to avoid those foods.

Lastly, I don’t claim to understand all this. I’m not sure that the oil led to my weight loss. Certainly there could have been another more important factor that I’m not seeing. Perhaps it was mostly a plecebo effect. I hope there are some scientific studies done to determine if this actually works. It should be easy to test in rat trials and I think it should be easy to test in human trials too. For now it seems like an interesting hunch that is amassing a lot of anecdotal evidence.

Calling it a diet is misleading though. It’s more of a way to trick your body into losing weight. I’ve lost more than 30 pounds since I made that video, about 40 pounds total on the Shangri-la Diet. It has not been hard. It hasn’t taken a lot of will power. I don’t starve myself. I never feel deprived.

The idea for the diet was developed by Seth Roberts. The hypothesis is this: your body has a set point, a weight that it wants to be. And your body resists gaining or losing weight. It tries to keep your weight close to this set point. However, this set point can gradually change over time. If your set point dips below your current weight, you will be less hungry and eat less (or burn off more calories in various ways), so that your weight and set point gradually come into sync. If your set point goes up, you will eat more, have more cravings, think more about food, until your body gains enough weight to bring you reach your set point.

But there are ways to affect your set point, to gradually push it up and down. Roberts’ primary insight is to link your set point with flavor calorie associations. Basically, flavors have a big affect on your set point. If you eat things which have strong flavors, consistent flavors and cheap calories, your set point can be driven up and you will crave more, eat more and gain weight. Obviously junk food, processed food and fast foods all have these consistent, strong flavors and plenty of calories too. He calls them ditto foods. The more we eat these kinds of foods, the more we crave them and the more our body wants to gain weight in general.

So he and others who have tried SLD have tried various ways to do the opposite, to disrupt the natural flavor calorie associations. For instance, eating bland food will push your set point down. Eating fresh foods that naturally vary in taste pushes down your set point. Eating lightly flavored foods pushes down your set point. And, most surprisingly, consuming flavorless calories pushes down your set point.

He first tried drinking sugar water. He drank a few hundred calories of fructose a day dissolved in water (simple sweetness is not considered a flavor the same way other things are flavors). He didn’t think it would work. But it did. He lost 35 pounds by drinking sugar water. It’s important to point out that he didn’t stop eating other foods. He added the sugar water to his diet. He simply made sure to drink the sugar water within a 2 hour flavorless window. He didn’t taste any flavors for one hour before or after drinking the sugar water. Eventually someone suggested flavorless oils like Extra Light Olive Oil (not Extra Virgin). That seemed to work too. People also tried crazy spicing, where they added random flavors to dishes that otherwise would taste the same each time. Others tried eating foods with noseclips on.

I’ve tried all these techniques. My weight loss was very steady up until about a month ago. I’ve mostly been stalled since then.

My Weight Chart:

I’m trying to figure out what is stalling me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve started drinking coffee (many suspect that coffee, like chocolate is a strong ditto food and tends to push up your set point). I’ve been eating 1 or 2 eggs a day, although I don’t think that is the problem. The amount of simple carbs has increased from several sources. Still, I’m thankful that I’ve lost this much and I’m holding steady. I’m starting to workout again. Perhaps some weight training will help me break through this plateau.

If I make any more progress (or if I start to lose significant ground), I’ll post about it again.