Seth's Blog

I started drinking lots of tea when I started the Shangri-La Diet. The diet made me crave food with smell, which tea provided. I started chewing gum, too, but that was less enjoyable, maybe because I never became a gum connoisseur.

I recently learned about Teeccino coffee-substitute “tees” (brewed like tea) from Patrick Pineda of Tisano. They resemble Pero but with more flavor and variety. I really liked the first two flavors I tried (Vanilla Nut and French Roast) so I wrote to Teeccino asking for samples of all the flavors. In addition to no caffeine, Teechino drinks are high in inulin, a soluble fiber.

Here are my comments on the samples.

Dandelion Dark Roast. Similar to French Roast (relatively strong coffee taste) but more earthy-tasting. Maybe that’s the dandelion.

French Vanilla. Strong vanilla taste. Too much like vanilla for me, I want something more complicated.

Caramel Nut. Halfway between  caramel and burnt caramel, which I like. As complex as French Roast.

Mocha. Excellent. Complexity of coffee plus complexity of chocolate.

Chocolate. Like mocha, except darker coffee flavor.

Original. Excellent. Weaker coffee flavor plus fruity complexity.

Almond Amaretto. Wonderful combination of coffee flavor with nutty almond/amaretto flavor.

Java. Rounded coffee flavor.

Chocolate Mint. Enough mint but not enough chocolate and coffee.

Southern Pecan. Delicious. Pecan and coffee flavors well-balanced. I wonder: What does Northern Pecan taste like?

Maya Chai. Tastes like chai. I would prefer, in addition, a dark coffee taste.

Greg Pomerantz writes:

Over the Thanksgiving [2012] holiday, I suggested to a relative, Richard, that he try the Shangri-la Diet. At the time I had heard about it but did not know anyone who had tried it. I did not have any particular reason to think it would work, but since Rich had tried a number of other diets (including low carb, which he is still following for the most part) I thought it would be worth a shot.

He started the diet over the Thanksgiving holiday and has kept it up since then with a few breaks. He lost 13 pounds in the first month and another 6 pounds over the next two weeks. Altogether he lost a total of 32 pounds over the 16 weeks following Thanksgiving, an average of 2 pounds per week. During this period, he traveled a fair amount and was not able to maintain the diet every day. However, he reported that one of his favorite things about the Shangri-la Diet is how easy it is to restart after a lapse. He began using extra light olive oil but has switched to walnut oil.

There were two surprising results other than the weight loss (which I think is exceptional in its own right). First, his blood sugar control has improved, even compared to the low carbohydrate diet he was (and still is) consuming. Second, he has been sleeping better at night due to a reduction in his nighttime appetite. I believe the two may be related — one of his medications for type 2 diabetes greatly increases his appetite and causes weight gain. He has been using much less of that medication because of his improved blood sugar on the Shangri-la Diet. Therefore, reduced appetite from the diet plus a reduction in an appetite-increasing medication results in lower nighttime appetite and therefore better sleep.

A friend of this blog writes:

What prompted me to try SLD: When I first went paleo I dropped 30 pounds with no exercise or food restriction, but my weight has been stable for about a year. In January and February [2013] I went through a bad allergy spell, with my nose congested all the time. I dropped six pounds in that time. When the seasonal allergy went away, the weight came right back. Calories without smell suddenly look like a big factor.

Here is a paper about the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet.

My theory of weight control predicts that eating unfamiliar food will cause weight loss. As food becomes familiar, we learn to associate its smell with its calories. Stronger smell-calorie associations produce a higher set point than weaker ones. Unfamiliar food has not yet gone through this learning process.

One way to eat unfamiliar food is to travel to another country. When I’ve done this, I’ve usually come home a few pounds lighter, supporting the prediction.

Another way is to have someone else choose what you’ll eat.  This is what Dan Goldstein did. “I emailed my friend Dan Reeves, who has a fitness-expert sister named Melanie Reeves Wicklow, to request a healthy diet I could follow for seven days with no exceptions.” He thought of it as a diet where he would make no decisions about what to eat.

Here’s what happened on Day One:

Discovered that if you eat oatmeal with an egg in it instead of just oatmeal, you feel full for much longer.

Here’s what happened overall:

I lost 15 pounds in about a couple months after the “no-decision” diet. (I lost no weight during the week of the diet).

My explanation: During the week of the diet, he ate the specified amounts, which were more than he would have eaten based on hunger. This kept his weight up. During the following weeks, three things happened: 1. He resumed eating according to hunger. His lower set point caused lack of hunger, which caused less eating, which caused weight loss. 2. Because he ate less, his set point went down. 3. During the no-decision week, he picked up some new habits, causing him to eat less familiar food during the following weeks. He says that the no-decision week “changed his cravings” and caused him to “commit to eating better”.

He also says the no-decision week caused him to exercise more but no details are given. I doubt this made a difference. Few people lose 15 pounds in two months from exercise so minor that they don’t bother to describe it.

Thanks to Andrew Gelman.

From a trip to Japan a friend gave me a mystery jar of some sort of flavoring. It turned out to be wasabi-flavored furikake. Furikake is used to season rice, I learned. It vaguely resembles salt and pepper but is far more complex and powerful. A version I bought has 25 ingredients, including sesame, wheat flour, lactose, salt, MSG, salmon, fish bone powder, and soybean protein. I use it many ways: on roast beef, eggs, and yogurt, for example. It is the easiest way I know to make hamburgers taste good.

The nearest Japanese market (in Berkeley) has 25 different types, I discovered. They cost about $4 each. I bought four. I’m going to buy ten more, to use for crazy spicing (randomly varying the smell of food to prevent strong smell-calorie associations from forming).

• Natto Commuter Pass. Really. A Tokyo restaurant has innovative ways to sell/serve natto.
• How to give an academic talk. I agree with almost all of this but it leaves out two important things: 1. Be as emotional as possible. Convey as much emotion as possible. 2. Tell stories. A good talk is a story.
• Repetition in the history of diets
• Fermentation bubbles back into the mainstream (newspaper article)
• Stinky cheeses in China
• Aaron Swartz lawyers accuse prosecutor Stephen Heymann of misconduct
• Michael Wolff on Renata Adler

Thanks to Rashad Mamood.

• Low pay at Weight Watchers. “The $18 base rate for running meetings has not increased in more than a decade. . . . The restlessness over low pay extends across the weight-loss industry to Weight Watchers’ rivals, including Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem.”
• At Berkeley I told undergraduates: “Do as many internships as possible. Take as few courses as possible.” Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) has a similar view and suggests that college should be built around this idea.
• The Umami Burger empire
• The Positive Deviance Initiative
• Michael Wolff on Edward Jay Epstein’s Annals of Unsolved Crimes
• Another teacher who stopped grading. “It has honestly been the best thing I have implemented in my career.”

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

In a recent post on the Shangri-La Diet forums, Morex, who lives in Mexico, describes several great side effects of the Shangri-La Diet:

1. At peace with food. “I am in control of what I eat. If I want I have a piece of chocolate or some peanuts, but food is no longer in command. Food is no longer an obstacle or an excuse. This is FANTASTIC! For 40 years I had a horrible relationship with food. It commanded my every activity in the day. I was always on the look for better flavors and foods that would quench my never fading hunger. This is no longer an issue.”

2. No more junk food. “Thanks to SLD, I quit junk food. I no longer crave it and when I have tasted it, it’s horrible! Too salty and greasy. Or too sweet. That means no soda, pizza, chips, donuts, candy or anything like that. When I want something sweet in the afternoon, I’d have a teaspoon of honey and that’s it.”

3. More money.  ”We eat so little that we are saving extra cash. Who knows, maybe we could soon afford a nice vacation on the beach! (Vacations for Mexicans in Mexico are VERY expensive.)”

4. More time. Much more time. “Since we have been doing SLD, our days are longer! Because of the fact that we eat so very little portions, we are barely cooking. And when we do, it lasts for about 4 days! Before SLD we spent about an hour a meal. 30 mins. cooking, and 30 mins. eating. Some days it was longer, depending on what we cooked. That means that we spent about 3 or 4 hours a day cooking and eating. Now we prepare meals in about 10 minutes and eat in about 5!!! That’s right. For breakfast I have half a bran cookie, some cereal or some fruit. For lunch I just heat up in the microwave something we cooked. For dinner we have a little oatmeal or cereal. And that’s it! My days are longer for 3 hours! We have been reading our books (we’re book worms here), watching movies we didn’t have the time to watch and going out for walks!! FREAKING AWESOME!”

I didn’t have the first two problems (loss of control and junk food) but I too distinctly noticed saving money and (especially) time. Just like he says. It’s been a long time since I wrote The Shangri-La Diet but I think I failed to mention how much time and money I saved. (If I’m wrong, please correct me.)

What about his weight? He doesn’t have a scale but says this: “Before SLD I was size 44. Today [after 2 months of SLD] I am 38, which I haven’t been able to wear since I was in the University (19 years old).” He wants to get to size 36. He also posts several pictures, before and after.

Thanks, Morex.

An Indianapolis man named Hugh, who goes by Nufftin on the Shangri-La Diet forums, has been blogging about his weight loss (including graphs) at increments of 10 pounds lost (he writes a post when he’s lost 10 pounds, 20 pounds, etc.). So far he’s lost more than 50 pounds and is close to his goal weight, which is near his weight in college.

I decided to read all the entries and note what I learned. He started more than a year ago.

November 2011. He’s been gaining weight for a long time. He is about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs more than 200 pounds, giving him a BMI in the 30s. He does not explain why he decided to try it. He has nice clothes that no longer fit.

April 2012 (10 pounds down). It took a long time to lose the first 10 pounds because he started just before Thanksgiving and Christmas, big eating holidays, and he gave up. He started again January 1 and gave up again. Then he started again in February. Daily weight spikes can be as much as 4 pounds (he weighs 4 pounds more on Tuesday than he did on Monday), but that only happened once (New Year’s Party?). After he becomes consistent with the diet (in February), the graph of his daily weights is enormously convincing that the diet works.

May 2012 (20 pounds down). Here’s exactly how he does the diet: “a shot glass full of extra-light tasting olive oil in the morning, with no eating for an hour each side; two heaping tablespoons of table sugar dissolved in as much water as it will take to dissolve it in the evening.” (You can see why I would write a rather short book about such a diet.)  He also does 15 minutes of exercise most days but I won’t describe it in detail since it doesn’t seem to matter — he stops exercising but keeps losing weight. Some old clothes now fit again. Only two people have commented on his weight loss. Maybe everyone notices but intentional weight loss is so rare it could be he’s dying. (Which is what one of my Berkeley colleagues thought about my weight loss. He actually said, “Are you dying?”) No one wants to hear that.

July 2012 (30 pounds down). The diet does require some effort. “I lost concentration for a couple of nights and, BOOM. To be fair, it was due to two great dinner parties (feta cheese hamburgers and The Descendants at one, Cuban sandwiches at the other).” These two “losses of concentration” did not have long-term effects. After 5-6 days — how long it took an unusually large amount of food to pass through his body and his salt balance to return to normal? — after those parties, his weight returned to its usual downward line.

September 2012 (40 pounds down). One of his shirts is now too big for him. He gained 6 pounds during a two-week trip. The gained weight comes off quickly (in about a week) but this time there is a noticeable long-term effect: Weight loss resumes at the same rate as before but the function is shifted by two weeks. He stops his 15 minutes of exercise and nothing happens to his rate of weight loss.

January 2013 (50 pounds down). It has taken 15 months to lose 50 pounds. There was one serious plateau, from December 2012 to January 2013, where he did not lose weight. Almost all of his pants are too big. He can take off his shirt at the pool.

It simply cannot be that drinking sugar water causes weight loss. Sugar caused the obesity epidemic! It simply cannot be that eating fat will cause weight loss. Eating fat is why we’re fat! Everyone knows this. It simply cannot be that whether you smell a food while you eat it makes any difference. Weight loss is all about calories in, calories out.  The Shangri-La Diet says all three things are true. I cannot think of an historical precedent. Science has uncovered all sorts of unlikely stuff but nothing so surprising that is also immediately useful.

I thought of the Shangri-La Diet when I read this description by Michael Lewis of what Goldman Sachs has recently done: (more…)