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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1992 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 15, 2024

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Anyone ever try the Shangri-La diet? It didn't work for Yud but apparently nothing works for him, even Ozempic. Other people report near-miraculous results.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BD4oExxQguTgpESdm/the-unfinished-mystery-of-the-shangri-la-diet

The concept is that your body's "set point" is controlled by access to familiar, flavorful food that your body associates with caloric intake. Your set point goes higher when you consume familiar high flavor/high calorie food. In the ancestral environment it made sense to take on extra fat when berries and nuts were plentiful.

On the other hand, the set point can go down when these familiar foods aren't available. Many people experience weight loss when traveling to an unfamiliar country and eating unfamiliar food. Seth Roberts, inventor of the diet, experienced this weight loss when traveling and drinking unfamiliar sugary beverages, not exactly a health food.

So here's the Shangri-La diet. Every day, drink one tablespoon of extra light olive oil (extra light flavor) mixed with water. Plug your nose so you don't taste it at all. This should happen during a window where you don't consume any flavors for one hour before or after.

Having calories but no flavor breaks the association between flavorful foods and caloric availability and lowers your set point. Or something.

I'm skeptical but I'm willing to give it a try.

Keto worked great for me but unfortunately I'm a cholesterol hyper responder and my levels shot up to over 400. That's probably fine, but I'm conservative so I gave up. Unfortunately, the weight all came back over the next 6 months. So now I'm trying this. Hope it works!

Why olive oil? Why not use one of the flavorless oils used for frying?

Same thing essentially, there might be some biochemical downside but a tablespoon a day is far below typical intake in a western diet so..

breaks the association

This isn't how your - or anyone's - body works.

Here's all of dieting summed up:

  • Processed foods and sugar are the devil. You have to stop eating them completely. There is no other way.
  • Put protein at the center of your diet. Every full meal you eat should contain a non-trivial amount of protein. Protein is meat, poultry, pork, eggs, and dairy. You can supplement (but not replace) with protein powders.
  • Figure out if you are fat or carb sensitive. Most people just retain a lot more of one or the other. You do this by keeping track of what you're eating day-to-day, nothing how you feel (lethargic, tired, etc.), and then weighing yourself.
  • Like sleep, regularity is important. Eat at the same times as much as possible (this is hard when traveling, I understand that). Snacks can be snacks in that they're smaller meals. They can't be absent minded. Plan your snacks.
  • Hydrate

I'd argue against bullet point 1, or at least ratchet it back a bit. I read Robert Lustig's book Metabolical and he is clearly wrong about a number of things. Sugar (sucrose, fructose, etc.) is obviously not great to eat constantly and vigilance and curating one's consumption of it can only help, but Lustig calls it a "toxin." It's not a toxin. Or, rather, it's not a toxin in small enough doses. I'd also flag "processed" food as overly vague. There are lots of meanings to the word processed and again just being processed doesn't necessarily make a food harmful to eat. Another point against Lustig (and I realize I'm the one mentioning him, not you, but he has been my most recent exposure to these same claims you're making) is he bangs the drum about "organic" food, a thing which always makes me immediately hold whoever's doing it suspect. Organic farms are arguably less sustainable than non-organic farms, and are not pesticide-free.. (Once again I realize you have not pushed organic food.)

I personally agree with your view on protein, as well as the importance of sleep and hydration.

Agree that "organic" types give me pause as well. Monsanto is just Gregor Mendel with a legal department. More food is pretty much always better in a global context.

Also agree that sugar isn't a "toxin" but that the highly refined granulated stuff (that is also present as a preservative in lots of foods) fucks hard with your pancreas and associated insulin cycles. That Type 2 Diabetes is now somehow mostly an acquired malady is evidence enough for this.

Re: "processed" foods, my general rule is to stay on the perimeter of the supermarket and, for main meals, that I must somehow be preparing the food via application of heat. If I'm not doing that, I should be conscious of what I'm eating; I don't have to "cook" milk, yogurt, cheese, nuts, nut butters, fruit, veggies. I should be the one cooking various meats. This is why I stay away from veggies (error), things in a can generally (massive exception here is canned fish).

Something I definitely overlooked: If you're eating at home for most of your meals, you're going to see results. For a variety of reasons, purchased full meals (anywhere from fast food to fast casual to sit down restaurants) is horrible for you. But that's the market meeting a demand. It is not the fault of "evil" corporations or mom and pop Italian restaurants.

I don't know if it's true or not but I feel as if living here in Japan for the last two decades really changed my diet. Like I haven't bought any sort of jarred pasta sauce since around 1999, but as a kid my mom served the Ragu weekly, and as a youth and young man I wouldn't think twice about it. I make my own salsa, guacamole, etc. But this is also largely because you just can't find that stuff regularly where I am. I have been known to make pot pies from scratch, simply because I get nostalgic for the frozen food of my childhood in the South.

Unlike what you're saying I eat many more vegetables now, as well as fruit. Probably at least part of that is because of my wife's skill in preparation.

I'd be a blob of walking triglycerides if I still lived in the states. Maybe.

Unlike what you're saying I eat many more vegetables now, as well as fruit.

Wait, I think this is what I am saying?

I took

This is why I stay away from veggies

to mean you avoid vegetables. Maybe just those in a can? Although you should know canned and frozen vegetables often retain many of their nutrients just fine, this is particularly true of frozen vegetables. I dislike making such statements without a good source though. Probably you already know this and are avoiding the added sugars/sodium etc.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Massive typographic error on my part. I don't stay away from veggies. Fixed in the original comment.

I think like all things, the dose makes the poison here. The modern diet has so much processed food and sugar in it that it’s a toxin in that high amount. We probably eat and drink more sugar in a day or two than a farmer in 1500 would have consumed in a month.

I have some observations that support the idea that modern flavors are hyper palatable and probably not only encourage overeating at the time, but also make a normal human diet unappealing. I don’t think olive oil and water actually do anything, my personal suggestion is to simply eat bland unprocessed foods until you get used to tasting the subtle flavors of normal foods.

I think the same is true of entertainment— if you don’t do the hyper-stimulating games and tv shows and so on and just do things that people would have done in 1900 you’ll find books, magazines, board and card games, and radio dramas just as interesting as video gaming.

Hyper stimulation is a real phenomenon and I think it’s generally good to occasionally “fast” from those things, and learn to slow down and get back closer to the kind of lifestyle that was normal for most of human history.

That's probably true for many. I recently got my buddy back home to stop drinking sodas. Whether he has kept up the abstinence I obviously don't know. I avoid drinking anything sweet, and only rarely even drink orange juice, which I remember I used to love. I can't even remember the last time I had it. I live in Japan with a Japanese wife and have Japanese in-laws though so my diet is dramatically different from what it used to be. Hopefully I am getting some of the acquired/acquirable health benefits of living here.

What do you think causes people on the Shangri-La diet to lose weight? I'll present a few possibilities.

  1. The mechanism explained in the Less Wrong article is correct
  2. Something else we don't understand
  3. No one actually loses weight, they are lying
  4. Simply watching one's weight is sufficient to lose weight
  5. Survivorship bias: only the people who lost weight report it

In any case, there don't seem to be any downsides and the anecdotal evidence is strong. I don't need a causal mechanism as long as it's safe which this diet obviously is.

I think it's a combination of 4 and 5.

  • Survivorship bias applies not only to reporting, but to continuing with the diet at all. If you give up then you're not going to report that it didn't work.
  • Simply watching one's weight is often enough to lose weight due to correlation if not causation. Those who press forward and continue to watch their weight and follow any diet are likely making other lifestyle changes too.
  • A 2 hour window where you eat very little is probably a big improvement on its own for most people. You need to plan out your meals much better and cannot mindlessly snack (you at least need to check you're not within the window first).

Only downside is wasting time and effort and (as with EY) potentially convincing yourself that dieting doesn't work.

I think it's worth trying, but improving physical health is really a lifelong goal. These gimmick diets might work for losing the initial weight, but you need to be willing to keep the diet up forever or learn the fundamental skills involved if you don't want the weight to come right back.

A 2 hour window where you eat very little is probably a big improvement on its own for most people. You need to plan out your meals much better and cannot mindlessly snack (you at least need to check you're not within the window first).

Forgot to add that one! Rules make it harder to consume calories. But... I don't think that explains it. Even intermittent fasting is not a particularly effective strategy. The problem is that fasting now just makes you hungry later.

I think it's worth trying, but improving physical health is really a lifelong goal. These gimmick diets might work for losing the initial weight, but you need to be willing to keep the diet up forever or learn the fundamental skills involved if you don't want the weight to come right back.

Funny how modern humans need "fundamental skills" but people 50 years ago just lived their normal lives and stayed skinny. This strikes me as Usain Bolt saying "you need to develop the skills to run fast" as if 99% of it wasn't God-given.

Funny how modern humans need "fundamental skills" but people 50 years ago just lived their normal lives and stayed skinny. This strikes me as Usain Bolt saying "you need to develop the skills to run fast" as if 99% of it wasn't God-given.

This doesn't contradict my point. These fundamental skills may not have been necessary in the past, but environmental factors have made them necessary nowadays. If people in the 70's time-travelled to today they'd need to develop those skills too.

Food today is cheaper, more plentiful, more tasty, and less healthy than your average king would have had access to in the past. Exercise is also much less important; you can get anywhere by car, and most modern entertainment is available right from the comfort of your home.

I'm not blaming you for needing to lose weight. I probably need to lose more weight than you do. But no diet is a silver bullet, especially if you don't intend to follow it forever.

I'm not blaming you for needing to lose weight. I probably need to lose more weight than you do. But no diet is a silver bullet, especially if you don't intend to follow it forever.

For the record, I don't expect the Shangri-La diet to work. I just hope it does. If it does, I probably will follow it forever.

Exercise is also much less important; you can get anywhere by car, and most modern entertainment is available right from the comfort of your home.

This is a red herring, IMO. Activity is not the problem. In fact, it has been reported that Americans are MORE active than they were in the 1970s when things like yoga and jogging were virtually unheard of.

It's common knowledge that you get fit in the gym but you lose weight in the kitchen. I am above the 90th percentile for activity. I can run circles around most people my age. My resting heart rate is in the 40s. And I lift. But I am still over 20% body fat according to scans. If you're focused on activity, you're barking up the wrong tree.

  1. Simply watching one's weight is sufficient to lose weight
  2. Survivorship bias: only the people who lost weight report it

Pretty much these two things. Most diets fail because the diet-er just stops.

Seth Roberts, inventor of the diet, experienced this weight loss when traveling and drinking unfamiliar sugary beverages, not exactly a health food.

I want everyone that posts about how they lost weight on vacation to post their step counter with averages outside of vacation and on vacation. My own experience is that I just walk a lot more on vacation, like an average of 10,000 steps more in a typical day, with peaks much higher than that. Unsurprisingly, this burns a bunch of calories. So is it magical European sodas, or did he just walk more?

That seems like the obvious answer.

Personally, activity levels have no bearing on my weight. I just got back from California where I walked 10 miles per day on average. I gained weight. Eating 4,000 calories in a day is just so easy and enjoyable for me. I'd say I'm 90th percentile in activity and my resting heart rate is in the 40s. Still kinda fat, though. I gain weight whenever I'm not actively dieting.

I do think there is an activity level that is sufficient for weight loss, but it's extremely high. When I was young, I was probably 99th percentile in activity and was quite skinny.

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