The Shangri-La Diet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Shangri-La Diet (ISBN 0-399-15364-0, published in 2006) is a book by Seth Roberts, then an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. The book outlines a method of natural appetite suppression that can lead to substantial weight loss.

Roberts developed the Shangri-La Diet in his own attempts to lose weight. The diet may be more accurately referred to as a weight-loss method because it doesn't involve a specific eating plan. He believes that traditional weight loss methods ignore a vital physiological element: the body's set-point. This is a theory that says the human body attempts to attain a certain weight at any given time, and will increase or decrease hunger to attain that weight. In the book Roberts says: "The bigger the gap between your set point and your weight, the more hungry you will be".^[1] Traditional diets fail because the participant lowers their weight without lowering their set point, which, combined with the dramatic reduction of food intake during dieting, means the participant becomes extremely hungry as the body attempts to climb back to the weight it thinks it should be.

Roberts goes on to state his theory that "the flavor of a food controls how it affects your set point". He believes that the set-point is always falling during periods of no food (such as between meals), but eating or drinking anything besides water will raise it. However, and crucially, tastier and familiar foods raise it more than bland, unfamiliar or even entirely tasteless foods, which raise it only slightly. This leads to the phrase used throughout the book: flavor/calorie association. This is something Roberts says should be avoided as much as possible. Roberts says he initially made this discovery while on holiday in France when he noticed that drinking high-sugar soda drinks with unfamiliar tastes suppressed his appetite.

The intention of the diet, then, is to allow the set-point to fall, and thereby cause the body to believe it should eat less. As the diet progresses, over the space of months, an individual's weight and set-point will fall to a level where he/she is slim.

Constantly eating foods with bland or unfamiliar tastes is impractical, so Roberts tried consuming entirely flavourless calories several times a day, initially in the form of fructose sugar mixed with water, but later moving on to extra-light olive oil. Eventually he abandoned fructose in favor of plain sugar (sucrose), because fructose was hard to locate.

Roberts noticed the same appetite suppression effects to that he had experienced in France, and over the following months managed to lose a total of 50 pounds. He lost so much that his colleagues complained he looked ill, so he deliberately eased off and regained 10 pounds. He claims not to have dieted but only to have eaten sensibly in response to his body's desires, eating one meal a day and assorted snacks at other times. The ease with which he lost weight led to him coining the phrase phrase Shangri-La Diet, which is to say, a happy place. When dieters achieve appetite suppression via the methods outlined, they are described as being "in Shangri-La".

Lowering the set-point using flavorless calories is not permanent. Should the individual stop taking flavorless calories, the set-point will start to rise once again.

In addition to flavorless calories, the book suggests "extra credit" techniques to further assist in losing weight without effort and/or lowering the body's set point, such as focusing on foods with lower glycemic indexes (similar to the South Beach Diet), consuming food with more subtle flavoring (such as sushi), and seeking out or creating foods with novel flavor combinations that the brain has not yet learned to associate with calories, which Roberts calls "crazy spicing".

The book later goes on to theorize that the reason for obesity epidemics in many Western countries is that a lot of food always tastes the same because of food processing, plus the rise of standardized fast food outlets. This creates a strong flavor/calorie association, which causes the set point to be raised in an extreme fashion, effectively causing the individual to desire more food. Roberts refers to such foods as "ditto" foods and advises people to avoid them.

Roberts has also achieved appetite suppression by "nose-clipping" – wearing a swimmer's nose-clip while eating in order to remove the flavour of any food; it is theorized that tastes on the tongue, such as sweet, sour, bitter and umami, do not affect flavor/calorie association. Once the meal is completed, the dieter washes their mouth with water to remove all flavor before removing the nose-clips. The book also details the efforts of an early and successful diet participant, Tim Beneke, who created "Beneke Balls", which are small balls of high-calorie food designed to be swallowed whole without tasting them.

Roberts' flavor-calorie association theory was first published as part of a 2004 article on self-experimentation as a source of scientific ideas in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.