This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to write about my experiment with the Shangri-La Diet which has been emerging as a controversial way to lose weight within the blogsphere. Why would I want to try it? Weight has always been an issue in my life and I’ve always been trying to find a way to control it, and I enjoy self-experimentation.

About 3 years ago, I was 100lbs overweight. I lost 95lbs faithfully and strictly following the Atkins lifestyle. I’ve been maintaining for almost a year and a half now, within a 10-15 pound range, but I’ve never really managed to get all the way down to my goal. I “cheat” a lot more than I did before maintenance, usually taking at least one day a week to eat whatever decadance I’ve forbidden myself for the rest of the week. So I’ll gain a couple of pounds from that indescretion and spend the next 6 days being “good” and work it off again.

Overall, I have been happy with my low-carb experience and it’s a very effective and powerful way for me to stay fit and healthy. Despite what the popular media tells you, living the Atkins way is actually a very healthy lifestyle. In a nutshell, I consume a large amount of healthy fats and the food that I eat is higher in quality and nutrition density than the food I ate before. After all, when you’re going low-carb, you’re basically giving up the highly processed, trans-fatty, high-fructose corn syrup laden crap that makes up 80% of the diet of most typical Americans.

But still, there’s that last 10-15 lbs that I just haven’t been able to get rid of. I kept telling myself that I’d bite the bullet and go on Induction (the first, most restrictive phase of Atkins) again for a couple of weeks and try to shed that weight, but I’ve put it off mainly because I’ve just been lazy and not as disgusted with my body as I was before I started Atkins.

So that’s why I was interested when Tad said: “Well, I’ve found my new diet!”. He has a few more pounds to lose than I have, and his extreme pickiness about food has prevented him from doing Atkins and several other diets he’s looked into. So if he’s interested in something at all it’s got to be easy to follow and not too crazy as far as what you are allowed to eat. And I think the Shangri-La diet fits the bill.

What is the Shangri-La diet? It’s a new method of controlling your weight that Seth Roberts discovered through self-experimentation and observation. The gist is that you take a tablespoon of unflavored oil or 4 tablespoons of sugar dissolved in water twice a day with a buffer of an hour before and after the dose with no food and drink other than water during the buffer. Yes, it sounds insanely pointless, too simple and counter-intuitive. How can you lose weight by eating more calories? Especially of fat or sugar?

The premise is that your body has something conceptually like a thermostat that it uses to regulate your weight. There is a “set point” which is the “temperature” that the thermostat is set to and your body is constantly adjusting your hunger, turning on the heat (hunger) or the A/C (loss of appetite) to cause your weight to stay at the set point. When your weight is higher than the set point, you aren’t hungry. When your weight is lower than the set point, you want to eat. To control your weight, you have to be able to move your set point to where you want it to be and effectively reset your hunger thermostat. Once your set point is where you want it, you will be compelled to take in as much or little food as you need without discomfort of hunger or extra effort of eating special foods to maintain that weight.

In the book, Roberts focuses on the psychological aspects of the diet, his theory of flavor/calorie connection and how it affects our hunger and calorie consumption. He doesn’t go into much detail about the biological aspects how the diet works, other than through illustrations of scientific experiments in an appendix that seem to confirm the hypothesis without necessarily explaining it. But I’m the type of person who likes to know how things work and I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

I am certainly not a medical professional, so I can’t be considered an authority, but I will take a stab at a theory on how the diet works biologically anyway. I have read Roberts’ book and did some reading based on the short paragraph in his book about the hormone lepitin. While doing that research I came across references to insulin and so did a refresher on some of the things I learned about how insulin affects the way you process food from my research on Atkins/low-carb diets. If someone has some additional insights or corrections here, I welcome the clarifications! I’d like to know as much as everybody else how it really works and someone with the proper credentials should be able to work it out.

I think the effects of the diet all have to do with influencing the functions of of lepitin, a hormone that tells the brain how much fat your body is storing, and insulin which directs how you utilize and/or store the calories that you ingest. I think that the set point itself is related to an acceptable ratio of lepitin in your bloodstream (your hunger thermostat will be triggered when the ratio is off balance) and the diet works by “tricking” the function of insulin, keeping it from switching from utilizing calories for energy to storing calories as fat for a longer period during the day resulting in a suppressing of your appetite. Tricking the insulin functionality consistently eventually causes your the acceptable ratio of lepitin to be changed so that your set point is lowered. And with your set point lowered your body doesn’t think you need to store as much fat and consume as many calories so you lose weight.

How does the insulin tricking function work? I think this is where Robert’s flavor connection comes in. When you eat something with a strong flavor association it triggers your brain to release more insulin to take care of the incoming food. When you eat things that have no flavor, there is no extra insulin released, but the insulin that’s already in your bloodstream continues to work on the energy release function instead of the storage function. Now I can see how that works for oil, but not so sure about the sugar water. So maybe I have it all wrong…

But maybe I have a partial clue. Regardless of how it works, it does seem to be working for many people who have tried it. And so I’ve decided to try it myself. So far it’s working for me too. I’m on the 7th day since I started and I’ve already lost about 2lbs.

My goals are modest:

• I’d like to finally get to my original weight goal, and potentially another 5lbs beyond that.
• I’d like to be able to incorporate more fruit like bananas and apples into my diet on a regular basis, currently something I can’t do with the low-carb regimine.
• I’d like to be in complete control of when and how much I eat and not be ruled by hunger. For instance: if it’s not convenient to eat lunch at 11:30am and I have to wait till 1:00pm, I don’t want to be hungry in the interval.

If Roberts’ diet can do all that for me then I’ll be happy. So I’m giving it a month and using the oil method. If it doesn’t work, no harm done. Oil can’t be a lot more low-carb! If it works, Woohoo! Shangri-La found!

Results:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3, I’m done.