Anne Truitt Zelenka

I’ve been following Seth Roberts’ Shangri-La Diet (SLD) since the beginning of August. My main goal in starting it was not to lose weight but rather to get my cravings and energy swings under control and to prevent weight gain in the future.

The SLD approach isn’t really a diet. It’s a mechanism for suppressing appetite, based on the results of rat studies and Roberts’ own self-experimentation. With SLD, you trick your body into lowering its weight setpoint by consuming flavorless calories, for example from flavorless oil.

I received a copy of Roberts’ book gratis after blogging about it on my now-defunct momblog. I tried it twice during 2006 without any detectable appetite suppression, then decided to try it again after reading about Kathy Sierra’s experience with SLD. This time, I used the collective wisdom from the Shangri-La Diet forums to tweak it to work for me.

It took me much of August to customize it to my physiology. And wow. It really, really works. I’ve lost five pounds since starting with little sense of deprivation, even while going on two family vacations. More important, I’ve eliminated the blood sugar roller coaster I’ve suffered with for years. Before Shangri-La, I couldn’t go an entire morning without food. I had to carry snacks with me on outings. I’d hit a major energy trough in the afternoon, leading me to self-medicate with a cup of coffee that I couldn’t fully metabolize by bedtime. I’d be wide-eyed at midnight and then, inevitably, groggy the next morning.

I confess when I received the book in the mail I thought, “what a dumb name for a diet book.” Now that it’s working for me, I get it. It is a kind of Shangri-La to eat less food but enjoy it more, lose the cravings for between-meal snacks, drop weight without any sense of deprivation, and even out my energy levels. If you have struggled with your relationship to food, I urge you to give this a try, even though it won’t match what you think you know about eating and weight control.

Here’s what’s working for me right now:

• I shoot for about 600 flavorless calories a day derived from a combination of flavorless oil and protein smoothies. These calories need to be taken at least an hour before and an hour after tasting anything, including coffee or toothpaste. The theory says that if the body associates the calories with a known flavor, it considers that a signal to raise the weight setpoint. If the calories are flavorless (or have an unrecognized flavor), the weight setpoint will be lowered.
• Spectrum Organics makes a refined walnut oil with a very light taste. Sugar water didn’t work for me–it gave me headaches and made me feel drowsy and irritable. No surprise given my freakishly overreactive blood sugar control system. Walnut oil is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which may offer important health benefits. I take the oil in the morning and afternoon, two tablespoons each time.
• Noseclipping is key to eliminating flavors. The Spectrum walnut oil has a light flavor that you can avoid tasting by holding your nose while taking the oil and rinsing your mouth with water before opening your nose, but it’s a lot easier to use noseclips.
• I make smoothies using various protein powders–whey, egg white, soy–depending on what I have on hand. I blend a scoop or two of the protein powder with water, a couple ice cubes, and sometimes some whole-milk yogurt or soy yogurt for good mouth feel. Occasionally I put the oil into the smoothie. Then I drink it through a straw with my noseclip on, rinsing my mouth afterwards. I leave the noseclip on for at least ten minutes afterwards so I don’t get any taste. Sometimes I crazy-spice the smoothies in case any flavor sneaks through.
• I track my calories on FitDay. That way I’ll know what calorie level will maintain a certain weight. Also, tracking something makes me more conscious of it–I eat healthier when I have to log every bite online.
• I found that some oils gave me terrible indigestion: fish oil capsules and a canola oil blend I tried made me feel just awful. Apparently it may take some time for your body to learn to digest a new kind of oil. I haven’t had any such problems with walnut oil, but if you do have some, you can give it a go for a couple weeks and see if the problem disappears.
• As I’ve adjusted to this approach, I have had serious hunger pangs. But I don’t necessarily feel like eating. Drinking a glass of water usually calms them. If it doesn’t, I enjoy the novel sensation of an empty stomach.

I feel better mentally–more alert, more motivated, less reactive, happier. It may be the omega-3’s I’m getting, or the fact that I’ve decreased my caffeine and alcohol consumption, or perhaps it’s that I’m not eating white flour and white sugar at every opportunity. This may be the happiest outcome for me, because I feel life is worth hardly anything if I can’t think energetically and effectively.

If you want control of your eating, give SLD a try. Be aware you may have to customize it to get it to work for you.