The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
Followup to: Beware of Other-Optimizing
Once upon a time, Seth Roberts (a professor of psychology at Berkeley, on the editorial board of Nutrition) noticed that he'd started losing weight while on vacation in Europe. For no apparent reason, he'd stopped wanting to eat.
Some time later, The Shangri-La Diet swept... the econoblogosphere, anyway. People including some respectable economists tried it, found that it actually seemed to work, and told their friends.
The Shangri-La Diet is unfortunately named - I would have called it "the set-point diet". And even worse, the actual procedure sounds like the wackiest fad diet imaginable:
Just drink two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil early in the morning... don't eat anything else for at least an hour afterward... and in a few days it will no longer take willpower to eat less; you'll feel so full all the time, you'll have to remind yourself to eat.
Why? I'm tempted to say "No one knows" just to see what kind of comments would show up, but that would be cheating. Roberts does have a theory motivating the diet, an elegant combination of pieces individually backed by previous experiments:
- Your metabolism has a set point, like the setting on a thermostat: when your weight is below the set point, you feel hungry; when your weight is above the set point, you feel full.
- But the set point is not a constant; it is raised and lowered by what you eat.
- This mechanism in turn seems to be regulated by a flavor-calorie association. (Possibly as a famine-storage mechanism that tries to store more resources when dense food sources are available.) If you eat something with flavor X, which is followed by your metabolism detecting a large source of calories, flavor X will (a) seem more appealing and taste better, and (b) will raise your set point whenever you eat items with flavor X.
- Your set point is always naturally dropping, but is raised by eating; usually these forces are in dynamic balance and your weight stays constant.
I'm not going to go into all the existing evidence that backs up each step of this theory, but the theory is very beautiful and elegant. The actual Shangri-La Diet is painfully simple by comparison: consume nearly tasteless extra-light olive oil, being careful not to associate it with any flavors before or after, to raise your body weight a little without raising your set point. Your body weight goes above your set point, and you stop feeling hungry. Then you eat less... and your weight drops... and your set point drops a little less than that... but then next morning it's time for your next dose of extra-light olive oil, which once again puts your (decreased) weight a bit above the set point. The regular dose of almost flavorless calories tilts the dynamic balance downward. That's the theory.
Many people, including some trustworthy econblogger types, have reported losing 1-2 pounds/week by implementing the actual actions of the Shangri-La Diet, up to 30 pounds or even more in some cases. Without expending willpower.
I tried it. It didn't work for me.
Now here's the frustrating thing: The Shangri-La Diet does not contain an obvious exception for Eliezer Yudkowsky. On the theory as stated, it should just work. But I am not the only person who reports trying this diet (and a couple of variations that Roberts recommended) without anything happening, except possibly some weight gain due to the added calories.
And here's the more frustrating thing: Roberts's explanation felt right. It's one of those insights that you grasp and then so much else snaps into place.
It explained that frustrating experience I'd often had, wherein I would try a new food and it would fill me up for a whole day - and then, as I kept on eating this amazing food in an effort to keep my total intake down, the satiation effect would go away.
It explained why I'd lost on the order of 50-60 pounds - with what, in retrospect, was very little effort - when I first moved out of my parents' house and to a new city and started eating non-Jewish food. In retrospect, I was eating an amazingly little amount each day, like 1200 calories, but without any feeling of hunger. And then my weight slowly started creeping up again, and no amount of exercise - to which (ha!) I'd originally attributed the weight loss - seemed able to stop it.
It's always hard to pick reality out of the gigantic morass of competing dietary theories. One of the elegant charms of Robert's hypothesis is that it helps explain why this is so - the mess of incoherent results. Any new diet will seem to work for a few months or weeks, you're losing weight and everything seems wonderful, you tell all your friends and they buy the same diet book, and then bam the flavor-calorie association kicks back in and you're back to hell. The number-one result of weight-loss science is that 95% of people who lose weight regain it.
(I haven't heard any complaints from people regaining weight they lost on the Shangri-La Diet, however - if it works for you at all, it seems to go on working. Most of the complaints on the forums are from people who suddenly plateau after losing 30 pounds, but who want to lose more. Or people like me, who try it, and find that it doesn't seem to do anything, or that we're gaining weight with no apparent loss of appetite.)
I have a pretty strong feeling - I don't know if I should trust it, since I'm not a dietary scientist - that Roberts's hypothesis is at least partially right. It makes a lot of data snap into focus. The pieces are well-supported individually.
But I don't think that Roberts has the whole story. There's something missing - something that would explain why the Shangri-La Diet lets some people control their weight as easily as a thermostat setting, and why others lose 30 pounds and then plateau well short of their goal, and why others simply find the Shangri-La diet ineffective. The Mystery of Shangri-La is not how the diet works when it does work; Roberts has made an excellent case for that. The question is why it sometimes doesn't work. There is a deeper law, I strongly suspect, that governs both the rule and the exception.
The problem is, though - and here's the really frustrating part - Roberts seems to think he does have the whole answer. If the diet doesn't work at first, his answer is to try more oil... which is a pretty scary answer if you're already gaining weight from the extra calorie intake! I decided not to go down this route because it didn't seem to work for the people on the forums who were reporting that the Shangri-La Diet didn't work for them. They just gained even more weight.
And what really makes this a catastrophe is that this theory has never been analyzed by controlled experiment, which drives me up the frickin' WALL. Roberts himself is a big advocate of "self-experimentation", which I suppose explains why he's not pushing harder for testing. (Though it's not like Roberts is a standard pseudoscientist, he's an academic in good standing.) But with reports of such drastic success from so many observers, some of them reliable, outside dietary scientists ought to be studying this. What the fsck, dietary scientists? Get off your butts and study this thing! NOW! Report these huge results in a peer-reviewed journal so that everyone gets excited and starts studying the exceptions to the rule!
It's awful; it seems like Roberts has gotten so close to burying the scourge Obesity, but the theory is still missing some final element, some completing piece that would explain the rule and the exception, and with that last piece it might be possible to make the diet work for everyone...
If we had a large-sized rationalist community going that had solved the group effort coordination problem, those of us who are metabolically disprivileged would be pooling resources and launching our own controlled study of this thing, and entering every conceivable variable we could report into the matrix, and hiring a professional biochemist to analyze our metabolisms before and afterward, and we would cryopreserve anyone who got in our way. You have no idea.
(Warning: Do not try the Shangri-La diet at home based on only the info here, there's a couple of caveats and I can't think offhand of a good complete description on the 'Net. Also you might want to reconsider the recommendation to use fructose in the sugar water route, because IIRC fructose has been shown to contribute to insulin resistance or something like that - sucrose may actually make more sense, despite the higher glycemic index.)
Continued in: Akrasia and Shangri-La
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Comments (102)
I've seen Roberts mention once or twice on his blog that he couldn't get a controlled experiment approved by the review board. (No details.) Also he seemed open to the diet just not working for some people.
Some variations haven't been mentioned here, like adding random combos of spices to your food to mix up the flavor. What I settled on, what worked for me without any unpleasantness drawing on willpower over time, was to pour flaxseed oil on toast and eat it noseclipped.
So you have a theory personally developed and promoted by an enthusiastic individual, a whole slew of positival anecdotal evidence, but no actual proper experimental verification. Sound much like - ooh any complementary or alternative medical treatment you'd care to mention? Are you sure you're being fully rational here?
FWIW, one of the reasons Shangri-la didn't quite work for me at first is that I had acid reflux issues. My reflux belches apparently count as "a taste" and after I started taking Zantac to control them - and also drinking less carbonated soda - it worked much better. Another problem I had is an issue S-L has in common with some other diet systems such as Eat-Stop-Eat - any encouragement to "eat whatever you want" when on the diet/regimen is counterproductive if you're eating for any reason other than hunger. I sometimes eat due to boredom or stress or habit; S-L won't stop me from doing that. And it definitely doesn't help to be parsimonious about the sugar or oil because you're afraid of calorie consumption - small amounts just don't work.
What did sort of work for me was to combine S-L with a certain amount of calorie counting - trying to make a conscious effort to cut back net calorie consumption a little, but not too much. To the degree that even that didn't work, it was mostly a matter of akrasy - the oil is nauseating and unsatisfying in the moment I take it so I often didn't feel like taking it.
It's especially hard to come to grips with the idea that even if it works, SL is something you pretty much have to keep doing for the rest of your life. It's the same problem many people have with antidepressants. You take a treatment and if the treatment works it seems like you're getting better and then that you've gotten better, so you start wondering if you really need to keep taking it. Eventually you fall off the treatment...and lose all the previous gains.
Other people have suggested similar things, but I'll take it a step farther: the issue may simply be fidelity of sensory input neurons, i.e. different things count as "having taste" for different people. I assure you, you could give me olive oil so lite that it glowed, and it would still have a very distinctive and strong taste to me.
This, I guess, is where the noseclip suggestion came from.
I have an (I think) better idea: "drink" the stuff by putting it in a (clean!) turkey baster, stick the turkey baster in the back of your throat, and squeeze. If you have a gag reflex problem, not so much, of course, but I'd sure be interested to find out how that works for people who have tried the diet and had it fail.
-Robin
When extra light olive oil didn't work, I tried taking oil in the form of swallowed flax oil caplets. Swallowing twenty of those wasn't much fun, but it still didn't work.
After reading all the comments and getting a lot more details about Eliezer's situation and the general responses to SLA, I have a theory:
SLA works by reducing appetite. The majority of the time, if you reduce appetite that causes people to eat less. When they eat less, they usually lose weight.
The problem is that SLA won't work if that link is broken. If you already weren't eating when you were hungry, then changing your hunger levels might not change how much you eat, which would result in you eating the same amount or if adding the oil doesn't reduce that amount you eat slightly more. In Eliezer's case, he already has so much willpower that he can break the link if he wants to, so SLA didn't solve the right problem. There are other ways to unlink that don't involve willpower, as well. For these people, SLA doesn't work. For another group, the link is severed past X pounds lost so it stops working.
This suggests that the important factor in weight loss has nothing to do with any specific diet. Rather the key is the sudden shock to the endocrinological system that goes along with starting a new diet. Given any stable diet, your system will adapt to keep you at a certain weight. But if you constantly change your diet, your system will never be able to adapt.
Proposal: the meta-diet. Get 12 wonder diet books. Mark each month with a corresponding diet (Jan. is Atkin's, Feb is Shangri-La, ...) Every month, ditch the previous diet without a second thought and scrupulously adhere to the new one.
I've seen this seriously suggested by dietary experts, but can't find the citation. Compare to similar strategies in defeating infections.
Or just invent new "diets". e.g., "This month I will only eat foods that start with the letter P."
The problem with that strategy is that the more diets you try, the more likely it is that at least one of them is seriously harmful.
Provided you aren't already malnourished, NO diet, even starvation, is going to be harmful over the course of one month.
100% not true. Ignoring actual poisons, overemphasis in some foods might make you ill, underemphasis might make you ill, too little X might affect your ability to process Y, and just plain starving for a month will leave you with organ damage.
You need to check your references more closely. I checked the last and what it actually said was:
prolonged starvation (in excess of 1–2 months) causes permanent organ damage[citation needed]
Notice it was in excess of 1-2 months, and it gave no citation.
I did realize another exception after I posted - if you have a problem like diabetes or several nutritional or metabolic disorders, you would also have problems.
Refusing to eat for a month isn't harmful? I'm not a nutritionist, but I find that claim absurd.
From Eliezer's other article:
As a diabetic (the kind caused by immunology, not the kind caused by diet), I am able to measure and experiment with insulin and blood sugar directly. I also think that Roberts is entirely wrong about why his diet works, and unless I see a study that says otherwise, I will believe that it would work equally well if you filled the olive oil with (metabolically inert) spices.
The real answer is that having fat in your system and being digested creates a buffer against blood sugar lows, which would make you feel hungry. If you eat some olive oil in the morning, the period in which it's being digested covers all three meals; on the other hand, fat eaten with dinner is mostly digested while you sleep. Normal appetite approximately matches energy expenditure, but blood sugar crash-driven eating is extra on top of that.
This really does not match my experience. If the effect is from having fat in your system, why does the method stop working if you have flavored fat, and work less the more times you have a given flavored fat?
I have eaten fatty meals, and I have taken flavorless fat SLA-style, and (at the beginning) the difference is massive. The latter killed my appetite. It was amazing.
I didn't see any evidence showing that it stops working if you have flavored fat. You say you've eaten fatty meals, but have you eaten fat-only meals, first thing in the morning? Most of the fatty things that people would normally eat are also high in protein, which has a very different effect on blood sugar.
Oops, there is a much better objection to your hypothesis which I should have made the first time.
Seth Roberts started out suggesting that people use either sugar water or flavorless oil to get their tasteless calories. Eventually he stopped recommending sugar water because of the negative effects on blood sugar levels. But not because it didn't work!
If your hypothesis was right, then sugar water would make people gain weight, and there would be a dramatic difference between the sugar water and oil methods. Whereas my impression (although I didn't read the forums thoroughly) is that people only found a small to moderate difference between sugar water and oil methods.
(And no, I have not tried a fat-only meal first thing in the morning, I always have protein with my fat, so you're right that I don't have a fair comparison)
While controlled trials for SLA would be great, Roberts' advocacy of self-experimentation is awesome, and if it leads him to being biased against big studies...well...he is still adding to our collective knowledge.
Anyway, SLA kicked ass for me. I think I lost 8 lbs in the first couple weeks, 15 lbs in 2 or 3 months. But individual endocrinology varies widely and I can easily believe it doesn't work for everyone. Or maybe you're doing it wrong :). Also, even though SLA worked great for me at the beginning, it wore off over the course of months. I dunno if it was b/c I got closer to my set point, or b/c I started developing an association with the limited amount of flavor there is even in ELOO.
And yeah, like you say, use oil not fructose water.
Out of curiousity, on the specific subject of this diet: did you try blocking your sense of smell, preferably for the entire duration of the "no flavors" period?
As an enthusiastic home cook, the first thing that came to mind for me is that the vast majority of what we interpret as "flavor" is actually an interplay of taste and smell (hence why almost everything tastes like crap when you have nasal congestion). I recall that research has shown smell as having partiularly strong associative powers for memory, so it would not surprise me to find that it's actually a smell-calorie association at work, totally independent of what you actually put in your mouth.
Ergo, I would predict that experiencing strong smells around the same time as taking the flavorless calories would sabotage the effect catastrophically. Unfortunately for the pursuit of science, I have a naturally and stubbornly low bodyweight set point, so I can't test this personally.
That's one of the alternative avenues that Seth Roberts recommends - basically wearing nose clips for the rest of your life. I didn't actually try that, but maybe I'll go ahead and give it a shot.
I find even ELOO has flavor, so I would shoot it while holding my nose, then rinse my mouth out with water, then wait a bit. Even then, I would "taste" some flavor when I stopped holding my nose.
If it's not too personal: Do you live with any other people, and would they have been commonly eating food within a few hours of the oil dose? Do you have a particularly acute sense of smell? Those seem like possible confounding factors for why some people get no benefit whatsoever, particularly the latter because it would be difficult to notice.
If you really want to do a trial by fire of the idea, taking a slightly larger dose of oil and then wearing nose clips for the entire morning ought to put the idea to rest one way or another...
What kind of rationalists are you? There is one way to lose weight with tons of research backing it, and perfectly valid molecular explanation how it works - one ECA pill every morning until you're done, if you're losing weight faster than 1kg/week definitely eat more as that's not very healthy.
You should behave like proper rationalists now, read some pubmed, order some pills, and lose as much weight as you want. No significant side effects observed, unlike "natural" dieting which causes hunger, loss of willpower, loss of energy etc. Your appetite will be so low you'll have to use alarm clock to remind yourself to eat, but it won't hurt when you do, so no willpower expended either way. Ask any random bodybuilder for advice if you need it, they mastered the art of getting rid of fat without harming rest of the body.
I'm 79 kg (bmi 22) down from 106 kg (bmi 30) five years ago, so unlike 95% of after-diet rebouncers I know what I'm talking about.
I'm 86 kg (bmi ~27). I took your advice and tried taking one ECA pill every morning for the last few weeks and...I was gaining weight on it. I think I had a little loss of appetite right at first - along with a feeling of being "wired" - but the effect wore off after a day or two.
One confounding factor is that I normally consume a lot of caffeine (~200 mg) daily in the form of Diet Coke. I cut back a bit on the soda while taking ECA, so the change in my caffeine consumption while taking ECA compared to baseline was quite small - perhaps being a prior caffeine addict renders ECA less effective?
As with Shangri-la, one might conclude any of the following: (a) I just need to take more ECA (b) I just need to stick with it for longer - eventually the effect will kick in (c) It works for some people but not others for as-yet unidentified reasons (d) it doesn't work, and other factors explain the apparent success in some
Upvoted for reporting self-experiment result.
Well, at least you tried. My points would be:
I took ECA Extreme which is claimed to contain 25 mg "ephedra extract", 200mg caffeine, and a few "woo" ingredients. So perhaps I just need a more ephedra-heavy mix.
I was just about stable in terms of fat, neither increasing nor decreasing.
Oops, my mistake - my bodyfat percentage is ~23% (measured by electronic resistance scale); my bmi is actually ~27(corrected in the post) . I don't really care about BMI - I expect that to be on the high side because BMI is a silly measurement and I'm trying for an "athletic" build. But I do want to reduce fat. I'm hoping to get bodyfat below 20%. My bodyfat level is currently in an "acceptable" health range, but I've been working on some circus skills (aerial acrobatics) for which it would be a huge advantage if I could be on the low end of acceptable.
25mg of "ephedra extract" might as well be 5mg of actual ephedrine. Seems like the most likely point of failure. Try with stronger ephedrine - if you don't see decent appetite suppression I'll be surprised.
Fat:carb ratio isn't really relevant, but most modern diets are pretty low in protein and micronutrients, barely enough. If you cut amount of your food by 1/3 without changing composition, you might put your protein and micronutrient consumption below healthy threshold, what will result in all sorts of badness. Micronutriens are easy (multivitamin pill). Most bodybuilders keep protein intake pretty much constant on cutting and bulking, so they're on moderate protein on bulking, and high protein when cutting. Plus proteins don't store well in our bodies (we have fat storage obviously, plus carb storage in liver and sort-of- in muscles (it's can only be used for muscle work, never gets released back to blood), but no protein storage), so you pretty much have to eat multiple small protein-containing meals a day if you want to efficiently lose fat without losing muscle.
As I understand it, ECA pills that contain actual ephedrine in amounts as high as you used can no longer be sold either in the US or in the EU - even the link you gave is now invalid because they've reformulated your pill. (The new Forza has "30 mg of Ephedra Extract" instead of 60 mg of ephedrine HCL; they recommend you take twice as many pills as before to get a similar effect.)
The good news for Americans is that we can still legally buy 25 mg Ephedrine. It can't be sold with weight-loss/bodybuilding claims but it's a legal over-the-counter treatment for asthma, if you don't buy too much of it at one time. So we can make our own ECA stack using three separate pills. I used this stack: 25mg Ephedrine (Vasopro), 200 mg Caffeine (No-Doz) and 325 mg aspirin.
And...it's working! You were correct to claim real Ephedrine would have a significant appetite suppressant effect - this was immediately apparent the first day I took it. It'd probably be stronger if I doubled the Eph dose to approach what you were taking - I might do that in a bit. It's too soon to tell whether I'll reach my long-term goals but things are definitely moving in the right direction!
UPDATE: it's still working. So far (about 3 months along), my BMI has dropped from 27 to 25.7; bodyfat has dropped from 23% to 20.5%, and weight has dropped from 86kg to ~81 kg.
I've been reading all the medical literature I can find on ECA and editing the wikipedia entry. A few things I've realized along the way: (1) the aspirin component really isn't necessary; all that matters is the ephedrine and caffeine. (to the extent that it's been studied, there's no clear benefit for most users). (2) It is possible - albeit pretty statistically unlikely - to overdose on ephedrine or ephedra or have bad health effects. When ECA was legal as a supplement there were a great many "adverse effect" reports including perhaps a dozen deaths attributed to it. The FDA banned the sale of ephedra supplements because there was what they regarded as a significant risk associated with it and they didn't count the fact that it enables easy weight loss as an offsetting benefit.
However, my estimate is that the benefit of this drug far, far outweighs the cost. Every plausible back-of-the-envelope calculation I've made says I should keep taking it.
Do you know any studies showing effect on life expectancy?
ECA seems to work by throwing the body into Continuous Panic Mode. Surely that will burn calories, but just going by analogies to stress, it doesn't sound good for you even if you dodge the bullet of heart symptoms.
There are no studies on life expectancy effects of almost anything including peanut butter, orange juice, and French fries.
One big argument for ECA safety is that you don't have to take it continuously. Just figure out how many kilograms you want to lose, it's most likely going to take 1-2 weeks per kg on ECA (assuming your eat mostly when hungry and just as much as needed to satisfy that, you can obviously drink 5 litres a day of sugared drinks a day even with zero appetite, and still be gaining weight). Unless you're gaining weight very quickly on your normal diet (in which case you need to adjust that) you won't have to repeat that in very long time, possibly ever.
The main effect of ECA is down-regulating your appetite - something there are very few known proven methods to do, fen-phen comes to mind, but it was removed from the market (completely misguidedly I'd say). ECA also seems to have some effects on fat and muscle metabolism, and some mild stimulating effects, but it's not obvious from research that these are of much relevance to humans.
This is serious stuff, so if you have some heart condition or don't think you can use it responsibly, don't do it. But then the only other anti-obesity method with better research record is surgery.
Is this deliberate irony?
I just looked up ECA. It is perhaps not as safe as you suggest, but I'd have to actually see the relevant numbers. Seems to be (primarily due to the E, apperently) linked to heart issues. Mostly via making existing issues worse, but possibly in some cases causing issues where there weren't before. At least according to wikipedia
What is ECA?
Ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin, apparently.
Have they mastered the art of getting ECA in countries where Ephedrine is a controlled substance?
Best check with your local bodybuilders. In UK you can conveniently order it from the Internet from this website or one of many others. In many countries ephedrine from natural sources doesn't fall under regulations. Politicians don't seem that bothered by that, as amounts found in ephedra isn't economical for large scale amphetamines manufacturing.
On the note of self-testing vs. controlled experiment, has anyone here tried the polyphasic ("uberman") sleep cycle? Does anyone know of any controlled experiments, either self-administered or larger-scale, which I could look at? I was interested in trying it a few years ago, but dropped in in about 24 hours (before I could have really even been said to try it) due to microsleep in waking hours.
It doesn't seem like anyone really keeps up uberman for much longer than a year.
An alternative sleep schedule that I do sometimes is biphasic, 3-5 hours twice a day.
Roberts calls it Pavlovian because he conceives of a specific flavor as an unconditioned stimulus and calories as the conditioned stimulus. He thinks set point changes are a response to a learned association between calories and a specific flavor. It's not a perfect fit to classical conditioning, but it's not a totally wacky naming. (I agree that PCT is a better fit, but it seems unlikely that Roberts is aware of PCT.)
Indeed. I'm pretty sure the word "Pavlovian" made its way in there mostly because the revelation involved salivating.
"Roberts seems to think he does have the whole answer. If the diet doesn't work at first, his answer is to try more oil... "
Coincidentally, I started looking into the diet a couple days before you posted this. I saw a few examples of him saying "try more oil", but didn't follow closely enough to see if that ever worked.
You make it sound like it doesn't, but how much evidence do you have on this?
You said it explained you losing 50lbs or so, but now it doesn't work for you. Why don't you try more variations until you do find something that works for you? It seems like it would take relatively little effort to try a few things, and might clue you in to the missing piece of the theory you're talking about.
This post has generated a disproportionate number of comments. I think it illustrates the common struggles we all face in attempting to optimize our own behavior as well as that of others. At what point does other-optimizing become a case of trying to hard and lapsing into failure mode, a disutility loop if you will. The UC Berkeley writer Michael Pollan summed up his dietary advice in seven words: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." Or how about renowned nutritionist Marion Nestle: "East less, move more." Of course, one of the joys of living is eating. Why not let the activity provide pleasure and utility? Is it the calories we are trying to conrol, or are we attempting to achieve mastery over some portion of our or other's behavior in order to comfort ourselves with an illusion of control? Is it what you're eating or is it what's eating you, to put it colloquially?
FWIW, my diet gurus are mostly here: http://calorierestriction.org/
What I find interesting is this matches, almost exactly, the 30 pounds I lost when I decided to consistently take a multi-vitamin with every meal on the theory that hunger was caused (at least at times) by vitamin deficiencies, and maybe making sure I was flush with vitamins would help.
Worked great for a month or so - I lost (and have kept off) 30 pounds (Unfortunately that means I'm down to 310). Then it just kinda stopped - I haven't gone back up (indeed there have been moments when it acted like it might start going back down again, but so far I'm stuck in fluctuation mode).
But what it to me interesting is this is the second occasion that happened - the first time was four years ago when I started buying flavored carbonated waters, and drinking those on a regular basis - not fatty at all, and flavored (both in opposition to, arguably, the vitamins), but virtually identical results (I did regain that weight, but only at an identical rate to my previous weight gain.).
Maybe I can switch them out?
Jonnan
As far as the oil diet, I tried it last year but didn't find much benefit. I had lost 40 pounds a year eralier and have kept it off since then through teeth-clenched, iron-willed, unceasing self-control. I tried oil for a few months and I can't really say it made it any easier. The oil tended to induce nausea which did suppress my appetite for a few hours, but it wasn't much fun feeling sick a lot.
You can alternatively drink sugar water in place of the oil, because sugar, in Roberts' model, does not have flavor.
The diet pretty obviously works because fat plays a huge role in satiety. If you can get a certain amount of fat in the lowest caloric form possible (olive oil, most likely), you won't be have to eat massively caloric things like bacon cheeseburgers in order to slake your hunger.
Still, good diet and exercise are the keys to staying thin. Satisfy your hunger by filling up on vegetables and lean protein. Exercise harder, eat less.
I find decapitation works the best -- you take about 5kg off right at the start, and continue losing gradually (but not as drastically) from then on.
I find that when I'm trying to teleport to Pluto, the first step is to scrunch up my forehead really hard and teleport to Mars.
Uh, you appreciate that even if the Sun, Earth, Mars, and Pluto are all neatly aligned, you will barely be any closer to Pluto when you get to Mars than you were here?
On the other hand, maybe Dr Manhattan can give you a lift...
You do realize, I hope, that comments now start with a score of 0?
Maybe people didn't realize they were jokes?
I don't know, I've made some dumb jokes and they got voted up, so I'm confused.
See Akrasia and Shangri-La, the sequel, for the reason why I wish there were some way I could strangle you over the Internet.
It seems like you're questioning the value of diet and exercise -- almost as if they don't work for all people, or they only work for limited amounts of time. This is, of course, untrue, and I know you know this. The real key is to put yourself into a virtuous cycle, where the rewards (or negative consequences) of diet and exercise make themselves apparent to you every day, rather than months down the line, effectively circumventing akrasia.
I am questioning the value of diet and exercise. Thermodynamics is technically true but useless, barring the application of physical constraint or inhuman willpower to artificially produce famine conditions and keep them in place permanently. You, clearly, are one of the metabolically privileged, so let me assure you that I could try exactly the same things you do to control your weight and fail. My fat cells would keep the energy that yours release; a skipped meal you wouldn't notice would have me dizzy when I stand up; exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.
"exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine."
Bullshit.
The rational thing to do here is to replace 'goal: loose weigth' with 'goal: become fit'. Lift weights or do bodyweight-exercises (pushups, lunges etc.) + walk/run/bike.
Tried it. Didn't work. Welcome to the unfair universe.
Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn't have anything to do with weight loss.
Good thing you don't have that attitude about FAI.
Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I've read an interesting book that says aerobics don't actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you're doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more... which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.
What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn't dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
Anyway, I'm currently experimenting with one of his simpler "beginner" routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I'm only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I've not done it every day this week. I'll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.
I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one's results, and that "tried it, didn't work" isn't a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn't overweight was the time where I didn't have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.
What I've observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.
This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you're not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you're getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate... even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I've had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?
There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they're all simultaneously satisfied, you're not going to get a result.
Simply labeling yourself "metabolically challenged" is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?
Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.
Crisis of belief? Definitely maybe. I don't know EY's full situation, but I'm still having a hard time digesting the idea that he just can't do it.
I believe you're just describing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) above. When I started learning about diet and fitness, that was a big one.
I agree with the poster who said to ask the bodybuilders. I got into reading bodybuilding information sites and they really do have it down to a fine art. There are many subtleties beyond "good diet and exercise." Screw up a few little things and you won't lose weight.
Diet: low carb, and only unrefined, high good fats, high protein ("low carb" here just means not the 80% carbs people normally consume - it doesn't have to be ridiculous like Atkins). Tons of vegetables and fruit (slightly more controversial). Lots of small meals. Eat less calories than you burn [Edit: though obviously this is wishy-washy. Still, count calories in general. Sometimes you have to eat more to boost your metabolism, etc]. There are degrees of strictness, and much more specific ratios and timing and cycles, but those are the basics.
Exercise: Do heavy weightlifting. Do full-body lifts like chin ups, push ups/bench press, squats, deadlifts, military press, etc. And do HIIT. And continuously switch your routine around in some way.
If this is exactly what you've done, then I underestimate the severity of a slow metabolism.
And of course, this doesn't address the willpower issue at all.
I just have to say it anyway though, because if you're eating well and exercising regularly and not losing weight, just missing a few things like:
-eating 5-6 meals a day, not 3
-pounding a spoonful of fish oil a day
-doing 15 min. HIIT 3-4 times a week and not slow cardio
-doing squats and deadlifts
can make the difference between losing a pound or two a week and actually gaining weight.
Yeah, in my case it's omega 3s or 6s, deadlifts, HIIT, pull-ups, side presses, lots of minimally-processed or unprocessed foods, raw meats and eggs, and the occasional tomato/lemon puree for alkalinization. My achilles' heel has been not being spectacularly regular about any of this, in that I'll also eat out or eat junk when pressed for time or otherwise stressed. And sometimes my exercise will make me sore all over for days, causing me to skip some exercise.
When I have ALL of this stuff lined up just so, I lose weight and have more energy. Drop even one piece, and it's flatline or gain.
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to "tweak" in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then... I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for results to become apparent. Or perhaps the timing is purely coincidental - I lose weight at random intervals or in response to stress at work or changes in my personal life and the latest downturn merely coincided with Tweak F. Or perhaps it's an observer affect, such as the fact that I'm paying attention to my weight in order to evaluate which tweak is working, is what made me lose weight.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there's a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
Hell, some of them are probably useless or counterproductive for me! ;-)
(Hence the admonition to try different things.)
Title?
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes also claims aerobics doesn't work to lose weight and refers to a bunch of studies to that effect. Though he doesn't go so far as to deny there are cardiovascular benefits.
PACE: Rediscover Your Native Fitness, by Al Sears, MD.
Thanks.
Apart from aesthetic preferences, replacing "loose weight" with "continually increase my fitness" (which is not something you'll ever be done with) is a far more constructive goal (and it will eliminate the diet-mindset-rollercoaster).
I suspect that lack of will power often means impatience. And impatience comes from unrealistic expectations regarding what you "should" be able to do in time n.
Daily moderate (will-power-) exercise will give positive results on a whole range of parameters, but it might take a year before the effects (including the habit of exercising) really show.
Off course you could be an exception.
Have you tried weightlifting? I can well believe that it doesn't work for you - just want to check :). It is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise, way better than cardio. It has the biggest endocrinological effects so I would think it would work the best against a stubborn body.
Yup. I didn't notice any muscle development; I did seem able to lift somewhat larger weights over time, but that could have been placebo or skill.
To expand on this:
Imagine a counterfactual organism that always preferentially stores X number of calories per day as fat, where X is equivalent to the calorie expenditure of running at top speed for over 24 hours, and does not increase muscle mass.
If the organism eats more than X calories, it gains weight. If it eats less than X calories, it will experience crippling lethargy and eventually die.
Obviously no such organism would be produced by natural selection, but assume the Least Convenient Possible World. Would advising such an organism "eat less, exercise more" enable it to lose weight?
Of course not, but you've contrived an odd corner-case that, in fact, doesn't exist in reality. I'm not sure what that goes to show.
Except that my counterfactual organism seems to more strongly resemble Eliezer Yudkowsky than does whatever model you're working from.
Oh come on. If Eliezer eats fewer calories than he expends, he's not going to die of hunger. I fully buy that will-power is a legitimate issue, but bringing up extreme cases like this to make your point doesn't enhance the conversation.
But he may spend large amounts of time in a state where physiological and psychological responses are screaming "eat more food!". This state is not conducive to a happy, productive life.
I won't dispute this. For some people, a calculated decision to remain overweight in today's world in order to focus on other things may be the best course of action.
Alternatively, if losing weight is that important to you, you can alter your environment so "today's world" doesn't make it so tempting to eat crappy foods. Your body can be screaming out "eat more food!" all it wants, but if you're living in a cabin in some remote corner of Alaska, there's only so much damage that can do.
So, maybe staying thin requires Herculean effort for some. Why turn your back on that particular challenge? Elsewhere you seem to take a lot of pride in your determination to "save the world," which seems like no small feat. Don't try to lose weight -- lose weight!
I can starve or think, not both at the same time.
I'm sure you've seen the psych research suggesting people have a finite amount of "willpower" they can exercise at a given time. It probably does make sense for some people to worry about hard-thinking (or other endeavors) than staying in top shape.
It's not just that you only have so much "will power" that you ration, it's that your brain doesn't work when you're starving.
I had to cut weight for wrestling in high school (from a healthy 185 down to 160) and the will power to not eat wasn't even that difficult (though it did suck), but I still couldn't think well.
If a thin person is in state S1, and a fat person is in a state S2, then a thin person who got that way by dieting is in state S3 and despite looking identical, S1 != S3. S1 has no particular tendency to change. S3 has a strong tendency to become S2. Diets don't work. You just don't have the super-senses to distinguish S1 from S3 at a glance.
Diet (singular) does work in the sense of consistently, indefinitely eating healthier foods.
No... it... DOESN'T. I tried that. I ate a simple Paleo diet which consists of nothing except healthy foods; my staples were home-cooked turkey and bananas. I did it for months. I lost not a single pound.
You CANNOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE how much stuff that really truly seems like it ought to work simply DOES NOT WORK when you are metabolically disprivileged.
Bananas are flagged as a risky item by a number of paleo-type diet authors, though not by 'The Paleo Diet'. They have a fairly high glycemic index. Not that it invalidates your point.
I lost 45lbs on the Paleo Diet and have kept most of it off 2 years later (I've crept up by about 8-10lbs and I'm trying to be a bit stricter to bring that back down). I didn't avoid bananas completely but I'd read enough to be wary of them. I'm sure it doesn't work for everybody but I find it persuasive and effective.
IF the theory that sugar and refined carbohydrates are the biggest risk factors for weight gain is true THEN learning enough to become convinced of just how bad they are, to the point that you develop a strong negative emotional response to foods containing them, is an effective technique of applying initially conscious rationality to create new habits. Of course it may not work for everybody. Variations in individual metabolism seem to be an understudied aspect of diet research.
Are you saying it didn't work because it didn't curb your hunger or your desire for other, less healthy foods? Or it didn't work because you stuck to the diet of healthy foods and gained weight nonetheless? The latter seems hard to believe, though I suppose it's technically possible to accumulate an excess of calories via turkey and bananas...
I can honestly say, I actually have healthy tastes - I actually like salad (I have a salad garden for exactly that reason), and do work on a small (3 acres) property when I'm not at my day job.
Although I do like most traditional deserts, they are not a typical portion of the meal, barring holidays. I do tend to eat 'candy' when it's around . . . which is one reason I don't keep it around.
So I sympathize entirely with the original poster when he says eating nothing but healthy foods doesn't help. My 'Vitamin Pill' version of the Shangra-la diet lost me 30 pounds straight through the holidays when I was eating deserts . . . and stopped.
So there are definitely other factors that are being missed.
Jonnan
The latter.
The above is equivalent to saying "being in state S1 works".
S3 is characterized by not being able to consistently, indefinitely eat healthier foods.
IOW: the above is a dodge.
I have to second Eliezer on this one. Saying "good diet and exercise" is just a disguised way of saying "be more disciplined". While it is true that being more disciplined would cause someone to lose weight, telling someone to be more disciplined does not cause them to actually /be/ more disciplined. The value of advice is properly judged by its effect, and actual observation shows that the "be more disciplined" advice has no effect or even the opposite effect, so it's simply bad advice. The part which is true is already known by the person receiving the advice, so truth is no defense.
This touches on a general issue about free will.
In a world where everyone is sort of a jerk and says "Just shut up and exercise, you fatso!" there may be such a strong drive to avoid condemnation and low social status that you actually do shut up and exercise.
In the alternate world where everyone understands that it's not really your fault and you can't shout people into having more willpower and willpower is a sketchy concept anyway and accepts you for who you are - you will have no incentive to get better.
So occasionally I do tell people the equivalent of "shut up and exercise" for certain things, even though I know it doesn't work directly. It's a case by case basis, depending on how many opportunities the person is missing and how likely I think my advice is to seriously affect them.
You have it completely backward. In my experience, to a first approximation we already live in the "everyone is a jerk" world, and the steaming piles of moralism serve to make it very hard for people to even think about this issue because of the waves of low self-esteem it brings on.
I did shut up and exercise. It didn't work. That's the point at which you have a problem.
And for years I felt guilty and that I must be doing something wrong; and then I read about the Shangri-La diet and all these people losing 50 pounds with ease; and then it didn't work for me; and that was when I figured out that yes, I actually had put in a really serious try, and that what was really going on was that the laws just didn't work the good and virtuous and just way that everyone said they did.
Now maybe for other things... if willpower really does work... then telling people "Shut up and expend willpower" might be helpful. I've just gotten a lot more skeptical, now.
Wasn't talking about your case in particular. Of would-be-dieters I know, the majority try to go to the gym a few times and then flake out. So although it may apply to you, I don't think "You can't just tell people to try harder" is always good advice.
Assuming unlimited willpower, burning more calories than you consume will reduce body weight (c.f. thermodynamics, &c.). Easy!
The issue is not how to reduce weight, per se, it's about how to do so while also suppressing hunger pangs and other physiological and psychological effects of wanting more food than you're getting.
As an aside, exercise itself isn't actually particularly useful unless you devote a lot of time to it, as the calorie burn rate is fairly low. Raising the basal metabolic rate via anaerobic exercise may have value, though.
Another issue is how to reduce fat weight per se. One of the eye-opening parts of Gary Taubes' talk was the fact that somebody can be simultaneously emaciated and obese. Fat cells want to survive and sometimes will do so to the detriment of their host.
Another Taubes insight: when it comes to vertical growth, we posit one causal direction. We say that a teenager eats a lot because he's a growing boy; we do not say he's growing taller because he eats a lot. It's accepted that the body of a teenager has somehow decided for itself that it wants to get taller and appetite/metabolism will accommodate that need.
Perhaps horizontal growth isn't all that different.
Could you explain that without the metaphor of intentionality? Fat cells don't have their own germ line, so I can't reason about what they "want" the way I can reason about what a virus "wants". Thanks!
I think that was just a colorful way of saying what the rest of the post elaborated on--that the body may prioritize fat storage higher than other energy uses that the person associated with the body may prefer.
Also, fat cells are biologically active. Obesity is caused by hormone activity and fat cells provide inputs into that biological process as well as being part of the outcome of it.
Rats that overproduce insulin can die of starvation despite being obese - the body gets energy by breaking down muscle - including heart muscle - in order to preserve the fat.
Yeah, and I realize that simply recommending "diet and exercise" is a bit too pat. Getting oneself into virtuous cycles, with extremely short-term rewards and consequences, is the most effective meta-tactic I know. There are various ways to do this; the key is just to render willpower moot.
I'm not actually sure that the diet, as you've written it, would work even if the theory were complete. You say that an association is formed between flavor X and calories and that association with X controls the set point. But why would X be the dominant factor, when you're already eating flavors A, B, through to W whose contribution to the set point got you to the weight you started at? Does the book elaborate on how the association works?