johnlawrenceaspden comments on A Medical Mystery: Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia - Less Wrong

23 Post author: johnlawrenceaspden 14 February 2016 01:14PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2016 05:06:49AM 2 points [-]

I wonder why [Seth Robert's Shangri-La Diet] hasn't caught on.

Because like every other dietary intervention, there's no rhyme or reason as to when it works for one person and fails for someone else. Recall:

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.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 15 February 2016 10:01:18PM *  1 point [-]

I wonder if the rhyme or reason might be to do with the metabolism slowing down in response to low availability of calories. and maybe that happens more quickly in some people than in others. The mysterious bit would be if there were some people who could starve themselves without their metabolism slowing down. But we know that's not true for obese people because dieting and exercise don't work as treatments for obesity.

So, all diets work for a bit, people tell their friends about them, write books, etc. They spread like wildfire for a bit and then they stop working and so people stop talking about them. And repeat.

That leaves a fair number of people with slow metabolisms. So obviously they put on weight when they start eating properly again. Storing calories for future famines. But they're doing that at the expense of things they might rather be doing with their calories, like fighting off invading infectious agents.

I guess I now have to predict that dieting fat people and anorexics get lots of symptoms associated with hypothyroidism. Anyone know if that's true? Is dieting part of this 'stress' that doesn't seem to be a real thing?

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