Shangri La
If you look over at that graph you'll see that I've gone from 120 kg to 117.2 kg in 4.5 weeks. Enough that I think we can say it's not a fluke and I can blog about it in good conscience.
I've been doing the Shangri La "diet" for a few weeks now. Redbeard blogged it when I told him about it when I first read about it on the Creating Passionate Users blog. It's a strange but scientifically-based diet based on two fairly established theories: first that your body has a body fat set point which works like a thermostat, and second that your body learns to associate calories and taste, raising the set point when you eat food that has been associated with calories.
I'm not going to go into the why in detail, since you can learn that at Seth Roberts' site. He wrote a book about it too, but the diet is simple enough that the mechanics can be explained in one sentence.
Every day, ingest 4 tablespoons of extra-light olive oil or sugar dissolved in water at least one hour away from tasting any food (or anything else with taste, like toothpaste). I like to have a tbsp of ELOO followed by a chaser of a quart of water with a tbsp of fructose (lower glycemic index), twice a day. The sugar water is effective at getting the oiliness out of your mouth quickly. But when I'm in a hurry I'll take 2 tbsp of oil, or sometimes if I've been procrastinating it all day I'll take 4 tbsp of oil.
Your appetite will reduce and you will lose weight on your body's terms simply by not being as hungry. I've read blog entries about how your appetite totally disappears blah blah... well mine didn't, but I'm 6'4" and we wouldn't really expect that now would we? I do feel somewhat less hungry, or at least full sooner. Is it a placebo effect? Time will tell. If time doesn't tell then I'm tricking my body into a better weight, and I'm ok with that. (As an aside, how do you control for a placebo effect when a standard placebo (sugar pill) would actually be following the diet? ;-)
The big question is, is it sustainable? I mean, do we really want to be drinking olive oil the rest of our lives. Well, drinking olive oil isn't that bad after you get used to it. No, really. Sugar water is actually more of a pain because if you care about not messing with your blood sugar you have to drink it slowly. In the book he talks about someone who does the diet down to his optimal weight, then stops and slowly rises back up 10 pounds or so, then goes back on, etc. I could live with that, even if I couldn't live with it every day which I think I could. Besides, I predict that if this diet works for a lot of people, and I think it will, then it won't be long until someone makes a tasteless pill with enough calories that doesn't mess with your blood sugar, and it'll be just like taking vitamins.
