The Shangri-La Diet: lose weight by drinking oil?

You may have noticed that several of the links on my “Kindred Spirits” blogroll go to blogs that talk about “SLD” or the Shangri-La Diet. I enjoyed specific posts by these bloggers, but really didn’t know much about the diet (except for the odd mention about drinking oil!) or the book that started it. When the publisher offered a review copy of the book, I jumped on it.

The book itself is a quick read: it’s 158 narrow pages of loosely-spaced text (the designer in me loved the unusual format!), so it was easy to breeze through during “found moments”. The conversational writing style helped, too.

The premise of the Shangri-La Diet

This book and theory have two basic tenets:

1. Each person has an individual weight “set point,” a specific weight that the body attempts to maintain by increasing or suppressing hunger, depending on the current distance from the set point.
2. There are techniques that can lower your set point, causing your body to want to eat less to reach that point.
3. The taste of a food is strongly associated with its calorie content, and we tend to like the taste of foods that contain many calories.

There seem to be folks who will argue with these conclusions, but the author, Seth Roberts, Ph.D., has valid scientific reasons for these claims (in my non-science-trained opinion, so take it with a grain of salt). These three points are drawn from rat studies and, more significantly to me, personal experience. I know, scientists would rather have human studies and lots of them, but short of that, my bent toward experimentation likes the overwhelming anecdotal success reported with Shangri-La on blogs and forums.

If you accept those three assumptions, though, you’ll find Seth’s resulting conclusion interesting: eating foods with no flavor but high calorie content lowers your set point and suppresses your appetite.

For this reason, Seth recommends drinking two to four tablespoons of flavorless oil every day, and not worrying about what else you eat. This sounds absurd to most dieters, who know that oil is pure fat and high-calorie. However, the reported result is that those 240-480 “extra” calories make you less hungry for other things (because the oil moves your set point down), causing your calories to drop even with the oil calories figured in, resulting in weight loss.

One important note: to avoid associating the calories with a flavor and undoing your effort, the diet requires that you have your oil at least an hour (in both directions) from anything else that has a flavor (food, toothpaste, everything).

The Shangri-La Diet in practice

One of the nice things about this diet is that it can easily be used in conjunction with other diets (well, except for the alli drug!). I decided to give it a go and see how it works for me.

I started last week with some olive oil we have around the house. Unfortunately, it’s extra virgin olive oil, the strongest tasting of the olive oil bunch, so I had to hold my nose while drinking it to get the taste-free experience that is central to the diet. It still had a bit of an aftertaste, so I drank lots of water afterwards.

The first time I tried just drinking a tablespoon of it straight. Uggh. Based on my current weight and my weight loss goal, I’m doing two tablespoons a day (at separate times to keep the tummy happy), and I really wasn’t excited to do the second “dose.”

One of the other options on the diet is to use white sugar instead. However, it’s not ideal to consume a tablespoon of sugar in one go, because it messes with the blood sugar and insulin response and all that. I read the suggestion to put the tablespoon of sugar in a quart of water and sip it for a while. I like sugar, I like water, so it sounded like a good idea.

It really, really wasn’t. Obviously some people like it just fine, but I thought it was worse than straight oil, because at least I was done with that quickly. The barely-sugared water tasted like a diet soda gone horribly wrong (and I think diet sodas are nasty to start with), and after realizing that in my first drink, I still had 28 ounces to go. I finished it (eventually!), but I wasn’t happy about it.

The next day, I tried another suggestion and put the tablespoon of oil in a cup of cold water. I held my nose and drank it all down, and realized that this was not nearly as gross as I expected. This was a method I could happily use indefinitely, so that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Because I didn’t like the lingering flavor of the extra virgin olive oil, I stopped in at the local health food co-op when I was in the area on Sunday and picked up a bottle of refined walnut oil and a bottle of canola oil. These both are much lighter in taste (almost no flavor), color (they’re very pretty, actually), and consistency (I feel like less sticks to my lips and more just goes down with the water).

Between the two bottles, there’s 64 tablespoons, so enough to give it an honest try for a month. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m still sticking to my calorie-deficit goals, but adding the oil in as part of my menu. I’m not sure what to expect since I’m already on a low-calorie diet (is it possible that my rather meager portions will actually seem like too much?), but it might help with cravings and general hunger.

I haven’t felt any noticeable difference yet, but it sounds like many people take a week or two to experience a change, so I’ll wait it out and report back.