A lot of what prompted my current discipline was just realizing that a lot of my running injuries are probably thanks to the extra weight I’m carrying, and that ditching the baggage will make running a whole lot more fun. I still have a hard time remembering long-term goals when faced with dessert, but I’m getting better about that.

With less than four weeks to go, I’d really like to do everything I can to go into my event as lean as possible. Four weeks isn’t very long, but it’s still an opportunity, and I have a plan. I’ll go into the specifics more tomorrow and Wednesday, but it’s based on what I’m learning from Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body. It seems doable (for a month, and probably beyond if I get the kind of results he describes) and certainly worth a shot.

Beyond that, I’m just focusing on keeping up with my training schedule and not getting hurt.

I don’t remember how I first heard about this book, but it was probably one of many that I find while playing on Amazon (I know, some people play cards, and I play on Amazon…). My general Amazon policy (central to me actually retaining some of my income) is that I only buy books that aren’t available at the library. In this case, it meant I waited on hold for this book for a month or two, and that I need to decide whether to buy it or not in the next few days, since I have to return it on July 5th.

The premise of the book is straightforward: it’s difficult or impossible to maintain the healthy behaviors that result in weight loss if you don’t change the way you think. Dr. Beck’s father is also the father of the Cognitive Therapy school of thought, and this book is essentially Cognitive Therapy applied to weight loss.

The Beck Diet Solution is made up of six weeks’ worth of daily exercises. The first two weeks are focused on preparing to diet. I’m already dieting, but Dr. Beck says it’s incredibly important to do those, regardless of current dieting status. That makes sense because those weeks are about establishing the habits and knowledge that help with actually sticking to a diet.

Week three is about understanding your body while dieting—learning to accurately interpret its signals and be realistic about progress. Week four deals with sabotaging thoughts (a major focus of the book, based on the introductory chapters), while week five tackles various challenges that can ruin a diet (food pushers, eating out, traveling, and emotional eating, among others). Finally, week six is about fine-tuning your dieting skills for the long haul.

I’ll have more feedback as I go through the book, but my first impression is good. As I mentioned, I’ve got some issues with food and taste, so I hope that working through this book will not only help me see food more accurately but will also help me want to make changes for the better.

The Amazon reviews for this book are very encouraging. Reviewer after reviewer reports success, and many of them are the “I tried everything, nothing worked, and then I found this” type. I also like that the book is compatible with any diet (since I like to try them all!) and develops lifetime skills. I’ll be working through some of the exercises here on the blog (when it makes sense to do them that way) so you’ll be able to see if the book might be helpful for you as well.

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.