Shangri-La Diet

How would you like to stop dieting physically and start dieting mentally? Sound good? Then the Shangri-La diet is for you.

Seth Roberts, an associate professor of Psychology at UCB, tried every diet on the market, lost weight and put it right back on again like a yo yo.

Well, we all know the feeling, and most of us blame ourselves, as weak will and temptation combine to pull us off track and get our weight creeping up the scale again.

But Seth decided to use his psychological background to find out what really happens on most diets, and using himself as guinea pig, he started a series of experiments.

His premise was that dieting is unnatural behaviour from a psychological stand point. Human survival depended in the past, when our psyches were being formed, on eating as much as possible and gaining enough weight to get past times of famine and drought.
Therefore, he reasoned, dieting arouses psychological resistance, which is so basic that it overrides our conscious will.

So far so good, but is there any way to diet without arousing resistance?
Seth says there is. He reasoned that the mechanism by which the body values food is taste. Tastier foods are valued more than tasteless foods because they have higher caloric value, and this value is given to food by psychological conditioning. This means that the body learns to recognise high calorie foods and associate them with strong taste.
Therefore, if this is a learned process, it can be unlearned, using the right methods, and the attraction for fattening food can be broken without ever dieting!

Using himself as a guinea pig, Seth experimented with different formulas, trying to discover the best way to break the food- taste connection, and eventually managed to come up with a formula that he says helped him to lose weight and keep it off.

the magic formula as described by him in his book , "the shangri la diet" is actually incredibly simple. Roberts mixes six tablespoons of sucrose or fructose in a liter of water, and uses this as an anti hunger device, drinking some of it at intervals through the day. in addition, he swallows up to a tablespoon of vegetable oil, not close to meal times.

He stresses the importance of tastelessness, so that no syrups or strong tasting oils like olive oil should be used, and that this caloric addition should be at times not associated by the body with meals.

Thus, he says, the body unlearns the connection between calories and taste.

Weight should come down automatically, since the mechanism driving hunger has been disrupted, and the body is free to find its real balance without interference from learned responses.

Even better, because this isn't actually a diet at all, but a behaviour change, it should last for ever.
According to Roberts, no hunger is involved, and subjects are encouraged to eat normally.
In fact, he says that he himself had to reduce the amount of sugar water he was drinking by half, because he had lost so much weight!
He eventually stabilised his weight using half a liter of sugar water and a small amount of oil per day.

So is this the wonder non diet of the 21st century? Lets hope so, although experts do point out that this is an unresearched diet, and hasn't been tried by a large enough amount of people to prove or disprove itself.

Well, time will tell, maybe we have all been dieting when we should have been educating ourselves!