So, we've gotten fat. As you probably noticed at the grocery store, on the airplane and in the stands at your son's Little League game, we're not alone. If you're an adult in the United States, 65% of the population including yours truly, are brothers-in-donuts. I for one never have to worry about being stranded on the highway, thanks to my spare tire. On my 6'3" frame, I'm easily carrying an extra twenty pounds of fat. The neighbors can attest to the sucking sounds that emanate from me every time I try to put on an old pair of jeans. What's a guy to do?
This is a rejected article. It's a piece I researched, developed and pitched with every hope of placing it in print as a freelance writer. If you read it you can probably guess the markets it was written for. I'm proud of this story and hope publishing it here will get it in front of people that are interested in it. Enjoy, and feel free to comment. Perhaps I'll add a postscript to the comments later on.
Enter the diet. It's an American concept, a guilty atonement for the indulgent excesses of meals, snacks and noshes past. It is penance for cheesecakes, nachos, and anything that emerges from a deep-fat fryer. We announce that we are going on one to our spouses, our coworkers, and our waiters. It's commonly estimated by journals that at any given time, one-quarter of the adult population is on a diet. If that's accurate, diets must hardly ever work. A plump 91% of us have tried to lose weight at least once in our lives.
Needless to say, if we had kept if off, 65% of us wouldn't still have a weight problem. So how is it that the diet experts can't seem to help us lose weight, and more importantly, keep it off? Most diets involve eating according to some arcane plan, plenty ofself-denial, and strategic cut backs on carbs, sugar, fats, or all of the above, depending on what particular diet guru's Kool-aid you're drinking. Besides the psychological effects, the logistics of staying on track tend to derail your social life and your daily routines in favor of a tightly regimented eating schedule. In the heat of a diet, it's a thin line of shoestring potatoes that keeps us from flipping out when our server is confused by our order of a hamburger, no bun, no fries. Thus, the dichotomy of dieting: we adhere to strict and unintuitive rules in an attempt to lose weight, only to eventually find ourselves back where we started. But, what if it wasn't that hard to get skinny, albeit the diet was even weirder than a typical weird diet? Would you try it, like I am right now? Seth Roberts, author of "The Shangri-La Diet", was trying to solve his own weight problem when he hit upon something even more American than the diet: the quick fix.
As something of a blogoholic, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where I found Roberts' Shangri-La diet. I do know that skipping across the blogosphere one day last month, I stumbled into a network of sites dedicated to it, which felt something like falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Blogger after blogger extolled the simplicity and sense of the diet plan, emphasizing that it wasn't so much a diet as a reprogramming of the mind. After finally finding and reading the instructions, I was sure something was missing. The basic rule of the diet, if you can really call it a diet, is simple. In fact, here it is. Drink, twice a day, in the middle of a two-hour window of noteating, a few tablespoons of flavorless oil, or a solution of sugar water.
Then, according to the bloggers, watch as the pastry case at Starbucks releases its death grip on you, as the dessert menu goes unread, as you barely finish half your lunch, as you have no desire to raid the vending machine for a mid-afternoon snack. Roberts claims that you will feel full after having eaten less food, which means you will cut your caloric intake without even thinking about it. Rather than having to deny yourself the fries on your plate, you just won't be interested in eating them, unless you want to feel bloated and sick afterwards. I can't help but think of it as gastric bypasssurgery for the mind.
It's pretty safe to say that if Roberts was my friend, Berkeley professor, Ph.D. or not, had he told me about this theory of his, I would've listened, nodded politely while eating my chocolate cake, and remembered to check his medicine cabinet for unusual drug combinations the next time I came over for a visit. But before allowing skepticism to set in, before understanding how his diet scientifically worked, I came across dozens of bloggers who are trying it and losing weight. Roberts shrewdly links to pretty much every blogger he can find doing the diet, and provides a forum wherehe encourages others to tweak his plan to fit their needs. Instead of being a diet guru, Roberts is a diet tour guide, allowing his tourists ample time to wander the grounds of Shangri-La and customizehis theory to fit their individual tastes and goals.
The substance of Roberts' discovery of his diet, and the focus of much of his book, is his research background, his penchant for self-experimentation, and an accidental realization that drinking soda in Paris left him feeling completely full and unable to eat. Roberts determined that his lack of hunger was due to his body lowering its set point, that is, the weight it wants to be, in response to the foreign (to him) taste of sodas in the City of Light. Using what he knows about the intersection of psychology, physiology, and hunger, he developed the diet plan, lost over 30 pounds, and has kept it off for five years. Even if Roberts is a walking laboratory, the research studies he cites in the book are peer reviewed, with control groups and blinds, e.g. careful experiments with verifiable results. His eureka moment was to connect theories of phsychology, weight loss, appetite and taste in such a way that his diet seems less a wild-eyed hunch and more an elegant solution to a thorny and complex problem.I decided it was time to try it, just as soon as I could overcome my physical aversion.
Thinking about it– thinking about having less appetite, picking at my food, and drinking oil bothered me to no end. I had a queasy reaction to the concept. I mean, drinking oil. After discussing the diet with my girlfriend and several friends, they had similar reactions. On some instinctual level, they all thought it would work. But in practice, not one of them was willing to go at abottle of Wesson Oil armed with just a tablespoon and a chaser glass of water.
Re-reading Roberts' book and website, I realized, in a way, aversion was the last barrier my mind was putting up to losing this protective fat. Roberts argues that our primitive brains make us horde and overeat tasty food when it's in abundance, to give us a shot at staying alive in leaner times. The problem is that in modern times food always tastes good, and there are no leaner times during which to burn off fat stores. Our bodies haven't caught up to the fact that sitting in an office chair is the new hunting caribou. It seemed my inner caveman was appealing to my sense of reason one last time,before I dosed it back into the stone age with extra light olive oil (ELOO, as Roberts riffs on Rachael Ray's EVOO).
What made me finally decide to push the button and move the canola oil from the back of the kitchen cabinet to the front was Roberts' accurate assessment of his main critic, UCLA Medical School professor John Ford. In responding to the criticism on his blog, Roberts makes an argument I can believe. Most of us are already taking in at least a few tablespoons of oil and sugar every day. If eating those calories separately will lower our set points, reduce the amount of food we eat, and, Roberts claims, make us hunger a more balanced diet (less junk food), there is probably no medical risk to those few hundred calories of sugar or fat. Slamming the door shut, he goes onto say, "For a long time, medical school researchers have contributed no useful ideas to our understanding of how the average person can lose weight." In fact, the more complicated and esoteric diets have become, the more Americans, myself included seem to be gaining weight without being able to lose it.
The diet is a non-diet, and I admit, it appeals to my intellect. It's a mental trick that fools our bodies into shedding pounds of fat that were once a security blanket for sustaining life, but are now more like heavy winter jackets in, well, Shangri-La. Ten days in, my hunger is reduced and my tendency to snack is gone. Drinking the oil (I haven't yet tried the sugar water) is actually as easy as tilting my head and shooting it back. I felt the effects within 8 hours, as I bought a takeout sandwich walking home on the first day, and forgot about it for an hour after I arrived. When hunger hits, I eat, but so far, much less than before. I should probably start bringing my own Tupperware when dining out.It's far too early for me to have accurate results (Roberts lost his weight over the course of about 100 days), but so far, I like how I feel.
As a "serious eater", to quote Calvin Trillin's "Tummy Trilogy," the idea of eating less bothered me, but it now seems that I was eating way too much. By turning the diet from a puritanical exercise into what feels like a video game cheat code, Roberts seems to have hit upon the underlying Ur diet that explains why other diets work at first. All that remains to be seen is whether instead ofWeight Watchers cards, we all start carrying around portable ELOO shooters.