The Shangri-La Diet Guide

, Jayaprakash

I came across the Shangri-La Diet, which works nothing like Keto or Paleo. Psychologist Seth Roberts built it around appetite rather than food. You count no calories, cut no food groups, and track no macros. You drink oil.

The set point theory

Roberts starts from a set point: the weight your brain defends. Eat less and your appetite rises to pull you back. That is why willpower diets fail at month three, and why the number on the scale returns.

His claim is that flavor moves the set point.

  1. The hypothesis. Your brain learns which flavors predict calories. Eat pizza, donuts, and fast food often enough, strong flavors paired with dense calories, and the brain raises the weight it defends.

  2. The intervention. Take 100-400 calories a day of something with no flavor, usually extra-light olive oil, in a window at least an hour away from any flavored food.

  3. The result. Roberts reports that the unpaired calories break the flavor-calorie link, the set point drops, appetite follows, and you lose about a pound a week.

The reasoning comes from associative learning. A flavor your brain cannot tie to calories stops triggering the expectation of calories, and the loop that drives you back to the fridge loses its cue. Whether the effect survives a controlled trial is another question, and Roberts tested most of it on himself.