Roberts’ theory is a variant of set point theory. He begins with a set of familiar premises:
1. Our bodies have a set point weight.
2. If we drop below our set points, our bodies will strive mightily to regain lost weight.
3. If we gain above our set points, our bodies will shed that weight easily.
Based in his own experience of unexpected weight loss during a vacation trip to Paris, in evolutionary biology, and in research on weight gain in animals, he then reasons that the following propositions are possibly true:
4. Set points evolved to help us survive during times when food is scarce.
5. When food is plentiful our set points rise, driving us to eat more and store fat.
6. When food is scare our set points fall, driving us to stop looking for food and burn the fat we’ve stored.
an aside: Number 6 was a new idea for me. Of course I’d always assumed that our bodies use hunger to drive us to eat food and store fat.
It had never occurred to me that our bodies would also have a form of ”anti-hunger” to compel us NOT to eat (as much) and instead to burn fat.
But when you think about it, we’d almost have to have such a mechanism. Hunting for food is “expensive”; you have to burn calories to find and/or kill more calories. When food is plentiful, it makes sense to “invest” calories in hunting and gathering. But when food is scarce, you’d be wasting precious calories on the hunt that you may not be able to replace. It makes sense that evolution we have given us a natural biological signal to stop hunting and gathering when food is scarce.
7. Our body’s “signalling mechanism” is hunger. When our bodies want us to eat more, set point rises & hunger increases. When our bodies want us to eat less, set point drops and hunger decreases (or “anti-hunger” sets in?) [Roberts doesn’t talk about “anti-hunger,” btw. He talks about increases and decreases in hunger.]
8. Our bodies “decide” that food is plentiful or scarce based on flavor. When food tastes good, our bodies conclude that food is plentiful. Hunger goes up, we eat more, we gain weight. When food tastes bad our bodies conclude that food is scarce. Hunger goes down, we eat less, and we burn the fat we’ve stored. We lose weight.
from there, several novel hypotheses follow:
9. Most importantly, it’s possible to game the system.
10. Roberts himself originally “gamed” his own system by drinking sugar water twice a day. He doesn’t know why this should work; he stumbled onto it during a trip to Paris when he drank a lot of French soda & lost his appetite. When he searched the weight loss literature to discover what might account for this, he found obscure studies that pointed to the novelty of the French sodas. Because he wasn’t used to the flavors, his body had reacted to French sodas as a signal that food was scarce. His set point and hunger decreased and he lost weight. The point is that your body has to learn what tastes good. More specifically, your body, over time, learns that certain flavors are associated with calories. This is how “acquired tastes” work. Roberts points out that if you remember back to your childhood, to the first time you ever drank Coca Cola, say, you may recall thinking it tasted like medicine. Then over time you came to think it tasted really good. Any flavor that is repeatedly associated with calories will come to taste good.
11. If Coca Cola didn’t have any calories, it would still taste like medicine today.
12. Because sugar is our one inborn taste, it’s possible that straight sugar doesn’t “read” as food. Once sugar has been associated with a learned flavor, we gain weight from the food or drink containing the sugar. This may be why Roberts lost his appetite drinking unfamiliar French soda pop. If he’d been drinking familiar American sodas he would have gained weight. This is his theory, at any rate. He really doesn’t know--and says he doesn’t know--why “straight” sugar should suppress appetite.
13. It was a friend of Roberts’ who suggested that “ELOO” - extra-light olive oil - might work on the same principal. Our bodies seem to “read” straight sugar as flavorless, and ELOO is almost flavorless, too. (Extra-virgin olive oil should not work to suppress appetite, because extra-virgin olive oil is highly flavorful.) Roberts tried ELOO and it worked. Various friends, relatives, and acquaintainces also tried the regimen, using either sugar and/or ELOO, and succeeded in losing weight.
14. The Shangri-La hypothesis explains why we can become addicted to junk food. Junk foods and processed foods are engineered to contain the maximum number of calories with maximum uniformity. Every time you eat a processed food you reinforce your body’s association of calories with the food’s flavor, which never, ever, varies. That’s why junk foods just keep tasting better and better over the years—and why people with food addictions are never addicted to homemade food. Homemade food always varies a bit in flavor or texture.
15. Shangri-La can also explain why set point might keep increasing over a lifespan. The longer we’ve been eating a processed food the stronger our learned association of calories and food. The message that ”food is plentiful, eat more of it” may get stronger over a lifetime.
[pause]
I see that I’ve managed to write a mere 1700 words explaining Shangri-La.
The take-home points are:
Shangri-La works, when it works, by suppressing appetite.
Shangri-La isn’t a diet; it’s analogous to an appetite suppressing medication or supplement.
Shangri-La works--assuming it does work--by gaming the system, by convincing our bodies that food is scarce even though it most assuredly is not.