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Wellness Wednesday for May 15, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Anyone ever try the Shangri-La diet? It didn't work for Yud but apparently nothing works for him, even Ozempic. Other people report near-miraculous results.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BD4oExxQguTgpESdm/the-unfinished-mystery-of-the-shangri-la-diet

The concept is that your body's "set point" is controlled by access to familiar, flavorful food that your body associates with caloric intake. Your set point goes higher when you consume familiar high flavor/high calorie food. In the ancestral environment it made sense to take on extra fat when berries and nuts were plentiful.

On the other hand, the set point can go down when these familiar foods aren't available. Many people experience weight loss when traveling to an unfamiliar country and eating unfamiliar food. Seth Roberts, inventor of the diet, experienced this weight loss when traveling and drinking unfamiliar sugary beverages, not exactly a health food.

So here's the Shangri-La diet. Every day, drink one tablespoon of extra light olive oil (extra light flavor) mixed with water. Plug your nose so you don't taste it at all. This should happen during a window where you don't consume any flavors for one hour before or after.

Having calories but no flavor breaks the association between flavorful foods and caloric availability and lowers your set point. Or something.

I'm skeptical but I'm willing to give it a try.

Keto worked great for me but unfortunately I'm a cholesterol hyper responder and my levels shot up to over 400. That's probably fine, but I'm conservative so I gave up. Unfortunately, the weight all came back over the next 6 months. So now I'm trying this. Hope it works!

Seth Roberts, inventor of the diet, experienced this weight loss when traveling and drinking unfamiliar sugary beverages, not exactly a health food.

I want everyone that posts about how they lost weight on vacation to post their step counter with averages outside of vacation and on vacation. My own experience is that I just walk a lot more on vacation, like an average of 10,000 steps more in a typical day, with peaks much higher than that. Unsurprisingly, this burns a bunch of calories. So is it magical European sodas, or did he just walk more?

That seems like the obvious answer.

Personally, activity levels have no bearing on my weight. I just got back from California where I walked 10 miles per day on average. I gained weight. Eating 4,000 calories in a day is just so easy and enjoyable for me. I'd say I'm 90th percentile in activity and my resting heart rate is in the 40s. Still kinda fat, though. I gain weight whenever I'm not actively dieting.

I do think there is an activity level that is sufficient for weight loss, but it's extremely high. When I was young, I was probably 99th percentile in activity and was quite skinny.