I've been reading about Seth Roberts's "Shangri-La diet" (henceforth SLD, but not to be confused with the "Steak Lover's Diet") and I thought this would be a good place to think out loud. This isn't strictly a lowcarb thing, but it has interesting implications, maybe.

For those who haven't heard about it, the SLD isn't actually a "diet" in the usual sense of the term. It's a technique for supressing appetite. It involves consuming tasteless calories at least an hour before a meal, and this should also be at least an hour after eating anything. That is, it's done in the middle of at least a 2-hr window of time between eating anything at all.

The tasteless calories could be in the form of sugar dissolved in a glass of warm water--I believe Roberts himself used granulated fructose, and has taken a good deal of heat for this dubious choice. Also, from what I've read, dilute sugar water doesn't work for a lot of people. Alternatively, one could use pure fat. Roberts suggests extra light olive, a couple of teaspoons. And that's essentially the whole diet. He claims that doing this blunts appetite and resets the body's setpoint, so that one will simply not want much food at meals.

That's the method. Now the theory behind it...

Roberts is a research psychologist. His theory is that there is an association between flavor, energy, and appetite. The completely unrevolutionary idea is that flavors stimulate appetite, i.e., when we eat a flavorful food and then "reward" the body with calories/energy, we set up a reinforcement to keep repeating the act. This, Roberts argues, makes sense in a setting of scarcity, as he imagines the paleolithic era to have been.

So one way to make use of this principle would be to eat only bland foods, with little variety, because variety itself is a way of heightening the flavor stimulus. There was some discussion about this recently in the "Anchell diet" thread, concerning the seemingly arbitrarily restricted list of non-meat food options. It may also be relevant to the all-meat diet discussions and the experience of those who find that *any* veggies give them cravings.

Roberts considered the bland food approach, but recognized that he, and most people, would be unable to eschew flavorful foods permanently. It's one thing if your environment *forces* bland foods upon you, but most people will not willingly accept that austerity.
Anyway, keeping to the fat-based version of the SLD, the premise is that taking in flavorless fuel a few times a day weakens the connection between flavor and energy, so that when one does eat, one wants less. Roberts himself claims that doing this actually resulted in too much weight loss, but even now, his ad libitum daily intake is only about 1200 calories, mostly taken in a single meal, with a couple of pieces of fruit during the rest of the day. That seems like pretty extreme caloric restriction to me, but I guess the point is that it's his ad libitum setpoint, while following this plan.

It's interesting to me that critics of LC diets often charge that they work by limiting food choices and variety, and by the satiety-inducing property of fat. I think there are good reasons to restrict carbs that are independent of weight control. Maybe the SLD in conjunction with an overall LC plan would work well.