Shangri La Diet, Here I Come!
I started the Shangri La diet on Sunday. For the last month I’ve been doing South Beach, and i was getting so frustrated, I can’t even begin to describe it.
I started South Beach when I realized that I just could not manage to lose weight with exercise alone. I had been exercising for about a month, every day, and I got on the scale to see what had happened. Well, in all that time, I gained 5 lb of fat! And yes, I am using a body fat scale, so it wasn’t muscle. I just realized that the way I was eating was too bad for any amount of exercise that I could fit into my diet to compete with. So then I tried the South Beach diet, and it worked for a while, but then I stopped losing weight.
Shangri la is really strange. Basically you drink oil or sugar water. You have to have a full hour with no flavor (no food, no toothpaste, no gum) on either side of drinking the sugar water or oil, and the oil has to be flavorless, like canola, extra light olive oil, or safflower oil. If you’re drinking sugar water it should be either sucrose or fructose.
The idea behind the diet is that flavorless calories lower your set point, the number that your body thinks you should weigh. Obviously its more than just that, but the whole scientific theory is spelled out in the Shangri la diet book, so I’m not going to go into all the gory scientific details here. You’re supposed to have between 200 and 400 flavorless calories a day, so of course, I am having more 
So far it’s working, and well. I started on Sunday, weighing 152.2 lb after I had gained 2.2 lb having some whole wheat bread on Friday night and Saturday. That was sort of the last straw in terms of sticking to South Beach foods. I mean, if the only way I can maintain my weight is by sticking to South Beach phase one for the rest of my life, well, it aint gonna happen.
Today, Wednesday morning, I’m down to 149. Finally, a new “tens”. It’s so nice to be somewhere in the forties instead of the fifties, know what I mean?
That weight loss is also nice because on both Sunday and Monday I treated myself to an 85 gram chocolate bar. Yesterday I wisened up and decided to try and accelerate my weight loss by following the extra credit ideas that are listed in the book. I really want to lose weight fast (who doesn’t?) and since the extra credit ideas aren’t horrid, I’m giving them a shot.
