Here’s a post that’s suitable for the Thanksgiving season.
I no longer believe in the Shangri-La diet. Here’s the story.
Background
I met Seth Roberts back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years.
At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psychology was minimal so I contacted the one person I knew in the psychology department and asked him if he had any suggestions of someone who’d like to teach the course with me. Seth responded that he’d be interested in doing it himself, and we did it.
Seth was an unusual guy—not always in a good way, but some of his positive traits were friendliness, inquisitiveness, and an openness to consider new ideas. He also struggled with mood swings, social awkwardness, and difficulties with sleep, and he attempted to address these problems with self-experimentation.
After we taught the class together we got together regularly for lunch and Seth told me about his efforts in self-experimentation involving sleeping hours and mood. Most interesting to me was his discovery that seeing life-sized faces in the morning helped with his mood. I can’t remember how he came up with this idea, but perhaps he started by following the recommendation that is often given to people with insomnia to turn off TV and other sources of artificial light in the evening. Seth got in the habit of taping late-night talk-show monologues and then watching them in the morning while he ate breakfast. He found himself happier, did some experimentation, and concluded that we had evolved to talk with people in the morning, and that life-sized faces were necessary. Seth lived alone, so the more natural approach of talking over breakfast with a partner was not available.
Seth’s self-experimentation went slowly, with lots of dead-ends and restarts, which makes sense given the difficulty of his projects. I was always impressed by Seth’s dedication in this, putting in the effort day after day for years. Or maybe it did not represent a huge amount of labor for him, perhaps it was something like a diary or blog which is pleasurable to create, even if it seems from the outside to be a lot of work. In any case, from my perspective, the sustained focus was impressive. He had worked for years to solve his sleep problems and only then turned to the experiments on mood.
Seth’s academic career was unusual. He shot through college and graduate school to a tenure-track job at a top university, then continued to do publication-quality research for several years until receiving tenure. At that point he was not a superstar but I think he was still considered a respected member of the mainstream academic community. But during the years that followed, Seth lost interest in that thread of research. He told me once that his shift was motivated by teaching introductory undergraduate psychology: the students, he said, were interested in things that would affect their lives, and, compared to that, the kind of research that leads to a productive academic career did not seem so appealing.
I suppose that Seth could’ve tried to do research in clinical psychology (Berkeley’s department actually has a strong clinical program) but instead he moved in a different direction and tried different things to improve his sleep and then, later, his skin, his mood, and his diet. In this work, Seth applied what he later called his “insider/outsider perspective”: he was an insider in that he applied what he’d learned from years of research on animal behavior, an outsider in that he was not working within the existing paradigm of research in physiology and nutrition.
At the same time he was working on a book project, which I believe started as a new introductory psychology course focused on science and self-improvement but ultimately morphed into a trade book on ways in which our adaptations to Stone Age life were not serving us well in the modern era. I liked the book but I don’t think he found a publisher. In the years since, this general concept has been widely advanced and many books have been published on the topic.
When Seth came up with the connection between morning faces and depression, this seemed potentially hugely important. Were the faces were really doing anything? I have no idea. On one hand, Seth was measuring his own happiness and doing his own treatments on his own hypothesis so the potential for expectation effects are huge. On the other hand, he said the effect he discovered was a surprise to him and he also reported that the treatment worked with others. Neither he nor, as far as I know, anyone else, has attempted a controlled trial of this idea.
In his self-experimentation, Seth lived the contradiction between the two tenets of evidence-based medicine: (1) Try everything, measure everything, record everything; and (2) Make general recommendations based on statistical evidence rather than anecdotes.
Seth’s ideas were extremely evidence-based in that they were based on data that he gathered himself or that people personally sent in to him, and he did use the statistical evidence of his self-measurements, but he did not put in much effort to reduce, control, or adjust for biases in his measurements, nor did he systematically gather data on multiple people.
The Shangri-La diet
Seth’s next success after curing his depression was losing 40 pounds on an unusual diet that he came up with, in which you can eat whatever you want as long as each day you drink a cup of unflavored sugar water, at least an hour before or after a meal. The way he theorized that his diet worked was that the carefully-timed sugar water had the effect of reducing the association between calories and flavor, thus lowering your weight set-point and making you uninterested in eating lots of food.
I asked Seth once if he thought I’d lose weight if I were to try his diet in a passive way, drinking the sugar water at the recommended time but not actively trying to reduce my caloric intake. He said he supposed not, that the diet would make it easier to lose weight but I’d probably still have to consciously eat less.
I described Seth’s diet to one of my psychologist colleagues at Columbia and asked what he thought of it. My colleague said he thought it was ridiculous. And, as with the depression treatment, Seth never had an interest in running a controlled trial, even for the purpose of convincing the skeptics.
I had a conversation with Seth about this. He said he’d tried lots of diets and none had worked for him. I suggested that maybe he was just ready at last to eat least and lose weight, and he said he’d been ready for awhile but this was the first diet that allowed him to eat less without difficulty. I suggested that maybe the theory underlying Seth’s diet was compelling enough to act as a sort of placebo, motivating him to follow the protocol. Seth responded that other people had tried his diet and lost weight with it. He also reminded me that it’s generally accepted that “diets don’t work” and that people who lose weight while dieting will usually gain it all back. He felt that his diet was different in that it didn’t you what foods to eat or how much; rather, it changed your set point so that you didn’t want to eat so much. I found Seth’s arguments persuasive. I didn’t feel that his diet had been proved effective, but I thought it might really work, I told people about it, and I was happy about its success. Unlike my Columbia colleague, I didn’t think the idea was ridiculous.
Media exposure and success
Seth’s breakout success happened gradually, starting with a 2005 article on self-experimentation in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a journal that publishes long articles followed by short discussions from many experts. Some of his findings from the ten of his experiments discussed in the article:
Seeing faces in the morning on television decreased mood in the evening and improved mood the next day . . . Standing 8 hours per day reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative . . . Drinking unflavored fructose water caused a large weight loss that has lasted more than 1 year . . .
As Seth described it, self-experimentation generates new hypotheses and is also an inexpensive way to test and modify them. The article does not seem to have had a huge effect within research psychology (Google Scholar gives it 93 cites) but two of its contributions—the idea of systematic self-experimentation and the weight-loss method—have spread throughout the popular culture in various ways. Seth’s work was featured in a series of increasingly prominent blogs, which led to a newspaper article by the authors of Freakonomics and ultimately a successful diet book (not enough to make Seth rich, I think, but Seth had simple tastes and no desire to be rich, as far as I know). Meanwhile, Seth started a blog of his own which led to a message board for his diet that he told me had thousands of participants.
Seth achieved some measure of internet fame, with fans including Nassim Taleb, Steven Levitt, Dennis Prager, Tucker Max, Tyler Cowen, . . . and me! In retrospect, I don’t think having all this appreciation was good for him. On his blog and elsewhere Seth reported success with various self-experiments, the last of which was a claim of improved brain function after eating half a stick of butter a day. Even while maintaining interest in Seth’s ideas on mood and diet, I was entirely skeptical of his new claims, partly because of his increasing rate of claimed successes. It took Seth close to 10 years of sustained experimentation to fix his sleep problems, but in later years it seemed that all sorts of different things he tried were effective. His apparent success rate was implausibly high. What was going on? One problem is that sleep hours and weight can be measured fairly objectively, whereas if you measure brain function by giving yourself little quizzes, it doesn’t seem hard at all for a bit of unconscious bias to drive all your results. I also wonder if Seth’s blog audience was a problem: if you have people cheering on your every move, it can be that much easier to fool yourself.
Seth also started to go down some internet rabbit holes. On one hand, he was a left-wing Berkeley professor who supported universal health care, Amnesty International, and other liberal causes. On the other hand, his paleo-diet enthusiasm brought him close to various internet right-wingers, and he was into global warming denial and kinda sympathetic to Holocaust denial, not because he was a Nazi or anything but just because he had distrust of authority thing going on. I guess that if he’d been an adult back in the 1950s and 1960s he would’ve been on the extreme left, but more recently it’s been the far right where the rebels are hanging out. Seth also had sympathy for some absolutely ridiculous and innumerate research on sex ratios and absolutely loved the since-discredited work of food behavior researcher Brian Wansink; see here and here. The point here is not that Seth believed things that turned out to be false—that happens to all of us—but rather that he had a soft spot for extreme claims that were wrapped in the language of science.
Back to Shangri-La
A few years ago, Seth passed away, and I didn’t think of him too often, but then a couple years ago my doctor told me that my cholesterol level too high. He prescribed a pill, which I’m still taking every day, and he told me to switch to a mostly-plant diet and lose a bunch of weight.
My first thought was to try the Shangri-La diet. That cup of unflavored sugar water at least an hour between meals. Or maybe I did the spoonful of unflavored olive oil, I can’t remember which. Anyway, I tried it for a few days, also following the advice to eat less. And then after a few days, I thought: if the point is to eat less, why not just do that? So that’s what I did. No sugar water or olive oil needed.
What’s the point of this story? Not that losing the weight was easy for me. For a few years before that fateful conversation, my doctor had been bugging me to lose weight, and I’d vaguely wanted that to happen, but it hadn’t. What worked was me having this clear goal and motivation. And it’s not like I’m starving all the time. I’m fine; I just changed my eating patterns, and I take in a lot less energy every day.
But here’s a funny thing. Suppose I’d stuck with the sugar water and everything else had been the same. Then I’d have lost all this weight, exactly when I’d switched to the new diet. I’d be another enthusiastic Shangri-La believer, and I’d be telling you, truthfully, that only since switching to that diet had I been able to comfortably eat less. But I didn’t stick with Shangri-La and I lost the weight anyway, so I won’t make that attribution.
OK, so after that experience I had a lot less belief in Seth’s diet. The flip side of being convinced by his earlier self-experiment was becoming unconvinced after my own self-experiment.
And that’s where I stood until I saw this post at the blog Slime Mold Time Mold about informal experimentation:
For the potato diet, we started with case studies like Andrew Taylor and Penn Jilette; we recruited some friends to try nothing but potatoes for several days; and one of the SMTM authors tried the all-potato diet for a couple weeks.
For the potassium trial, two SMTM hive mind members tried the low-dose potassium protocol for a couple of weeks and lost weight without any negative side effects. Then we got a couple of friends to try it for just a couple of days to make sure that there weren’t any side effects for them either.
For the half-tato diet, we didn’t explicitly organize things this way, but we looked at three very similar case studies that, taken together, are essentially an N = 3 pilot of the half-tato diet protocol. No idea if the half-tato effect will generalize beyond Nicky Case and M, but the fact that it generalizes between them is pretty interesting. We also happened to know about a couple of other friends who had also tried versions of the half-tato diet with good results.
My point here is not to delve into the details of these new diets, but rather to point out that they are like the Shangri-La diet in being different from other diets, associated with some theory, evaluated through before-after studies on some people who wanted to lose weight, and yielded success.
At this point, though, my conclusion is not that unflavored sugar water is effective in making it easy to lose weight, or that unflavored oil works, or that potatoes work, or that potassium works. Rather, the hypothesis that’s most plausible to me is that, if you’re at the right stage of motivation, anything can work.
Or, to put it another way, I now believe that the observed effect of the Shangri-La diet, the potato diet, etc., comes from a mixture of placebo and selection. The placebo is that just about any gimmick can help you lose weight, and keep the weight off, if it somehow motivates you to eat less. The selection is that, once you’re ready to try something like this diet, you might be ready to eat less.
But what about “diets don’t work”? I guess that diets don’t work for most people at most times. But the people trying these diets are not “most people at most times.” They’re people with a high motivation to eat less and lose weight.
I’m not saying I have an ironclad case here. I’m pretty much now in the position of my Columbia colleague who felt that there’s no good reason to believe that Seth’s diet is more effective than any other arbitrary series of rules that somewhere includes the suggestion to eat less. And, yes, I have the same impression of the potato diet and the other ideas mentioned above. It’s just funny that it took so long for me to reach this position.
Back to Seth
I wouldn’t say the internet killed Seth Roberts, but ultimately I don’t think it did him any favors for him to become an internet hero, in the same way that it’s not always good for an ungrounded person to become an academic hero, or an athletic hero, or a musical hero, or a literary hero, or a military hero, or any other kind of hero. The stuff that got you to heroism can be a great service to the world, but what comes next can be a challenge.
Seth ended up believing in his own hype. In this case, the hype was not that he was an amazing genius; rather, the hype was about his method, the idea that he had discovered modern self-experimentation (to the extent that this rediscovery can be attributed to anybody, it should be to Seth’s undergraduate adviser, Allen Neuringer, in this article from 1981). Maybe even without his internet fame Seth would’ve gone off the deep end and started to believe he was regularly making major discoveries; I don’t know.
From a scientific standpoint, Seth’s writings are an example of the principle that honesty and transparency are not enough. He clearly described what he did, but his experiments got to be so flawed as to be essentially useless.
After I posted my obituary of Seth (from which I took much of the beginning of this post), there were many moving tributes in the comments, and I concluded by writing, “It is good that he found an online community of people who valued him.” That’s how I felt right now, but in retrospect, maybe not. If I could’ve done it all over again, I never would’ve promoted his diet, a promotion that led to all the rest.
I’d guess that the wide dissemination of Seth’s ideas was a net benefit to the world. Even if his diet idea is bogus, it seems to have made a difference to a lot of people. And even if the discoveries he reported from his self-experimentation (eating a stick of butter a day improving brain functioning and all the rest) were nothing but artifacts of his hopeful measurement protocols, the idea of self-experimentation was empowering to people—and I’m assuming that even his true believers (other than himself) weren’t actually doing the butter thing.
Setting aside the effects on others, though, I don’t think that this online community was good for Seth in his own work or for his personal life. In some ways he was ahead of his time, as nowadays we’re hearing a lot about people getting sucked into cult-like vortexes of misinformation.
P.S. Lots of discussion in comments, including this from the Slime Mold Time Mold bloggers.
Interesting. There’s a saying amongst trainers that goes something like, “Every athlete is an experiment of n=1.” I can’t remember who said that, maybe the exercise physiologist David Martin or Peter Coe (Sebastian Coe’s father and trainer). Having trained many good amateur cyclists (and also myself), I would say that this is a true statement. There are some general, well-established principals that can serve as guides, but ultimately, everyone is a bit different. You can’t scale the same program for each person’s fitness level and then repeat. It always needs tweaks for each individual. People are so complex that even when you set up this n=1 experiment, hold ‘everything else’ constant, and change one part, you really can’t be sure. ‘Everything else’ is just too vast and complex to hold constant. At least one plus is that the data is always longitudinal, so you can repeat the same experiment many times.
“Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects.”
— George A. Sheehan in 1992 (c.f. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1346631 )
I’m a little unclear about the point of this post, but to the extent that it is about self-experimentation, I’ll put in a plug for that, with caveats. Variation is the stuff of life, so people and their conditions vary, and what works for one may not work for another. Accordingly, studies that do not take relevant variation into account can seem to show no effect, when there is an effect in a subset of cases. A n example of this concerns drugs targeting EGF receptors in lung cancer. Early tests of these drugs showed on effect, but then people figured out that whether they work depends on the particular mutations involved with the cancer, and drugs targeting EFG receptors are now used on a subset of lung cancer patients. I’ve seen the same argued about the ‘diets don’t work’ data.
Similarly, there is a lot of variation in how people react to NSAIDs, and as far as I know the only thing you can do is try different ones to see which you can tolerate. (I can tolerate one called meloxicam, but not others.)
I think the same applies to folk treatments. Marijuana seems to help some people sleep better, but it doesn’t do it for me. Going back to meloxicam, I learned when I tried to get off it that it helps a lot with neuropathic pain that I have from an injured lateral femoral nerve. This is completely off-label, and I have no idea why it works, but for me it does. Long-term use of NSAIDs is dangerous, but the benefit I get is enough that I take the risk.
The caveat is that people are suggestible and the placebo effect is powerful, so if you are trying things that could be harmful (e.g., meloxicam), don’t hide it from your doctor.
Quote from the blogpost: “Rather, the hypothesis that’s most plausible to me is that, if you’re at the right stage of motivation, anything can work.”
Perhaps something similar can be said about the faces-on-TV-in-the-morning thing and depression. Taping late night monologues and watching them in the morning takes some effort, which might only be done by people who are at the right stage of motivation.
Also, depending on your taste in humor and the particular late night show your taping, I would reason that the humor and possible subsequent laughing might be a variable of interest and importance as well next to the role of the faces.
Perhaps all the experimentation, hypothesizing, and thinking by Mr. Roberts concerning things like depression and weight-loss might be what has helped him the most with regard to these things. Engaging in these things might influence or involve things like self-efficacy or having a purpose. This in turn might help with things like depression and weight-loss.
Quote from above: “Perhaps all the experimentation, hypothesizing, and thinking by Mr. Roberts concerning things like depression and weight-loss might be what has helped him the most with regard to these things. Engaging in these things might influence or involve things like self-efficacy or having a purpose. ”
I have often wondered whether studying clinical psychology, and research related things, and commenting on this blog, and writing and publishing manuscripts is, and/or has been, some sort of way for me personally to somehow help concerning things like depression and finding a purpose and all that stuff.
I also often wonder whether this is still the case, and whether engaging in these things may have served its purpose in this light, and whether it might be better for me to go and do other things. I think it might be a good thing to wonder once in a while why one might be doing something, and whether that might still be useful, and whether one could and/or should do it slightly differently, and whether it might be time for something else.
There’s lots going on in this post! I’ll comment on just a few aspects of it. I don’t really have a specific point to make, it’s just that this post reminded me of a few things.
First, formal self-experimentation goes way back before Seth’s advisor. For instance, a few years ago I read a book about self-experimentation (Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation, by Trevor Norton) and it had chapter after chapter about different self-experimenters. One of the true heroes of self-experimentation, as well as being a hero in the conventional sense of someone who took enormous risk to try to save the lives of others, was John Scott Haldane, father of the famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane. John Scott did all kinds of crazy things like expose himself to different gases to see which ones are most dangerous, and experiment on himself (and his young son) to see what chemicals made good anesthetics.
Second, we’ve talked about n=1 experiments before on this blog, and in the context of weight loss. Here’s a post from five years ago, which refers to a much earlier post: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/07/10/exercise-weight-loss-long-term-follow/
Finally, a few words about Seth. Seth and I had lunch together about ten times a year for several years. We weren’t good friends, and in fact every time we had lunch I would b reminded of things about him that irritated me, but he was always very interesting to speak with and if he were still alive I’m sure we would still be having those lunches. He was anti-establishment to a fault: if you wanted him to believe something was true, all you had to do is assert that there’s good evidence for it but experts don’t believe it. Of course there are many examples of experts being wrong — experts didn’t believe h. pylori caused ulcers, they didn’t believe in planetary drift, etc. etc. Famously, medical students are told “half of what we’re going to teach you is wrong, but we don’t know which half.” But if you learn that experts think something is false, surely you should be at least somewhat less likely to believe it, rather than much more likely. In any case, although it can barely be said that I liked Seth, I did find him very thought-provoking and I am sorry that it’s no longer possible to have those long lunchtime conversations.
J.B.S. Haldane (the geneticist, son of J.S. Haldane, the physiologist) continued his father’s tradition of self experimentation. He seemingly enjoyed his stint as an infantry officer in the First World War, but he was too old to serve in the military in the Second World War. He got funding from the Admiralty to study the effects of pressure and temperature on the body, with an aim to improving the conditions for, and survival of, submarine crews: he ran experiments on himself, his colleagues, and his family in a sealed chamber.
And he was a communist, which suggests he was ok with running experiments on entire populations!
Quote from above: “And he was a communist, which suggests he was ok with running experiments on entire populations!
I sometimes wonder what exact percentage of social scientists currently employed by universities and such are ok with that as well…
Anon:
Probably a lot lower than the percentage of tech executives who are actually running experiments on entire populations…
Both social scientists and tech executives may have a lot in common. And perhaps they might even work together. Or, perhaps some social scientists want to be sort of like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg and are currently planning out their ten-year strategy to aim for world-domination, manipulation, and control. Or perhaps people like Gates and Zuckerberg hire social scientists.
Who knows what some people are attempting to do in the name of “science”, “collaboration”, “improvement”, and “changing the incentives” and who know what words and terms that sort of sound desirable but upon closer inspection might be used inappropriately and might even be complete BS…
Anyway, to the main point again: perhaps some social scientists and tech executives think and act similarly. The use, and seemingly unlimited praise and trust, of technology being one thing they may have in common. And perhaps being a bit narcissitic and/or psychopathic being another thing they might have in common. The combination of these things might be extremely problematic.
Concerning social scientists with these kinds of characteristics, I am reminded of two sentences depicted in one of my favorite papers titled “The moral responsibility of the scientist” by Popper (1971). Depending on what his intentions were when writing the following sentences, I might presently be a little less confident than Popper was decades ago:
“I am confident that in fact most scientists, at least most creative scientists, value independent and critical thinking very highly. Most of them hate the very idea of a society manipulated by the technologists and by mass-communication.”
Anon:
1. There’s a lot of variation in attitudes among social scientists and tech executives. Not so many social scientists are communist anymore—for that matter, Haldane, mentioned above, was a biologist, not a social scientist—as communism has been discredited. Some tech executives seem pretty fascist, which for someone of my generation seems odd, but I guess that fascism was discredited so many years ago that it’s coming back. Maybe communism will come back too, I don’t know.
2. Yes, many social scientists work in the private sector.
3. I doubt that any social scientists of note are “planning out their ten-year strategy to aim for world-domination, manipulation, and control.” I mean, sure, there are crazy people everywhere, certainly there are some crazy social scientists too, but I don’t think that has anything to do with social science. In any large enough group, I’m sure you’d find some people who have delusions of world domination, some people who believe that they are Jesus, some people who can’t carry a tune but still think that they are incredibly talented musicians who are unfairly unappreciated by the world because of a vast conspiracy, some people who are sure they’ve discovered a cure for cancer if only the goddamn medical establishment would let them try it out, some people who carry around a ragged binder with their grand unified theory of physics which for some nefarious reason they can’t get published in the Physical Review, etc etc.
3. Thanks for pointing out the Popper article. It seems consistent with what he said in his classic book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
“World domination”, “control”, “manipulation” can perhaps take many forms, and can perhaps have many steps and degrees. One example of this all could be having certain values and thinking you have the right, as a scientist, to nudge or steer others in the direction of those values.
It all reminds me of the fraudulent social psychologists Diederik Stapel who wrote in his book: “I wanted to make the world a nicer place and get some recognition for it. I wanted to play God and be praised.” (Stapel, 2014, p. 188).
I think there might be many more social scientists like Stapel, concerning several features and actions.
Haldane was an amazing character.
I first heard about Seth’s theories through the NY Times article by the Freakanomics guys, then I started reading Seth’s blog. Eventually, I corresponded with Seth and had some phone conversations with him. I never met him in person. He helped me with some self-experimentation on reaction time to see if eating soy products hurts my brain function (I found no effect). And, I’ve also been following his Shangri-La diet since October of 2009, so about 14 years now. I don’t use sugar water. I take three or four tablespoons of flaxseed oil early in the afternoon. I don’t eat breakfast or lunch. I like the diet because I find it’s good at suppressing my appetite, and I save both time and money by skipping two meals.
Andrew wrote, “I now believe that the observed effect of the Shangri-La diet, the potato diet, etc., comes from a mixture of placebo and selection.” I disagree with this assessment of Shangri-La. The diet helped me lose about 30 pounds when other methods had failed. The weight loss was fairly effortless. However, having said that, I found that I couldn’t maintain that weight loss for very long, and I slowly regained about 20 pounds over a period of years. (If I had more time, I’d plot my weight and post a link to the graph. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow). So it’s hardly been a miracle diet for me, but I also wonder how much I would weigh today if I had never done the Shangri-La diet. My suspicion, which I obviously can’t prove, is that I would have weighed a great deal more than I weigh now, and probably would have weighed a lot more than I did 14 years ago when I first started the diet.
I didn’t know Seth nearly as well as you (Andrew) knew him, but I liked and admired him. Seth’s anti-establishment ideas and his emphasis on self-empowerment continue to resonate with me.
Here is a graph of my daily weight:
https://half-tato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/shangri-la-diet.jpg
The red arrow indicates the start of the Shangri-La diet, which continues to the present. The graph is current as of yesterday.
The diet worked very well at first. I was losing a pound a week without much effort or discomfort. I do think that the diet has some physiological basis beyond the simple placebo effect. Unfortunately, like many diets, its effectiveness gradually wore off over time, though I’m still about 12 pounds lower than when I started in 2009.
Also, in case anyone is interested in discussing Seth’s ideas, there is a Facebook group dedicated to him. I’m one of the admins, along with Seth’s sister Amy and another friend of Seth’s.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/103549593359917/user/689355442/
Sorry, I posted the wrong Facebook link. Here is the correct one:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SethRobertsCommunity/
Related to Phil’s post, every student of memory knows that Hermann Ebbinghaus did all of his work on memory with himself as the only subject. I don’t know if he applied that self-experimentation to anything else in his life, but it became one of the foundational works in psychology. That was the late 1800s.
The self-experiment that stood out for me was the stick of butter a day. So I looked up Seth Roberts death (in 2014 at age 60) on Wikipedia, where I found “Occlusive coronary artery disease and cardiomegaly contributed to his death” with no other contributory cause mentioned. It might be that his final contribution was a harsh lesson on the limits of self experimentation: With death as the outcome, you don’t get much chance to learn from error if your first choice was bad. At least, it seems fair to speculate he might have survived longer had he chosen olive oil instead of butter for his daily fat fix.
Sander:
Agreed. Self-experimentation and the feedback from internet admirers may literally have killed him.
Fwiw: What I wrote when Seth died:
https://economics.com.au/2014/06/04/in-memoriam-seth-roberts-1953-2014/
Andreas:
In your post, you write, “In the aftermath of his untimely death, it has been suggested that his experimentation with (and miscalculations about) Omega-3 fatty acids might have caused his collapse.” As I recall, near the end he was eating a stick of butter a day, which is mostly not Omega-3 fatty acids.
I think that a combination of three factors—(a) methodological errors in his research (taking self-measurements which allowed him to all-too-easily see confirmation of his hypothesis), (b) an internet fan club, and (c) a history of doing work on his own, without collaborators—led Seth to a point where he had a mistaken sense of invincibility, as if anything he tried would lead to a discovery. If he’d been doing academic social psychology, this could’ve led him to a successful career of publications in Psychological Science. But since he was manipulating his own diet, he was putting his body at risk.
It’s great to see so much detail on Seth’s background and the early days of the Shangri-La diet, that story can be hard to piece together from old blog posts.
It seems possible that much of the Shangri-La diet effect was driven by placebo or selection, though it’s hard to tell since Seth didn’t keep great records of the data (at least not that we’ve been able to find). However, we think that for our studies, the evidence seems strongly against the idea that “if you’re at the right stage of motivation, anything can work”. In particular, because many things did not work! The original potato diet had a large effect size, an average loss of 10.6 lbs, 99% CI [12.1, 9.1] over four weeks. But the potassium trial had a measly average effect of 0.89 lbs lost over 29 days, 95% CI [1.59, 0.19] pounds.
The half-tato trial had the added feature of a two-week baseline period where people measured their weight for two weeks before starting the diet. Over the baseline period, weight loss was not statistically distinct from zero: 0.22 lbs loss, 95% CI [0.70, -0.27]. Following baseline, people did four weeks of half-tato, where weight loss was distinct from zero but again measly, just 1.7 lb on average.
If the observed effect were consistent with placebo and selection, then you would expect similar effects for potato, potassium, and half-tato. Instead we see a very strong effect for the potato diet and tiny effects for the potassium and half-tato. While these are different from zero they do not seem at all consistent with the large effect observed in the potato diet. And if the effects were selection, then you would expect to see weight loss in the two-week baseline period we tried for the Half-Tato Diet Community Trial, which we did not observe. So we can’t agree with “these new diets … are like the Shangri-La diet in being different from other diets, associated with some theory, evaluated through before-after studies on some people who wanted to lose weight, and yielded success” — 2/3 did not yield success!
And if it’s really placebo, that should be easy to show. Anyone can run a Shangri-La RCT and see what happens, or a trial modified to account for selection effects (e.g. people sign up for the potato diet and half of them are randomly assigned to caloric restriction instead of potatoes). We think these studies would further rule out selection and placebo if anyone wants to try.
Slime:
Regarding the differences you’ve observed, I’d say: (1) you have different people trying these different diets at different points in their lives, (2) but, yeah, sure, I’m not arguing that any diet will work, (3) based on my own N=1 experience, my current take on the success of Seth’s diet is that any abracadabra would’ve worked, as long as it was convincing to the dieter. Not “placebo,” exactly; more like, now he was ready to eat a lot less and so he started doing so. What got me to do it was my doctor; what got Seth to do it was the belief he had come up with a theory. It’s a stone-soup kind of thing: Seth’s diet plus caloric restriction really works! Caloric restriction isn’t so hard if you’re motivated . . . at the individual level, the hard part is the psychology, not the nutrition. That said, sure, I guess there will be lots of diets that don’t work so well. I don’t think your argument rules out selection in the way that you think, because there’s selection in who tries these different diets.
And I do think that, had I wanted to lose weight 15 years ago and had I tried Seth’s diet, I would’ve lost weight . . . but I was able to lose weight just directly, etc etc., so in the intellectual sense I feel like I dodged a bullet by avoiding becoming another enthusiastic testimonial for that diet.
The point isn’t that CR is hard; it’s that it doesn’t work for most obese people.
You can’t prove a hypothesis, of course, only disprove it. I don’t see you disproving Shangri-La, although I don’t have a particular reason to believe in it, besides knowing 2 people who swear by it.
“Anything works for a motivated person” is clearly false, as any motivated obese person can tell you.
> (2) but, yeah, sure, I’m not arguing that any diet will work
It does seem like you’re arguing that in the post. If not, what are you arguing? When do diets work? “When people are motivated” is clearly false in the experience of myself and everybody who’s ever been obese.
Exfatloss:
When I wrote, “I no longer believe in the Shangri-La diet,” I didn’t mean to imply that I think the diet can’t ever work for people. I believe it can work; it can help people lose weight. It worked for Seth and it’s worked for others, including the two people you know.
It’s also true that there are lots and lots of diet books out there, all of which have testimonials from people who’ve used these diets to lose weight. There are lots of diets that work, and these diets have all sorts of different rules.
That’s why I think these diets work by reaching people at the right time. Perhaps rather than saying, “I no longer believe in the Shangri-La diet,” I should’ve said, “I no longer believe there’s something special about the Shangri-La diet.” I believe in the Shangri-La diet in the same way that I believe in the Scarsdale diet, the potato diet, the eat-500-calories-less-every-day diet (that’s approximately what I did), and all sorts of other diets. Lots of diets can, and do, work. I’m not saying that any diet will work, and I’m definitely not saying that any diet will work for all or even most people at any time; I’m saying that, for people who are in the right situation, many diets seem to work, and I think the details (the sugar water, the rules about carbs, the potatoes, etc.) mostly just serve a motivational purpose.
I also agree that I’ve not proved or disproved anything in this post. I’m just sharing my experiences, which I think are as valuable as the experiences of people who have lost weight or not lost weight using the Scarsdale diet, the potato diet, and lots of other things.
Also, I don’t know how relevant this is, but I don’t think Seth was ever obese. He wanted to lose weight, and he did, but he was not obese to start with; he just weighed a bit more than he wanted to.
Interesting discussion. “And if it’s really placebo, that should be easy to show. Anyone can run a Shangri-La RCT and see what happens, or a trial modified to account for selection effects (e.g. people sign up for the potato diet and half of them are randomly assigned to caloric restriction instead of potatoes). We think these studies would further rule out selection and placebo if anyone wants to try.”
Perhaps you mean “easy to accumulate evidence that supports x or y hypothesis”?
Placebo trials–“lie that heals”–are hard often much harder to assess than we think.
I absolutely buy the potato diet, in a way that is neither placebo nor selection. It is not a calorically dense food — preparing it takes a considerable amount of time. It is simply not convenient to eat enough potatoes to actually gain weight, and if you stick to it you’ll just go hungry rather than wait 20 minutes of bake a barely palatable plain potato. It’d be like making it a half hour walk to get a snack rather than putting it in your pantry — you’ll get fewer snacks.
What makes it work is that you can say no to everything. It’s far easier to say no, absolutely, than to say yes but only moderately.
Nicholas:
As other commenters have discussed, it depends on the person. It hasn’t been hard for me “to say yes but only moderately” to caloric food.
The “potato diet” is not the “potato diet”: experiments show that eating only one food – literally any food – will produce sustained weight loss.
Stephan Guyenet described the relevant experiments, including a citation regarding the potato diet, in his “The Hungry Brain”.
Thought this was relevant.
1. iirc, Seth increased the pace of his self-experimentation is later years. this was my memory based on endless reading of his blog and other sources.
2. one’s feedback group is a huge thing
Academia is good in terms of technical people generally arguing on logic.
IDW crashed in my view because after being cancelled, many lost the intellectual anchor of the intellectual ecosystem + audience capture.
after cancelling unbalanced said intellectuals, the “system” is having a great day laughing at their demise which was a result of the cancellation rather than a cause thereof.
3. Shangri-la diet can easily be tested with double blinding. using pills that are harder to distinguish. but would need to mask the aftertaste coming from the gut. it’s depressing that nobody did it yet.
FWIW, when I tried the Shangri-la diet about 15 years ago, my hunger just sort or fell away, and I finally understood those people who would “forget” to eat a meal. The effect felt very, very real, and I lost quite a bit of weight.
Strangely, I’ve tried it again in recent years and the effect is gone.
heterogeneity is underrated.
Opposite observation here; I tried SLD twice in the last decade and abandoned it when it was too gross to keep going. Trying it this year I’ve lost 15 lbs very steadily. One difference is that I’m using MCT oil and taking much less, a little under 1 Tbsp/day, simply because I have smaller spoons now. I think little changes can make an unexpectedly big difference. But agree with general point that it’s hard to isolate causes in n=1 work.
I found that virgin coconut oil and MCT oil were very effective at suppressing my appetite, more so than the flaxseed oil that I currently use. However, the coconut oil and MCT oil often gave me gastric disturbances, so I had to stop using them.
“Most interesting to me was his discovery that seeing life-sized faces in the morning helped with his mood. I can’t remember how he came up with this idea…”
Seth was aware of a multi-country time-use survey conducted from 1964-1966 by A. Szalai. Seth noticed that Americans were much more often awake around midnight than people in any other country, and that Americans watched late-night television far more than did people in any other country.
Seth was looking for the cause of early awakening. He wondered if late-night television viewing, as a substitute for human contact, could affect a circadian oscillator that was sensitive to human contact (as theorized by R. A. Wever in 1979.) Perhaps this oscillator needed a “push” each morning to increase its amplitude; perhaps lack of human contact in the morning caused early awakening.
His discovery – that viewing television shows early in the morning had a dramatic effect on his mood – was entirely an accidental by-product.
Under Seth’s supervision, I was the first person with severe mental illness to try his Morning Faces Therapy. I have done this treatment every morning for 23 years; I have been off all psychotropic medications for 13 years. Before treatment, I was diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder One, with three hospitalizations — two for psychotic mania and one for suicidal depression. I am Nansen in Seth Roberts’ blog.
Speaking as n=1, with all that implies with respect to the scientific method, this treatment has been miraculous for me. Would someone please explain to me how, in the midst of a mental health crisis, this treatment has received zero attention from the medical establishment?
Yes, Morning Faces Therapy sounds crazy, and it is not easy to 1) get up early every morning to watch faces for an hour, and 2) avoid faces and fluorescent lights at night. The alternative for me was having a fogged-over mind and living on the margins of society.
I am forever indebted to Seth Roberts and I thank the stars that he saved my life.
Quote from above: “Would someone please explain to me how, in the midst of a mental health crisis, this treatment has received zero attention from the medical establishment?”
I am not sure how and why something does or does not get investigated and researched, but I reason that it might have a lot to do with 1) the people funding research, and 2) the people coming up with therapies, theories, research topics, etc.
I have recently started to wonder a lot how much this all might affect matters, and perhaps not in a good way. If I am not mistaken this blog recently had a post that discussed “selection bias” in what exactly gets researched or something like that that might also be relevant when thinking about these things.
Anyway, I myself feel a certain alternative therapy I followed has helped me a lot, and that sort of picking certain things from all over the place has helped me a lot as well. I think, and reason, both of these things might not have had “attention from the medical establishment”. And perhaps these things can’t even be measured or investigated well.
Maybe “attention from the medical establishment” might not be necessary, positive, or desirable concerning certain things…
Robert, Anon:
I encouraged Seth many times to do some sort of controlled trial of his ideas, and he was never interested. He always would say that he knew his ideas worked, and he was more interested in improving them. Seth and I had a conversation about this which we published as an article in 2007.
Speaking of bipolar, I didn’t know what Gelman mentions about Roberts’s early struggles in young adulthood/middle-age, and these days, it takes on a different light for me as I’ve become more acquainted with (heavily underdiagnosed) bipolar disorder:
‘Mood swings’, ‘difficulty with sleep’, considerable energy directed into career, ‘increasingly eccentric ideas’, even some degree of what a critic might call ‘delusions of grandeur’, all in young adulthood or middle age when other psychiatric issues (eg. autism, schizophrenia) tend to be fading… Makes you wonder.
Strange article. You basically no longer believe in Seth’s diet based on your biased anecdote, which is what you seem to be criticizing in Seth’s work. “One problem is that sleep hours and weight can be measured fairly objectively, whereas if you measure brain function by giving yourself little quizzes, it doesn’t seem hard at all for a bit of unconscious bias to drive all your results.” I have been doing Seth’s brain test for years and find it quite useful and sensitive – for example, in a blinded two-month test I was able to tell decaffeinated coffee from caffeinated coffee. The fact that butter may have had a negative impact on Seth’s health (which also only a hypothesis) doesn’t imply that it didn’t improve his brain function.
Juraj:
First of all, there’s nothing “biased” about my anecdote; it’s what actually happened to me.
Second, I’m not trying to tell you not to believe in Seth’s diet. If you want to believe in it, go for it! I believed in it for many years myself.
There are many things in the above post; for discussion of Seth’s diet, the relevant point is that the reason I believed in it was from Seth’s anecdote, and the reason I no longer believe in it is from my anecdote. Live by the anecdote, die by the anecdote.
There’s a reason why researchers do controlled trials! I would not at all want to claim that my anecdote should be taken as strong evidence against Seth’s diet. From my perspective, there’s no strong evidence for the diet either, and so to me it looks like one of the many many cute diets that work very well for people who happen to be ready to eat less calories.
As for the hypothesis that butter improved Seth’s brain function: Yeah, I don’t believe that at all. Partly because I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe it; partly because he was measuring his brain function himself, and it doesn’t take much measurement bias to create the appearance of an effect that he wanted to find; and partly because, as discussed in the above post, he moved from making an apparent discovery every five years to an apparent discovery every couple of months. I think he got hooked on wanting to make discoveries, which was yet another motivation for him to find things.
As to caffeine having an effect on the brain: yeah, I’ve heard from many sources that this is the case. In all seriousness, I don’t recommend you start eating a stick of butter a day. It’s supposed to be bad for your health.
Andrew,
I do not think of the world in terms of believing or not believing in something. That is religious thinking used to divide people between us and them. It is always a scale that moves based on priors (theory/plausible mechanism, data and/or anecdotes if you will) and is updated with new data or theory. I am surprised that you wrote that you no longer “believe” in the diet with no new data, not even an anecdote (you didn’t finish your trial) just a new (?) insight. Did this insight move the needle that much for you? Isn’t that what you’re criticizing in Seth’s work? Isn’t the appropriate answer for you: I don’t know? I currently find some of the mechanisms (for example the set point theory) of the diet plausible (and empirically tested in a number of papers ) and think it may be effective in some contexts and for some (limited) time.
I see Seth’s work as an efficient new approach to generating relevant, interesting and useful hypotheses to test. Individually, if for personal use, or through the scientific apparatus, if to be postulated as general truths. His attitude was very refreshing as large parts of science today seem to serve only the status acquisition of the scientist and forget about what is useful.
The point of the caffeine example I offered was not about caffeine and its effects on the brain, but to illustrate that your dismissal of Seth’s brain test as “little quizzes” seems to be misinformed. I used this replicated effect of caffeine to test the brain test itself. I do not plan to eat loads of butter, as I consider it risky, based on my current knowledge. But the omega-3 fatty acids (but not the ones from flax seed) do improve my brain activity. I am pretty sure, because I tested it.
Juraj:
When I wrote that I used to believe in the Shangri-La diet and now I don’t, that’s shorthand for something like: my belief in the Shangri-La diet has declined. It’s not a sharp division.
Beyond this: My anecdote is as good as Seth’s. You write, “Isn’t that what you’re criticizing in Seth’s work?” Indeed, that’s my point! I think I was seduced by Seth’s anecdote into believing too strongly in his diet, and my own anecdote informed me in two ways, directly by demonstrating that I could lose weight by simply eating less calories, and indirectly by making me realize that my original strong belief in his diet was not so strongly founded.
And, yes, “I don’t know” is the correct answer. I don’t know about Seth’s diet, the potato diet, and all the others. Also, as discussed in my above post, I think (but am not sure!) that the effectiveness of these diets is in large part social. Seth’s diet worked for him in part because Seth was convinced by his own theory. It worked for others in part because Seth offered a convincing and appealing explanation. The potato people were motivated in part by a loose membership in a community of experimenters. Etc. For me, the key was deciding to eat less, and the sugar water was irrelevant.
Regarding your second paragraph: Indeed, I think experimentation of all sorts can be good, and self-experimentation has the advantage that anyone can do it right away. It also has the disadvantage that it can be easy to fool yourself (which is what I think happened to Seth, with this self-fooling abetted by an internet cheering section) and even to hurt yourself (as may have happened with Seth with the butter, and has happened with various athletes trying home remedies over the years). I’m not saying self-experimentation is bad, just that it has pluses and minuses, and I think Seth got sucked up into an unfortunate feedback loop where he started to believe his own hype.
Juraj: Like you, I used Seth’s reaction time test to study the effects of caffeine. I found that it had the expected effect (namely, that the caffeine made me respond faster). You can read my write-up here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RHt_OFTz-87arWevIfz6wAKTce_ZFcVW/view?usp=sharing
I also tested the effectiveness of omega-3s, but didn’t see any difference in my reaction times. I’m currently testing the effect of creatine, which is purported to be a cognitive enhancer (we’ll see).
Andrew, it’s probably true that the Shangri-La diet works by reducing the number of calories that you consume and that you could duplicate the effect by skipping the sugar water (or oil, or whatever) and simply eating less. However, Seth’s insight was that the flavorless calories make it easier to eat less food by suppressing your appetite. Dieting is difficult, especially when it involves consciously trying to eat less than you would prefer to eat. Anything that makes it easier to diet will be valuable for people (like me) who have historically had difficulty losing weight.
I’m not sure about the potato diet, but I suspect that the Shangri-La diet has effects that go beyond some kind of psycho-social expectation effect (or placebo, or whatever you want to call it). As for some of Seth’s other theories, I have doubts about his thoughts on butter and pork fat. I don’t eat either of those myself. The morning faces theory seems intriguing, but I’m not willing to spend the time and effort to test it.
Andrew wrote: “For me, the key was deciding to eat less, and the sugar water was irrelevant.”
I’ve always wondered if Seth’s original research interest in operant conditioning could provide some nuance. I remember him once mentioning an animal study suggesting that environment signals can influence heroine tolerance. This is just one of many examples of the strange ways interventions can have effects, aside from selection and conscious belief. In placebo controlled trials, the failure of the placebo to have any physiological effect can be a problem; the other side of the coin is that a physiological effects can induce relevant physiological changes even when the mechanism is not the one meant to be in focus. (I’m avoiding saying “the mechanism is purely psychological,” since that’s the question that can’t be so easily answered, but I do _want_ to say it.) That’s what happened to Pavlov’s dog’s right? The ringing bell stimulates appetite, but the conscious belief of the dog that bells are good for stimulating appetite is probably not why.
I talked with Seth quite a lot about this and found him to be sort of willing to listen, though not really interested in teasing out these issues. I was a bit disappointed, because he had a ton of knowledge about designing experiments of this type. It just didn’t mean much to him. I thought: that’s ok, he’s entitled to be interested in what he’s interested in, but if he doesn’t want to do that sort of research he should probably be more cautious about making general claims.
I’ve looked at over 1000 self-tracking projects, and many of them have a similar ambiguity: a deliberate tracking project brings focused awareness to a topic, and there is also a positive change. The pattern isn’t exactly: I wished for this and tried it and it came true. Often the change is not the one that was looked for originally. For instance, sometimes the effects are purely intellectual and emotional: the phenomenon continued or even got worse, but was now understood or experienced in a different way. Sometimes the effects were physiological and dramatic: I lost forty pounds. I stopped sneezing so much. My stomach aches stopped. In most cases, there was learning and it helped. Of course that’s not surprising. If I told you “thinking about your problem and trying to observe it carefully is a waste of time” you would probably be more surprised than if I claimed you should try to reason about your questions as carefully as you can. But in almost all of these cases, even where the benefit is clear, a big residue of uncertainty about cause remains.
If Seth were still alive I would probably still be trying to convince him to explore it.
(I wrote this and then asked myself, did I have good sense to get a reference to the heroine rat study after Seth told me about it? Turned out, I did. Paper is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xsj2_LNdbDssXYJsnzxkWdUwbtZt7BGB/view?usp=sharing)
What was your purpose in writing this piece? Being critical of Seth’s theories, methodologies and/or beliefs is one thing, but this really feels like a personal attack. “The Rise and Fall of Seth Roberts…” I’d been a friend of Seth’s since the early 80s at Berkeley, and this characterization seems more cruel innuendo than objective critical analysis. It hurts to see you painting Seth as a socially awkward delusional commie when he was a very kind sweet man who cared very much for and about people, and he was a good friend to those of us who were lucky enough to ENJOY our time with him, rather than use him for his stimulating conversation all while denouncing any “friendship.” Why now do you feel it so necessary to take him down – personally — and after all this time? Being this mean was so unnecessary, and since Seth isn’t here to defend himself, I will stand up for him as a friend. I miss him.
Wendy:
My purpose in writing this post was to explain how it was that I believed in the Shangri-La diet and then didn’t believe in it. On this blog we often discuss questions of statistical evidence and understanding, and this is an interesting example for both statistical and substantive reasoning.
The post is not a personal attack at all. Seth was my friend; see the obituary I wrote when he died.
It’s true that Seth was socially awkward; it’s true that he was a bit delusional, at least that’s my interpretation based on his escalating claim of self-experimentation successes; and, ummm, I didn’t call him a commie, I said he was left-wing (in the context of U.S. politics at the time).
I did not “use” Seth for stimulating conversation. He was my friend and we often got together and talked. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but . . . that’s ok! People can be friends while disagreeing.
Seth had a lot to offer as a person, and he had some flaws too. That’s true of all of us. For better or worse, some of these flaws remain relevant, given the continued popularity of self-experimentation, the continued controversies over unusual diets, and the continued prevalence of extreme political views. When I discuss his flaws, that is not intended to attack him; it’s just part of the big picture of who he was.
Worth emphasizing is that the specifics of the Seth Roberts’ diet are crucial, including that the flavorless oil or sugar water must be consumed “in middle of a two-hour window in which you do not eat any food or flavored drinks.” Also, no chewing gum, no toothpaste, no flavors of any kind that the brain could associate with the oil or sugar water. Ignoring that detail and just swallowing the oil or sugar water won’t likely change anything.
Does the Seth Roberts diet work? The book is still in print, so anyone who wants to can try it for themselves. But it seems to have helped a lot of people.
Finally, does the writer here have anything at all to say about set point? The seeming advice to just eat less must strike most people struggling with weight as stunningly useless.
Jw:
Nowhere in my post did I give the advice, stunning or otherwise, to just eat less. I just shared my experience, which I think is as valuable as Seth’s experience. I also shared my current understanding, which was that I was able to easily lose weight because I was ready to eat less.
To put it another way: Seth’s diet has two parts:
1. Drink the sugar water in the middle of the two-hour window etc.
2. Eat a lot less calories.
Step 2 is absolutely necessary here! Indeed, as mentioned in the above post, I once asked Seth if step 1 would be enough: that is, if I were to just do the sugar water etc. every day and not otherwise try to alter my eating habits, would I lose weight? His guess was no, that I’d still have to consciously eat less. His point was that step 1 would make step 2 easier.
For me, the hard part was step 2. Once I decided to eat a lot less, I lost weight. I’m pretty sure that, had I followed both steps 1 and 2 for a few months or a year or whatever, the weight would’ve come off, and I also would be attributing the weight loss to Seth’s diet. Another success story! But, I didn’t do step 1, so my anecdote is much different. This retrospectively changes my reaction to Seth’s anecdote from many years ago; it also makes me aware of the difficulty of learning from an uncontrolled study.
In answer to your other question: No, I don’t really have anything to say about the set point. To learn more about this, I think it would be very helpful to have a record of how many calories I consume each day, but I’ve been too lazy to do this. Maybe all the red peppers I’m eating have more calories than I realized!
Finally, yeah, I know that many people struggle with their weight. I’m not offering any advice to them here. I’m doing my best to advance our understanding, which I hope will be useful to people who want to offer advice, design new experiments, whatever.
P.S. Regarding your question, “Does the Seth Roberts diet work? The book is still in print, so anyone who wants to can try it for themselves. But it seems to have helped a lot of people,” all I’ll say is that you could repeat that paragraph replacing “the Seth Robert diet” with “Diet X,” for any Diet X that has been in a book that has sold many copies.
There is a large number of such X’s, and I can well believe that all of them “work” in the before-after sense that there are many people who were struggling with weight, followed the advice of Diet X, and lost weight. My current understanding is that these successes are people who were ready to eat less calories, and it could well be that starting Diet X gave them the confidence to do so.
If you have nothing to say about set point, if you think that just eating fewer calories is the obvious solution to weight loss—and that butter is dangerous—then you really haven’t bothered to come to terms with Roberts’ arguments—which presupposes stating those arguments fairly before rejecting them. (See the book and the numerous articles.)
I didn’t know him well, I had only a couple of phone conversations with him, but this seems a shabby dismissal of someone you claim to regard as a friend.
Jw:
Seth was my friend. That doesn’t make him perfect. For reasons discussed in my above post, I think he got into a trap of self-delusion. I won’t repeat all my arguments in the comment section here. You can fel free to disagree with me. I have come to terms with Seth’s arguments—I’ve thought a lot about these arguments and have discussed them from different perspectives on this blog over the years—; that’s one reason why I thought it was worth explaining why I’d changed my mind regarding his diet.
Also, no, I’m not saying there is any obvious solution to weight loss. I’m not offering any diet advice here; I’m just sharing my experiences and my thoughts.
Finally, no, I’m not saying that butter is dangerous. I just wouldn’t recommend eating a stick of butter a day.. And I certainly wouldn’t do so based on Seth’s self-experiments—there was just too much bias in his measurements of his own cognitive performance. I think that was all an example of self-delusion, and it might have even killed him, which makes me very sad. I’m not dismissing Seth at all; I’m sad about what happened to him.
“To put it another way: Seth’s diet has two parts:
1. Drink the sugar water in the middle of the two-hour window etc.
2. Eat a lot less calories.
Step 2 is absolutely necessary here!”
This is misleading, in that the whole point of changing the set point is so that you WANT to eat less. Roberts in the book is emphatic about this. P. 6, for example: “It is not . . . true that to lose weight you must TRY to eat less.”
Whatever you understood Roberts to have told you orally, this is the published Seth Roberts diet you supposedly are reviewing.
(In fact, there’s good reason to think that “dieting” in the sense of not eating when you’re hungry will raise the set point and cause weight gain in the long run. See what happens to people on the TV weight loss shows after the show is over.)
The Slime Mold Time Mold bloggers are not intellectually honest. There are multiple falsehoods in their blog posts that they have refused to fix or address years after being repeatedly told about them.
For example, one of their blog posts still says that lithium levels in water are higher in the areas of Texas with higher obesity rates, almost two years after I first told them that they had misread the chart they were citing and that the opposite was true. They also claim that wild animals have been getting more obese, when there’s no evidence of that.
There are more examples of that sort of in the description of this Manifold market:
https://manifold.markets/market/how-many-of-these-falsemisleading-s
And in these posts:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas