The question then becomes how does one motivate people to eat fewer calories? Simply telling people to eat less and exercise more is clearly not working. Some things do work. Fen-phen was a marvelous appetite suppressant that helped many people lose huge amounts of weight. Unfortunately, it was toxic and could not be sustained over a period of years.

Roberts’s claim, which I am not vouching for, is that intake of a few hundred calories of flavorless foods sufficiently far away from flavored foods, will make people feel fuller, think about food less, and eat less. In essence it is a realtively natural equivalent of fen-phen. His hypothesis is fully consistent with what is generally known about weight loss. It does not contradict the standard model of how the body gains and loses fat in any way.

His essential claim is that he can trick the body into eating less. Most diets clearly fail at this over the long term. Most diets are also obviously unsustainable over a lifetime. Low-carb diets are simply the latest example of this. There are numerous other examples.

The Shangri-La diet does seem at least plausible to sustain for a lifetime. It’s not really a diet at all. All it involves is drinking some sugar water or extra light olive oil a couple of times a day. Then eat what you feel like eating. Roberts claims that what you feel like eating under this regimen is a lot less than what you would otherwise feel like eating.

Again, whether this is true or not, I don’t know; but it’s not as obviously false as some of the fads one encounters; and it’s easy enough to test. There’s a definitely a strong whiff of pseudo-science and quacksterism to the book; but not nearly at the same level as you find in the works of the diploma mill-Ph.D’s and fake doctors who infest the field. There just might be something real here; but I’d really like to see some serious double-blind studies to settle the question definitively.

The research has been done thousands of times and the results are always same.
In engineering terms, treat your body like a control volume: if the amount of calories you consume is smaller than the number you burn through exercise, you will lose weight.

Eat salads, whole grains, lots of vegetables, a modicum of poultry/fish.
Exercise portion control -eat til you’re a bit shy of satsified but not profoundly hungry.
Make a exercise a top priority & do it 30 minutes a minimum of four times a week.

All diets depreciate the quality of your health. The body is a complex organism that needs vitamins and minerals and it needs to get them from food, not pills.

Thanks & keep up the great tech writing
Ken