Time for a primer on the Shangri-La Diet. Seth Roberts says that taste encourages hunger. You eat chocolate: you want more food. You eat plain rice: you finish your bowl and go off to work. The body has a ’set point’: you lower it by eating less stuff with taste but which still has calories, and you feel less hungry so you eat less and magic, magic — you lose weight.
This doesn’t work with bulimia. Bulimics don’t eat when we’re hungry — we wish! — we eat when there’s food and when we have to go out and buy food, and when someone next door has food and when no-one’s looking as we scoff down another half-litre tub of yoghurt, with raisins and dried fruit and pumpkin seeds and brazil nuts. Because nothing’s more fattening than brazil nuts. And then we eat tofu. But we put honey on it because it might as well be special, and then we eat crystallised fruit and baked beans and that seemed like a fairly normal meal, so what about some yoghurt to finish it off?
Before we waddle to a loo and poo out enough for the pain to go away.
And purge.
If it were about hunger, the Shangri-La diet would be a fairly good idea.
It might make very low calorie restrictions easier. But they’re possible anyway. Temptation is more potent in the mind than in levels of circulating leptin.
If Marion gets some more basic things under control, she might do some testing and tell you about the use of Shangri-La in serious restricting.
