The Shangri-La Diet: The No Hunger Eat Anything Weight-Loss Plan by Seth Roberts

Author:Seth Roberts [Roberts, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nutrition, Health & Fitness, Diets, Medical, Weight Loss, Reducing Diets, Diet Therapy
ISBN: 9780399533167
Google: mVtRbgM4T1MC
Amazon: B0014E92NC
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2006-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Method 4. Cook more.

The opposite of new food is familiar food, and the foods that can become most familiar are those that taste exactly the same each time—what I call ditto foods. These mass-produced foods come mostly from factories and chain restaurants. Because their flavors are so constant, when they are eaten repeatedly they can produce very strong flavor-calorie associations—much stronger than similar foods that vary in flavor, such as your homemade lasagna or meat loaf, which vary a bit each time you make them. (To increase the power of this method, I intentionally vary the flavors of my cooking.)

Ditto foods are the profit centers of the food industry. They include convenience food (such as frozen entrées, breakfast cereals, canned and frozen juices), ready-to-eat food, canned soup, junk food (such as soda, potato chips, and candy), fast food, and chain restaurant food. Almost any food sold in a package or made in a factory qualifies. It isn’t just “bad” food; “good” food can be ditto food as well. “I’ve been having granola and soy milk for breakfast every day for months,” wrote a woman who was trying my diet. “At first it made me extremely full until lunchtime. Now I’m hungry within a couple of hours.” No doubt the granola was manufactured rather than homemade and tasted the same each time. And the soy milk tasted exactly the same each time. When she first started to eat the granola/soy milk combination, it was unfamiliar to her, and it acted like sugar water and flavorless oil: It lowered her set point. But with time, the flavors became associated with calories and became fattening. Chapter 7, “Changing the Rest of the World,” explains why I believe the cause of today’s obesity epidemic is an increase in the consumption of ditto foods—or, to put it another way, a decrease in home cooking.

Home cooks are neither machines nor fast-food restaurant employees following precise instructions with ingredients that are always the same. This is why a home-cooked dish usually varies from one rendition to the next far more than factory food or fast food. “The most successful dieters, we’ve found,” observes Dr. Arthur Agatston in The South Beach Diet, “are the ones who try every recipe imaginable and take advantage of all the foods and ingredients permitted. . . . One patient invented a new soup made with every green vegetable he could find.” The flavor of this soup surely varied a lot from one batch to the next. (And by trying new recipes, Dr. Agatston’s most successful dieters were also following Method 3, “Try new foods.”) Leftovers, unfortunately, are ditto food; so when you cook, make only enough for one meal.

Only foods that always taste the same become addictive. For example, a New Yorker article in 1995 by Susan Sheehan described an Iowa family that was living near poverty and seemingly headed toward bankruptcy. To save the price of a stamp, they paid bills in person. Yet the husband and wife both drank a lot of Pepsi every day, calling themselves “Pepsiholics.

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