Healthy Food Choices for the Shangri-La Diet

Video Transcript

The Shangri-La Diet is a concept that was developed by Seth Roberts, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Seth Roberts believes that weight gain is associated with how tasty a food is and that if you have a food that you feel is very tasty, you're more likely to eat more of it and your body will respond by basically not burning off those calories, increasing your weight. So one of the ways he purports to disassociate tastiness or to trick your body into not absorbing all those calories is to either use oil or sugar water, again, to dissociate the taste and the calorie count. The way he suggests you do that, for example, is to use an oil such as canola oil or a light olive oil not to be confused with extra virgin olive oil. You're to take one tablespoon of this oil approximately one hour before eating a meal. He doesn't have any specific recommendation for portions of your meal or what other foods to include. If you don't want to use oil, his other option is to use sugar water where you are using a small amount of sugar in about a liter of water, again sipping on this about an hour before you are to eat your regular meal.