Even More Unctuous

I’m on a diet, hope to lose 10 pounds.

Isn’t everyone?

In my case, there’s a slight difference from most, I suspect, in that I don’t need to lose the weight. My BMI is 22, putting me comfortably in the middle of the normal range, well below most of my peers (60% of whom are classified as either “overweight” or “obese”).

I don’t particularly want to lose the weight either. I’m currently at the lower-end of my personal weight range. My clothes all fit. I don’t care how I look. And, happily married and surgically removed from the breeding pool, I have no need to impress the ladies (and if did, I’d have to gain weight, my slight physique the sort that begs for the sand-kicking and subsequent girl-stealing so popular amongst those with high BMIs).

And apart from two small love handles, I’m not sure where my body will find the expendable pounds if my diet succeeds. Will it be forced to jettison minor organs?

So why am I doing this?

My purpose is not, as many of you surely suspect, to annoy the hell out of those who actually need to lose weight. In fact, only my wife and you are privy to my plan. As the pounds melt away, I’m perfectly content to let everyone else think I’m dying from some wasting disease.

And my purpose is not in any way anorexic, unless, that is, a middle-aged man with no history of eating disorders or concern for his body image or desire for more control over his life could nevertheless be hit out of the blue with strong but well-disguised anorexic urges. I suppose anything’s possible, but if so, these urges are so deeply submerged I’ve never perceived them.

My purpose, as far as I can tell, has three levels.

At the first and most superficial level, my purpose is to prove a point. Intrigued by the science behind Seth Roberts’ Shangri-La Diet, I tried to convince my wife to try it. My wife, in my opinion, needs to lose no weight, but this is not, apparently, her opinion, for she, like so many of her female peers, is steadfastly devoted to periodically depriving herself of food in order to reach the impossible dream of the Perfect Weight, which is always defined as 10 pounds less than whatever she happens to weigh that day. It’s the modern equivalent of sackcloth, ashes and self-flagellation in order to attain that eternally elusive goal of Perfect Grace.

The Shangri-La Diet claims to offer a much easier way, like free indulgences that actually work. It’s based on the premise that your body actively regulates your appetite, ramping it up in times of plenty, damping it down in times of scarcity. Flavor is the signal; the more intense and familiar the flavor, the more your body assumes you’re in a time of plenty. This little-known process is little-known in the developed world because we live in a land of perpetual plenty, our highly-processed food stuffed full of artificial flavor enhancers, ensuring our appetites are permanently set on “Gorge.”

When your appetite is set to “Gorge,” it’s really hard to stop eating. Which is why conventional diets are so hard to follow for long. Your body won’t stop screaming “EAT!” Is it any wonder 60% of my peers are overweight or obese?

The Shangri-La Diet seeks to subvert this system by depriving it of flavor, not of food. Every day on this diet, you consume 300 or so calories in the form of flavorless oil. By ingesting these flavorless calories, you manage the neat trick of avoiding hunger pangs while fooling your body into thinking you’re hungry. As your body reacts by going into scarcity mode, lowering your appetite, you need less and less real food to feel full, causing those excess pounds to effortlessly melt away.

It seems too good to be true, it’s counterintuitive, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom so, of course, I had to try it. My hope is that, if it works, I can convince my wife to exchange her deprivation treadmill for daily doses of flavorless oil.

At a deeper level, though, this isn’t really about the Shangri-La Diet. It’s simply the latest episode in my long history of self-experimentation with food.

One year, I went vegetarian, not out of a love for animals, or a hatred of vegetables, but simply out of curiosity. How difficult would it be? Would I develop cravings for the taste of freshly-slaughtered animal flesh? Or, with distance, would I lose the desire to sink my teeth into dead things? Is it possible to completely avoid the omnipresence of meat and meat byproducts in our food system (what, no Jello!) while still living a normal life? Would I feel better, or worse? Would the sudden disappearance from my diet of bovine growth hormones soften my features, raise the pitch of my voice and reduce the density of my body hair? Does a meatless diet attract (or repel) the opposite sex? Is it something in the vegetables that causes hard-eyed cynicism to melt into wide-eyed idealism, ultimately driving one to vote for a Kennedy?

One summer I lived on fried rice for lunch and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. That wasn’t experiment, though, as I couldn’t afford anything else.

Other times I’ve given up specific food items or ingredients just to see what effect, if any, that would have on me. Giving up dairy revealed a lactose intolerance I never realized I had (hey, I feel so much better!). Radically reducing the sodium in my daily diet made restaurant food taste like it had been soaked overnight in brine (I still avoid it, and it still does). Similarly, a ban on sugar made many foods taste like candy (do you realize how much sugar is in ketchup?). Giving up caffeine revealed (a) that I didn’t need it (I actually felt awake when I awoke), but (b) that I nevertheless wanted it so much I made it my recreational drug of choice, which it is to this day.

I once tried to gain weight, wondering where it would show. I guzzled two liter bottles of regular Coke, I ate almost exclusively at fast food joints, at night I downed a pint or two of ice cream and, to top it off, I’d have a few beers. Within just a few weeks, love handles appeared on the side, and then, in a matter of only a few months, I had several inches of belly skin drooping my significantly expanded waistband. Looking back, that experiment was a mistake; although it took only a few months of monastic living to shed the beer belly, nothing I’ve done has succeeded in eliminating the handles.

Once I gave up solid food for a blended concoction of various powders, fruits, supplements and yogurts. I didn’t do this out of a desire to improve my health, or to lose weight, or to see if I could live without teeth, but to see how much time I could save if I eliminated most trips to the grocery store, almost all food preparation time, and all that time we spend sitting around a table chewing the cud. If we had food pellets like in the Jetsons, I would have gladly eaten those instead.

I was eventually coaxed into returning to the table, but as recently as last year I was experimenting with the total elimination of lunch from my life, subsisting solely on breakfast and dinner and a few cashews or peanuts in between. This has made my shift to the Shangri-La Diet much easier, for all I had to do was substitute 3 tablespoons of oil for the nuts.

By this point you may be wondering why anyone would do this to himself. Food is one of life’s great pleasures. Why mess with it if you don’t have to? The answer, I think, is in the third, and probably ultimate, reason why I’ve undertaken to lose weight I don’t have.

It goes back to the whole Cartesian mind/body duality thing. Philosophically, I reject this mind/body dualism. It isn’t mind over matter, it’s mind is matter.

I qualify this with “philosophically,” though, not because I’m trying to score more pretentiousness points (as if that were possible) but because I have to admit that when it comes to dualism, what I believe is very different from what I do.

Every day, my mind holds fast to the belief that it’s just matter, no different from the rest of me, in fact it is me, while at the same time my mind carries on a constant campaign to detach itself from my body.

So when my body sends hunger signals up my spine and into my amygdala, some higher part of my brain asks “Why?” That higher part asks whether this is true hunger, or just time-based conditioning (it’s noon, must eat) or social conditioning (everyone’s eating, so must I). That higher part likes to experiment, wondering what would happen if we denied the request or answered it with something different (you want lunch? here’s a handful of peanuts). That higher part basically needs to insert itself between me and all my basic urges, monitoring, analyzing, filtering and ultimately controlling what I do. Nothing is allowed to be mindless.

We all do this to some degree – that is, those of us who aren’t savages – but I suspect I do it to a greater degree than most. And I can appreciate that at some point, all this thinking just gets in the way. It isn’t living. It isn’t healthy. I’ve tried to turn off my mind – studied Taoism, meditated – but so far without success. I can’t resist self-analysis.

So I’ll continue to drink oil to see what happens, just as I’ll continue to experiment with sleep (how much do I really need? can I get it all on the weekend?, can I get to REM sleep while sitting up?), music (must it be repetitive? how long should it take to grow on you? when have you listened too much? does it sound one way when you play it, another when you listen to a tape of yourself playing? are all pop melodies derived from the same simple formula?), sex (if I wear nose plugs, will it affect my desire or just my desirability? is it better with eyes closed or open? does sex improve in the dark? does laughter help or get in the way?), and everything else that makes life, for everyone else, worth living.