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[orwell46]

I offer this for encouragement to others.

I use oil, find it much more effective then fructose.  LOO works, but canola has even less taste.

Sometimes I wash my mouth out with water a bit to make sure there are no flavors there when I drink the oil.

(Pepper seems to be a flavor that persists in the mouth, by the way.)

I take about 2-3 teaspoons of oil each morning around 1030 am. I eat lunch soonish. I take more oil in mid afternoon, about the same amount. I have tried taking about 2 taps of oil at bedtime and that also works.

When I am not in the two-hour windows, I drink all the caffeine I want--using Equal instead of sugar.

It helps a lot to eat only moderate carbs. Once or twice when I had a big gooey flour-y dessert, it threw me off and strong hunger pains or pangs returned. So I do stirfrys with meat and veggies; fruit and cottage cheese; small healthy sub sandwiches (Subway).  The great thing is of course feeling the way diminshed hunger.

It seems to me that when I do feel hungry though--if it comes in a strong way, the old way--I must eat and not fight it.

In general, when this is working, I can go for a week without feeling any strong hunger pains. I have two brothers who are near obese and I plan to tell them about this on June 24 when  I should be down a few more pounds.

My final goal is in the 155-163 area.  It's amazing not to feel my hunger increasing as I lose weight.  The whole experience of weight losing is different.  Usually it is like holding your breath underwater--the longer you go without air, the more massively you need air.  Usually the longer you are on a diet the more hungry you are.  This is so strikingly different.  Formerly, if I was trying to get down, I would be, say, terribly hungry at about 170 pounds and never able to get below it. It felt like trying to hold your breath for four minutes--the body just won't let you.  Now I suspect that this barrier at 170 pounds probably won't be there when I get to 170.

Best wishes.

[barleyblair]

Orwell, thank you for such detailed reporting.  I found that I need a full two hours before and another two hours after taking the oil, a full four-hour window, to experience any appetite gentling.  But your idea of rinsing the flavors out of your mouth might work for me.  I'll give it a try and let you know.

"It's amazing not to feel my hunger increasing as I lose weight."  I know, isn't it almost freaky?  I get on the scale every five or six days and I can't believe I've actually lost some weight because I haven't suffered at all.  Stephen M (Ethesis) says he feels that too.

[barleyblair]

Wow.  I just posted a long message about rinsing and a progress report on the Four Weeks or More child board of the Progress/Updates forum, but I definitely want to get back to you here as well.

Rinsing my mouth out before I take the oil is magic.  The effect is much, much stronger than anything I had experienced before. I wasn't at all unhappy with my previous progress, but this is miles better.

My new routine is to stop eating two hours before I'm planning to take the oil.  When it's time, I rinse my mouth out with a saturated salt solution, spitting it out.  Then I drink a glass or two of water, scrunching it around in my mouth and swallowing it.  Then I take 2T of canola oil.  Then I don't eat anything for two hours.

Maybe ... I don't know -- maybe before I started rinsing there were little bits of food hiding in my mouth?  That sounds disgusting.  Maybe my tastebuds have an overlong latency?  Maybe I am so fixated on food that I have hypertrophic flavor memory?  Whatever the explanation, rinsing has made a huge, enormous, gigantic difference.  Thank you so much for recommending it.  You should post it on the Tips & Innovations forum -- or I'll be happy to, if that's more convenient for you.

[orwell46]

Dear readers,

I was down to 170 two days ago. and assume  that despite a big family picnic, with overeating, recently, I will be there or below the next time I weigh myself. .   When I hit 166 I will have lost 10 per cent of my starting weight.  And it will have been with almost no unpleasant feelings.

My recent discovery is that a substantial amount of oil--maybe 1.5 tbss--around ten in the morning really strongly flattens my appetite for what seems like the whole day.    I eat a real though light  meal for lunch, and then have about 100 calories of oil in the later afternoon. If I wanted to, I could eat nothing else the rest of the day, but I often have two 50-calories Weight Watchers treats while watching TV.  Then to bed, highly satiated, and I wake the next day, also not hungry.

This is news because a few weeks ago I was taking about half that (2/3 of a tablespoon) in the morning...and at that dose was  having hunger "break throughs" later in the day.  I didn't like this because the hunger "breakthroughs" were pretty painful--serious hunger pangs.  This new set up, of about 200 calories of oil in the morning, quells my hunger totally.

I have communicated some of this to a friend of mine who's high up in one of the biggest hospital-based obesity treatment programs in the country. (Seth, it's HMR.) His first response was "it's got to be the placebo effect, only that."  But he's a scientist, and his mind is open. I can't want to hear what he says when he looks at more data and reads Seth's paper.

As many have discovered, with one's appestat set lower, a fairly small amount of food at a picnic (one and a half modest platesful, and two small cookies) now feels like gorging. This is way useful. Right?

[dgrillot2000]

I have communicated some of this to a friend of mine who's high up in one of the biggest hospital-based obesity treatment programs in the country. (Seth, it's HMR.) His first response was "it's got to be the placebo effect, only that." 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hurray for the placebo effect!!  I find it hard to believe that the SLD is a "placebo effect".

[Seth Roberts]

As I've said before about the idea that this is a placebo effect: Tell me why this diet's placebo effect is so much stronger than the placebo effects produced by the previous 1000 diet books. Something about my prose style?

[frenata]

As I've said before about the idea that this is a placebo effect: Tell me why this diet's placebo effect is so much stronger than the placebo effects produced by the previous 1000 diet books. Something about my prose style?

I think the answer is inside your own theories. At least, the answer to why people make this assumption. In essence, all diets work more or less equally well for a while, because they all start out being SLD. That is, whatever the diet, it forces you to eat unfamiliar things...or at least a set of things you might not have chosen for yourself. Hence, any diet is like being on vacation in France: no ditto foods, down goes your setpoint.

After a while, though, on most other diets, you become acclimated to the food and the effect wears off. On SLD, because you understand the mechanism, you can prolong the effect indefinitely by other strategies.

From the outside, though, it looks like any other diet. At first, anyway. Abrupt weight loss, followed by plateau.

After that...well. My SO (who believes this one is like all the others) rolls his eyes and says, "we'll see" and I'm like "we'll see" and he's like "yeah, we'll see" and I'm like "okay, we'll see..."

So, we'll see. But I believe this one's different.

[chrianna]

ok, i just have to interrupt to tell frenata that girl you are hysterical.  its a pleasure to read your posts and now i click on the link if you've posted just to have a giggle . . . thanks for wrapping your wisdom in the funny.

[Seth Roberts]

barleyblair, I hope you will post about rinsing, etc., on the Tips and Innovation board. Two stories of it working (yours & orwell's) is better than one.

[orwell46]

Folks,

Report on olive oil and mouth flavors.

This method has worked well for me--but not all the time, which is interesting. It's like a car that drives like a dream 5 days out of seven, but sputters the other two.

 Most days I get really strong loss of appetite (with desire for veggies). Yet on other days I feel like a normal overweight American: "Can I have some more bread?"

So I'm analysing it, and here's  a report about "slips."  At  least twice, and perhaps three or four times, I have had my morning oil...and then due to factors beyond my easy control...have put strong flavors in my mouth within, say, half an hour of the oil.  At that, all the appetite suppression seems to recede, and I go back to normal "let's eat again" mode.

Two examples I can remember. 

1.  Yesterday I'd had my morning oil, and was about 30 minutes into a 90-minute window...when my son called to tell me he'd had a big win. (Law student, got a good clerkship.) He was nearby. This called for celebration. We went to lunch right away--time constraints made it mandatory.  So within an hour of taking that oil I was eating Chinese food and spring rolls, etc.  I ate generously, and that afternoon I felt hungry for candy. I had a little.  Today my weight is up, and I feel carbohydrate hunger. ("Can I have part of your muffin? Thanks.") 

2. I smoke cigars.  Sometimes they are messy and your lips and tongue get a very intense tobacco flavor. One morning a few weeks ago I had my oil an hour after eating breakfast, but while I still had a strong bitter tobacco taste on my tongue. I was thoughtless about this. I didn't think of tobacco as food.  Anyway, the oil ingested with the intense flavor in the mouth just did a number on my appetite, which came roaring back. Then, as at other times, I had to start the whole method over the next day.

So today I am climbing back on the low-food wagon after a heavy day yesterday.  I'd say my appetite is moderate.  Bread and cookies seem like nice things to me at this moment.  I'll do oil tonight, and by tomorrow most likely, but by Sunday certainly, I'll be back in the zone of veggies.

This is interesting and weird. As I have said earlier, rinsing and even flossing  helps clear the mouth of flavors. Pepper, for instance, can stay in a tooth-crevice and affect your flavor neurons in the background.   Seth, I don't read all the comments.  Are you seeing stuff like this being reported?

[Seth Roberts]

No, I'm not. I find it easy to see why really tasty food would overwhelm the appetite suppression. But I find it hard to see why the timing of that tasty food would matter -- why it would be more disruptive when within 30 minutes after oil.

[orwell46]

Seth,   I had the impression that one waits after eating flavorless calories so that the brain can get a clear message (calories without flavor here.)

If the energy from one's oil intake 30 minutes earlier is still "being processed" or "in the bloodstream" or whatever, and then one has a tasty meal, doesn't that  mean that the calories from the oil will register as "flavor associated" calories rather than flavorless calories, and thus bump the "thermostat" up? Am I misunderstanding something?

[Seth Roberts]

The reason for waiting an hour after the oil is that so no flavor-calorie association forms. If you had Flavor X within that period, Flavor X might become associated with calories.

[orwell46]

My weight went up to 175 about 10 days ago, and then gradually came back to 170, which it reached again today.

I have begun taking my oil at 4 am, and it seems to keep me from feeling any hunger until noon time or later.  I am going to try this for a while. My next goal is 166.  My hunger has gone away again and some pound droppage should be underway again soon.

[Seth Roberts]

This is news because a few weeks ago I was taking about half that (2/3 of a tablespoon) in the morning...and at that dose was  having hunger "break throughs" later in the day.  I didn't like this because the hunger "breakthroughs" were pretty painful--serious hunger pangs.  This new set up, of about 200 calories of oil in the morning, quells my hunger totally.

I have communicated some of this to a friend of mine who's high up in one of the biggest hospital-based obesity treatment programs in the country. (Seth, it's HMR.) His first response was "it's got to be the placebo effect, only that."

One sign of a placebo effect is that the effect is not dose-dependent. But you are finding different results with different amounts of oil -- i.e., dose dependence.