So, what about the Shangri La Diet?

SLD will help any type of compulsive over eater with hunger. The troubled won't be able to deal with their issues without some support if they don't have food. A number of early SLDers dropped out when they realized they were not ready to live without their fat. Annie's is the blog of an SLDer who lost weight and then realized her staying fat was how she had dealt with being sexually assaulted. She had to drop SLD until she was ready to lose weight again.

However, it worked.

Several people have posted that the diet did not seem to be working for them, or that it was working very slowly (there is a "Why am I not losing weight?" thread).

However, the vast majority have indeed reported successful weight loss, at varying rates. (I'll not pull any instances of this for you, as a quick glance at Seth's forums shows this very clearly.) The current "champion" loser, Stephen M or Ethesis, started last year and is currently at -62 pounds. He posts updates here. I'm currently still at -20 pounds, but sure I can lose more, and will post more on my experience at this blog and here on Seth's forum. Folks posting at Seth's forums are in all stages of weight loss, from nada to having lost more weight than I have.

Very interestingly, posters regularly report identical "symptoms" as I and others experienced and documented in this blog back into 2005:

• dramatic, sudden, and new (for us) "control" over what and when to eat
• dramatic reduction or "taming" of appetite
• greatly diminished cravings
• a change in "taste" away from junk, salty, overly-spiced, or other typical "bad" foods

The diet seems to regularly increase people's sense of "detachment"; especially from food, but also from other intakes it seems.