Monthly Archives: January 2014

So I’ve been on DIY “soylent” (People Chow 3.0.1) for 2 weeks now, let’s see how it’s going:

Weight Log January 2014

Not bad. So this last weekend I went on an outing with my wife and had normal food for dinner and breakfast, then some more muggle food on Sunday. I was starting to miss the plain simplicity of the soylent, so was my GI. It’s been quite a relief yesterday and today to go back to just the soylent. To say it’s grown on me would be a vast understatement. I think the only thing I think I would change would be to find a decent vitamin K source so I could switch the soybean oil for olive oil. Aside from eliminating the potential phytoestrogen (there’s still a lot of debate on that) issue there has also been lots of rumbling regarding “oxidative stress” as QuidNYC puts it in his DIY soylent formulation’s notes: “In the end, it’s your call. Maybe canola isn’t that bad. But personally, I’d rather consume something that has been demonstrated as safe — and even beneficial in terms of human health — over a period of thousands of years (i.e., extra-virgin olive oil).”

People Chow 301 Nutrition Label

The official soylent recipe just got their final nutrition information done so they have a label. So just for kicks, using this generator, I made a nutrition information label for People Chow 3.0.1. Here is the PDF version. This is the ingredients list:

Ingredients: Selected Corn Treated With Lime, Microfiltered Whey Protein Isolate, Soybean Oil, Mega Man Sport

[contains: Whey Protein Concentrate, Nonfat dry milk, natural and artificial vanilla cream flavor, DiArginine Malate, Sodium Citrate, Maltodextrin, Xanthan, Lecithin, Potassium Citrate, Sodium Chloride, Sodium Caseinate, Potassium Chloride, Sodium Caseinate, Dipotassium Phosphate, Tricalcium Phosphate, Mono & Diglycerides, Sucralose, Acesulfame Potassium], Calcium & Magnesium Citrate Powder with Vitamin D3, Potassium Citrate, Iodized Salt, Choline bitartrate, Soy Lecithin (< 1%).

Contains: Milk, Wheat, Soybeans

So I wanted to do a video of mixing up a few days batches of soylent – mostly because it’s the sort of thing that would have saved me a bunch of time and spilled powder when I was starting all this but also because I made the claim that “I’ve gotten to where I can mix up 3 days worth in about 6 minutes” and po2gdHaeKaYk called me out wanting to see it =)

So here it is. Turns out (at least in this video) that it takes me almost exactly 12 minutes from the time I start measuring the first ingredient (0:31) to the time I finish measuring the oil (12:34). So I was only off by half? I suspect mixing another days worth would only add an additional 3 minutes and so forth.

https://youtu.be/ir04Yv5Gj9w

 

The biggest time saving tips (in my opinion)

1. use a bowl large enough to hold your largest ingredient (in this formulation that’s 345 grams of corn flour)
2. dump each ingredient into a container large enough to hold everything with an opening larger than your  bowl from tip #1
3. measure each ingredient separately, don’t stack them up and “tare” or zero out the scale. In addition to it being hard to take out extra overage; many scales are less sensitive/accurate at higher weight loads
4. I forgot to put this one the video: a new $0.05 nickel weighs exactly 5.000 grams – if your scale can be calibrated using a specific weight and you don’t have one to calibrate it with you can use a stack or two of nickels.

So I completed 1 week of drinking soylent all week, I did have some other food (a piece of pizza, a little soup, some biscuits and gravy) which combined are about 750 calories for the week. While not insubstantial, it was less than 5% of what I ate. I wanted to log my results so that others could benefit from my experiences. Rather like the “Stuff I’ve learned through sad and painful experience (you’re welcome)” section I put in a tech conference class I taught about Amazon Web Services.

So how do I feel about the soylent? I think the stuff is simply awesome. I’ve gotten to where I can mix up 3 days worth in about 6 minutes, preparing a meal involves dumping 2 half cups of powder into a blender bottle and adding water. I’m not having any of the heartburn issues that I had the first few days now that I’m adding the right amount of water and the almond meal was removed from the formulation. The recipe that I’m using right now (People Chow 3.0.1) is really good; superb, in fact. I suspect the only reason I would change anything is if Max (the creator) comes up with another tweak that makes it even better. The main complaint people have about the recipe (and just about all of the recipes) is the grittiness of the flour. Yes, it is a bit gritty; though far less so than the previous iteration. I find it very drinkable and usually just shake up my bottle, chug about a third of it, and then repeat again when I feel like it. Twice last week I only consumed 3/4 of my daily soylent, mostly because I wasn’t hungry, partly because of eating some “muggle” food. Still – I agree with most of the experiences I’ve read from others: no you aren’t hungry all the time. For that matter I’m rarely hungry and when I do feel hungry I drink some soylent and some water and I’m OK. On the topic of muggle/normal food: Earlier on I had some rather severe reactions to eating stuff besides soylent. I don’t know if that was because of the 2.3.0 version or what but the last two days what little I have eaten hasn’t caused me any discomfort or problems of any kind.

How is my body reacting to a week on soylent? Very well, thank you. My gastrointestinal tract seems to like it just fine. The microbes that release foul smelling gas after feasting upon the insoluble sugars in bean skins appear to be rather sad though – since they appear to not be doing much of anything right now (meaning I’m not having a problem with gas, rather a vacation from it!). I’ve not had any issue with not enough or too much fiber (constipation or the runs). I feel like I have more energy, I wake up easier, don’t feel slow and bogged down after eating dinner. I’ve also gone from eating (far) too many calories to eating as much or even less than the 2000 calorie recommendation, especially when I add 30 minutes of elliptical. I was a little freaked out by the vitamins tinting my urine a bright neon yellow – though I was dehydrated; but others had the same issue and it’s apparently a well known reaction with certain vitamin supplements. I’ve found it easier to not eat junky snacks when (a) I’m already full from the soylent I drank a few hours ago (b) I can just mix up some more and (c) seriously? do I really want to eat that? If I do it might sit heavy in my stomach and I don’t even really want to – I just think I do.

I started this whole endeavor as a way to lose weight. Thus far it’s working quite well. I know that’s not the aim of creating soylent but I have no problem using it for my own nefarious purposes. Until now I’ve posted a few graphs without a Y-axis label since I wanted to have more results before telling teh Intrawebs how much I weigh. Well, here is the graph for January 2014 using the tools from The Hackers Diet to account for variations in water and other factors. I’ve been using this since 2006 and have the process down fairly well: weigh at same time every day just before showering (plus removing other variables I won’t go in to).

Weight log – January 2014

Yeah, that’s a VERY good trend =) It will be fun to see how it continues to go down over the next few months. I suppose if I really wanted to amp it up I could play around with the formulation or even go Shangri-la Diet on it and down the oil with my nose plugged but I’m content with how it’s going so far. In about a month or so I plan on getting some blood work done, mostly because my health insurance will pay me $50 to do a health assessment each year (cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, etc…) but it will be good to see how I’m doing.

Anyhow – I expect I’ll be doing a few weekly updates from here on out, now that the “exciting” or unknown is behind me.

Nothing much to note, and that’s a very good thing – I think. I ate a little bit of normal food yesterday, but for the most part am happily subsisting almost entirely on People Chow DIY soylent.

OK, one thing to note is that yesterday and today I was sated enough drinking 1/4 of the stuff at my regular meals that I only imbibed 3/4 of my days worth of powder each of the days. It’s possible that my “set point” is already moving down thanks to the soylent and I’m becoming less hungry. It’s also possible that the biscuit and 4 table spoons of gravy I ended up eating during dinner helped too. Apparently that is my Achilles Heel. I expect to do a 1 week on soylent summary tomorrow.

So I finally finished off the last of my pre-mixed 2.3.0 and can now move on to the new formulation. As I said earlier, the big change in the new formulation was the removal of the almond meal; along with a new corn flour and some tweaked amounts of the protein and other stuff. Allegedly the new mix tastes like tortilla chips since it’s made from the same flour you use for corn tortillas/tortilla chips. I haven’t had a chance to taste it (that will be tomorrow) but it certainly smells like tortilla chips!

I thought I would document mixing up a batch of 3 days worth. According to the time stamps on the photos this took around 30 minutes. I suspect I could do it in far less time (10-15 minutes) if I was using a better scale and containers that had larger openings… and I wasn’t taking photos or doing stuff with the kids the whole time. I don’t want to champion this being best practices, in fact I anxiously anticipate many from the DIY soylent community to say “why are you doing x when it’s so much easier to do y?” – I’ll likely do a followup or two with MOAR BETTER-ER methods.

Starting to measure

So I use my harbor freight scale with quart bottles. I’m doing 3 days at a time so I can kinda do it like an assembly line.

1. Put a bottle on the scale
2. hit the “tare” button to zero the weight measurement
3. dump ingredient into the bottle until I hit the desired weight
4. swap bottle, goto step 1

Adding Protein

For the bulky ingredients (the corn and whey protein isolate) this is super easy, aside from messing up and dumping powder over the side. This is why it would be nice to have a larger opening. If I put too much it’s usually easy to just spoon out the excess, though this gets tricky for some of the ingredients that are in smaller quantities (like 4 or 2 grams). With the smaller ones it becomes difficult to get just the one I want out without getting some of the last one, adding it in piles makes this a little easier. Also: get a good scale with 0.01 g resolution. Mine tends to stick at a particular weight. I’ll add a bunch of salt and it will hold at 1.2 g (or something) and then suddenly jump up to 5.3. Eventually it settles down and shows the right weight (I think) but it’s annoying and slows me down a lot.

Bottles Full – so nice and stratified!

The old formulation had denser almond meal so this new one takes up more volume, almost exactly 1 US quart, aka 4 cups, aka 32 fluid ounces, aka 0.946353 liters (you can call it 1 liter if you like). The last one gave me 1/2 cup less – so this new one will fill 4 of the larger Blenderbottles with what appears to be a best practice: 1 cup/8 oz of powder mixed with water up to the top after shaking.

1 day ready to go

I suppose I could leave the powder in the quart jars and put lids on them but the zip-lock bags fit in the cupboard better. As of yet I haven’t figured out a decent way to mix the oil in with the powder that doesn’t just coat the inside of the bag with oil and have the powder stick to it. Maybe others have suggestions. For now I’m just adding the oil to the mixture after I add the water, usually right about the time I’ve been adding some vanilla. I’ll have to see what 3.0.1 tastes like without vanilla, I tried adding some taco seasoning to 2.3.0 and while it was actually quite good, it’s not the sort of thing I could handle more than a test shot glass of.

Anyhow that’s it! Tomorrow I’ll actually mix it up and see how the new formulation goes.

 

So I did eventually get hungry. Right around 21:00 last night, my stomach felt empty and I wanted to eat. I thought that it might just be that I was thirsty since my mouth felt dry. So I drank a bunch and it (mostly) went away. The odd thing was when I woke up today I wasn’t hungry at all, which is kinda odd. So I guess I wasn’t hungry last night… or something. I also had made it a point to only consume soylent for the entire day, for better or for worse. I made it:

MyNetDiary.com for Day 3

My wife forgot and tried to give me some Chicken in a Biscuit crackers and I came really close to eating some chocolate – even had it written down in mynetdiary – but I decided to do it right. Anyhow…

One of the big questions a lot of people have is: so how will this affect my gastrointestinal tract? Lee Hutchinson did his own hilarious write up on his second day of Soylent but here is my “plumbing” experience:

• On Day 1 I mixed the stuff way too thick and had a lot of heartburn and burping (although correlation != causation) – there is a slight possibility some of this was due to a short stomach bug that gave me the runs and the desire not to eat the day before I started all this (Day -1? Day 0? I don’t know!) – though it only lasted until noon and I was feeling perfectly fine by dinner.
• Since day 1 I haven’t had a problem with gas… from either end. I’d go so far as to say there is substantially *less* than a week ago. From what I understand this is likely due to the use of Corn as the primary carbohydrate source, as opposed to the oat flour that is used in the official Soylent.
• If you really want to know, I’d say this morning was about a 4.5 on the Bristol scale and there’s far less volume. Also it was lighter, like #FFDB4A.
• I said it earlier but I have noticed that my mouth feels dry a lot. I’m not sure if it’s dehydration (which honestly seems unlikely right now – there’s no way I’ve been running fluid through my kidneys at that rate and been dehydrated) or some sort of after-taste from the vitamin powder but drinking does make it go away for quite a while… until it comes back =)
• Speaking of dehydration. It was pointed out to me that “The extra b vitamins will make bright colors when they come out” – and that makes sense given the bright yellow tint. I guess I should be happy it isn’t red.

One other fun thing: the trend is looking good so far

Well, I’m back to the original Almond meal and there’s not a noticeable difference, guess that was a wasted $12. Seriously this is so much better when I put in the right amount of water! Speaking of water, I’m apparently extremely dehydrated – that or something in the formulation is tinting my pee yellow, and there’s the 4 pound weight loss since I started. Regardless I’m happy with how it’s going so far. Entering my daily meal into myfitnesspal.com is stupid easy: “let’s see… what did I eat today? Oh that’s right +peoplechow2.3” and DONE. It was also nice to be able to sit and talk to my kids during dinner while they ate, normally I’m chowing down on a salad or something.

I’m going to be in this for the long haul. I’m not picky about repetitive foods, quite the opposite. For the last 7 years I’ve eaten instant oatmeal for lunch at work probably 90+% of the time. Probably helped my cholesterol and stuff a lot, especially since my previous lunch regimen was heating up a can of chili or putting a frozen pizza in the toaster oven (my blood pressure used to be CRAZY high!).

As for my state of being on soylent: this is actually rather nice thus far. I’m not hungry all the time, quite the opposite. it’s sort of like how I don’t get hungry when I have a stomach bug. I also learned from Lee Hutchinson’s experience when he tried Soylent for a week for Ars Technica: if you’re not hungry, you don’t have to gag it down =).

So my biggest problem so far has been the acid reflux/heartburn from the bits of almond sticking to the back of my throat. I thought it might be the brand of almond meal so I got the stuff that was officially recommended and tried that out. Somebody also noted that I was using WAY too little water. At their direction I put 8 (volume) ounces of powder into the bottle, then after shaking it a bit got it up to 24 fluid ounces (up to the top). It was much better. I tried chugging it instead of sipping it and I don’t have the acid reflux nearly as bad, it’s barely noticeable. While not a ringing endorsement =) it’s a significant improvement. It’s also possible that the change to the Bob’s red mill almond meal has helped too. I’ll have to try the old stuff tomorrow (since I still have 2 days mixed up in baggies). Scientific method-ish you know?

I also did break ranks a bit and had 1 slice of pizza during lunch. I decided I would finish my second bottle of soylent before having any, mostly so I would be full and not want much. I stopped at 1 because I was full already but also I noticed that my stomach didn’t seem to like the pizza very much. It has to be psychosomatic or something because, while I did take 5 minutes to eat a single slice, I don’t thing it could have reacted to it that fast. Plus I’ve only been on this for like 30 hours and my gall bladder still has plenty of bile. Regardless; the pizza, while tasting yummy and salty, didn’t sit well.

My wife decided to try a swig during dinner. Her response: “Well… it’s not *horrible*…” I laughed pretty hard.

I discovered that the recipie/formulation has been revised: People Chow 3.0 is here! The official changelog:

CHANGELOG 3.0.0 – “Tortilla Perfection!”

• Replaced Harina P.A.N. with masa harina
• Added 30g carbohydrate base (masa harina)
• Removed the almond meal
• Added 7g whey protein isolate
• Added 14g soybean oil

Too bad I still have 2 days mixed up of the old formulation. I’m going to go ahead with the prepared stuff for days 3 and 4 and switch to the new formulation on Saturday. I’m conflicted though since I really like the almond *taste* but won’t miss the stuff in the back of my throat.

So On Monday I got all my ingredients (finally – I ordered it all on Jan 1st). I mixed up three batches Monday night and concluded that I need a better scale. The one I have has .1 g increments, I need one that has .01 increments.

All the stuff I’ll be eating. I have enough of everything for 45 days, some stuff I have 110 days worth.

I didn’t see specific guidance for how much powder to mix with how much water so I split up the powder between the three BlenderBottles I got from Sams-Club. The mix ended up about as thick as a milk shake (yeah, this was WAY too thick, more on that later).

BlenderBottles ready to go – that’s 2000 calories for 1 day.

It didn’t taste like I anticipated at all. Because it has 45 g of ground almond it has a distinctive nutty flavor that I actually like quite a bit. But because I mixed it up too thick  I was taking a mouthful and kinda chewing at it (“mmmm almonds!”) but I had some almond stopping at the back of my throat giving me heartburn/acid reflux. This proved to be the biggest hurdle for me and didn’t really go away until I ate half a slice of bread followed by some Tums. Aside from the almond issue it was really nice to not feel hungry at all. I commented on my experience with the almond and hypothesized that it might be due to my choice of “Simply Right” instead of “Bob’s Red Mill” brand. So I bought some of the Bobs and mixed up a new batch for Wednesday.