chris, Author at TheBairs

About chris

Chris Bair is a computer geek and SalesForce.com system administrator for his "day job". He became involved in the powdered foods (aka "soylent") movement in January 2014, originally with a conventional recipe and later switching to a high fat, low carb "ketogenic" variant on October 2014. In January 2015 he created the recipe for Keto Chow and released it without restriction for anyone to use, at the same time he began mixing the recipe up for people that wanted a finished product and has seen steady growth in the business every month since. Conversely since starting Keto, he has added 6 new holes to his belt and recently bought a far smaller belt. He has also eaten far more bacon and cheese than in all his previous years combined trying to avoid fat but still slowly gaining weight. Chris has lived in Utah for most of his life, except for a few years living in Chile where he learned Castillian. Chris and his wife have two sets of twins with a couple singltons thrown in for good measure.

Leveling the playing field

This entry is part 34 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

On Wednesday I have my initial weigh in for a local weight loss contest. It’s based on % of body weight lost. In the past the winners have lost anywhere from 15 to 21%. I figure that no one else doing it is going to be starting out without glycogen in their system so I’ve been building back up my reserve. Glycogen comes with a lot of water weight, this is the major 5-10 pounds that most people lose in the first week of Keto (and it stays off so long as you don’t eat carbs).

In other words: I just ate some biscuits and gravy, yesterday was Mexican food and on Wednesday I’ll have pizza and soda.

It’s been interesting having carbohydrates again (if only for a few days). Yeah I do feel sluggish and rather crappy. And thirsty, I keep making myself feel ill from drinking so much water but I’m still thirsty. I’m really not looking forward to carb cravings on Thurdsay (or the keto flu). I had completely overcome that and intentionally putting myself back into that is actually kinda stupid.

I guess one good thing is it’s given me some perspective: Carbs aren’t as delicious and I thought they were. Eating a Kit-Kat or strawberry oreo was anti-climactic. Yeah, it’s good but not good enough to cheat on next week. Frankly melted cheese, bacon and other 0 carb foods are good enough there really isn’t a reason to cheat.

Now excuse me as I go eat the last tortilla chips I’ll eat for at least 6 months.

By chris|2015-01-18T09:44:42-07:00January 18th, 2015|Ketogenic, Soylent, Weight Loss|3 Comments

Best “customer comment” on an order yet

This entry is part 33 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Got an order today, there’s a box where people can add a note. This was in the box:

$ ./configure $ make $ make keto

My first thought was:

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

I had a good laugh.

By chris|2015-01-18T07:21:21-07:00January 18th, 2015|Keto Chow, Soylent|Comments Off

Customizing the calories in Keto Chow to your requirements

This entry is part 32 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

On the Keto Chow page I have this:

This recipe has the added benefit of being customizable for people with different caloric requirements. Without any oil or cream it’s right around 500 calories/day and still hits all the right nutrients except protein, and the different fatty acids. Following the directions you’ll get 1269 calories/day (woohoo, deficit!) but you can raise that up to whatever level you want by increasing the heavy cream and/or the oil. It’s super flexible.

So how exactly do you do this?

First you’re going to need a nutrient profile. Head over to the DIY profile calculator page: http://diy.soylent.me/nutrient-profiles/calculator
If you don’t have an account on the DIY site you’ll need to make one; either log in or create an account, then co back to the calculator page if necessary.
Enter in all your information. You’re going to need to set the sliders to 5% 20% and 75% (maybe a bit more protein if you lift weights a lot). I use “chris.bair’s Keto New” as the DRI profile, I found it last time by typing “chr” three times in the dropdown menu but women might want to check out another profile. There’s a full list at http://diy.soylent.me/nutrient-profiles. Here’s what I put in last time I made one:
You can play around with the requirements a bit if you like.
Go to the Keto Chow recipe page http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/keto-chow-10-2
Click on the “Copy” button.
Type in a name and such, make sure you select your nutrient profile that you made earlier. It should be at the very top of the list.
Once you have that saved you can start customizing. You’ll need to switch over to the “Recipe Editor” tab
At the bottom it will show you the percentages you’re hitting. You may get red flags on Sodium, Potassium and a few other minerals depending on the profile you selected. Ketogenic diets need more electrolytes than normal so I’ve edited my own DRI profile to require the higher amounts. I’ve also taken out the maximum values on saturated fat and several others since the lipid hypothesis is false (watch Fat Head).
To edit a nutrient just click on the quantity in the recipe and then change the values in the pop-up.
You can hit the + and – just look at the percentages as they change. Once you get them where you’d like hit the “Save Changes” button.
Bug: the bottom numbers don’t recalculate until you refresh the entire page.
For the most part you should really only need to modify the Heavy Cream and/or the MCT oil on the Keto Chow recipe (unless you’re a nursing mother or pregnant, then your vitamin needs might be wildly different)

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 18th, 2015|Soylent, Keto Chow, Ketogenic|8 Comments

Additional Flavors for Keto Chow

This entry is part 31 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

The flavored protein I’m using for Keto Chow comes in more than the 3 flavors I’m going to keep stocked so I added an option to special order any of the other available flavors. It does cost $15 more than the chocolate mint, strawberry or vanilla since I have to get a tub of that flavor just for the one order; and it may add an additional 2-5 days to the time it takes to get your stuff but hey, you’ve got the option if you’re so inclined. The other flavors are:

“Butter Cream Toffee”
“Cafe Mocha”
“Chocolate Fudge”
“Cinnamon Bun”
“Cookies & Cream”
“Pina Colada”
“Rich Chocolate”
“Smooth Banana”

I grabbed some Cookies and Cream and some Butter Cream Toffee to test and both are good (who am I kidding? the Cookies and Cream is better than any I’ve tasted until now, it’s crazy good).

By chris|2015-01-31T16:52:19-07:00January 16th, 2015|Ketogenic, Site or Store Stuff, Keto Chow, Soylent|8 Comments

Powdered Cream not suitable for Keto soylent

This entry is part 30 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I guess I’m supposed to do clickbait titles if I want more traffic, but I prefer to get the conclusion out there and then back it up in the body.

A question came up about how well powdered cream could be used for Keto Chow instead of the liquid heavy cream. The Amazon Page doesn’t show any nutrition information and I couldn’t get a response from the manufacturer… so logically I bought some.

Here’s the nutrition information. Pay attention to the grams of fat + grams of protein + grams of carbohydrates != serving size.

OK, so the math doesn’t add up. Besides that I can work with the calories and carbohydrate numbers to see how many carbs would be in the same calorie amount as liquid heavy cream. For reference, here’s the nutrition for Darigold 40% cream:

0 carbs, none. Granted, in the US you can call anything below 1g 0 but I’m inclined to believe the 0 figure. So let’s do math. To equal the 518 calories in the heavy cream we’re going to need 58 servings (maybe 4g, maybe 7g going by my math) of the powder. That will give us 29g of carbohydrates (specifically sugars thanks to the #1 ingredient “sweet cream”) that aren’t there when using heavy cream. That would bring your daily net carbs up from 10.9 to 39.9. Did I mention that it will cost you $2.30/day for the powdered cream vs $0.75 for the liquid.

So yeah, not suitable.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 15th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent|4 Comments

The apps and tools I’m using to track my progress

This entry is part 29 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

A coworker asked me a while ago about all the stuff I’m using, I figure I might as well document it. Here are the Apps, monitors and other things I’m using to track stuff about my health.

Activity Monitor

I grabbed a used Fitbit Flex off eBay about a month ago to see if I would like it better than the Jawbone Up I had. Ultimately the Fitbit won and the Jawbone is in my backpack in case anybody on craigslist decides they want to buy it for $40. The Jawbone app was actually far better than the Fitbit one and gave me better information but I like the bluetooth sync function of the Fitbit and couldn’t find an Up24 for cheap. Neither do automatic sleep tracking, you had to tell the device it was nap time and again tell it when you woke up. The more expensive trackers do more stuff automatically. Both Up and Fitbit talk quite nicely to all the other apps mentioned here, sending activity data over automatically.

Fitbit Web UI

Fitbit Android UI

Weight Tracking

The Withings app/website does a great job of tracking weight, blood pressure and a number of other metrics. It’s also free to use and will send the weight data to a large number of applications. By having it send that data I don’t have to go into 5 different apps to update my weight all the time, it just does it automagically for me. You can use the Withings app and site with the Withings Wi-Fi scale or one of their fitness trackers, but you don’t need to. I did eventually end up buying a Withings scale but I used the app for about a month and a half before that. You can also import and export all the measurements very easily. I imported my weight logs from all the way back to October 2006.

Withings Web UI

Withings Android UI

Nutrition Tracking

I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for 2 or 3 years to (occasionally, up until 4 months ago) track my nutrition. Currently I’m on a 87 day streak of putting in my food, weight and activity. I use MFP as a sort of “central hub” for everything else. All my activity monitoring, weight and workouts head here. On a Ketogenic Diet I also need to track how many carbs I’m eating and it does a good job of that. There’s some settings and a userscript that enhance MFP for keto diets. It’s particularly nice to be able to scan a barcode to add food and with how I’m eating mostly the same stuff every day it’s a cinch. I used to use My Net Diary but MFP is way more useful.

MyFitnessPal Web UI

MyFitnessPal Android UI

Workout tracking

I’m using Digifit on my phone to track exercise (via a heart rate monitor, see below). On an ideal day I’m doing 30 minutes of elliptical in the morning and 30 minutes of running/walking in the evening. They have Android and iOS apps that have limited functionality unless you pay the $1.99 or whatever to upgrade it – it was worth it and I used an account that is shared on all my family’s phones and devices to pay so my wife gets the upgrade too. It can be used indoors on exercise equipment (which is what I mostly do) but it really likes going outside to fire up your GPS and correlate actual distance and speed with heart rate. It gets weight data automatically from Withings to use in calorie calculations.

Digifit Web UI

Digifit Android UI

Heart Rate Monitoring

I bought a Jarv Bluetooth 4.0 Chest Heart Rate Monitor for myself and then another one for my wife about 3 days later since it works so well (then we can work out together!). It works exceptionally well and communicates to Digifit just fine, although occasionally it takes a bit of prodding or wetting the chest contacts to wake it up. Coupled with Digifit, it does a much better job at calculating the actual calories you are burning. This morning with the heart rate monitor, Digifit calculated that I burned 439 calories in 30 minutes on the elliptical. That’s a far cry from the machine’s solely weight based calculation of 870.

Ketone Level Monitoring

After a few weeks in Ketosis you get accustomed to what it feels like and can mostly just Keep Calm & Keto On. I do still occasionally check my ketone levels. When I first started I bought a 200 pack of 2 Parameter Glucose & Ketone Test (URS) Urinalysis Reagent Strip (C 200 Strips). I also picked up a very, very cheap blood alcohol breathalyzer about 2 months ago for fun because the super cheap ones can’t distinguish the difference between alcohol on your breath and acetone. Actual breathalyzers that cost more than $5-10 can tell the difference just fine. I’m very proud to report that this morning I blew 0.05% even though I have no alcohol in my system at all.

Cheap Breathalyzer

Ketone Test Strip looks great!

Name	1/6/2015	3/20/2014	target
Sodium	141	142	135-145 mmol/L
Potassium	4.7	4.4	3.5-5.1 mmol/L
Chloride	103	106	99-111 mmol/L
ECO2	28.2	29.6	21.0-32.0 mmol/L
Glucose	87	79	74-106 mg/dL
BUN	21	19	7-18 mg/dL
Creatinine	1.11	1.1	0.6-1.3 mg/dL
BUN/Creatinine Ratio	18.9	17.3	8.0-27.0 Ratio
Calcium	9.5	9.2	6.5-11.8 mg/dL
Alkaline Phosphatase	79.2	83	50-136 U/L
Cholesterol	135	142	0-200 mg/dL
Triglycerides	96	160	0-200 mg/dL
HDL, Cholesterol	45	43	40-60 mg/dL
LDL (calculated)	71	67	0-160 mg/dL

chris

About chris

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Activity Monitor

Weight Tracking

Nutrition Tracking

Workout tracking

Heart Rate Monitoring

Ketone Level Monitoring

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