preparation

The kind of people Keto Chow appeals to

This entry is part 104 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

There is an excellent post over on /r/keto with this comment

For some people, especially those with atomic families, eating is less about the food and more about the social interaction and tradition of breaking bread with those you care for. Obviously having one person sit at a table drinking a shake while everyone else is eating would be strange. So for those people that share meals with people, any Soylent-like shake is probably not something that will jive really well for those social meals.

How many meals do you truly savor? How many meals are just you trying to find something, anything that you can put in your mouth to keep you from being hungry without screwing up your macros? For me, I still eat an absolutely decadent meal once or twice a month where I cook or go out and enjoy the experience of fine dining. The difference is that all the hum-drum meals have been replaced with Keto Chow.

Yep, that sums it up quite well.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:59-06:00October 28th, 2015|Keto Chow, Soylent|Comments Off on The kind of people Keto Chow appeals to
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1 Year of Keto, 77% the man I used to be

This entry is part 102 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I started Keto on October 20, 2014 and started posting my experiences on November 4, 2014. A lot has happened in a year, I’m 77% the man I used to be; so let’s do a retrospective.

Weight Log 1 year of Keto

I initially started keto without having done the right research and didn’t know what “keto flu” was or how to avoid it; but I did know that I needed to get my weight under control and get healthy. I never got tested but based on how my body was acting, I was pre-diabetic or at least insulin resistant. Keto was exactly what I needed. I feel this burning desire to make little business cards and hand them out to teenagers that… well, look like I did at that age:

keto business card

The changes go beyond just weight loss. For the first time in years the cells in my body have adequate fuel since it’s not being shoved into fat cells by insulin. I go to a class and don’t fall into a “carb coma” after lunch. My blood tests are awesome and my blood sugar is normalized.

Anyway. I started doing Keto using a recipe of ketogenic “soylent” called KetoFood. Initially with the “induction phase” one and quickly switching over to the “ongoing phase” recipe because the induction one was really, really gross. KetoFood served me well for the time but still wasn’t very pleasant and had a horrible texture since it’s primarily coconut flour, chia seeds and raw cocoa powder (with a bunch or oil). To this day I still gag when I smell chia seeds. In early December after I had been choking down KetoFood for about 6 weeks I was sent a sample of KetoSoy by Ted Tieken. It was far and away so much better than KetoFood I couldn’t believe it – MIND BLOWN. See, most people do a ketogenic diet using “real food” (instead of “fake hippie garbage“) but I have an unhealthy relationship with food and on top of that, doing food replacement shakes is really convenient – and that convenience and the results I was already getting had me resigned to the notion that ketogenic soylent was going to be barely palatable.

Around the same time a new keto soylent recipe was published by Kenneth Swanson. Instead of copious amounts of oils for the calories, Ken’s recipe used heavy cream. It was far smoother than anything else I had tried at that point too which was a nice respite for my “gritted-out” palate. I had enough supplies to make roughly 10 days of this recipe and ordered more of the protein powder too late for it to arrive in time for a second batch before I ran out. So I was forced to go back on KetoFood for a week. It was at that point I decided I was going to kill off my KetoFood and create a new recipe. I was still selling People Chow pre-mixed for people but didn’t have my heart in it. I eventually abandoned all of the other recipes in favor of the new one I was working on. January 1, 2015 I posted for the first time about what would become Keto Chow. I had finally worked out a suitable protein powder and over the next month or so I messed around with the recipe ingredients to further cut down on gritty texture and simplify the ingredient list. I posted the recipe for Keto Chow 0.7 for anyone to use and abuse. Not opening the recipe didn’t even occur to me: we’re all in this together and frankly there’s no way I could mix up enough Keto Chow for all the people that are mixing their own (plus it would be kinda a jerk-move since I was pulling ingredients and concepts from Ken’s Recipe, KetoFood and even People Chow).

Oddly enough, right about the time I was launching Keto Chow, I participated in a community weight loss challenge and to prepare for it I indulged in my very first “cheat” (week). The thing with ketogenic diets is it’s kinda binary: you’re either under your carb goal and in ketosis… or you’re not. If you “cheat” and eat food with sugar or the like (including fruit) then you won’t be in ketosis. Anyhow I ate carbs with reckless abandon, gained a ton of water weight thanks to glycogen and ultimately ended up getting second place. Fortunately that was the last time time I did that and I’m not planning on doing it again. The longer I go without eating carbs, the less appealing to me they become. Nothing tastes as good as I remember it and the few things I have tasted I usually end up spitting out without swallowing and eat some bacon instead.

Speaking of bacon, I don’t exclusively live off keto chow, far from it; but I do stick to keto. With my wife doing keto too now (along with a growing list of family and friends) my kids are even getting less carbs. Nobody ever complains when I make sausage, bacon or eggs and cover everything with liberal amounts of cheese. This Saturday we’re doing a neighborhood Haloween party with a chili cook off and I’ll be bringing a giant batch of Caveman Keto Chili (though I use sausage instead of ground pork). The one thing I do need to cut back on though is sugar alcohol treats – stuff like Quest Bars and the like. You can see on my weight graph from the beginning of this post the plateaus where I’ve stopped losing weight (like the last 2 weeks). If I knuckle down and stick to eating only Keto Chow and ultra low carb foods then it picks back up.

One thing I have noticed over the past month or so is that I’m losing fat in my arms and legs. My quadriceps are getting pretty crazy looking and I’m starting to get veins popping out on my biceps. This is especially interesting because I stopped exercising when I tried to drill a hole in my leg back in June. Before I started keto I was exercising 1-2 times a day, either on the elliptical or running yet I was still gaining weight. The big change was stopping eating carbohydrates. Exercise just makes me hungry (unless I have excess energy).

So here are shirtless before and after pics. You’ve been warned. I’m 258lbs in the one on the left (November 2014), 210 in the middle (April 2015) and just barely under 200 on the right (October 2015)

[print_gllr id=7612]

In the end, I’m 77% the man I used to be but my wife still likes me =)

If you’re interested, here is the body fat percentage graph for the last 11 months or so since I got a withings scale that tracks that.

Fat Log 1 year of Keto

…and if you’re really interested, here is my weight history going all the way back to October 2006.

2015-10-20 09_51_12-Health Mate

The first dip was doing the “Shangri-La diet” The second big dip was when my wife and I did a program where we removed sugar, flour and other foods from our diet. As obvious as it is now I didn’t make the connection then. The second to the last small dip right before keto was the 9 months I was doing People Chow.

By |2016-10-13T07:28:01-06:00October 20th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off on 1 Year of Keto, 77% the man I used to be
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Is Powdered MCT oil viable for Keto Chow

This entry is part 101 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

With Keto Chow there are several liquid ingredients you have to add to the mixture for it to be complete:

  • Heavy Cream
  • MCT Oil
  • Fish Oil

You have the option of doing the fish oil as pills (which is what I personally do). But wouldn’t it be cool to somehow include the MCT oil as well as the heavy cream? Well, I previously explored powdered cream, to put it quickly: turns out it’s powdered sweet cream and has WAY too much sugar, isn’t going to work. How about powdered MCT Oil?

To make an oil into a powder you have to mix it with a carbohydrate. Rosa Labs (Soylent 1.5) powders their oil using maltodextrin (a complex sugar) and you can get MCT oils that have been mixed similarly with starches and other sugars to form a powder. Keto 101 says you need to minimize the amount of carbohydrates that aren’t fiber so using maltodextrin isn’t going to work. I did discover that Quest (makers of Quest Bars) has a powdered MCT oil that uses “Soluble corn fiber” and claims to have 0g of sugars or complex carbohydrates. That might actually work. The problem then is the cost. a 454g (1 lb) container is $30 and for the 300 calories of MCT oil you would need 45g of the powdered MCT (1/10 the container per day) at a cost of $2.97. Regular MCT oil you need 39ml a day and it costs $0.59. Over the course of a week, liquid MCT oil would be $4.13 while the powdered stuff would cost $20.79. That isn’t even including the labor and other expenses if I were to include the MCT oil in the mix, that would probably drive up the price of a week of Keto Chow over $100.

So while it may be viable to include powdered MCT in the mix; economically it makes little sense, especially since you have to add other liquid ingredients anyway.

By |2016-10-13T07:28:02-06:00October 16th, 2015|Preparation, Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|1 Comment
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Scaling up meals of Keto Chow (6 at a time!)

This entry is part 100 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Whilst replying to a thread over on reddit I remembered something I had pondered upon a few weeks ago: I was making 12 blender bottles of Keto Chow for my wife and myself (lasts a whole 2 days if we both eat 3 meals a day) and thought that making Keto Chow for 2 is workable though kinda tedious. What if ALL the family was on Keto Chow? Granted, the smaller kids wouldn’t drink a full one but the big kids would and I would still probably need 7 meals worth just for the one meal. Mixing them individually doesn’t scale well, so how do you scale it?

Others mentioned it before but I hadn’t ever tried it: mass mixing 3 or more meals at a time either in a blender or in a pitcher with an immersion blender. Last night I tried it. I target 1400 calories a day so I’m using 50ml of heavy cream per meal. I like the thickness when I mix it up to be 16 fluid ounces (about 475ml). At that volume I could fit 8 meals into a 1 gallon pitcher. Figured it would be nice to have some room at the top to avoid spilling so I decided to do 6 meals at a time. The math was easy enough, just multiple everything by 6. 50g of powder = 300g. 50ml of heavy cream = 300ml. 13ml of MCT oil = 78ml.

  • I stuck it all in the pitcher then added water to about the half point.
  • I blended it for a bit with the immersion blender to get it going and then finished filling with water to the 3 quart mark.
  • Kept the blender going for about 5 minutes.
  • Finally I measured out 16 ounces into individual bottles and stuck them in the fridge.

The time stamps on my camera say it took 7 minutes from start to finish. Awesome!

By |2015-10-12T10:17:29-06:00October 12th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Preparation, Soylent|4 Comments
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Making Keto Chow in a Hotel

This entry is part 95 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Doing something like Keto Chow in a hotel room presents some interesting issues. I’ve done another “soylent” in hotels before and I’ve done Keto Chow while camping. I’m using a couple tools to make this all work in my hotel room.

  1. A refrigerator. Doesn’t come standard in the room though a quick call to the front desk and it’s happily chilling out.
  2. Shelf stable cream, specifically the Trader Joe’s brand. While it’s not the same fat content as the Heavy Cream I normally use, this travels well and you don’t have to worry about it. It comes in smallish 8 ounce containers and plugging the nutrition information from the package into the Recipe Editor on diy.soylent.me it says that I need to use all 236ml per day to get 1400 calories. This works out to 78ml per meal. So I open a box, split it 3 ways and I’m done with that box.
  3. I brought along two of the 18oz Hydro Flask insulated containers. These should keep lunch nicely chilled all day.
  4. I brought along a bottle brush and dish soap. You have to scrub out the hydro flasks (and blender bottles).
  5. I have 3 blender bottles. I’m going to mix in these and transfer 1 or 2 meals into the hydro flasks as needed.
  6. I stopped and grabbed a bottle of liquid coconut oil since my containers of MCT oil are the massive 64 ounce ones.
  7. Scale, measuring cups, a bowl to measure into and some fish oil pills.

Anyhow, should be interesting to see how it all works out. I have classes tomorrow and the included breakfast is bagels and pastries. No way am I eating that junk. Going to bring along my Keto Chow and if I’m lucky there will be a cheese tray during lunch.

By |2016-10-13T07:28:03-06:00September 12th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Preparation, On Tour, Soylent, Uncategorized|1 Comment
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New “how to prepare Keto Chow” video (6 meals)

This entry is part 93 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Had some time yesterday to make a new video on how to prepare Keto Chow. I also wanted to talk about using an insulated thermos like this 40 ounce Hydro Flask or this 16 ounce one because you can use them for when you won’t have refrigeration available. You can also use them to maintain “slushy” for hours Keto Chow made mostly with ice in a blender (think Wendy’s Frosty). Takes me about 14 minutes to make 6 meals worth in the video, it’s faster if you’re not ‘splaining stuff.

By |2015-09-02T05:51:26-06:00September 2nd, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Preparation, Soylent|7 Comments
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Mixing for two

This entry is part 90 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Since my wife switched from “Whole30” to keto I’ve been burning through blender bottles much quicker. We finished the last round this morning so I mixed up some chocolate fudge using all of the blender bottles that weren’t in the dishwasher. Took about 20 minutes, ended up with 10 of them. That won’t even last 2 days! First world problems I guess.

By |2015-08-30T11:31:04-06:00August 30th, 2015|Soylent, Keto Chow, Ketogenic|3 Comments
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Keto Chow for the Lactose Intolerant

This entry is part 88 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Over on Reddit there’s a great post from a guy that’s lactose intolerant and wanted to try Keto Chow. I often get questions about this in relation to the heavy cream and it’s interesting what he found. The TL;DR version is:

  • Don’t replace the heavy cream with MCT oil, 63ml of MCT is WAY too much for your GI tract.
  • Try a shake with 50ml of heavy cream in it, you might just be fine (this is what he determined and is what he is currently doing). Heavy cream actually has very little lactose (sugar) in it.
  • If you have problems with the cream, try putting lactose enzyme drops into keto chow when you mix it and let it sit overnight. The enzyme should break down the lactose.

Anyhow, it’s a good read. “If you or someone you know is lactose intolerant” you should check it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/3hr032/keto_for_the_lactose_intolerant/

By |2015-08-28T05:55:09-06:00August 28th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent|4 Comments
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Video of mixing up a big batch of Chocolate Peanut Butter Keto Chow

This entry is part 86 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I decided to take a video of mixing up a batch of Chocolate Peanut Butter Keto Chow. The mixing device was sparkling clean before I dumped the powder into it, that powder is messy stuff man. For this video I let off the cover that normally keeps the dust down a bit. I will sometimes get requests for custom blends of Keto Chow (less salt, less fiber, etc…) that I used to be able to accommodate when I was mixing each batch individually, measuring out each individual ingredient as I show in my mixing video. That approach works fine for 1-8 weeks at a time but it doesn’t scale very well (yesterday I did 34 weeks of just Vanilla, 5 of those being destined for day pouches in addition to that many more of other flavors). So now I measure out the minerals into small bags that match a 10lb bag of Dymatize; a bag of minerals for each batch. I do a quick pre-mix of the minerals before adding them to the mixer because otherwise the calcium/magnesium citrates tend to clump. For the Peanut Butter flavor I also add the peanut flour and then start the mixer. You can see why I’m not able to reduce a single ingredient for 1 week pack.

Because of the peanut flour, every time I do the Chocolate Peanut butter flavor I have to spend 15 minutes or so cleaning everything (bins, scale, scoops) because even though my bags say “may contain peanuts” in the allergy section, I don’t want anybody to get sick.

In completely unrelated news I decided I should set up some social media accounts so there’s now one for “the” Facebook and the tweeter Twitter.

By |2015-08-21T09:48:25-06:00August 21st, 2015|Keto Chow|6 Comments
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