Soylent

Just thought I would sing the praises of Soylent. Any fellow soylent heads around?

(I am not shilling, I have no interest in them increasing sales)

If you don't know, (Soylent.com - Free your body) is a meal replacement product. It is designed from the ground up to have a good balance of macronutrients and vitamins and minerals. They initially sold a foul powder that you mixed with water and it made a nutritious goo that if you had a lot of discipline you could eat if you had a mastery of your gag reflex.

Then they made their 2.0 ready mixed drink! This is my second favorite product in the world, after my Model S. It comes in 400 kcal bottles, which makes calorie counting super easy. And it is positively good. It tastes like really creamy milk, but with a nutty, oaty bit. It tastes like cereal milk left over from honey nut cheerios, if you used half and half for your milk. Yet its vegan and dairy free. Some people compare it to melted ice cream.

It's made in the USA and was started in the Bay Area by geeky programmers trying to "solve" food. They wanted to make something that was better and easier than the fast food they were eating during long work days.

The concept is that it saves time and money, which I suppose it does. For me the best feature is that I can easily use it to run a calorie deficit and lose weight. I have lost a ton of weight since I have started depending on it. I am down 4.3lbs in the last month alone and I feel great. (I have shed about 17 lbs this year)

Typically I have a bottle on my commute into work. Then at lunch I have another. If I don't have evening plans I have another at 4-5pm if I need to work late. At that point I have had 1200 calories and can still have a modest late dinner or just a 4th bottle. I am probably getting 80% of my calories from the stuff in the last few months. What you end up doing is planning around social meals or the occasional burger that you need for sanity. A common "meal" for me is a bottle and an ounce of Doritos or something so I feel like I "ate"

Just sharing

tomas said:

Hope it isn't soylent green. Look it up. Can't believe someone picked this name after that movie!!! Blchhh

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I am not a fan of the name, but they are aware of that association.

But, the book the movie was based on didn't have that twist, it was based on Soy thus the name. Plus that is a 42 year old movie reference. The word means nothing to a lot of people.

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MileHighMotoring said:

That's the joke and why they chose it.

I love eating too much - I'm a health food nut and really into Amazing Grass powders - I've got like 4 different tubs right now. But replacing meals is a deal killer for me. I recently did Eat To Live (vegan/low carb basically) for a month and lost weight, and then went back to basically watching what I eat now and not overdoing it. Hard this time of year of course, but I'll muddle through.

Thanks for posting, I'm sure being a Tesla forum there are other health nuts around here.

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I love eating too, don't we all. I am just taking a break from it. Plus my breakfast, if I eat, is typically a sausage egg sandwhich and a typical lunch for me is fast food. So I am doing no harm here.

One reason to switch to something like this is for the experience. It causes a first-in-your-lifetime division between eating to solve your hunger and eating for entertainment. We combine these things, even when we are eating healthy. It is less "fun" but then when I do sit down for a really first rate social meal, it is SOOOO much better. You really appreciate every bite.

One thing I have noticed is how much of a religious component eating has. When I suggest this to people they tend to get defensive like I am trying to convert them to a cult. We have such confusing messages about health and eating, everyone has a private model of what is ok to eat. And when you bring up an alternate they can get really threatened.

No one at Soylent is looking to ban food. And, it is true that we don't know if there are hidden magic food components not present in Soylent such that after a long period of time of eating it I might drop dead from kryptonite deficiency. Their answer for that is eat food. But maybe have Soylent instead of the millionth cheeseburger and fries. If you are already eating a perfectly managed vegan balanced diet then you would have no need for a meal replacement product. But the rest of us can use the help!

MileHighMotoring said:

I'm glad you like it - personally, I wouldn't consider it healthy. The first six ingredients are fat, fat, sugar, sugar, fat, and salt. It may be life-sustaining, but I don't think it's healthy. To each his own; if it's working for you, keep on keepin' on!

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All true. They are upfront in their macronutrient split. They are clearly keeping with the very recent ideas that we have over-vilified fat calories. 47% of the calories are from fat, 20% from protein, and only the remaining 33% from Carbohydrates (sugars in this case). That is fine by me.

It is also based on the assumption that your body does not care about the source of nutrients, which I also believe. As I said above there might well be secret micronutrients present in natural food that we haven't discovered yet but I doubt that is the case, and if it is it will take 100 years to die from it.

Lastly I believe that MOST of the health problems we hang on nutrition really have their roots in obesity. My personal, mostly unsubstatiated, theory is that the most important metric in a meal's quality is simply the calories. The rest is stuff we tell ourselves. If I had a live in vegan chef preparing all my meals I would be healthy and lose weight largely because I wouldn't want to eat very much of it

Max* said:

For the longest time I thought just like you: as long as calories out > calories in, you're going to lose weight. Unfortunately, that's far from the truth and there's a lot more to it. The human body is very complex, and there are a lot of things besides caloric intake that dictate your weight loss/gain.

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Got to disagree here. If a person can account accurately for calories in and out, not an easy task, you will lose weight. Conversely if calories out is not greater than calories in you cannot lose weight.

Lots of people have proved this, like by by eating mcdonalds only and losing weight. http://www.today.com/health/man-loses-56-pounds-after-eating-only-mcdonalds-six-months-2D79329158

I also use a fitbit, which helps me be realistic about how active I am. If I walk a lot in a given day I have a higher budget.

It is notoriously difficult to judge portion sizes and calorie counts so you can think you are doing ok when you are really not. That is why for dieting I rank my days like this, from best to worst:

1) I precisely measured my calories and I know I had a deficit
2) I precisely measured my calories and I know I didn't meet my goal
3) I am kind of sure I had a deficit
4) I am kind of sure I didn't meet my goal.
5) I ate a lot and I have no idea how I did (aka, thanksgiving)

I would rather have good data on my failure (#2) than poor data on a success (#3). A lot of #3 days will cause you to stall out on weight loss and get frustrated and conclude your genes prevent you from losing weight.

That is the real beauty of Soylent. I know *exactly* where I am for most meals. It solves the hardest part, measuring.

Max* said:

I had a well written out response which got cleared by the back button, so here's a summary:



I'm not going to address the rest of the comments below, as you jumped to a lot of conclusions based on my comment. I never said it's easy to calculate calories, I never said anything about genes, I never said eating McDonalds or other junk food will prevent you from losing weight, I never said anything about being "kind of sure" in my calculations.

I made one statement that it's not as simple as "calories out > calories in, you're going to lose weight". What I really meant to say was that reducing your "calories in" is not a straight line to "reducing weight" assuming calories out stays the same.

So you're right, the statement I made is not accurate, but not for any of the reasons you listed. You are correct that if your fat tissues get less calories than they burn, that you will lose weight. The fat tissue gets more calories, you will gain weight. There's no argument there.

Looking closer at the details, you can measure your calories in (maybe not easily, but you can). You can not accurately measure your calories out. Even the fitbit gives you an estimate. Calorie calculations are based on METs for various activities, including walking, so you only get an estimate of how many calories you burn. So your list of 5 items are actually all estimates, they may be precise, but they're not accurate.

Your calories out depend on your calories in (they're completely inbred), that's your metabolic rate, your muscle mass (which burns calories round the clock), starvation mode from being deprived of caloric intake, etc.

So by reducing your calories in to a low level, you're not guaranteed to lose weight as your calories out will have reduced too. Going on a 1000 calories a day diet is going to make you lose some weight, until your metabolism slows down, and now you're no longer losing weight. That was the point I was trying to make originally.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

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Sorry if I came off aggressive. I was using the response to your short post as an excuse to expound and slay some strawmen.

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ItsNotAboutTheMoney said:

I'm down from 239.3lb to 215.2lb and falling. My target is to be no more than 200lb for the rest of my life. That's still overweight, but I'm being realistic given a pretty sedentary lifestyle. Maybe I can change my mind when I get to my target.
I just eliminated "extras", dropped 15.5lb, plateaued for 3 weeks, and then reduced my portion sizes and stopped drinking calories in the evening, after which I've lost another 8.6lb. Nearly down to overweight on BMI.

I wasn't frustrated when I plateaued, I just asked myself whether I wanted to wait a while to see whether I needed to reduce the amount I eat, or do it now and adjust my portion sizes so that when I reach target I can add more stuff back in to get to my equilibrium.

I don't calorie count. That's effort. If I were going to spend extra time, I'd put it into food preparation or exercise.

Psychologically, all I had to do overcome some habits of bored eating and accept the fundamental input = output equilibrium.
I think people just kid themselves too much, and I think that they mix up the "healthy diet and exercise" message with weight. There's a connection, but it's a loose one. Obesity is a problem because it's hard to be obese, eat healthily and get regular exercise.

As for the Thanksgiving issue, well, that's easy: I'll have turkey, and sides but I'll eat the amount I normally eat. And, since I'm currently trying to get my weight down to target, I'll not be eating any extra stuff. My metabolism doesn't care that it's Thanksgiving. Next year, maintaining my equilibrium, my basic intake will allow room for some extras. But right now I'm having to balance years of excess.

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Here is what is crazy. (Now we are just talking dieting, fine by me ) About 3 years ago I was 205, a heaviest point and I had no business being that heavy, I am not unusually muscled or anything. So I set a goal of 175, which seemed like a fine goal but I was aware that wasn't based on anything. As of this week I got to 175! Yay! aaaand I am still fat. I have a BMI of 25, which is right at the threshold of normal and overweight. If you google ideal weight formulas, normal is like 145-170. It is sort of astonishing. Granted, almost no one is "normal" anymore, but I don't want that to be my excuse. I set a new goal of 165, I think I will be happy there.

Maybe this is an aspect of the 'set point' since I didn't watch the video, but as you shrink the amount of calories you need shrinks so your "reward" for getting skinny is a permanant lower ceiling for what you can eat

Also I am suddenly cold all the time... more surface area to mass.