Soylent, 2+ weeks in · 9:38pm Dec 5th, 2013
Okay, sorry for the blog spam, but I find myself with a little time, suitable for an update post.
If you're just joining us, Soylent is a meal-replacement shake that is nutritionally-complete. In other words, if you drink this sludge, not only will it keep you alive but you should actually be healthier than if you eat fast food half the time like I do. It is similar to, but not identical to, existing products like Slimfast or Ensure or Boost. Those are designed to be an occasional supplement to a regular diet -- and they cost way more than Soylent.
I've wanted to try this for months, got increasingly frustrated as the official Soylent kept getting pushed back because they got crazy-overfunded, and finally found an easy Amazon-friendly recipe. Filly and I took the plunge and dove in.
Pictured: everything the body needs?
It's been over two weeks since we received the ingredients and I mixed the first batch of Soylent. My verdict?
Bottoms up...
I fucking love this stuff.
For an hour or two of prep work on a weekend, I have something like 80 meals ready to go -- just add water and oil. From nothing to being fed and feeling satisfied in five minutes flat. Some days -- most days -- I only eat (consume?) Soylent. Other days, I eat "real" food, if I'm dying for a specific flavor... but I'm finding that more often than not, when I start getting hungry, I'm getting hungry for Soylent. It's filling, and especially with flavored syrup added, pretty tasty.
Prep work consists of precisely measuring out dry ingredients (by weight, with a gram scale) into a blender...
...and then grinding it into a fine, homogenous powder.
Once I worked out the kinks in my procedures and found my groove, making one batch of Soylent (about 5.5 "meals" at 375 calories per meal -- I have 3 or 4 a day) takes perhaps five minutes. I put on a TV show or some music and get into a routine until I fill up my handy Rubbermaid container.
One container, filled to the top, holds about 45 meals. I like to do two at a time, one for work and one for home.
Soylent by itself is pretty bland -- vaguely oaty, vaguely sweet, altogether unobjectionable -- but it actually becomes delicious with just a little bit of flavoring syrup, the kind you use in blended coffee drinks. And there are a bunch of flavors to choose from. Our favorite flavors so far are Butter Pecan, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, Salted Caramel, Irish Cream, and Vanilla Hazelnut. (Peanut Butter, Chocolate Macadamia Nut, Coffee, and Chocolate Mint were all washes.) True, these syrups add a few empty calories (about 20 per meal), but that is a welcome trade. (Before we got the syrups, Filly also flavored hers with Maxwell International powder.)
So... yeah. I'm a huge fan. Soylent is exactly what I hoped it would be: a cheap (did I mention each meal works out to about a buck?), easy, convenient, and healthy default food. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
Hm.
Might have to look into it, then...
~Skeeter The Lurker
I think I'm going to try this soon.
I want that recipe!
Ho, man! I've been waiting for this update! This is so incredibly interesting to me. It seems futuristic in a way. A perfect, portable, cheap way to eat.
I might have to give this a whirl, but my wife turned her nose up at the mere idea of it. She's like that, though. She does poorly with conceptual ideas. She won't get behind it until she actually tries it/sees the cost benefit, etc.
What has it been doing for your GI tract, if I might ask an indelicate question? I'd be afraid that it would cause the loosest bowel moviements ever.
Honestly? That doesn't look like people food.
*ba dum tss*
I seriously question the marketing choices behind naming a food something for which the first thing that springs to most potential customers' minds will be "it's made of people!"
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It was in the blog post, but I forgot to underline the hyperlink for visibility. Here you go!
The only sticking point is that it relies in its original form on a protein powder that only Trader Joe's carries. If you don't have a Trader Joe's in your area, you'll have to do a little ingredient juggling to work around it.
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I think it has definite benefits. Pay close attention to the "Safety" section in the recipe blog post. I take absolutely no responsibility for you going into hypercalcemic shock!
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We've actually gotten a couple of coworkers in on it with us, and my little brother is dying to start using it too (he tried mine over Thanksgiving and liked it).
For your wife, in terms of cost/benefit: 2 hours on the weekend plus 60 seconds for each meal = a filling, satisfying meal that takes practically no effort. I basically never think about food any more; I don't try to figure out what to make myself, I don't spend time making it, and I don't spend time eating it. Each 2051-calorie batch of Soylent costs me $5.76. I'm eating smaller meals as part of my bid to lose weight (stupidly-easy calorie counting is another reason I love Soylent), so 375 calories' worth of Soylent costs me $1.05. (I use tap water, so that's 'free', and the flavoring syrup adds another 20 calories and $0.02 cents per meal.)
Spoilering for poop talk!
I have never pooped better. Every trip to the bathroom is hassle-free, which is unusual for me as I previously struggled with getting enough fiber, or had an upset stomach from junk food. Over Thanksgiving weekend I still had one or two Soylent meals a day, and my 'routine' stayed nice and easy.
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I know, right?
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That's 'cause it wasn't a marketing decision. The guy who started this, a programmer named Rob Rhinehart, just did it as a personal experiment, and called it Soylent as a joke. By the time it gained traction online and spawned an actual company, the name had stuck.
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Besides, in the original story, it wasn't people. It was soy.
Thanks for the update, this is quickly becoming an item on my "things I need to try" list, especially since you're not experiencing any "digestive distress."
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It's not a complete marketing disaster though, at least in my opinion. The name gets the message of what it is across pretty efficiently and leads to the exchange:
"What are you eating?"
"Oh, just some soylent."
"Isn't that made of people? And fictional?"
"Heh. Well actually..."
I think the key is that it's so implausible that it's actually made of people that most reasonable minds will realise it's not. Now if it were named with a name that implied it was genetically modified or contains snails (for certain cultures), or something that people associate with the instinctively disgusting (like, say, "brown log"), it would probably be worse.
I've seen programmers come up with far, far worse names for things. I mean, The GIMP is a classic, but at least it's vaguely memorable. Looking at my programs menu, can you guess what "Shotwell" does? "Remmina"?
About how much does it cost monthly? If it's cheap, I'd definitely consider investing money into this.
Apparently, some people are worried about jaw muscles and teeth. You have any troubles there, since you're practically eating a liquid diet. Of course, chewing gum and the like should be enough to off set that.
Oh, what happened with the flax seed? Did you end up just grinding it down finer?
Wow.
I've never even heard of this before, and I gotta say it looks incredibly appealing to me. I don't like making food for myself (and I know nothing about cooking), so most of the time I just end up skipping a meal or taking a vaguely adequate substitute. Or putting a pizza in the oven for when I'm lazy.
I'm also at that point where I'm possibly considering living on my own, and food-making is definitely a concern for me.
I'll look into it.
I am rather excited by this journal.
A pal of mine is a college student, and this is very relevant to his interests. Thanks for this.
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Come to think of it, that was actually the founder's original thought process too. And a lot of the ingredients in my recipe are soy-derived, so there you go!
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It depends entirely on how much you eat a month. For rough, table-napkin-style calculations, you could assume 2000 calories costs you $6. I myself am shooting for 1500 calories a day or less, which runs me $4 a day --> $120 a month. Costs will also vary depending on where you live/if you can secure the ingredients, etc.
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I haven't run into any difficulty in that regard personally. From what I've read, others who have experienced that issue just chew some gum like you suggest and it's resolved.
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Forgot! I ground it finer myself, which helped, but then I found a flax powder that was even more finely ground that's barely noticeable and switched to that outright. I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll do a follow-up post with links to my equipment and my ingredients so people can see exactly what it takes; I'll include the powder there. Definitely recommend it over the original flax meal.
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I would definitely consider it! I started looking into it because I am now a full-time student on top of working 40 hours a week, so I just don't have the time or energy (or money) to deal with food.
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Now I'm excited that you're excited!
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Glad to be of service!
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Also, I showed Filly this post and the comments, and she thought you might be interested in a woman's side of things -- namely that when I first ran across the idea months ago and showed her, all excited, the first words out of her mouth were, "I am never going to do that, and neither are you." Obviously she came around... but it took her a few days to even accept the possibility, and then once she started grasping the finer points of the plan (money saved, time saved, healthiness, etc), she was as desperate to try it as I was -- and is now as enthusiastic as I am about the process.
How much are you getting paid? =3
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Of course, I've never had a doctor to talk to, so it'll have to wait. :|
[youtube=8Sp-VFBbjpE]
Do you think you'll get sick of the meal eventually, as variable as the options are? I imagine it'd be a little taxing to eat the same meal over and over again.
All in all, the idea is really interesting.
How many portions of the stuff do you
a day? And would it matter if you divided the daily consumption into more or less intakes? I'm asking because I'm curious about your hunger. Can you keep it at bay completely if you take (for example) the stuff 3 times a day and would you feel slightly hungry if you took only two portions of the stuff (of course bigger ones to fulfill the daily quota)?
eattake inSorry for bothering you with questions but I'm really curious about it. I'd love to try the stuff myself. I guess a trip to a nearby shop(s) is in order.
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Nothing, heh. If I was getting paid I'd also be using the official Soylent powder, not mixing up my own.
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I actually am not doing this under a doctor's supervision. I haven't had a doctor since I last moved, about five years ago. My reasoning is that I'm otherwise healthy, and this diet has to be better than my previous diet. When I can afford it and have time to do so, in the new year I plan to get a full workup done, just to make sure everything's okay.
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I personally am not the type to get sick of something if I like it. I brought the same lunch to school every day for something like ten years. When I go to any given restaurant I (almost) always order the same thing. Before Soylent I had settled on a standard breakfast and lunch (same thing every day) and a cycle of a couple of favorite dinners. I am perfectly happy with a diet that's 90% the same -- really, being able to mix up the flavors is just a nice bonus -- and while I foresee myself giving in to occasional cravings for specific food ("man, I could really go for a pizza right now"), that's only because I happen to want that particular food at that particular time, not because I'm tired of Soylent.
Soylent is pretty... unobjectionable. There's a sciency phrase Rob Rhinehart uses to describe what he was shooting for, in terms of "here's a substance your body will never get tired of consuming", but I can't remember what it is at the moment.
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On a Soylent-only day, I would consume three to four 375-calorie servings. One or more of those might be replaced by a real-food snack/meal on other days; it depends.
I'm not aware of any reason you couldn't break it up into smaller chunks; you'd just get hungry more often. No different than the people that have 5 or 6 small meals over the course of a day rather than the three big standard ones, really.
One reporter who tried the official Soylent for a week had a day where he wouldn't be able to bring the Soylent with him -- he was covering something in the UN headquarters and they're touchy about bringing in stuff from the outside -- so he drank his whole day's caloric allotment for breakfast. He says he felt fine throughout the day and didn't get hungry again until 10 or 11 that night.
You know, the more I think about this, the more plausible it seems. I'm heading off to a new city to start a job in about a week or so and I've never exactly been a "foodie" anyway.
Yeah... swap a few ingredients to UK alternatives and I could probably try this.
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Check out Soylent's DIY website for UK-based recipes; might be helpful.
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No more spreadsheets for me. 
Oh wow, that's fancy.
This looks really, really awesome. Might have to try this after the move's over.
What are your thoughts on these articles?
http://www.mercola.com/article/soy/avoid_soy3.htm
http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/whole-soy-story
Stuff like this makes me hesitant to try out soylent. I wonder if it'd be viable to swap soy out with a different type of protein powder?
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There are lots of folks who don't use soy in their Soylent (seems like they need a new name then...), because of those fears. I personally am not worried about it, perhaps because I am a rebellious, immortal young man.
There are lots of recipes on the Soylent DIY site, if you wanted to look for one that doesn't use soy-based products.
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Thanks! My only fear regarding something like this is the risks associated with a mostly liquid diet, plus other health risks from consuming mostly dietary supplements instead of "real" food. $1, 5 minutes, and a healthy 375 calories per meal sounds too good to be true.
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The doctors I've seen quoted don't bat an eye at a liquid diet -- your body liquifies everything you put into it anyway, and there are plenty of people with health issues who live for years or decades on a liquid diet.
The argument against your other concern isn't that I'm not putting anything into my body you aren't; my sources just look a little different from the usual ones. And really, most of the recipe isn't using dietary supplements -- oat flour, brown sugar, olive oil, cocoa powder, salt, and flax meal are all ingredients the average (well, slightly above average for the oat flour and flax meal, but still) person would find in their pantry.
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Thank you very much!