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Two Months of Soylent

robrhinehart.com

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Re: Two Months of Soylent

#191

Post by Andrenid »

confluence wrote: post #175
Andrenid wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done 3-5 month stretches (multiple times) using Sustagen (the Hospital Formula[1] one from chemists, not the supermarket variety). It was during cancer surgeries and therapies, and recommended to me by the hospital + various specialist doctors, so that's the only vote of confidence I needed that it was OK. I had no side effects while on it, didn't lose or gain weight, and actually quite enjoyed not having to wor…

Could you please go into more detail with what your Sustagen regime was like? Number of drinks per day? Taste? Cost? Preparation? No problems if you can't - but I'd love to hear it from someone that's been through it before (under cancer no less! hope you got better). The website you shared says that it's merely a nutritional supplement - I'd just like to know what a full regime of meal replacement would be like over…

Pretty much drink it when you're hungry. I usually had 3-4 serves a day at random times. A serve is 2 tablespoons of the powder mixed into a glass/tumbler of water.

Keep in mind I was nearly 100% dormant for those months, so I wasn't exactly building up an appetite. The most exercise I'd get would be a trip to the bathroom. I rarely got hungry with 3-4 serves a day.

Occasionally I would try eat some fruit and (real/natural) yoghurt. Just for taste/sanity more than health/hunger. Maybe once a week or so, and about a coffee-mug sized portion at most was all I could handle.

I believe the websites say they're a "supplement" for legal purposes? I'm not sure. The doctors, nutritionists, and specialists all agreed I could live indefinitely off it.

(Thanks for the well wishes, but there's no getting better from my particular case, just a matter of prolonging it now)

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#192

Post by jtheory »

nsxwolf wrote: post #184
nawitus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10k years is plenty enough: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/paleofantasy_stone_age_delus... In fact, 10k years is enough for dogs to have evolved to digest carbs a lot better. There's even specific genes that are known to help that.

What question is really being asked - did we evolve the ability to digest carbs? We've apparently always been able to do that. Or did we evolve the ability to eat large amounts of carbs without risking various ills like type II diabetes and heart disease? The paleo hypothesis is that we haven't adapted to carbs to the point that they don't cause disease. Carbs aren't dangerous enough to kill us before we reproduce, s…

Gene selection isn't that simple.

Population members aren't useless to preserving genes once they're done having babies.

Elders use and share collected knowledge (particularly skills that take a long time to master), care for babies while the parents are hunting/etc., help with gathering/cooking/cleaning/etc.. If they are all sick & dying instead of doing this work, your group isn't going to do as well as the competing group whose elders are in good shape.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#193

Post by lilsunnybee »

jff wrote: post #75
ChuckMcM wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The components of Soylent (as listed in an earlier blog post) are chemically stable at room temperature. (caveat the probiotics). (this from looking them up in the 'rubber bible' [1]) I would expect you could spoil them if they got too hot (oxidizing) but other than that doesn't look too bad. Assuming the $150/month calculated, that's still pretty pricey for someone who makes $1-$2 a day in wages. Its not clear to me…

If I could keep myself fully nourished for $5/day ($150/month), I'd be pretty damn happy. We don't even have to talk about the third world to see possible benefits. We're always hearing about how America's poor don't have time to prepare food and are thus "forced" to buy, essentially, McDonald's. Well, you can feed yourself 3 sandwiches off the dollar menu a day on that budget, or for $5/day you can get (theoreticall…

You can easily. Rice, olive oil, frozen vegetables, almonds, bananas, oatmeal, cheap bread, salt, sugar, margarine, cheap spices, multivitamin. You can even splurge on canned soups (chunky even) once a day, with real meat in them. If you had to you'd figure it out.

Junk foods should not be buyable with food stamps. Though food industry lobbying results in that restriction not being abided by in a lot of cases.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#194

Post by randallsquared »

kscaldef wrote: post #107
randallsquared wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it's relatively easy to eat 4000 kcal a day without trying (in fact, just by not trying to not do so), I can only imagine how much you must be eating. 6000 kcal? 8000?

I'm curious what your diet looks like such that you have to take care not to consume 4000 kcal a day. When I was cycling 100 miles a week, I found I needed about 3500 kcal / day to sustain myself, and it wasn't easy. On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). Dinners were typically a massive serving of las…

> On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal).

That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast.

When I'm trying to lose, I do low carb or intermittent fasting, or both. But if I'm not paying any attention, my diet might typically be three meals and some snacking: an cheese and bacon omelet with coffee for breakfast, a 4oz bag of avocado-oil kettle chips and plate of rice and chicken curry for lunch, a quart of chicken lo mein and three spring rolls for dinner. The snacks might something like 10-12 double-stuf Oreos, or a pint of peanuts, munched on over the course of an hour or so.

It's really easy to exceed 4000 kcal, and not hard at all to exceed 5000 kcal, all without ever feeling too full (or ever feeling hungry, of course...).

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#195

Post by randallsquared »

mapt wrote: post #171
dylangs1030 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's relatively easy to eat 4000 without trying? How many meals do you consume a day and what do they consist of? When I did weight resistance training in tandem with intense cardio training five days a week it was still difficult to reach my needed caloric content (which hovered more or less around 4000). I mean, I'm not saying you're lying, but how is it easy for you?

The physiological satiety response just isn't as strong or effective in some people. To further complicate things, once obesity sets in, it creates a degree of insulin & leptin resistance, and losing control of these signalling devices even further reduces the negative feedback available to establish a hunger / eating cycle, when ad libitum food is available. To some degree, it takes acts of deliberate control severa…

Yes, this matches my experience, though I've lost more weight with fewer health problems: I once lost about 100 pounds in 3 months, but I was 19, and probably couldn't repeat that now at almost 40.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#196

Post by jtheory »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #113
allforJesse wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's the question that's gone unasked, because we're focusing (understandably) on the health implications first: Could Soylent be scalably produced to feed 10% or more of the world's population? Would the material prices skyrocket in response to demand? Let's set aside the physiological consequences for a moment, what are the potential economic and environmental ramifications of Soylent?

Plumpy'nut [1] is food product specifically designed to be consumed by malnourished children. Given that the cost of it is around $30/mo I would actually guess that the barriers to adoption are political and social in nature and not technical. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpynut

That sounds pretty good, actually! I do love good peanut butter.

It can be even cheaper than $30/month as well, since the manufacturer allows local production of the paste (in peanut-growing locales) with no license fee payment required.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#197

Post by electronvolt »

jaggederest wrote: post #125
electronvolt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your marathon analogy: A marathon is usually run in about four and a half hours. The best marathon runners in the world (i.e. current record holders) ran one in about 2 hours. The university that I'm at has about 45-48 hours of classroom instruction per semester; you're expected to spend between two and three times that preparing; that's an assumption of between 135 and 192 hours of work per semester. I find th…

> The take away is that it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you've learned a lot from a math book when you're reading it like a novel. In practice, though, if you aren't doing the exercises (or if they don't exist, working through your own), then you probably aren't actually engaging with the material in any deep and significant way. Agreed. That doesn't mean he didn't read it and glean a little from it tho…

I agree that he may have gleaned something (possibly even a substantial something) from it. As I pointed out, it's easy to learn the applied parts of differential geometry in a day or two: curvature, fundamental forms, etc. are fairly simple, fairly intuitive ideas for someone with a good grasp of multivariate calculus and differential equations, particularly when you're restricting yourself to three dimensional manifolds.

I'd note that that's different from having a rigorous understanding of arbitrary dimension differential geometry, and being able to rigorously show new (if simple/uninteresting) results.

I wasn't trying to imply that you can't read a textbook (or any math text, for that matter) and not learn the material at as deep a level as anyone who's main reference is that text. It's a bit like reading someone's code after very heavy optimization, though: it's easy to miss little parts of how or why the algorithm works, and if you go over it once, without trying possible inputs/etc., then you're likely to miss something.

Instruction and interpretation are like comments in code when you're dealing with specific proofs (they make it easier, but it isn't impossible without them). The thing that is harder (but not impossible) to get without some sort of feedback is a deep understanding of when a proof is rigorous and mathematical aesthetics.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#199

Post by crusso »

rb2k_ wrote: post #173
bsmith wrote: post #7

> Some people tell me going "ketogenic", or reducing carbs is healthy. I am now skeptical of this claim as lowering carbs makes me feel hungry and tired, and the drink taste less sweet. Perhaps it would be possible after an unpleasant transition period, but I don’t see the ultimate gain... Their advice seems to fall in line with the paleo/primal philosophies—in a nutshell: man only started eating a significant amount…

> I am now skeptical of this claim as lowering carbs makes me feel hungry and tired, The initial tiredness is known as keto-fever or induction flu: http://lowcarb4u.blogspot.de/2010/02/induction-flu.html Goes away after a few days.

The first time I low carbed on Atkins, the cravings and bad feelings built up for about a week - but then on the 8th day, it was like I had passed some invisible line. I felt great.

It's really worth pushing yourself past this point - for no other reason than to gain the experience of what it's like to burn fat as your primary energy source to see what people have raved about.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#200

Post by crusso »

goggles99 wrote: post #144

This product would never work for me (I can't speak for everyone else) because such a thin, denatured substance transfers into the intestines (digests) rather quickly. This leaves the stomach empty and me feeling hungry. My brain starts to make me feel bad at this point. Even if I have consumed 4000 calories, it does not care. My brain wants some food in there. This is one of the same reasons why babies who can't eat…

Have you tried going on a low-carb diet? I found that after passing through the induction phase, my very healthy appetite was dramatically reduced. It was like flipping a switch. Suddenly, a normal salad felt satisfying and enough to be considered "a meal".
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