Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

Can you give more details about the article "not eating for a year". I can't seem to find it, and I don't know how it is possible to maintain the nitrogen balance for so long.

Since vegetarianism tends to attract a certain sort of person anecdotal evidence regarding them is shaky at best. It would be interesting to see various studies but I'm not sure there are many I trust since they tend to get hijacked to serve a political or moral point. If soylent (or some future product) does prove successful I would think a lot of vegetarians (as well as meat eaters) would benefit from having some occasionally just to make sure they're getting all their required nutrients.

I was indeed unaware of them, they sound good, thank you.

Yeah, I can't guarantee they are better than fast food. But, I bet you can find one that is similar to Soylent. It is more convenient than fast food.

I actually kinda like the McDonald's salads. I mean, as far as you can like fast food at all. If you go easy on the dressing, (the dressing comes in a package that looks like a giant-size katsup packet, so you get to decide how much you eat.) I think it's probably pretty healthy, I mean, at least when you compare to shakes.

I have used meal-replacement shakes in the past as supplemental breakfast; I like to load up on calories in the morning, but eating can be... hard before my system wakes up, so the meal-replacement shakes (with as much breakfast as I can choke down) is a reasonable way to consume as many calories as I can in the morning.

Of course, for me? meal-replacement shakes have never quelled hunger like real food, so I'm no longer using them just because I'm trying to reduce the number of calories I consume. If I eat something, it had better make me feel not hungry for a good long time. I'm having the best luck with meat and vegetables... the carbohydrates tend to make me hungry shortly afterwards. On the other hand, I have not lost significant weight. (I vary from 200 to 195#, and that has been true for some time now. As far as I can tell, most of that 5# is either water gain or loss, or inaccuracy of my cheap bathroom scale.) so "you shall know him by his fruits" - don't take my advice on losing weight, as I've not managed to do so myself.

Also, a big, sarcastic thanks. after that 'meal replacement shake' query on google, now just about every webpage I load is trying to sell me some sort of 'optimized nutrition' (Google seems to get that I'm male-identified and thus is trying to sell me the shakes targeted at 'building lean muscle' - you know, the stuff with the rippling abs on the can. Google does not seem to be smart enough to notice that I quite often google things I don't intend to buy. Really, books on what I'm searching for are usually more appropriate than products I'm searching for. Not that I often buy books through ads... but it's more likely than me buying nutrition shakes targeted at bodybuilders.)

"Rob is a Y Combinator alumnus with professional experience in electrical engineering, computer science and entrepreneurship. Lacking the means to produce cheap energy, he invented a form of fusion as a more efficient approach to powering his home and hopes to use it to reduce the global disparity of electrification."

On one hand, the entire field of nutritional science (and several associated topics), coupled with a wealthy and powerful nutrition industry who, despite literally decades of research, have never succeeded in creating a total meal replacement. Oh, and don't forget the world's militaries, who throw enormous amounts of money at research groups for anything even remotely useful and for who full meal replacements would be a holy grail.

On the other, this one computer hacker dude who is going to 'disrupt' the expert opinion and hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. He read some papers guys!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And yet the sum total evidence is 'Me and my friends haven't died yet, and we feel good'. His company still has no staff with biology experience, and the blog sells more merchandise than science.

Still, otherwise incredibly smart and driven people on HN eat this up.