Monthly Archives: January 2015

Powdered Cream not suitable for Keto soylent

This entry is part 30 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I guess I’m supposed to do clickbait titles if I want more traffic, but I prefer to get the conclusion out there and then back it up in the body.

A question came up about how well powdered cream could be used for Keto Chow instead of the liquid heavy cream. The Amazon Page doesn’t show any nutrition information and I couldn’t get a response from the manufacturer… so logically I bought some.

Here’s the nutrition information. Pay attention to the grams of fat + grams of protein + grams of carbohydrates != serving size.

OK, so the math doesn’t add up. Besides that I can work with the calories and carbohydrate numbers to see how many carbs would be in the same calorie amount as liquid heavy cream. For reference, here’s the nutrition for Darigold 40% cream:

0 carbs, none. Granted, in the US you can call anything below 1g 0 but I’m inclined to believe the 0 figure. So let’s do math. To equal the 518 calories in the heavy cream we’re going to need 58 servings (maybe 4g, maybe 7g going by my math) of the powder. That will give us 29g of carbohydrates (specifically sugars thanks to the #1 ingredient “sweet cream”) that aren’t there when using heavy cream. That would bring your daily net carbs up from 10.9 to 39.9. Did I mention that it will cost you $2.30/day for the powdered cream vs $0.75 for the liquid.

So yeah, not suitable.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 15th, 2015|Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|4 Comments

The apps and tools I’m using to track my progress

This entry is part 29 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

A coworker asked me a while ago about all the stuff I’m using, I figure I might as well document it. Here are the Apps, monitors and other things I’m using to track stuff about my health.

Activity Monitor

I grabbed a used Fitbit Flex off eBay about a month ago to see if I would like it better than the Jawbone Up I had. Ultimately the Fitbit won and the Jawbone is in my backpack in case anybody on craigslist decides they want to buy it for $40. The Jawbone app was actually far better than the Fitbit one and gave me better information but I like the bluetooth sync function of the Fitbit and couldn’t find an Up24 for cheap. Neither do automatic sleep tracking, you had to tell the device it was nap time and again tell it when you woke up. The more expensive trackers do more stuff automatically. Both Up and Fitbit talk quite nicely to all the other apps mentioned here, sending activity data over automatically.

Fitbit Web UI

Fitbit Android UI

Weight Tracking

The Withings app/website does a great job of tracking weight, blood pressure and a number of other metrics. It’s also free to use and will send the weight data to a large number of applications. By having it send that data I don’t have to go into 5 different apps to update my weight all the time, it just does it automagically for me. You can use the Withings app and site with the Withings Wi-Fi scale or one of their fitness trackers, but you don’t need to. I did eventually end up buying a Withings scale but I used the app for about a month and a half before that. You can also import and export all the measurements very easily. I imported my weight logs from all the way back to October 2006.

Withings Web UI

Withings Android UI

Nutrition Tracking

I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for 2 or 3 years to (occasionally, up until 4 months ago) track my nutrition. Currently I’m on a 87 day streak of putting in my food, weight and activity. I use MFP as a sort of “central hub” for everything else. All my activity monitoring, weight and workouts head here. On a Ketogenic Diet I also need to track how many carbs I’m eating and it does a good job of that. There’s some settings and a userscript that enhance MFP for keto diets. It’s particularly nice to be able to scan a barcode to add food and with how I’m eating mostly the same stuff every day it’s a cinch. I used to use My Net Diary but MFP is way more useful.

MyFitnessPal Web UI

MyFitnessPal Android UI

Workout tracking

I’m using Digifit on my phone to track exercise (via a heart rate monitor, see below). On an ideal day I’m doing 30 minutes of elliptical in the morning and 30 minutes of running/walking in the evening. They have Android and iOS apps that have limited functionality unless you pay the $1.99 or whatever to upgrade it – it was worth it and I used an account that is shared on all my family’s phones and devices to pay so my wife gets the upgrade too. It can be used indoors on exercise equipment (which is what I mostly do) but it really likes going outside to fire up your GPS and correlate actual distance and speed with heart rate. It gets weight data automatically from Withings to use in calorie calculations.

Digifit Web UI

Digifit Android UI

Heart Rate Monitoring

I bought a Jarv Bluetooth 4.0 Chest Heart Rate Monitor for myself and then another one for my wife about 3 days later since it works so well (then we can work out together!). It works exceptionally well and communicates to Digifit just fine, although occasionally it takes a bit of prodding or wetting the chest contacts to wake it up. Coupled with Digifit, it does a much better job at calculating the actual calories you are burning. This morning with the heart rate monitor, Digifit calculated that I burned 439 calories in 30 minutes on the elliptical. That’s a far cry from the machine’s solely weight based calculation of 870.

Ketone Level Monitoring

After a few weeks in Ketosis you get accustomed to what it feels like and can mostly just Keep Calm & Keto On. I do still occasionally check my ketone levels. When I first started I bought a 200 pack of 2 Parameter Glucose & Ketone Test (URS) Urinalysis Reagent Strip (C 200 Strips). I also picked up a very, very cheap blood alcohol breathalyzer about 2 months ago for fun because the super cheap ones can’t distinguish the difference between alcohol on your breath and acetone. Actual breathalyzers that cost more than $5-10 can tell the difference just fine. I’m very proud to report that this morning I blew 0.05% even though I have no alcohol in my system at all.

Cheap Breathalyzer

Ketone Test Strip looks great!

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 14th, 2015|Soylent|Comments Off

Soylent anniversary – 365 days (mostly) on DIY soylent

This entry is part 38 of 39 in the series DIY Soylent

On January 13th, 2014 I mixed up my first batch of People Chow 2.3.0 you can read my first blog post about it here. People Chow 2.3 wasn’t very good. It had a lot of almond meal in it that gave me heartburn and specified a particular brand of corn flour that was exceptionally difficult to find and was the only one on the market that wasn’t nixtamalized. The creator of the recipe, MaxK, soon updated it to v3.0 and then 3.0.1 which has been the recipe for almost a year now. It’s been an interesting year.

I’d have to say that eating (mostly) just soylent for the last year has been a great success. As I’ve noted in other posts I initially lost quite a bit of weight drinking only people chow, maintained it for quite some time, slacked off and ate other stuff too, gained a bunch on vacations and then started dropping it like crazy on ketogenic soylent. I’ve learned really a lot about diet and nutrition over the past year and even more about metabolism, ketogenic bodies, insulin and such since October.

So here’s to another year!

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 13th, 2015|Soylent|Comments Off

For fun I tried making Keto Chow cookies

This entry is part 28 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Just for fun I decided to see what making Keto Chow into a solid would be like. I did People Chow cookies several months ago so I thought I’d try that form. I just put a meal’s worth of powder into a bowl, added the oil and the heavy cream and mixed it up.

Mixing up the oil, cream and powder

“dough” mixed up and ready

Ready for baking, 10min @350

The Finished, baked, cookies

It’s hard to see in the above picture of the finished “cookies” but they’re sitting in a pool of oil that came out during cooking. Mixed up liquid Keto Chow tastes sweet like a milk shake (kinda) but the sweeteners in the protein don’t seem to be doing much in baked form. I’m not sure if it’s because the stuff didn’t actually dissolve in the little water that was in the cream or what. In the end, the potassium citrate and salt ended up making them markedly salty. They’re not awful but the liquid form is better.

I’ll probably try it again but I might try not cooking or maybe with an egg added in too. I’ll also likely use the vanilla flavor instead of the chocolate mint (can’t even taste the mint in the baked form).

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 9th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Preparation, Soylent|Comments Off

Blood test for a year on DIY soylent, 1/4 of that doing keto

I just got back my blood tests and they look good (at least as far as I can tell =). The last time I had it all tested like that was March 2014 after 3 months of People Chow. So here’s how they stack up to each other:

Name	1/6/2015	3/20/2014	target
Sodium	141	142	135-145 mmol/L
Potassium	4.7	4.4	3.5-5.1 mmol/L
Chloride	103	106	99-111 mmol/L
ECO2	28.2	29.6	21.0-32.0 mmol/L
Glucose	87	79	74-106 mg/dL
BUN	21	19	7-18 mg/dL
Creatinine	1.11	1.1	0.6-1.3 mg/dL
BUN/Creatinine Ratio	18.9	17.3	8.0-27.0 Ratio
Calcium	9.5	9.2	6.5-11.8 mg/dL
Alkaline Phosphatase	79.2	83	50-136 U/L
Cholesterol	135	142	0-200 mg/dL
Triglycerides	96	160	0-200 mg/dL
HDL, Cholesterol	45	43	40-60 mg/dL
LDL (calculated)	71	67	0-160 mg/dL

My wife points out that I really should have done a blood test before I started People Chow last January but hey, I forgot to do it at the time.

Clearly I’m dying due to the massive amounts of saturated fat I eat every day on my ketogenic diet… or not =) I do think it’s funny that my glucose level is slightly higher even though I hardly consume any glucose anymore.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 8th, 2015|Ketogenic, Soylent|2 Comments

Apparently “Fathead” is on YouTube for free (legitimately)

Here you go:

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 7th, 2015|Uncategorized|Comments Off

Tried Vanilla Keto Chow. I think it’s good enough, beta’s over: v1.0

Last night I mixed up 3 meals of vanilla flavored Keto Chow, it’s really good. My wife tried some and said “mmm, that’s good!” Later she asked about the possibility of me mixing her up a few blender bottles for her to have on hand for meals.

I’ve decided that after the most recent changes to the recipe I’m declaring it “version 1.0” (yay!). It will be more stable for a while with maybe a few minor changes here and there but it’s good enough for me.

After yesterday’s price changes I also went through the store part of the site and updated descriptions, links and other fun stuff. I also split the Keto Chow samples from the 1 week product so it’s easier to find the samples vs the 1 week.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:21-06:00January 7th, 2015|Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|1 Comment

Minor changes to Keto Chow recipe.

OK, so I drank Chocolate Mint Keto Chow for breakfast and Strawberry for lunch, how was it? Really good. I said it in my last post but I’m going to say it again: even if I wasn’t doing Keto I would drink this stuff instead of any other powdered food/DIY soylent/Official Soylent that I have tried. As of right now I’m planning on sticking with this recipe or a variation of it indefinitely. Yes, you understood correctly: I’m not going to go back to drinking People Chow, this is far better. If I get to the point that I don’t want to be so strict about carbs and doing Ketosis there’s no reason I can’t and won’t continue with ketogenic soylent as my primary food.

Anyhow. Like the post title says, after the batch I drank today I’m going to remove the coconut flour in favor of more psyllium husk powder so there will be no grittiness at all. I also tweaked the protein amounts and will up the xanthan gum from 1g to 1.5g.

One awesome thing about the removal of the coconut flour is the carb count is now obscenely low. I consider psyllum husk a non-soluble fiber since it doesn’t contribute any calories and isn’t digested, so I have it with the dietary fiber that is subtracted from the 27g total carbs to give 10.9g net carbs per day. Yeah, I can live with that.

The final change for the day is pricing. I recalculated my costs based on the current recipe. Even though the total cost for doing a day of Keto Chow is higher than doing People Chow, quite a bit of that cost is in Heavy Cream and MCT/Coconut Oil, both of which aren’t part of my costs since they are not included with the powder. I changed the prices on Keto Chow to be the same price as People Chow (without any added chocolate). The 1 meal sample of Keto Chow is now actually less expensive than People Chow since it’s for a full meal (1/3 of a day) instead of 300 calories.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:22-06:00January 6th, 2015|Uncategorized|Comments Off

A year in review

This entry is part 27 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Hey, how about a “year in review” post? I started mixing soylent almost a year ago, starting January 13, 2014. You can read my full exploits Here (in chronological order!). It’s been an interesting year with a lot of downs and a few ups (most notably there in October when I gained back everything I lost in February. I’m approaching the lowest weight I’ve been since I started tracking in October 2006. When I hit 220 I’ll probably do a post with that graph for the morbidly curious =).

Doing a ketogenic diet has made a huge difference in my life. When I first started I said I’d probably get my weight down and then go back to People Chow but with the way Keto Chow is shaping up I think I’ll stick with Ketogenic soylent as my primary food. I probably won’t be as strict with snacks but with how good Keto Chow is I don’t see a need to switch back. Honestly it’s far better tasting that People Chow, less gritty and low carb to boot.

As they say on /r/keto: “Keep Calm and Keto On” (KCKO).

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:22-06:00January 6th, 2015|Soylent, Weight Loss, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|Comments Off

First batches of Keto Chow using Dynamize protein

This entry is part 26 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Last night I mixed up the first batches of Keto Chow using the Dynamize whey protein I’m going to start using. An adventurous soul ordered week of mint chocolate and I did two smaller 1-day batches of strawberry and mint chocolate for testing.

Keto Chow Strawberry Sample

Upon mixing, the Strawberry is a little pink but not much, and the chocolate mint is a bit… tan. You can tell the difference between the chocolate and strawberry but I think the cream is overruling a lot of the coloring it would have had if it was just protein and water. I took better measurements of the finished result (2 lb 8 oz and 9x7x2.5 inches) which will make shipping estimates better. I’m also going to see if I can squeeze it into a 1096L USPS shipping box instead of a Regional Rate A box that I could fit two weeks in.

Keto Chow Chocolate Mint packaged (bottle not included =)

I tasted the results about an hour after mixing and it was pretty good. It tasted like it could still use some time for stuff to dissolve but in a time crunch it would be just fine. I would have tried it for realsies this morning but I’m going to get a “Comprehensive Metabolic Panel” blood test and I’m supposed to be fasting. As soon as that’s done (and I’m done with my dentist appointment that’s right after, might as well double up) I’ll give it a better taste test.

It’ll be interesting to see what my blood work shows when I get it sometime later this week or next week. I had it done back in March 2014 (9 months ago?) after doing People Chow for 2 months and those results weren’t bad at all. I’m looking forward to seeing what cutting out carbohydrates and living on mostly fat and some protein has done =).

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:24-06:00January 6th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent|Comments Off

Monthly Archives: January 2015

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Activity Monitor

Weight Tracking

Nutrition Tracking

Workout tracking

Heart Rate Monitoring

Ketone Level Monitoring

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