Awesome user success post from Reddit today
Just saw this posted over on /r/keto, thought you’d all enjoy seeing it (make sure you check out the photo gallery). 350 to 225lbs.
Found an awesome Keto blog – especially relevant for “the ladies”
OK, so I was kicking around /r/keto and found this post which linked over to this recipe over on ketokarma.com
Seriously good stuff and inspiring! She has a wealth of great information, recipes, and video updates. If you’re looking into starting Keto, wanting some more info, motivation to keep going, or whatever – check it out!
Goodbye Chocolate Mint
Well, I figured this would happen when I posted about it back in May – Chocolate Mint is no more. We ran out of weeks and days this week, we have 40 of the samples left and then that’s it.  I’ve already removed it from the “Sample all the things” (though we have a couple with it already in there so they’re getting a free bonus flavor). I’ve seen people try adding mint extract to Rich Chocolate but I haven’t personally tried it myself.
Staying keto at Disneyland
Phineas and Ferb taught me to be careful about what I post online (they carved it into a meteor or something so it was really important) so I usually don’t post anything about going on vacation until after I get back. I’m back.
We finally took our kids to Disneyland. Some of the stuff was too immature for the older kids and some was too intense for the youngest. That didn’t deter us at all though. I also wasn’t deterred about staying keto while I was in Disneyland, also known as land of carbs.
I didn’t have very high hopes of finding foods I could eat there so I bought a few extra insulated flasks and brought along enough Keto Chow for myself and my wife. I was also prepared to do intermittent fasting (eat at night, drink during the day), ended up never doing it though. Following my previously established pattern from the last time I did Keto Chow in a hotel I brought:
- Two bags of Chocolate Peanut Butter
- a carton of heavy whipping cream
- 4 blender bottles for mixing and chilling
- MCT oil
- Fish oil pills
- Scale
- Measuring cup
- Bottle brush
- Soap
- Vacuum insulated flasks
Happily it all fit into an Amazon box for easy packing:
The Vacuum flasks do an excellent job of keeping Keto Chow cold all day in a backpack- provided it’s cold when you put it in there. Hence the need for the blender bottles. I would mix up enough to replace the ones used that day, stick them in the fridge overnight and in the morning pour the Keto Chow into the HydroFlasks. Wash out the now empty blender bottles (with soap and the brush) and leave them to dry. While we were there I had a GoPro strapped to my chest that took a photo every 30 seconds. I ended up with a bunch of fun photos of me eating keto chow (and other keto friendly foods):
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Should be noted that if you’re willing to pay the $37/plate at Ariel’s Grotto for breakfast they will do a surprisingly good job adapting the meal for a low-carb diet. The server was fine removing the hash browns and toast and adding more bacon, then she asked if I wanted more sausage and some avocado slices. I also ate 3 of the smoked turkey legs – Allegedly they’re soaked in a brine solution with no carbs, I can’t find reliable information though.
On a side note, on our way to California we stopped in Mesquite Nevada for a night, we caught the buffet and I was surprised at the crab legs, I kinda ate a lot of them (did 3 plates like this):
Relatively good article in Men’s Fitness about Keto
If you’re familiar with Keto you probably won’t get too much out of it but Men’s Fitness has an article up about the Ketogenic Diet:Â http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/what-to-eat/truth-behind-worlds-most-cutting-edge-fat-burning-performance-meal-plan-keto
That is all.
1.5 update, Sample All the Things change, and UPC Barcodes
First off – All of the active flavors in all the sizes are switched over to Keto Chow 1.5 with acacia gum (which is good since everybody seems to really like it). There are still a few Butter Cream Toffee samples that are the old formulation but that’s because it’s been discontinued and I can’t make it in the new formulation.
I woke up this morning and had an idea for the “Sample all the things” bundle that has one of each of the 8 currently active flavors. We’re pre-packaging them into an actual bundle (in a quart sized zip-loc bag if you’re curious). This will make a bunch of stuff easier, especially filling orders since most of the samples we sell are part of that bundle. It even got its own label! I also changed the product to be a “simple product” so it’ll no longer break out the names of each flavor, it’ll just show up as the one line item in the cart.
I bought 250 UPC codes a few days ago and added them to the labels, if you want to see them check out this page – it has both the week and day full labels. I tested the day ones by scanning them into MyFitnessPal – I’ll probably do the same with the week ones shortly. In case you’re curious (and also to seed the UPC search engine results) here are the codes and their corresponding product:
| 760537021847 | Day – Chocolate Fudge |
| 760537021854 | Day – Chocolate Mint |
| 760537021861 | Day – Cookies and Cream |
| 760537021878 | Day – Gourmet Vanilla |
| 760537021885 | Day – Peanut Butter |
| 760537021892 | Day – Rich Chocolate |
| 760537021908 | Day – Snicker Doodle |
| 760537021915 | Day – Strawberry Blast |
| 760537021922 | Fish Oil Capsules |
| 760537021939 | Minerals – for 10lbs |
| 760537021946 | Minerals – 1 week |
| 760537021953 | Sample – Chocolate Fudge |
| 760537021960 | Sample – Chocolate Mint |
| 760537021977 | Sample – Cookies and Cream |
| 760537021984 | Sample – Gourmet Vanilla |
| 760537021991 | Sample – Peanut Butter |
| 760537022004 | Sample – Pina Colada |
| 760537022011 | Sample – Rich Chocolate |
| 760537022028 | Sample – Snicker Doodle |
| 760537022035 | Sample – Strawberry Blast |
| 760537022042 | Week – Chocolate Fudge |
| 760537022059 | Week – Chocolate Mint |
| 760537022066 | Week – Cookies and Cream |
| 760537022073 | Week – Gourmet Vanilla |
| 760537022080 | Week – Peanut Butter |
| 760537022097 | Week – Rich Chocolate |
| 760537022103 | Week – Snicker Doodle |
| 760537022110 | Week – Strawberry Blast |
| 760537022127 | Sample all the things |
Questions about alcohol on keto and using different oils/protein
Got an email today, I took long enough to answer it I thought I might as well put my answer in a blog post.
The first question was about whether they need to give up alcohol
Well, there are a lot of reports on /r/keto about being on keto lowering tolerance for alcohol (just search for “keto cheap date” and you’ll see what I mean). “Liquid bread” drinks like beer have WAY too many carbs but distilled spirits don’t – and the aforementioned lower tolerance makes it less expensive too.
The second question was about if I had considered algal oil in powder form – it’s what Rosa Labs uses for Soylent 1.6
Rosa Lab’s motivation is a bit different than mine: they want to use vegan sources for everything. While that’s possible with keto, it runs counter to much of the philosophy. MCT oil and cream are better (tasting) and have definitive advantages for ketosis. Additionally doing powdered oils with keto is difficult to do because most powdered oils use starch (maltodextrin) and you’d end up with several times more carbs that the max amount. The only exception to that is the Quest powdered MCT/Coconut oil but it’s prohibitively expensive. I did some poking around and found that to get powdered coconut oil in palettes it ends up being almost exactly the same price as the end user simply buying it from Quest off Amazon.
The third question was about switching to soy protein
Rosa Labs was using rice protein in their powdered mix but it gives an icky silty gritty mouthfeel. Doing Soy protein is the best option if you don’t want to use whey protein. Again, I’m not interested in vegan (I eat a lot of bacon) – I want the best tasting and highest nutrition that’s economical, with emphasis on taste and texture. To that end I’m using whey protein. Doesn’t have the grit of rice or the (incorrect but whatever) public relations issues that soy has with the phytoestrogen scare.
So the short answer to the 3rd question is simply: Keto Chow already has superior nutrition, flavor and mouthfeel; it’s better than the new stuff Rosa Labs is using.
Results from soylent eater’s survey – keto and gender analysis
The results from the 2016 soylent Eaters Survey are in – I hadn’t commented on it yet since I was out on vacation last week and didn’t really dig down into the results until yesterday.
I’m not a stats guy, can’t even hope to work R but I can poke around a bit with Excel and a few other tools. One question I had was “given the gender disparity in the 2015 survey, would the ketogenic versions change the results? Would there be a higher incidence of women drinking ketogenic ones?”
I’m not going to get into the argument about gender/sex and all that, not the time. There were 26 people who gave a response on the survey that wasn’t “male” or “female”. If you like you can read all the responses to all the questions here. I’m just going to analyze the responses. OK, now that that’s out of the way…
The image at the top shows the total numbers and percentages for all the responses, regardless of what they were or were not using/eating. 18% selected Female, 81% selected Male and 0.8% typed in something different. 18% is larger than the 14% from the 2015 survey but it’s still small. I’ll quote Ted:
Such a wide skew is unlikely to be due to the demographics of reddit as our major sample source, as the Reddit audience is 47% female.
The most plausible answer we’ve heard for the gender disparity since first reporting this disparity last year is that the market for female meal replacement shakes is already well served by Slim Fast and the plethora of other diet shakes created in the past 20 years.  In this interpretation, the soylent/future food trend can be categorized as “slim fast for men.”
We think there are two important differences between future food and the diet shakes of the past.  One, future foods could be consumed perpetually as a single source of nutrition, even if they aren’t currently being used that way.  And two, as we’ve seen in this years data, use of these products is consistent over time, not just during periods of dieting.
That’s the general breakdown by gender, let’s see what happens when we add the additional dimension of “Which soylent/future food distributions do you primarily consume?” – I took off any that had less than 15 responses to make it more relevant. I’d also like to add “Which soylent/future food distributions have you tried?” but I haven’t figured the Excel stuff to do that yet.
I find it really interesting that the two “soylent” type foods with the highest percentage of female users are both ketogenic: Keto Chow and KetoSoy. I did skew the numbers a little in my favor by sending out a quick invitation to people who had used Keto Chow in the last year. Still, I like that my product has an above average representation of female users, mostly because the people I like best are women =) Here’s another view of the gender/distribution data:
Here’s some additional analysis of the survey, and here too.
A Keto Vacation
Got back yesterday from vacation at Bear lake (because we’re the BAIR’s! get it?! …sorry, “dad” joke) My parents came along which made meals interesting – 4 adults eating (mostly) keto and 6 kids eating regular food. We only cooked 5lbs of the bacon we brought but we did power through an awful lot of rotisserie chicken, mayo and boiled eggs for chicken salad. It was a fun time. My wife said:
You should make a post with the big bacon pictures in Minnetonka Cave. Then you can geekily talk about the minerals and stuff
Well, I’m not going to geek out about minerals and stuff – our guide did that enough for everyone. =) The “Cave Bacon” was pretty cool though, here’s another picture of the surrounding area
I did set up a time lapse both times we went down to the “beach” (which consisted of tiny shells that got into your shoes and was the equivalent of walking barefoot across a floor of legos) – the kids still had fun.
About the Business Cards that come in orders
Back in March we started including business cards in the packages we ship out. It was my Wife’s idea (I think, might have been Heather’s idea originally). There’s a discount code on the back but it only works once for each person, we continue sending them with each order so you’ll have a nice and easy way to explain to people that ask what is up with Keto Chow. Here’s a comment I got on an order this morning:
Please include a bunch of cards so I can hand em’ out to my friends and coworkers whom are interested in the “shake” that has allowed me to loose 45lbs.
THAT is why we put the cards in there =)
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