Weight Loss

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, Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Weight Loss|Comments Off

New ketogenic soylent recipe in development, it’s moar betterer

This entry is part 23 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Several weeks ago /u/kennufs posted his current Ketogenic soylent recipe. I ordered some of the ingredients and gave it a try recently. It’s so superior to KetoFood it’s kinda silly, probably because it doesn’t have chia seeds and does use a generous amount of heavy cream. I did that recipe for about a week and a half whilst changing stuff around before I ran out of the NutraBio whey protein isolate he specifies. That particular WPI is unique in that it doesn’t have any carbohydrate sources in it, like none at all, which keeps the net carbs down.

The problem with the NutraBio is where I’m living (Utah) it takes 9 business days to get a shipment of it from New Jersey. With a 2lb tub lasting approximately 10 days this makes sourcing it and keeping it on hand a logistical nightmare. It’s the same problem I have with getting Cal/Mag/D3 from supplementwarehouse.com: sometimes it takes them 2 weeks to get me stuff. I’m also working to replace the ketofood I mix on this site with a recipe along the same lines as Kennufs’ so I’ve been searching for a viable alternative to the protein and I think I finally have it.

I wanted to find something that I can buy at bodybuilding.com – they may not have the absolute lowest prices but my proximity to their central warehouse (Boise Idaho) makes for crazy fast shipping times, like 2 days at the longest with a few orders arriving the day after I ordered. Seriously, they are great; especially in the states surrounding Idaho =). Anyhow I found two possibilities: IsoPure Zero Carb and Dymatize Elite. Initially it looked like the Isopure would work but they include vitamins in their powder making it terribly difficult to get the right micronutrient mix. I had overage on some stuff and hardly anything on others (Iron, Vitamin C) that required adding an additional specific supplement.

Since I have the day off work today, obviously I woke up early and my brain switched on. So I started looking again and found the Dymatize Elite. It comes in a variety of flavors but I’m only going to mess with the ones that come in the 10lb size: Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla and Chocolate Mint. I took the groundwork that Kennufs laid, fixed some ingredients that showed different nutritional values, updated prices, copied over a bunch of the ingredients from my People Chow and my KetoFood recipes and the end result is what I’m going to call Keto Chow 0.7. Feel free to clone it, abuse it, whatever =)

In a few days (or hours, who knows?) I’ll add it as an orderable product on the site with the caveat that it’s going to be changing as it’s very much in active development. UPDATE: that was quick. At first you might even get some NutraBio WPI since I still have a bunch of that en-route. Additionally, except one flavor, I haven’t actually tasted the Dymatize WPI yet so some of the flavors might be awesome or might be completely awful. I’m also still trying to figure out what to do with the fish oil. To hit the right omega 3’s you need 5ml (1 tsp.) per day. You can get that from liquid cod liver oil in a big bottle or you can get it in gelatin capsules and take 5 a day along with the daily multivitamin. Any feedback on which you like better?

Anyhow, how’s that for a New Years update?

By chris|2015-11-05T13:49:38-07:00January 1st, 2015|Preparation, Soylent, Weight Loss, Keto Chow|2 Comments

3 months of Keto – update

This entry is part 22 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I hit my 3 month mark on ketosis yesterday (while eating a lettuce wrapped hamburger at Carl’s Jr.) and It’s time for an update.

Weight Oct – Dec 2014

In total I’m down almost 24 lbs. I’m going to be getting a “comprehensive metabolic panel” sometime next week. It will be interesting to compare it to my results from May (when I was eating mostly People Chow). Now to get through Christmas and it’s chocolate oranges with my ketosis intact…

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:24-06:00December 23rd, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Fun with Graphs

This entry is part 20 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

While it’s not as fun as “Fun with Flags” here are some fun graphs. Here’s my weight since I started doing keto. High spot is 257.8, this morning I was 238.0 (Thursday I was 235 but I ate a LOT of shrimp and prime rib on Friday):

Weight graph

I got myself and my wife each a Jarv Premium Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Heart Rate Monitor and have been using https://my.digifit.com to track workouts (mostly treadmill and elliptical). They do a really good job and were half or less the cost of comparable ones. They work great with our phones and appear to be very accurate. Digifit tracks time, heart rates and the like and has some cool dashboards. The graph above is calories burned while wearing the heart rate monitor. Did pretty well last week, we’ll see how well this week goes.

There was a reddit thread last night that caused a lot of interest in official and DIY soylent – and a pretty massive surge in visits to my site. It was pretty funny to see the stats going a little crazy. Below is site traffic according to WordPress:

Here is site traffic according to Google Analytics:

You can see in increased database queries on the backend:

mysql_commands-week

But it’s not nearly enough to significantly impact the load on the processors:

load-month

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:24-06:00December 15th, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Using a different coconut flour makes all the difference

This entry is part 19 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I started doing ketofood using Anthony’s USDA Organic Coconut Flour (5 lb), because the cost was better. I actually went through two of them before starting on my new Nutiva Organic Flour, Coconut, 25 Pound that I didn’t get from Amazon, I got it from these guys.

Wow, what a difference! The Anthony’s is is more of a finely shredded not-powder while the Nutiva is a darker color (slightly toasted?) and a much finer grind. It’s more like actual flour. I tried adding in some xanthan gum to the mix as well and the consistency was much improved, overall it was awfully close to Ketosoy except sweetened with stevia instead of sucralose. I’m going to have to keep experimenting with this.

By chris|2014-12-08T13:24:51-07:00December 8th, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Fixed nutrient info on Ketofood recipe, fun with fatty acids

This entry is part 17 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Following a question on reddit I went through the nutrient info for just about all of the ingredients and made sure the info was as complete and accurate as I could get.

The recipe has 92.3g of total carbs with 62.2g of insoluble fiber, 10.8g of soluble fiber. Including the soluble fiber in the equation, that gives 30.1g net carbs. If all you’re eating for the entire day is this recipe (which is possible) then you’ll get 30g net. It looks like the number 1 source of net carbs is the raw cocoa powder which turns out to have more net carbs than originally thought. It’d be interesting to tweak that ingredient.

Notably the raw cocoa was using nutrition info for something else entirely, the carbs and calories were really messed up compared to the info on the label. Anyhow, you can find the current version at http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/ketofood-12-for-ongoing-ketosis I also updated the prices.

There are also now 4 oil entries on the page: MCT, Olive, Canola and liquid Coconut. I have the olive and canola zeroed out for my own usage because I’m trying MCT + coconut right now. I was surprised to find some at Walmart.

It’s interesting to see the difference between MCT, liquid coconut and regular coconut oils:

	Caprylic Acid (C8:0)	Capric Acid (C10:0)	Lauric Acid (C12:0)
NOW MCT	55.71%	44.29%	0.00%
Carrington Liquid coconut	32.86%	26.43%	5.00%
Regular Coconut Oil	9.00%	10.00%	52.00%

While the liquid coconut oil has quite a bit more of the smaller MCTs, it doesn’t have as much of the Lauric Acid that makes it solid at room temp. Looking at this breakdown of different oils, there aren’t many oils that contain MCTs. As a refresher, the reason you want MCTs when you’re doing ketosis is they get converted almost directly into ketones so it will help you achieve and maintain ketosis better. I bought a bottle of liquid coconut oil and substituted it for the canola I had been using for half of my fat calories. It’ll be an interesting experiment. It adds right around $1 a day to the cost.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:24-06:00December 7th, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Leveraging “fat bombs” with Ketofood

This entry is part 16 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Loosely following the recipe for “Fat Bombs” from this site, I put all the coconut flour plus the caloric equivalent in Coconut oil to all of my MCT and other oil into these little guys

Ended up with 100g of coconut flour that I toasted in the oven for about 10 minutes and 104g of coconut oil that happily melted when I put the still hot from toasting flour on it. I also put in a little stevia powder and completely forgot the part form the recipe about a little salt. Bah. Then I stuck them in the fridge for 15 minutes and got these.

They taste very good. It does have the same desiccating effect on my mouth that eating 10 saltines would have though. I put one in my mouth whole and spent the next 10 minutes sipping water, trying not to choke.

The trade off of doing this is: my regular meals don’t have any oil and no coconut flour. The effect on the flavor of the now mostly chia+raw cocoa+soy lecithin+salt and potassium citrate drink isn’t pleasant. It ends up being pretty bitter, I’m thinking it’s the raw cocoa and the potassium citrate. I added some additional stevia to make it moar better-er and I can drink it without shuddering too bad, but at this point it’s nearly the same experience I had with the induction phase recipe.

I’m going to call this experiment an overall failure. Though the “fat bombs” really are pretty tasty, they don’t make up for the taste of the drink portion. I might try it again with just the coconut oil and maybe some peanut butter, while leaving the coconut flour for the drink part, dunno.

In other news: I just bought a $7 breathalyzer off ebay, which will be fun since I don’t drink alcohol.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:24-06:00December 4th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|Comments Off

Adapting MyFitnessPal for Keto diets

This entry is part 15 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

This keeps coming up and I keep forgetting where I got it from so I’ll post it here. NEVER AGAIN!

Do the install, as instructed on this page
Next you’ll want to set up your “macros” in MyFitnessPal:Go to: Home -> Goals -> Change Goals
Select “Custom” and click continue
I have mine set up as 70% Fat, 25% Protein and 5% Carbs.
You also need to add Fiber as a column to track so the script can calculate Net Carbs for you:Go to: Food -> Settings
Add Fiber to your list of nutrients to track. Make sure you at least have carbs, fiber, fat and protein selected. These are what you need to track for a low carb or ketogenic diet.

It ends up with a cool pie graph and net carbs on the tables (this is for a full day on Ketofood, plus a pepperjack cheese stick as a snack… and 30 minutes of intense elliptical exercise):

2014-11-24 11_53_13-Chris_bair's Food Diary _ MyFitnessPal.com

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:25-06:00November 24th, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|3 Comments

1 month in 3 days doing Ketosis – Time for an update.

This entry is part 11 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I had a crazy huge lunch of pizza on October 22nd, that night I tried the “induction” recipe for the first time and then went full-bore the next day on Thursday, October 23, 2014. I’m expecting to hit at least 16 lbs down at the month mark and I’m gunning for 18. Today I took a drill to my belt and added a couple new holes so my pants won’t fall down.

Since I have the data, here is the last year of my weight. TMI, I know. I’ve labeled notable changes in the trend with what was going on at the time.

Last year of weight data, click to “em-biggen”

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:27-06:00November 18th, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Video – Mixing up Ketofood, some more details about getting started with keto

This entry is part 10 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Somebody asked me about the recipe that I’m using for ketosis. It’s the same as QuidNYCs for ongoing ketosis but with Canola oil instead of Olive, mostly because I have issues with the smell/flavor of Extra Virgin Olive Oil, you can see it here. The first tab is more of a general overview, you can get down to the nitty-gritty in the “Recipe Editor” tab including omega ratios and other specifics.

Along with that, yesterday I recorded a video of me mixing up a week of Ketofood. Normally it doesn’t take this long but I was ‘splainin’ stuff and taking my sweet time to do it (plus grinding those chia seeds is a pain).

So, there you go. Ideally it only takes me 15 minutes or so to mix up a batch. It’s not rocket science and really it’s easier than baking a cake from scratch: you just weigh stuff and stick it into a big container, then you measure oil.

Final thought: I was asked how quickly I got into ketosis. I started by using the QuidNYC induction phase recipe but I didn’t like it at all and jumped to the “ongoing” after 1 week. I didn’t get the Ketone test strips ($14 for 200 FTW!) I’m using until I was well into my second week so I can’t tell you exactly when I entered ketosis but I was feeling the dreaded ketosis flu by the 3rd day. By the time I got the test strips on Halloween (ordered on the 27th) and tested myself it was showing a level between 4 and 8.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:27-06:00November 16th, 2014|Preparation, Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

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