
How I Stopped Eating Food - juletide
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
======
hcarvalhoalves
TL;DR Someone trying to sell you on another crazy diet.

A complete enteral diet (when you're in the hospital and they feed it to you
in a tube) is both extremely hard to achieve and expensive, not to mention the
collateral effects. Then there's this guy claiming that he can not only live
on a carb/protein/fat shake he made on his kitchen, but that it gave him
superpowers and it's cheap to boot. He even gave it a market name already.

Not flying with me.

~~~
nathan_f77
I agree that this is most likely a scam, but just wanted to point out that the
'market name' is just a reference to a movie called 'Soylent Green':
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green>

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eggbrain
I get immediately suspicious when the ingredients to make such a product
aren't listed. Run faster, think clearer, all for 1/5th the price, with just
one simple trick a single mom found!

I'll assume this must be either satire or a sales pitch until proven otherwise
-- I fully expect the first ingredient if listed to be "premium snake oil".

~~~
Jemm
The formula has been posted.

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kbutler
An engineered food replace drink named "Soylent"? It's a spoof.

Researched every substance the body needs to survive, but missed iron? And
"heart racing" from iron deficiency on the third day, then corrected
immediately?

Yep, it's a spoof.

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hammock
It looks remarkably like the "bowl of snot" that Neo and his buddies eat in
the Matrix.

"It's a single-celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and
minerals. Everything the body needs."
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY>

~~~
bitwize
How do you know it's not Tastee Wheat? Do any of us know what Tastee Wheat
looked or tasted like?

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guylhem
I love this approach, and I would like to know more about the actual
composition of his Soylent meal to check for other "missing things" such as
iron which was mentioned in the article, and whether the correct biodisponible
versions are used (you can't get much iron from eating screws). I'm especially
curious about the proteins.

Then after careful checking, I'd like to try that myself!

Food is a waste of time. It is something you do because it has to be done. You
can save time by eating out (but you may still lose time standing in line,
going there, etc.) but you are just trading time for money and getting food
that might not be optimal for your body.

At the moment, the best I've found is microwaving frozen food as the best
tradeoff between time spent/healthy content/price : frozen minced meat and
whole rice can be cooked in ~ 3 minutes for 1 person. I add a fruit, usually
an apple and I call that a meal.

Sometimes I replace the minced meat by a box of tuna or herring (once or twice
per weak) to get fish oil, and on weekends the meal is replaced by french
saucisson and cheese (ready in 30 seconds : you cut yourself a portion!! even
better !!) + fruit. I drink half a glass of acerola/mango/etc. juice each day
for vitamins I could be missing.

I eat when I feel hungry - usually in the morning and in the afternoon,
sometimes before going to bed I add an apple (I've noticed if I don't, I wake
up around 4 am - maybe due to a too low glucose level). I do workout about 3
times a week - I then replace the apple by a full meal - same standard
composition.

Not only do I feel better as the author mentioned (but I doubt that - these
many little things could be just a placebo effect) but also, above all, I feel
free.

I don't have to overthink what food I have to prepare or chose or anything
like this - just sticking to the default. It's like creating a good habit -
easy to follow is the selling point, healthy effects are sideproducts. No time
lost in the supermarket. Sometimes I buy random stuff to check if it could be
added to my default, but so far nothing stuck.

Now after reading that article I would like to improve it even more : I could
replace the weekend saucisson + cheese by something that takes even less time,
and that could be drunk.

That's hacking the body :-)

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> Food is a waste of time. It is something you do because it has to be done.

To think like this is sickening. Food is one of the few pleasures in life.

PS: Makes me scared you're a MD PhD, but still don't see how absurd the
original blog post is, maybe even a hoax.

~~~
guylhem
You have your views on life and I respect them. You may enjoy spending hours
everyday preparing your food, and hours eating it - why not.

But personally, I don't. Just like you, I have my own views, which I enjoy
enough to openly share them, in full honesty.

For me food is a nuisance that I want to take as little time as possible
(preparation + consumption). I enjoy spending my time on different things.

The original blog post might be questionable (the iron thing - I can't imagine
how he might have missed that!) and light on details. It could also be a hoax.

But for the one time I find someone who shares my views, as opposed to the
prevalent "food is the most important thing in life - food is sacred - spend
all your time on it", I want to know more about his approach, to find
mistakes, correct them, and _experiment_.

Who knows, maybe more people think the same secretly? Maybe some day it will
be the most prevalent view on food?

I was somehow expecting some negative replies, but not something just ad
hominem like this, and devoid of content. Still, I wanted to share my current
approach, in the hope others could find it interesting as a baseline to
experiment upon, and also to get their own (hopefully someone else is also
trying to optimize the food problem on time + health constraints)

So relax, I'm experimenting my own regimen on myself, and you're free to
disagree.

~~~
npsimons
I think the GP is missing the point here: for many people, food is like bills.
You deal with them, but not because you want to, only because you have to.
Whether or not the OP is serious, it reminded me much of molecular gastronomy,
and approaching food scientifically. While some may look down on this as an
exercise in soul-crushing, is it any worse than the mass produced eating
material that is fast/convenience food today? At least with this approach, the
goal is health, not addictiveness or saleability.

I'm the kind of person who has spent hundreds of dollars on a fine dining
experience (and heartily enjoy and recommend it), and has spent countless
hours in the kitchen attempting to make good food. Yet, on some days, I'd
rather just whip up a soylent shake and be done with it. On some days, I'm not
even in any state to care what it tastes or feels like.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
First, enjoying food does not imply _spending hours cooking_ food. If you
think so, this is one thing your culture taught you wrong. Good food is
simple, can be frozen, or even eaten raw. Also, there's no explanation to why
one can order chicken wings by phone and have it delivered in 30 minutes but
not something healthier other than pure ignorance.

Second, this is a reductionist, naive view of nutrition. There's more to
nurturing than swallowing a mix of nutrients. Smell, taste, chewing motion,
the brain. If you don't enjoy your food, you don't feel satisfied. If you
don't feel satisfied, your organism doesn't work as expected, neither your
mood. Food and pleasure are intimately associated, you cannot have a whole
human being by reducing the act of eating to an inconvenience.

If you were right, enteral diets (Google what it means) would be completely
normal by today.

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DigitalTurk
> Error establishing a database connection

Seems like the author's blog is starving too.

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juletide
for clarification: I'm fairly certain this piece is meant to be a satire of
lifehacker/self-improvement/etc-ish block posts...

~~~
aw3c2
Same here. 3.14 miles is a nice touch. ;)

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stove
Anyone else see an Onion headline in this?

"Area Man Loses Weight By Not Eating For A Month"

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nathan_f77
Here's a more realistic version: <http://www.angryman.ca/monkey.html>

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schoper
He mentions that his bowel movements have stopped on the "Soylent." I'd watch
out for gall bladder disease if I were him.

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kevinthew
"My cravings and tastes closely matched with my needs. One day I accidentally
put in a tablespoon of salt, rather than a teaspoon. I immediately noticed the
mixture tasted unpleasantly salty. When I was deficient of iron I felt a
strong craving for red meat. As I started running longer distances I craved
more carbohydrates. After a week advertisements for fast food looked
repulsive. All I crave is Soylent." Man, this is super creepy stuff

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bluetidepro
> _Error establishing a database connection_

Anyone have a mirror?

~~~
modoc
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/aa569b56-0cc3-410f-a775...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/aa569b56-0cc3-410f-a775-6c0ba9d91b00/096349ae1cee91aef5b1f663db44429f)

~~~
ankitml
Is he serious?? Sounds completely magical. Please share how to make this
thing.

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lyesit
It would seem that all the benefits the author described are relative to his
health before he started this diet. Is it possible then that the diet
corrected some previous nutrient deficiency and that the same result could
have been obtained by just taking a multivitamin or something?

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drinchev
So how can we make this Soyent? If it really costs 50$/month then it should be
easy to made.

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NotThatGuyToo
Very suspicious indeed but here's something similar backed by science.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/12/28/aging-
longevi...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/12/28/aging-longevity-
chasing-cures.html)

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up_and_up
"Error establishing a database connection"

As a developer, yeah thats usually when the pager goes off and I have to put
down my lunch.

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kvprashant
UPDATE: The site is now down. Probably too much load and MySQL service has
been shut down

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kazuya
Strange, no mention about excretions. The author did blood tests but no urine
tests.

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coderzach
Soylent Green is people!

~~~
ckluis
I was just thinking does no one remember classic sci fi?

~~~
mchahn
But Soylent Green wasn't people. That was a hollywood fantasy to sell more
tickets. It was actually an artificial meat product engineered to taste like
people. The book was awesome, the movie sucked. I remember in the movie that a
front-loader was scooping up people to slaughter.

~~~
Shorel
According to some cannibal anecdotes, people taste like pigs. So the
artificial meat product would be simply pig meat.

Soylent bacon.

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kvprashant
Dr. Hyde, is that you?!

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IheartApplesDix
This seems to be some kind of writing experiment about the implications of
"soylent" rather than a technical piece. It tries to speak toward the
sociology food in culture, but it doesn't really go into great depth. What is
the point of this? Considering the present day use of factory farms, I think
any impact it desires is cheapened.

