Results of the 2015 Soylent Eaters Survey
ketosoy.com
ketosoy.com
Right now, I'm "changing my relationship with food" but by cooking everything myself. I almost exclusively roast and steam things. So long as you can plan things ahead a little bit, on about a 45 minute horizon, this is actually very convenient. As it so happens, it's also very low carb. I've lost 12 pounds since this summer. (Of course, people vary a lot, so your results may vary.)
Roasting results in complex flavors. You don't have to fuss with lots of ingredients. or undertake a lot of cooking steps. Instead, it just happens for you in an emergent process. We're programmers -- we should be excited by emergent processes. Likewise with steaming fresh vegetables. So long as you use fresh vegetables and do not overcook them, you wind up with lots of subtle and fantastic flavors. (Add butter to be decadent.)
So basically:
1) Learn how to roast and steam everything properly
2) Go buy fresh produce once every 3 or 4 days
3) Be as efficiency minded in the kitchen as you are in hot code
(If you like bacon, and would like to do that "hyper-lazy," I'm planning on doing a blog post about, "Why you should make folding bacon a chore.")
Possibly related to a gender gap of continued use?
For the extra-lazy, I also suggest having a lot of raw ready-to-eat stuff around. For me, it's carrots, apples, almonds, snap peas, and string beans.
It really helped me to see the difference between actual hunger and things like boredom or a desire for distraction from whatever negative emotions I was experiencing. If I got to the fridge but don't want any of those things, it's almost always a sign I'm there for something other than hunger.
I would add:
4) Buy stuff that's in season
This can save a lot of pre-planning on meals, since by just buying one or two measures of several things (focusing on getting a variety of colors) you'll naturally have what you need to make a bunch of traditional recipes, which are almost always based around seasonal fruits/berries and veggies (i.e. you won't find a lot of recipes calling for both something that's ripe in Spring and something that's ripe in late Fall).
You can buy first, plan later. I find it to be nearly as easy as sticking to small set of dishes week after week, except that it gives you much more variety. Since what you bought determines the set of things you can make, it removes most of the time and stress associated creating new meal plans for every week and shopping to match them. A good middle ground between the two, IMO.
As a bonus, your food will taste better. AND it opens up the possibility of shopping almost exclusively at farmers' markets, which will make it taste better still. There's no, "oh, they didn't have any fresh X at the farmers' market, and the dish I'm making tomorrow requires it, so now I have to go to the grocery store too, even though I don't need anything else from there right now". Staples at the grocery store, fresh stuff at the farmer's market, make what you can with what you got.
This may be less practical in the Winter, depending on where you are, when canned and frozen stuff becomes important if you don't want to eat rice & beans and various stews for every single meal, but works well for the most part.
Excellent point.
You can buy first, plan later.
Excellent! I'm going to adopt that as a pillar of "hyper-lazy cuisine."
http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/quidnycs-superfood-for-him (there's a "for her" version as well that my fiancee has had good luck with)
It accounts for 50-100% of my calories depending on the day. Fairly inexpensive, good nutrition, and very scalable for different calorie needs. Most importantly no farts.
I eat Soylent about 50% of the time, so I'm not surprised the data show others doing the same.
I agree on mornings. It fills that infinite vacuum of hunger I get some mornings pretty well.
Men might think of protein shakes: you know, whey protein GMC-type stuff, that kind of thing. Women, on the other hand, might think of diet shakes: Slim-Fast and the like.
These might both have a broadly "body improvement" type outlook, but one of these associations is perhaps more positive-thinking than the other.
Or maybe not. Just a thought.
I did know some women in the group who would do that as well, so I can't say it's exclusively men, but women were definitely a minority when it came to power lifting. Not sure if that's what's going on here or not. Maybe it's that mostly people who follow tech news know about the product, and the tech industry does tend to lean more towards men. Who knows?
I haven't done it in a very long time, and the thought of drinking even a single shake makes me feel ill now. But it's possible to lose 20lbs in one month.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1262767/
Although excessive protein intake remains a health concern in individuals with pre-existing renal disease, the literature lacks significant research demonstrating a link between protein intake and the initiation or progression of renal disease in healthy individuals.
or this
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10722779
To conclude, it appears that protein intake under 2. 8 g.kg does not impair renal function in well-trained athletes as indicated by the measures of renal function used in this study
- For new foods and drugs that are potentially dangerous, the early adopters are almost universally men. Just look at the demographics of the various online research chemical communities.
- The product almost seems like it's marketed toward people on the autism spectrum.
Soylent surely tickles the nerdy nerve of some people, but (fortunately) real food is still a pleasure for many; adding the fact that it's possible to prepare such food spending relatively little time, I can imagine that people who are already inclined to cook (as above) would not switch to substitute food.
EDIT: I dug into the raw data and my original assumption seems to be supported with the age distributions as well. 23% of respondents were younger than 25, 70% were younger than 35, and 88% younger than 45. So the demographics for Soylent are young men with the largest chunk in their 20s.
Soylent is a tech product with standard early adopters of tech guys.
That's true, but not necessarily so. I value the ritual of going to the comic book store and browsing. But I don't value comics so much that I want to bag and collect them obsessively for hours on end. Likewise, I do value the ritual of food/coffee prep. But I don't want it to consume more than 15% of my daily allotment of time and energy. My priorities just aren't set up like that.
So you can also think of Soylent as a way to control that daily allotment.
Knowledge is cheap. Execution is where value is delivered.
* The End of Food - The New Yorker
* Soylent Isn't People; But Is It The End Of Food?
* New Yorker: Soylent to end food? (secondary article)
* 11 Craziest Parts of The New Yorker's Soylent Article (secondary article)
* Following the rise of soylent and the end of food | The Verge
* Soylent Could Make Food Preparation A Thing Of The Past
* Let's embrace the end of food | Al Jazeera America
2 of the 7 articles have question marks, and one of those is a secondary article. 1 of 5 of the primary articles pose it as a question.
I think that's Soylent's niche. Imagine those days when you're too (busy/lazy/unskilled/low on cash) to cook or get takeout, so now you've got this alternative that's probably better for you than the stuff you would have gotten anyways.
CalorieMate is manufactured by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company. No hype, no cool branding. The very plain box just has a list of ingredients. Available in convenience stores and vending machines. It's kind of blah, but it's not bad.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Calorie-Mate-Balanced-Chocolate-Ounce/...