Soylent Week 3 – baked soylent and deficiencies

Close up of the soylent cookies

The cookies come off silicone baking sheets better than greased aluminum foil (if you have the baking sheets). I ran into a problem with the muffins: the recipe calls for x and y ingredients for every cup of soylent mix; yeah well, I missed that part and only put in .5 cups applesauce and 3/4 c milk for an entire days worth of soylent. It didn’t mix well. Double checked the recipe and found I needed 3X more of everything. After I had the right amount of stuff, it mixed up OK but took forever to cook thoroughly. I wasn’t overly excited by the taste and work required to make them. The cookies on the other hand were easy to make (still took forever to cook – 30 minutes!) and are just like a thick, dry, corn tortilla. I had cooked 2 days worth of soylent so I split it up into 8 bags and am substituting a “meal” of muffins and cookies for 1/4 of my soylent every day until it’s gone.

This has been an interesting week (health wise) to say the least.

To start off with, I was prescribed an oral steroid to help with some tendinitis I had in my Achilles tendon – and I’m not sure what that did to my overall health. It did make sleeping difficult which was further exacerbated by having to wear a boot that would keep my plantar fascia and Achilles tendon extended all night long. It’s also supposed to make me irritable or something.

Next we have a nice cold/flu/whatever that set in just before the weekend and continued up through yesterday. Being sick stinks. Being sick when you’ve started out a new diet and are skittish about what may or may not be going on with your health really stinks since I had nothing to compare it to. In addition to the normal stuffiness, I had the unpleasant side effect that my soylent all of a sudden tasted like chalky metal and only like chalky metal. It was exceedingly difficult to drink, especially Thursday – Saturday. Ultimately what got me through was doing something that Max had suggested quite some time ago: a little bit of stevia and some cinnamon. Suddenly soylent was (somewhat) palatable again and I’ve continued with adding those to my mixes. I discovered that if you are using pure stevia you need hardly any at all – like somewhere between 1 and 0.5 grains of rice size. I accidentally put in about 1/10 of a teaspoon into a blenderbottle of soylent and literally gagged when I tasted it; way too sweet! Being sick also put a halt to my workout routine which also stopped my weight loss. I’m currently sitting at negative 10 pounds since I started. Next week should be better.

I also encountered my first nutrient deficiency: Calcium (and likely potassium too). Since the formulation only gives me a little over 100% my RDI of calcium and potassium; if I skipped 1/4 of 1/2 of my daily soylent for more than a few days in a row due to eating “muggle” food and being full I was ending up severely deficient in calcium. This manifested its self initially as an ache in my calf, which then moved on to be an ache in my quads, then both legs plus a nasty headache that felt like dehydration. The next morning I was all set to go buy some “citrical” or something when I realized “duh, I have all the stuff for that here!” so I added extra cal/mag citrate and potassium citrate to that day’s soylent. Like magic I was fine. Since then I’ve been eating all of my daily soylent no matter what, which was a little hard after eating 7-layer dip during the superbowl and getting full on that. People in the community warned about not eating all of the soylent but did I listen? apparently not. I guess the moral of the story is: if you don’t plan on eating all the stuff every day then adjust your recipe down so you’re still getting the right nutrients.