Wondering how to calculate your calories?
On the Keto Chow page I have this:
This recipe has the added benefit of being customizable for people with different caloric requirements. Without any oil or cream it’s right around 500 calories/day and still hits all the right nutrients except protein, and the different fatty acids. Following the directions you’ll get 1269 calories/day (woohoo, deficit!) but you can raise that up to whatever level you want by increasing the heavy cream and/or the oil. It’s super flexible.
So how exactly do you do this? Well, there are two ways:
- Use the simple calculator (green button below) to determine how much heavy cream to use.
- Customize the Keto Chow recipe (rather involved).
And here are the instructions for customizing the recipe. It’s pretty involved but can give you fine control over the nutrients.
- First you’re going to need a nutrient profile. Head over to the DIY profile calculator page: http://diy.soylent.me/nutrient-profiles/calculator
- If you don’t have an account on the DIY site you’ll need to make one; either log in or create an account, then co back to the calculator page if necessary.
- Enter in all your information. You’re going to need to set the sliders to 5% 20% and 75% (maybe a bit more protein if you lift weights a lot). I use “chris.bair’s Keto New” as the DRI profile, I found it last time by typing “chr” three times in the dropdown menu but women might want to check out another profile. There’s a full list at http://diy.soylent.me/nutrient-profiles. Here’s what I put in last time I made one:
- You can play around with the requirements a bit if you like.
- Go to the Keto Chow recipe page
- Click on the “Copy” button.
- Type in a name and such, make sure you select your nutrient profile that you made earlier. It should be at the very top of the list.
- Once you have that saved you can start customizing. You’ll need to switch over to the “Recipe Editor” tab
- At the bottom it will show you the percentages you’re hitting. You may get red flags on Sodium, Potassium and a few other minerals depending on the profile you selected. Ketogenic diets need more electrolytes than normal so I’ve edited my own DRI profile to require the higher amounts. I’ve also taken out the maximum values on saturated fat and several others since the lipid hypothesis is false (watch Fat Head).
- To edit a nutrient just click on the quantity in the recipe and then change the values in the pop-up.
- You can hit the + and – just look at the percentages as they change. Once you get them where you’d like hit the “Save Changes” button.
- Bug: the bottom numbers don’t recalculate until you refresh the entire page.
- For the most part, you should really only need to modify the Heavy Cream and/or the MCT oil on the Keto Chow recipe (unless you’re a nursing mother or pregnant, then your vitamin needs might be wildly different)
Awesome write-up. Thank you!
I followed your instructions to create my nutrient profile and start editing the recipe, but i couldn’t get the macronutrients to line up by just tweaking the Heavy Cream and MCT Oil. For example, I put in 320ml Cream and 50 ml MCT Oil (these are per day values right?) and the carbs come out at 140% but protein at 90%. Should I worry about these differences, and if so, can you help a total newbie figure out what to tweak?
Yes, all of the values in the recipe editor are per day. Ignore the percent on the carbs, that’s gross carbs. You have to do Total carbs – total fiber and get the net carbs under 30g/day. Protein being a bit low shouldn’t be a problem unless you exercise a lot or lift weights and if you do then you can either supplement with some extra protein powder or eat a chicken breast every so often (or snack on bacon, sweet sweet bacon). You also might want to try http://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/ to calculate your macros instead of using the soylent calculator, then you can pop the values into your nutrient profile.
Did anyone notice that 50g of keto chow is pretty close to 100ml volume? Just a tip for those on the go types who only want to use a shaker bottle to measure
The volume depends on the flavor. 50g of rich chocolate takes up far less space than vanilla. That’s why the measurement is in grams instead of cups.
I know you have lots of reddit folks who do this, and I was wondering if any of them were pregnant? Or if you’ve heard any stories? Expecting a baby in four weeks, and thinking this would be great to have for one meal a day, after my husband goes back to work and I’m maybe too busy to cook. It’s worth noting I’ve been doing keto for almost two years now, so it would hardly be a body shock.
There was a lady that was pregnant doing Keto Chow but I don’t remember her name – likely the best source of information for you would be the “lady” keto subreddit over onhttps://www.reddit.com/r/xxketo I did a search for “keto Chow pregnant” there but didn’t find anything, unfortunately.
I do know that once the baby arrives you would probably want to omit the MCT oil and use more heavy cream instead, the MCT tends to make breastfeeding babies pretty angry for some reason.
That’s hugely useful, thank you! If I didn’t know that about breastfeeding babies and MCT oil I would have been tempted to cut out dairy first if problems arose (a usual suspect for angry babies) and that would have been a tragedy! I was considering posting my results on reddit in a few months….but the trolls! Can’t always handle it :) Thanks again!