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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need

This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.

Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eating enough (bulking). Serious weightlifters go through cycles of both but most people struggle more with one side or another.

Bulking isn't a struggle for me -- I can clear 5,000 kcal/day without a sweat. I've trained myself to eat pretty healthy but I'd always prefer steak and eggs for breakfast. On the other hand, a friend of mine complains about all the pizza he has to eat to meet his targets. Soylent makes a lot of sense for him (quick calories) but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

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Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction.

The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep. A meal is really disruptive during those times, because I just want my head fully integrated into the problems I'm working on.

If that's a regular schedule for you - Don't you feel you're missing out on living life?

Telling someone they're "missing out on living life" just because they don't do the same thing as you is really condescending.

I don't think it was meant that way, I didn't take offense.

When I'm really sucked into a problem is one of the few times that I feel fully alive. It's like being in a flow state for multiple days, pushing every cognitive resource I have to reach a solution.

I think it happens less than once a month, and almost always lasts less than a week.

I do wish that I went hiking more often, camping more often, and I wish that I had more social interactions that were free of social and business undertones.

You sound like me 25 years ago. I assume you are still young (20-30?) but I would urge you to take a look at your lifestyle and habits now, with a view to changing it to incorporate more of your hiking and camping and social interactions that you mention.

I once felt that living like you currently are was sustainable and that I would be impervious to the long term effects, but now that I have hit the half century mark, I am finding I suffer from all sorts of back and shoulder pain from sitting for extended programming sessions lasting days. I also have rapidly degrading eyesight, and high risk of glaucoma from staring at screens all day every day, and I have other health and digestive issues from not eating regular healthy meals, or drinking enough water back in the day.

It is highly likely that the lifestyle you are accustomed to will turn around and bite you one day. Make changes now so that you don't end up the same as this old programmer. :)

Mathematicians get a similar mental state from the release of dopamine that rewards working on and successfully solving ever more complex problems. I've also seen engineers comment similarly about it, and it sounded quite like what my great grandfather described when working on a complex math problem over a span of time.

That being said, make time for yourself, all consuming projects will make you discontent with life in general.

I wondered if maybe I was missing out at some point, but after pushing myself to do other stuff, what I quickly realised was that I do what I do because it is what I enjoy.

It is not necessarily less "living life", just different choices.

Of course, that assumes you do it because you're working on things that excite you and interest you because you enjoy them.

At that effort level I was hoping you're working on curing a disease or at least something more important than the cloud. :-/

I'm honored that you dug into it.

I'm working on decentralization, which I think is a very socially important goal. The cloud is not my ultimate objective, but it's one of the very few short term use cases I see where a decentralized system seems to have the potential to utterly dominate a centralized one.

Decentralized tech is very new. It's very hopium, and it's very poorly understood, both by zealots and by non-believers. I think that decentralization is going to change a lot of things in fundamental ways, and I think I can move the field forward faster by building a tangible, provably working, provably superior use case for decentralized tech.

Cloud storage is not as glamorous as starting a new world order, but the most important engineering is often the most mundane. People probably felt similarly about the Internet back before the world wide web was invented.

What are you specifically working on decentralizing? Do you have an end goal in mind for what a perfectly decentralized world would look like? Eg. a SBC in every home & office running a mailserver, webserver, etc

Edit: I think decentralization is great (like say IPFS), but I would not risk health or put off others to dedicate all my time to working on it, social interaction is an everyday need!

Ultimately I would like to see that people are allowed to maintain full control over their access to money and information. As tech improves, those things are getting more important, and right now the trend is to increasingly outsource the control (especially for information) to centralized entities that likely don't have your well-being as their primary objective.

There are a vast number of things that fit under the umbrella of tech that needs to be decentralized to give you full control over your money and information.

What part of that stack are you working on? Blockchain currency, low level networking, distributed filesystems, p2p websites, ...

I'd give up now.

Hari Seldon of decentralization, I tip my hat.

I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. It works well for menial programming tasks where time is the limiting factor. Incidently, those are the problems where you can for the most part jump out and right back in without too much overhead. But when facing a hard problem, getting up and away from the computer, and cooking a meal always mean I'll solve the problem faster and better. Simply because I let the problem alone for a while. I even use non tech coworkers for sparing, explaning the problem, and answering their questions means I'll have to think about the problem in a significantly different way - often revealing insight in the process. YMMW

> I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then.

Is Soylent ramen for rich people?

Oh, hey, this is my favorite so far. Can Soylent just be a shitty food choice, full stop? I think yes!

Maybe, except it seems better to your body than most normal meals you eat ;).

Stealing this shamelessly

If Ramen were nutritionally complete to a reasonably modern understanding of Human nutrition

A thousand times this. I remember staying up late to finish programming problems when I was young (and stupid). Now I find the most effective way of solving hard programming problems is to spend an afternoon attacking it and then go to sleep at a normal hour. Magically, an elegant solution - usually quite different from work in progress - appears in my brain while I'm showering.

I do my best work while sleeping, I just need to figure out how to bill for it.

Agreed - for really hard problems I've never found that pounding away directly is effective. I load up on the required information and then intentionally go and do something else (ironically cooking seem to does it for me but overnight and in shower also works) and out of nowhere a solution will appear.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

That sounds extremely unhealthy from both a physical and a mental standpoint.

Ok so why specifically Soylent and not one of the many alternatives?

    "Good morning," said the little prince.

    "Good morning," said the merchant.

    This was a merchant who sold pills that had been
    invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one
    pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to
    drink.

    "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

    "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said
    the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts.
    With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every
    week."

    "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

    "Anything you like..."

    "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I
    had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should
    walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

IS either opinion incorrect? Why can't we agree that some people don't want to take time preparing food, and others do?

It's not about the food. It's about slowing down and taking your time. When you start taking tablets to save time drinking, o soylent, to save time eating, you for sure do not slow down. Why it is important to slow down and unplug is another big topic, but that is absolutely essential.

"New technology usurps romanticization of older technology" is not a new and surprising concept. One could replace "pill" and "spring of fresh water" with any technological advancement which took over some earlier activity that a subset of the population found and still finds enjoyable to do. Typewriters and computers, bicycles and cars, making a fire using sticks verses using a stove to cook food even.

In my experience no one who treats that idea as novel ever seems to offer a litmus test to tell if the value of technology trumps the potential enjoyment in doing something manually. Does rimantas use stone or metal tools to cook? But the feeling of spinning the tree branch in your hands against the kindling! How greatly rimantas has lost in their fervor for convenience...

It has nothing to do with technology and tools.

>You've got to [...] take your mind off of whatever you are doing

Exactly the reason we should enjoy actual regular meals, preferably with other people.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

I know this is HN, but that sounds awful.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep

In all seriousness, this is tremendously unhealthy. Get up and go for a walk, a light jog, something. The health consequences of even just being sedentary for that long are terrible (to say nothing of the psychological consequences of deceiving yourself into thinking that work is the only thing of value in life).

I have two young kids and a startup. The idea that I should view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed is honestly a pipe dream right now. I enjoy as many of my meals as I can with my family. But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.

I have one kid, and no startup, and sometimes the only meal I get to enjoy is lunch at the office.

When going out to eat, I would hold my son in my left hand, as I shoveled food into my mouth with my right hand, taking a break to apologize to whomever was dining with me for having such bad manners.

Soylent has nine grams of sugar per serving. It is sugary junk.

Isn’t it supposed to be a meal or something? Nine grams isn’t that much compared to e.g. a muffin (~30 g).

A muffin is not a meal though. A juicy steak with a side of grilled vegetables has ~0g sugar.

I tried that. I got sick after I eat a juicy steak that I put in the trunk of my car last week.

Did it sit in the trunk of your car for an extended period of time?

From the earlier comment:

> But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.

It's not about general meals. It's those situations where you aren't able to make a real meal and have to settle on either nothing, or something fast and convenient. A muffin can be grabbed and eaten immediately. I'm not really sure how you expect them to grill a steak and vegetables.

Isn't the WHO recommended sugar intake ~25 grams? 3 meals at 9 grams each is pretty close to that.

3 Soylent drinks is 1200 calories. You're talking five to hit 2000 calories in a day.

(And it's 34 total net carbohydrates per bottle, with 3g fiber. Which isn't great, either.)

It has 9g of Isomaltulose. It's a sugar, but it's not as bad as table sugar or HFCS for your blood sugar levels.

So yes, it's not perfect, but it's better than it sounds.

9g of sugar for an entire meal isn't that much. A bottle of Coca-Cola has 67.5g of sugar in it, for comparison. An Apple has 19g.

Your expectations of how much sugar people should eat are set unrealistically low.

I average about 30g of carbohydrate and under 5g sugar for an entire day when I'm losing or maintaining my weight. 9g for a small meal (and Soylent is a small meal, it's 400 calories a bottle) is a lot, especially given that it's 34g of non-fiber carbohydrates in the bottle besides jst the sugar count..

You are eating an extremely low-carb diet that is far from the norm. The average carbohydrate consumption for a normal 2,000-calorie diet is almost ten times as much as what you're eating. So sure, I guess Soylent isn't useful for outlier diets, but it's fine for people with normal diets.

How much longer would an apple and a handful of walnuts take to eat?

I'll have that as well, usually with a soylent. An apple and nuts just doesn't leave you feeling very full for long.

Think of something you have to do every day that you don't like to do. Like flossing maybe? Some people really enjoy flossing. Some people don't. If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed, I would totally do that. But some people would think, man how can you do that and take all the enjoyment out of flossing?

Sometimes when I'm working, I run to the fridge, grab whatever is in it and eat it while I keep working. It usually doesn't taste like anything because I don't even bother heating it.

Soylent lets me do that but it's a lot healthier than whatever leftovers I might grab out of the fridge.

Either way I'm not enjoying the food nor the company (I'm at my desk at home alone). I'm also only spending 10 minutes.

"If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed"... I think what you're looking for is dental floss.

If it takes you less than a minute to floss you're probably doing it wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PreNWWOYfI#t=32s

Eh, flossing is a placebo anyway.

I can't attest to whether it helps prevent cavities or gum disease or whatever, given regular dental visits. I can say though that I used to rarely floss, and since I started flossing daily a few years ago, my teeth remain noticeably smoother and cleaner feeling between dentist visits, and require considerably less scraping when I'm there.

I don't know about you but I can tell how important flossing is by the amount of blood that comes out of my mouth the longer I take a break from flossing

With a little bit of practice you can easily do it as demonstrated there in under a minute.

I think you mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRivxlG8Bmc#t=25s

Some people's teeth are so messed up that flossing is a puzzle. "Right angle there, diagonal between those two teeth, curve a bit there, go backward there"...

Actually what you're looking for would be a waterflosser. The trick is not forcing yourself to use it, it's not getting addicted to it.

When I've looked into waterflossers the evidence wasn't strong that they actually work. Then again, neither is it for flossing at all.

It's one of those things you have to try for yourself, I think. The evidence in my case is very much apparent when I'm in the chair getting poked by my hygienist. The waterflosser is more effective at maintaining my gum health than floss ever was, with a p-value amounting to a floating-point denormal.

I have a feeling that if the truth were to come out, the effectiveness of flossing would turn out to be entirely dependent on tooth spacing or some other individual characteristic. If so, that may be true for the waterjet gadgets as well. But it seems less likely.

That's exactly the alien part, I think. Equating eating to flossing is utterly alien to me. Every meal is a positive thing.

From people on the other side: sometimes I'm like "ugh, even drinking smth seems too much distraction, don't wanna loose this focus now, an IV-cathether port that could just pump the right stuff into my veins, triggered automatically by sensors knowing my dietary intake history and pooling blood concentrations of things from me, would be so awesome now" :)

Also, deciding what to eat is a huge chore and mental energy drain for me... especially since I like constant diversity and novelty even in food. If I could afford to have a personal chef that would be trained to "always surprise me" and occasionally I could just tell him smth like "uhm, that salad looks delicious, but I'm too lazy to eat it, grind it up into a shake please so I can slurp it on my way to place X or while coding" it would rock!

You like diverse food but then resort to Soylent to avoid choosing food? I suppose it's healthier than McD but it really sounds a bit crazy.

> Some people really enjoy flossing.

Who does exactly?

Food, to me, represents more than replenishment of nutrition. It represents meeting and understanding my coworkers. Learning more about my significant other or unwinding with this person to talk about our week. Even when it's not a social situation, for me it's a treat. I completed some work and now I should treat myself by revitalizing my body with a substance that tastes good. It's a great motivator.

It's such a fundamental part of being a human being I can't at all relate to seeing it as a mechanical process such as flossing. I can't think of a worse comparison: when you're flossing, you're alone, and if anything anti social. Eating couldn't be any more be the opposite. It's something that all humans can relate to and bond over no matter what your opinions are.

Flossing isn't a part of our culture. Food is a part of every culture.

>> Some people really enjoy flossing.

> Who does exactly?

I do! Admittedly anecdotal. I am not afraid to confess that I enjoy flossing.

That we can all relate to it and bond over it doesn't mean that all of us want to. If I feel like being social, fine. But most of the time I don't feel like being social. Often that's the case even when I want to relax and enjoy food - I'd say maybe 3/4 of the time I go to restaurants I go alone by choice.

But just like I can, and occasionally do, enjoy social interactions but usually prefer solitude, while I can, and do often, greatly enjoy food there are still plenty of time when hunger is just an annoying disruption.

All of the stuff that you have built up around food can exist just fine separate from it. You connecting socialising and bonding with food is just habit. That's fine, but it isn't universal.

It might be very important for your, but not for me. People have different taste.

> Eating couldn't be any more be the opposite. It's something that all humans can relate to and bond over no matter what your opinions are.

I generally don't like food. Sometimes I crave something specific, or want to eat at a nice place. But 6 out of 7 days out of the week, food just isn't appealing to me, and is a chore to eat. It's basically like flossing.

Ever since a time when I was a teen and had to fast because of an esophagus problem, I haven't really felt hunger the same way. It's possible for me to go a few days without eating and not notice it or feel hungry. I can tell when I'm very hungry because I get lightheaded and weak around day 3. (Note, I don't do this intentionally and it isn't often I go days without eating).

So Soylent (or equivalent) is really helpful in making sure I get some food everyday.

> It's such a fundamental part of being a human being I can't at all relate to seeing it as a mechanical process such as flossing

I mean, I agree with you and everything but you're saying "this thing is so important to me I cannot understand other people". There are a reasonably large number of people who would be very happy if they only ever ate a bowl of cereal and a banana for breakfast every single day for the rest of their life. I don't understand it, and I wouldn't like it, but I don't want to prevent them the comfort they get from that.

Is it really so difficult to make a sandwich?

It is very easy to make a sandwich once you have a fridge which fills itself with fresh ingredients whenever you run out.

Also your sandwich is predominantly going to be made up of bread, even the healthiest of which isn't all that healthy, and likely deli meat, which you probably don't want to much of either.

Not with sudo.

Though I'd argue the healthier alternative would be to take a break and go walk to a nice restaurant somewhere, but alas I also fall into situations where you just need to keep on task.

Usually keeping a break is better for both your health and your work

yup. when went from working 14h/day (with almost no breaks) to working 7~8h (with breaks to eat, drink water, walk around), my productivity increased a lot.

Is it healthier? Apparently it's making people sick.

That's a problem of empathy. You can't understand how other people would have this specific feeling or practice. Obviously though many people do have it.

There seems to be something very unsettling to people like you about the idea of "meal replacement". To me it appears to be a kind of cultural conservatism, like it's an attack on "family values".

It's not about empathy. The original poster was asking why people don't understand Soylent, and my answer is that it's solving a problem that they never even considered could be a problem.

> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.

Different people, different concepts :). I used a Soylent clone in the past to replace breakfast/lunch and I liked it. I feel I might be unique at that among my coworkers, but I e.g. really prefer eating at my desk - I can parallelize it with work, or reading a book, or reading HN, which is infinitely more interesting to me than eating out with most people.

> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

My mother was on a diet plan once, where they suggested two options for meals each day, and if you really didn't feel like eating that, you could replace it with a protein shake. There were days when that shake really was the best alternative, and it allowed her to stick to the plan instead of giving up.

> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

It sounds like you have either more free time or a more a steady work schedule then their target user.

I have all the free time in the world and I have that "ugh do I really need to eat again?"

I find it hard to hit 2500 calories daily to not lose weight.

Replace all water with whole milk - problem solved!

Honestly, what the other poster said: whole milk.

2400 calories per gallon, well balanced between protein, fat, and carbs (you might say that it is ideally formulated to feed large mammals :P). The best part is that it is readily available every where and super cheap (< $3 per gallon).

Why not shouldn't instead of whole milk?

Even better: custard. Straight from the box.

65%-90% of humans are lactose intolerant[0], and lactaid pills aren't always effective.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...

I'm guessing that ratio is probably different for people on HN, since, as fluent English speakers, they're more likely to be descended from Europeans.

It is, but it's still significant. 13% for whites in the US but rising to near 90% for some ethnic groups.

Europe varies greatly, with by far the highest level of tolerance in Northern Europe (I'm Norwegian, and I didn't even know about lactose intolerance until I was in the 20's - it just wasn't something that became a subject until we were exposed to more immigrants as while it existed in Norway before that it was <5%), with lactose intolerance increasing to well above 20% in many other European countris.

In any case the advice to down vast quantities as milk isn't universally applicable anywhere.

I would be very surprised if HN didn't also a large number of people of Asian descent who are much less likely to tolerate lactose.

That is not a careful reading of the statistics given.

The full quote:

"Approximately 65 percent of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy. Lactose intolerance in adulthood is most prevalent in people of East Asian descent, affecting more than 90 percent of adults in some of these communities. Lactose intolerance is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent."

Lactose free milk (ehich is different than taking lactase pigs with milk) is a readily available thing.

I've dropped the idea that IGF response is something I need in my life. Milk is ideally formulated to feed babies that need to grow into gigantic beasts.

It is also a very inferior product made with zero genetic engineering. Just silly crossbreeding until the cow has big enough milk gains.

Don't see how it's, from a nutritional or health perspective, superior to Soylent.

Milk is also super cheap because it's heavily subsidized through taxes. I'm not saving idiot entrepreneurs by buying their unsustainable products.

So you prefer a diet engineered by humans (who, with our rather limited understanding of nutrition, can't even decide on whether carbs are a good thing) to a diet engineered and field tested by evolution over millions of years? Not the bet I would make, but to each their own, I guess.

Several other points:

1. The OP was remarking that they had a hard time maintaining weight. Anybody who has done GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) can tell you that large quantities of milk will head off the possibility of weight loss.

2. Is there any reason to believe that the agricultural inputs to something like Soylent aren't just as heavily subsidized as you claim milk to be?

Never said I consider a Soylent only diet proper. I have no opinion on that.

Milk is in our diet for several thousand years, not millions.

1. There's also a lot of people who ate balanced meals and kept weight. Drinking that much milk has some unwanted stuff in it - like IGF-I - which can cause cancer in those huge amounts.

2. Maybe soy, but that's a side-effect of the dairy that uses it not for the sake of human consumption. But it's highly likely the soy used is the one for human consumption, which would remove the necessary subsidies.

Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?

Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day (recently Marissa Mayer and Bill Gates and someone else from the US said in interviews they have every minute of every day planned; sounds like pure hell but he) seems very American. This Soylent thing fits in there.

Why would someone want to work that much unless you want to become a billionaire which, again, seems a drive in media coming from the US?

Maybe it is just the media I read though, but here there is no vibe like that and when I meet (very successful/rich) entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately so they do not give of that vibe either. Again the press distorts but posts here on HN and a thing like Soylent support that press.

> Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?

I think there is more acceptance in certain cultures, for example, to skip lunch because it's a busy day. Having worked globally and in multiple industries, I don't believe it's an American only thing although probably more common there. I see it as more of an industry thing, and each industry seems to have it's own use case for a product like Soylent. i.e. the programmer 'in the zone' and not wanting to stop for dinner or the investment banker running on a few hours of sleep due to an upcoming pitch.

> Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day

I'm not sure how that was implied, but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.

> entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately

I would be surprised to hear these types of individuals don't deal with skipped meals or lack of time based on what's going on in there life/work like their counterparts in other countries do.

> I'm not sure how that was implied,

People here imply that people consume Soylent either because they cannot get enough calories in with normal food to not lose weight (what a luxury that must be), or, in most cases and as the direct parent writes, that they do not have time to eat 'normally'. That seems to mesh with the whole culture of fast food and minute day planning; I for one could not tell you if I have time for an elaborate meal or a quick meal at lunch today and I would not want to know if I do either. I'll see what happens when I get hungry.

> but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.

Not typical workforce; I'm citing some famous and very rich US business people. Just noting that these people seem proud of it while I don't hear the same stories (in the press) from anywhere else. And others (especially on HN) seem desperate to copy it (which is, I assume, were Soylent came from in the first place); people who cite this (time-hacking/life-hacking/whatever-hacking it is called) as a great feat are all from (=living in currently) the US when I check their profiles.

It's an old tradition, too: there are accounts from the early days of the United States talking about how reading is treated as labor rather than the enjoyable affairs which visitors from England, France, etc. were accustomed to.

https://books.google.com/books?id=2uBEAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA44&ots=...

Particularly when you are inundated in valley slave culture, being busy all the time is a sign of your importance - you're busy disrupting the market getting ready to IPO, and if you have 10 spare minutes a day in which to regain some semblance of health or sanity, clearly you aren't a 10x developer. It's absolute hogwash and sadly a good number of brilliant young engineers are going to burn out, suffer health consequences, quit the field, etc. over it.

But having employees willing to sacrifice their actual wellbeing for the pipe-dream of getting "rich" is quite beneficial if you're say, a VC, so of course they foster this culture. "Look at how busy you are, you must be doing such important work!"

Not everybody is the same. Maybe it's not for you, but for people to busy with something else to think about what to eat, soylent is a lot better than fast food, a bar, whatever random crap you have lying around, or skipping a meal.

That's not _the_ problem, it just means Soylent isn't for you. Which is cool. I love Soylent 2.0. I'm very happy that I can get a decent chunk of my calories from a vegan source with little effort and lots of convenience.

Maybe it's the way Soylent markets itself, but I don't understand why people are so _personally_ offended by it. Just... don't eat it.

Surely cleaning up after cooking is almost always a chore, no matter how delicious the food was?

You could also take pride in cleaning and maintaining your tools. It's rather fast if you don't burn your food and if you use proper cleaning agents like "Barkeepers Friend" when soap isn't appropriate.

i usually cleanup while i listen to an audiobook/music. it's not a chore.

But do you understand that based on the way I was raised, eat was the thing you did because if you didn't you'd literally die?

There is no cultural value to food, for me. There is no social value that I find appealing about food.

Right, I do understand that! That's the whole point. Your experience is completely foreign to me which is why I didn't understand Soylent's purpose when it first came out. It's like trying to sell an umbrella to a nomad in the Sahara.

Don't you ever have things to do?

I like a great meal a lot, but if that was the three top events each day, I'd consider it an empty life.

You are clearly not French or have you lived there. A great meal should absolutely be one of the highlights of a day. Food can be (and should be) the catalyst of great conversations, great ideas or even meditative self-reflection.

Soylent seems to me to be a hipster Ultra Slim Fast and consumed for the exact same reasons legions of working women have that stuff in office refrigerators.

I can respect that people have different priorities than a great meal each day, but I can also pity them.

Even if I was French, I would be happy to ignore arguments about how I must to things because it's The French Way.

Who said anything about that? Of course I have things to do, but grabbing a sandwich from the deli on my block is almost as fast as soylent and much more enjoyable.

Although from this thread I'm starting to think the real reason many people dislike Soylent is the holier-than-thou attitude many of it's supporters seem to sport :)

It depends a little on what you choose to eat. Hitting my calorie goals would be easy if I ate fast food, but I'm trying to bulk while avoiding refined carbs and keeping my fruit & vegetable intake up.

There's a volume challenge - 5,000kcal is only 1.5lb of butter, but 32lb of broccoli.

There's also a mechanical challenge- chewing constantly (e.g. when eating lots of vegetables) is emotionally exhausting.

I do acknowledge it's possible there are people out there for whom there is simply no greater joy than eating, who would eat nonstop with joy. But, not everyone is like that.

> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included).

When I arrive home to an empty apartment at 9PM, I sure as hell don't feel like cooking. Sure, I cook great meals during the weekend and the days I come home early. But cooking when you got back from a big day of work + an infernal commute is cooking nothing but a chore.

Edit: That being said, I'll drink a regular liquid meal and only if all the other alternatives can't be done (no food in the fridge, I am not home, I need to eat in the car, etc.) I don't see the need to get Soylent either.

How can you eat 5,000 kcal a day and not be a huge fat pig? How many miles a day do you need to run to burn that off?

I used to be a normal weight, but I had to eat 1,200 kcals and run 4 miles a day.

How can you eat 5,000 kcal a day and not be a huge fat pig? How many miles a day do you need to run to burn that off?

On the days when I lift weights I eat close to 5K calories, sometimes even a little more, depending on the commute. All of my daily commute is by bike, including taking my kid to and from the kindergarten, and later to some extra activities (welcome to Denmark), which can be anywhere between 20 and 35 km total for the day.

I'm 178 cm and weigh around 79 kg.

Thats quite a bit of cycling. Don't you think all that cycling is getting into your lifting? I used to cycle about 10km a day and found that it was already hampering leg training at the gym.

Not if you are eating 5000 kcals and getting enough sleep...

I actually changed my approach to lifting a little and now following the principles described by Greg Nuckols in his article about increasing work capacity

http://strengtheory.com/increasing-work-capacity/

So essentially every week I'm doing just a little bit more volume in every exercise, either by adding a little weight, or an extra rep. So far I'm able to do it consistently for a few months so I guess I'm recovering well.

Then of course there is all that "getting used to it" thing where you do something long enough and get into it gradually and increase little by little and you're fine.

I worked originally about 5 km from home and it felt like it was enough cycling there and back. Then I changed my job and now I was 11 km from home so I started combining bike + train for a while because that felt like too much to cycle. Then one sunny day I cycled all the way home. I realized two things: 1) I'm not that tired and 2) I cut 10 minutes off my train + bike commute. So now I bike all the way and save time and money at the same time! Win-win!

Thats one hell of a boost to your TDEE. Im impressed.

I lift 5x, walk every where and swim LISS 3x a week. 173cm about 82kg. TDEE is ~3250 kcal. Currently shoot for 3500 a day. However, I only see my son on weekends. I bet my TDEE would be higher if had him every day.

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