I’d been reading about a new meal replacement system that attempts to replace the need for hunting and gathering by reducing the core components of what you need to survive into a powder form. One of the writers at Ars Technica also wrote about his experiences with this product, named Soylent. According to the advertising and the daily journal, all you needed to do was add water and some pre-packaged oil and you have a liquid meal ready-to-eat. I went to their website back in July of 2014 and decided that I would try it for a week to see if I could stomach it (pun intended, sorry).
I visited their site to place an order and I didn’t realize how backed up their shipments were. It looked like that for the $70 I paid out, I might not receive my first shipment until late September. That’s no trouble, really. After all, it wasn’t as though I were dying of hunger. I just pushed off my plans until September.
And then September arrived and still no Soylent. I received an email saying that they were tremendously backed up and that shipments were being sent out to current subscribers to their product. New subscribers (myself) would get lower priority. Made sense to me; after all, if you’re already on the plan, then you would need to have priority over people who aren’t. This required me to have some more patience, though, as they projected another 10-12 weeks (4 months) before I would see my first bag of food-powder.
In between then, I flew to the United Kingdom on a work assignment and returned in late December to find my first shipment of Soylent waiting for me.
Therefore, I begin this project with this shipment and hope to report on what it is doing to me over time. To properly introduce my vitals, I am rather obese (330 lbs) for my height (5 feet, 9 inches). I’m not looking for this to be a silver bullet, but I am interested in simplifying a way to eat healthy in order to maximize the exercise program I’m going through. For reference, I am switching off cardio and weight-lifting every other day with the following routine:
- Day 1: 40 minutes cardio, 5 minutes cardio cool down.
- Day 2: 20 minutes cardio, 20 minutes weight-lifting, 5 minutes cardio, 20 minutes weight-lifting, 5 minutes cardio cool down.
I will continue to post under this category and tags to track my progress.
