I'm pretty obese at 275lbs, and binging on food is my drug of choice. Soylent has been invaluable in my addiction management. Because food is something you can't quit cold turkey, I have to try and focus on eating for nutrition instead of emotional support. Soylent allows me to get nutrition fast and in a non-food manner when my blood sugar is low and I can't reliably make a sensible food choice.<p>I drink 500 calories and 42 grams of protein upon waking, and found that it increases my ability to fight urges to binge throughout the day. I'll often have another 500 calorie shot of Soylent around 4 o'clock so in a couple of hours when I have to decide on real dinner food, I'm in a good place to eat sensibly. I'm very excited at the trend of meal replacements, it's an indispensable tool in managing my addiction and I'm down 20lbs since January just as a side effect.
I reluctantly replaced about half of my meals with Soylent while stateside for a few months recently on a visit.<p>Jake Shake is an EU competitor and, as far as I can tell, has the same nutritional profile and tastes about a million times better than Soylent on its best day. It also comes in single-serving pouches, which is a big win for me because Soylent has to be refrigerated after making it and the colder it is, the less palatable it seems.<p>I bought supply for several months' with Bitcoin, and it presently serves as 80%+ of my meals (I'm working a lot at the moment).
Sigh. If you are drinking a Soylent or some other drink because you literally don't have the time to get up from your desk for 30-60 minutes for a meal I question what type of human existence you are living. There are so many things central to living life that revolve around eating (social benefits, maybe fresh air and sunshine, tasting and smelling the food itself) that one misses out on by just drinking a shake and not seeing daylight for days on end. It seems like another way to make people more productive. Who needs a lunch break? Just drink a shake and keep coding! If you don't have any ownership in what you are making why one would give up one of the rights they have as a worker, a break in the day to get something to eat, is beyond me.<p>With that said I understand the value of a meal replacement if you are trying to loose weight. Soylent seems to be better vs the older meal replacement shakes out there, ie that slim fast junk.
I've been using Soylent and other powdered food products (Schmilk, Keto Chow) regularly (as in 4-5 times per week) for the past 8 months.<p>I'm a full-time student. I spend upwards of 10 hours a day in classes or in the lab. I've tried prepping meals beforehand to avoid eating out, but in the end I always ended up getting fast food on campus because I didn't have time or energy. Powdered foods have a surprising amount of utility as a meal replacement for one or two meals a day.<p>Soylent itself is a fantastic product, truly. They've been attentive to the needs of their users, adapting the formula to issues as they crop up (such as digestive troubles from an excess of fiber), and recently made it a lot easier to use by incorporating the oils into the powder. Now they just send you the powder, and you mix it with water in the included pitcher. No measuring or anything. Of all the powdered foods, Soylent is easily the most convenient.<p>Nowadays, I'm a big fan of Schmilk. It tastes pretty good (like milk and oats) for powdered food, and it's very inexpensive at $55/week (with no subscription) for the powder (and around $10/week for the whole milk required).
"While a meal generally costs upward of $50 at Silicon Valley-area restaurants, a week’s worth of Soylent or Schmoylent totals $85."<p>I get it, Soylent can save you money on food, but this comically excessive exaggeration isn't helping make that point. Even in "Silicon-Valley area restaurants", I've only ever spent $50 on a meal when it was a nice dinner with drinks.
Soylent was originally touted as a meal replacement but I (and others) have found that it works best as a "plan B" to nutrition. It changes the way you look at food if you always have an option to just get the nutrition you need quickly and easily: a lot of meals you'd normally skip you don't, and a lot of meals you eat that are less than nutritious you can either opt-out of or can supplement with proper nutrition with soylent.<p>I've also found it to be pretty transformative that it turns hunger into something as easily solved as thirst and puts it into the same mental framework.
Always strange to read about the la la land that New York Times reporters seem to stumble into when they take a cross country flight. It's like an exaggerated cartoon version of the real California. I guess they've got papers to flog.
For fun, I ordered a couple weeks of Soylent. On my first taste I realized it tasted almost exactly like a common but old Korean grain drink called Misugaru (미숫가루)[1]. It's hard to get exact nutrition information on Misugaru because even today it's usually ground up at the supermarket and put into nondescript bags. It's usually made with water or milk and chilled or mixed with ice. Like Soylent it dissolves poorly in whatever liquid you put it in, so you'll end up with big chunks of powder at the bottom of your cup. Leaving Soylent overnight usually resolves most of that, I have no idea if Misugaru does the same. Soylent is a little more "pancake/unsweetened cake batter" flavor than Misugaru, but the experience is remarkably similar.<p>Soylent is weird stuff, I expect to get hungry shortly after drinking it, but it holds satiation longer than regular food for me. I usually drink it as a quick breakfast, and where I'd normally get hungry around 11:00-11:30, I'll still be fine till around 1:00-1:30pm. I've also started drinking it on weekends where my option is microwave garbage or fast food. I'll be fuller, longer, and can <i>almost</i> guarantee it will have a better nutrition profile than what I <i>would</i> have eaten. And it'll probably have been cheaper as well.<p>As a result, I'm buying fewer groceries, and I have other stuff in my freezer that I'm not eating and seem to just take up space. I have fewer dishes to do as well. It's kind of weird how much time and space is taken up by food and food related activities and items and you don't realize it until you don't need them.<p>The only real weird side effect I've had is that when I go for a couple days at more than half Soylent, I get really vivid dreams, often about eating red meat. They're kind of disturbing so I usually just keep to under half my meals. That way. I've read other people reporting similar meat cravings and vivid dreams as well when they dose up.<p>One other benefit, when I decide to eat food, I'm doing it for flavor and experience, so I find I'm focusing on finding great foods to eat more than just looking for something to get me through the next few hours. It's paradoxically made me like good food more than I did.<p>So on the whole: cheaper, more nutritious, more convenient offsets the boring taste for me.<p><i>edit</i> they also support a robust community of DIYers, which is a really smart way of growing the marketspace out.<p>1 - <a href="http://mykoreankitchen.com/2013/02/05/korean-multigrain-shakes-misutgaru/" rel="nofollow">http://mykoreankitchen.com/2013/02/05/korean-multigrain-shak...</a>
I would really like to see a long-term study of heavy Soylent use. It would be awesome if we're getting close to an optimally healthy meal replacement, but I have some serious doubts about the stuff due to the lack of phytochemicals. Vegetables contain thousands of organic compounds that are metabolized by our bodies in poorly understood ways -- my hunch is that Soylent doesn't have enough ingredients to keep human bodies running optimally. I guess it depends on where your baseline is, though; a soylent meal seems better than a fast food meal. I'll be watching the scientific literature with interest!
From 2008-2009 when I was still in the Marine Corps I spent a year in Iraq operating on small teams while embedded with the Iraqi security forces. We'd go out on 6-9 man teams and stay in the field for 1-2 weeks at a time.<p>Since a lot of what we did was clearing operating we were constantly on the move, so we needed something quick that packed a lot of calories since it was hard to keep weight on.<p>What I found that worked really well was a high calorie protein powder called TrueMass (I'm not sure if it's still around, but I use Syntha 6 now since it's leaner) since we could find it at just about every PX (store on military bases) we came across.<p>It worked well because we had those large bottles of water and you could drink half of it then pour some powder in, shake it up and polish it off for some calories. It wasn't super filling, but by the time you made it through the next half a bottle of water you'd be ready for more. The large jugs of protein and the large water bottles were a bit unwieldy on patrols, but we always had our vics relatively close by so it wasn't a problem.<p>When I heard about Soylent I thought back to this and got pretty excited. I have yet to try it yet (I ordered some early on, but cancelled after waiting a few months), but look forward to it. I'm especially looking forward to more variations in flavors and lifestyles (i.e. athletes, bodybuilders, distance, sedentary, etc.).
I've been eating our own type of soylent for the past year and a half now. 2 per day, morning and noon, and 'normal' dinner. The type I eat is ketogenic (meaning low carb).<p>I have to conclude that I feel better than ever before. Where previously I ate very monotonic (and one could argue, I still do), I did not get all the nutrients I should. I now do, and feel pretty damn good.<p>I do feel soylent is the future, but there are many varieties.<p>In my circles, the whole movement has sparked a lot of discussion, and many people close to me are now eating all kinds of soylent, homemade, joylent, jake shake etc.<p>Let's hope that someday the whole 'fat is bad' concept leaves the mainstream, it does not seem to do a lot of good.<p>Btw the variety I eat costs below 5 euros per day, with 2100 calories. And I think it tastes pretty great. Only wins.
IMHO if cooking or ordering food is "taking time away" then, well, you need to evaluate the whole picture, maybe you need to improve in other areas, plus, you are not going to get to me to sign a check serving soylent as dinner, sorry! Dinner is more than a meal.
Welcome to the future.<p>It has taken surprisingly long time for people to make difference between functional eating and social eating. The key insight is: they are not mutually exclusive.<p>When there’s something more important to focus than food, so be it, and powdered foods enables you to stay in flow. However, nothing replaces the psychological need for social dining with your friends.<p>I’m just a bit worried of some of the second grade ingredients some of these powders contain. There are also organic real-food options available which contain 100% of nutrition guidelines. Have a look at Ambronite ( <a href="http://ambronite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ambronite.com/</a> ) for example.
Whenever I hear anyone talk about Soylent as a utilitarian product made for boring people it always makes me think of the Volkswagen Beetle. Everyone initially thought they were utilitarian cars and only boring people should buy them, until they realized that artists and trendsetters were buying them because a vast majority of people don't use their cars as their main source of artistic expression. There are a lot of people that don't use what they eat as their main artistic expression.
I gave Soylent a try when it first came out. The initial formulation gave me incredible gastro-intestinal distress, and it was so painful that I could barely sleep at night. Apparently they heard this sort of feedback from a bunch of people and changed their mixture so it wasn't as hard on the digestive tract. I haven't tried it though, so I don't know if it'd work for me. Honestly, I'm a bit scared to do so. Oh the pain!
I understand that everyone has their own needs and desires. But personally, if I found the need to appeal to some product like this, I'd view it as an indication of a problem rather than a solution to one.