Drinking nothing but shakes gets a touch monotonous. Today I decided to get a little creative!
Getting Creative with Soylent
Soylent pancake’s slogan would be: It’s solid.
One of the promises of the Soylent diet is that it will liberate you from food. All that messy nonsense of planning meals, cooking, and cleaning up after are a thing of the past (to say nothing of the time spent measuring, mixing, and cleaning up after the soylent). Of course, I actually like food, and I consider cooking one of my hobbies. I want to be liberated from food like a pig wants to be liberated from a mud bath.
Today I woke up needing to eat something, but instead of ditching the soylent diet three days in, I decided to get creative. Today I made pancakes and eggs.
The eggs were simple enough. Heat up some olive oil in a pan, toss in the eggs, baste them so they get nice and greasy. Since the oil is part of my diet for the day, I can hardly feel guilty for eating eggs swimming in oil. A little bit of hot sauce made the eggs quite lovely. Shout out to Choperena for the suggestion!
The pancakes were different. To make the pancakes I mixed 1 meal’s worth of the Ketofood soylent powder with 1/4 cup melted coconut oil and 1/4 cup water. Beat with a whisk until it reaches the consistency of pancake batter, and let sit. I actually think it would have been better if I let it sit in the fridge over night, but I can’t say I’ve tried it. Then, heat up a bit of coconut oil in a pan, pour in the pancake mix, and cover to cook until the pancake is lightly browned, flipping over once.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend them as anything higher than a health food, but they have that amazing quality of actually being solid. The experience was completely different than a normal pancake. Where a normal pancake is light, fluffy, and mildly sweet, this pancake was thick, heavy, and tasted vaguely meaty. I wouldn’t want to put maple syrup on this pancake, even if I could, but I’m considering mixing up a hollandaise sauce for it next time. As for the texture, the pancake came out pretty dry and grainy. I think letting the mix sit over night would fix the graininess, while a high temperature pan and shorter cook time would help keep the pancake from getting too dry. The aforementioned hollandaise sauce wouldn’t hurt, either.
Overall, I would call the experiment of cooking with soylent a success. The biggest thing a soylent diet lacks is variety, and this certainly helped to break the monotony of the shakes. I have some things planned for the ongoing ketosis recipe that take advantage of the coconut flour in it, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
The rest of the soylent
World’s least interesting food blogger.
I actually consumed more than half of my calories at breakfast. Both eggs, half of the coconut oil and olive oil for the day, and one third of my day’s soylent powder went into that meal. Everything else went into the shake, as usual.
Today’s shake was much less gritty than the last few. My guess is that it’s because I switched from solid coconut grease over to the liquid MCT oil, but I really can’t be certain because the shake’s composition was so different today. Tomorrow, I’ll get confirmation on that when everything goes into the shake again.
How I felt
I really felt satisfied after breakfast today. I don’t know if it’s because I ate more calories than normal or if it’s because I actually had something solid sitting in my belly, but it was nice to feel sated.
Throughout most of the day I felt fairly good. A little hungry now and then, but the less gritty soylent seemed to do the trick.
I didn’t get a chance to hit the gym today. Summer hours at Penn State means the gym is closed on Saturday and only runs limited hours on Sunday. I decided to take a 2 mile walk at the end of the day just to make sure I didn’t spend the whole day lounging around like a sack of potatoes.
Near the end of my walk, though, I really started to feel exhausted. Sore limbs, soreness in my sides (near my kidneys), and just a general desire to lay down and stop moving. I drank another glass of potassium infused broth, and while it lessened the symptoms somewhat, I still felt pretty miserable. At this point I’m wondering if there’s anything else I might be missing,
Daily Status: Day 3
Sleep: 1:00 AM – 9:45 AM (8.75 hours)
Food today: 2 eggs, 1 soylent pancake, 2x induction phase ketosis soylent (minus the eggs and pancake ingredients), 1 glass chicken broth with potassium citrate
Distance walked: ~2 miles
Workout: None (gym closed on Saturday)
Weight: 187.6 lb
Waist: 34″
Hips: 42.75″
Feeling: Fatigued, sore (especially legs and sides)
The soreness might be your version of the keto flu. I want to say I just felt exhausted and hangry.
The pancake sounds like a good idea for a pita bread faux pizza. Can you sub some of your fat with cheese, maybe toss on some broccoli? Cinnamon and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray could make some kind of cinnamon roll cookie things.
I could probably do that if I was just doing a ketogenic diet, but once you slap the soylent restriction on there all the options go away.
Also, if I wasn’t doing soylent, I’m sure I could come up with a better recipe for ketopizza that used coconut flour, or something.
True. I was also thinking you could toast the pancakes and make an egg sandwich, keeping it on the simple side.
Reading you guys’ blogs and talking with a friend last weekend really makes me want to go back in to keto, but Dave would probably kill me in my sleep.