It has been a week with Soylent now. I have been recording my thoughts related to diet daily since I first wrote about my Soylent experiment a few days in. Those thoughts are what follow.

DAY 4

Today I got up bright and early and had plenty of energy to actually stay awake and complete tasks before the rest of the house woke up. I have been having trouble with that lately. Is Soylent helping me get more energy? The jury is still out on that.

I do find myself more aware of what I am eating. I am going for 50% or about 1000 of my calories coming from Soylent. I am also changing my diet. I do not think that the ingestion of Soylent is causing more awareness. Rather, it probably has more to do with the change from habitual diet to something non-habitual. I’m not just using muscle memory right now, so that probably makes me more aware.

I have not really been snacking. I had a lunch today prepared by my partner from HelloFresh (a fresh food and recipe shipping service). I have a meal like this three times a week and they are all pretty nutritionally complete. HelloFresh or not, I am having a meal each day that has anywhere from 400 to 1200 calories.

DAY 5

I had two servings of Soylent during the day and I started feeling pretty hungry before it was time to start making supper. I ended up snacking on some baby carrots and hummus, but I am starting to think that three servings of Soylent per day is going to need to be the standard to keep me satisfied until supper time. I wake up pretty early and, with my partner's work schedule the way it is, I sometimes eat supper pretty late. Not that I think snacking on baby carrots and hummus is such a bad thing.

I was thinking about an article I read about how we get more out of eating than just nutrition. The article focused on the chewing part of eating and reasons that may be an essential part of our diet that we do not typically think about. Besides my desire to prepare and eat some meals with my family, this is another big part of why I would probably not attempt to go on a 100% Soylent diet. I thought about how someone who wanted to go all Soylent might deal with this. Chewing gum might be an option, but it is pretty soft. I guess someone could chew on a harder object like leather or a stick. In that case though, one might suffer the ability to socialize in our culture.

DAY 6

This morning I made bacon and hard boiled eggs and sat down and watched my family eat them. It seems a little strange, but not as much as I expected. Maybe it has already become a little familiar to me since I often prepare meat for them to eat. I have been enjoying a vegetarian diet for about a year already and as the person in the house who accepts the responsibility of preparing much of the food, I try to fill everyone's dietary desires to the extent that I am able. Maybe that is part of why it does not seem so strange to sit with people eating and not eat that myself.

Bacon does not do this, but I am starting to feel cravings when certain foods are being eaten around me. It is only those foods I am trying to get away from eating anyway though. The junk with little or no nutritional value. If I want to get away from that, there is going to be some of this no matter what change I make to my diet.

DAY 7

This evening I went to the movies and had some popcorn. I can usually go through the whole bag of popcorn without thinking much about it. Tonight however, I stopped eating and put it down after about a quarter of the bag. I picked it up a little later and had a bit more, but I did not even finish half of it. I am mentioning this to mark the fact that I have noticed that I am aware of feeling full before it reaches levels of discomfort. I welcome this change.

I am still getting up early without crawling back into bed or falling asleep on the couch during my morning meditation. I feel like I have a lot of healthy energy after my rest. Sometimes I nap a little in the middle of the day, but my urge to do that has decreased as well.

A couple of friends have mentioned doing something similar to what I am to lose weight. Any time you keep track of calories the way I am right now and if you are consuming a lower amount than you were otherwise, you will lose weight.

I lost over 100 pounds a few years back simply by paying attention to calories. The dangerous thing about that is that simply counting calories can still be very unhealthy. Many days while doing that before I ate low calorie foods so that I could eat more throughout the day. This means a lot of vegetables many times. But it also meant a lot of popcorn (sans butter) sometimes. There were also more days than I probably care to remember when my entire day's calories was donuts or some other high calorie pastry.

I have been losing a little weight since my calorie intake had been higher than I prefer. I did not get on the scale recently enough before I started to have an exact figure, but I can see it going down and I can feel it.

To conclude the first week, I feel an increased sense of satisfaction with my wellness both mentally and physically, I am definitely feeling and increased awareness of nutritional value of food intake, and feel much less like snacking between meals.

Kirk Aug

Kirk is interested in all things new and exciting, like drones. Follow his Soylent journey here on SeedSing and twitter @kirkaug.