> ... total diet replacement (825–853 kcal/day formula diet for 3–5 months), stepped food reintroduction (2–8 weeks) ...
That sounds to me like participants were given a professionally prepared formula to consume instead of food, so the calorie counts might be that accurate.
I think in the previous post that was on HN about this they were interviewing a lady that said she was eating some powder that "had all the nutrients", which sounds like something similar to Soylent.
There's a keto version called keto chow. There are recipes online as well as pre-mixed packages to buy. I don't know that the study used this exactly, but it's the same idea.
That is certainly not what I would consider "quite a lot of food"! If I was forced to use your meal plan I'd eat it in a single sitting in the evening and fast the rest of the day.
This is why I hate the term "Two pizza teams". At best that is me and one other person. On a hungry day (say after training squats) I'd be working on my own.
While there are a few comments that this is a single meal. This is pretty much how I consume my food each day. The only exception is that I tend to add an Icelandic style yogurt to breakfast and some turkey sausage. Puts me around 1,000 calories.
It's tough not only to cut back the calories, but to pack needed nutrients into the few calories remaining. Over several months you could accidentally end up with a severe deficiency of something.
Spinach can help a huge amount in that because it has soo many nutrients.
Here's my fasting plan: 1 Meal/day
100 cals - 1 lb of Spinach
60 cals of tuna (1/2 a small can)
1/2 lb of cauliflower
That total comes out to about 200 cals and meets aboout 100% of 1/2 of all the micronutrients and roughly 50 to 100% of all the other micronutrients. The Tuna (Selenium,b3,b12,b6) nicely complements the Spinach (high in A,C,E,K,Iron, Magnesium). And you get a relatively high amount of protein and fiber (normalized for cals)
Also, you can use something like Crono-meter to measure all your nutrients.
And btw, just because someone is eating 2000+ cals doesn't mean they're getting all their nutrients. Most of the foods people eat are so devoid of any nutrition, they minus well not even count.
It becomes a lot smaller after you boil it. But, it's fairly easy to eat all that, with my vast appetite. For anyone with weight problems, appetite and hunger tends to be way too large anyway.
The minerals stay the same. It's just the vitamins that are decreased. But, spinach has such a vast amount of vitamin A,C,K to start with, it hardly matters.
In my experience "listen to your body" is most often an excuse that people use to continue making unhealthy choices about food. Is there any research data on the correlation between food cravings and actual nutritional deficiencies?
A man[1] lost in an ocean suddenly developed an appetite for eyes of fish -- rich source of Vitamin C (which they had started to have depletion adrift in the sea)
Too much sugar (check the label). More like Ketochow (protein shake, vitamins, heavy whipping cream). Each of my servings is ~500 calories. Shed three pounds per week eating it 3 meals a day, no exercise.
I miss the pancake batter taste of Soylent, don’t miss being fat.
I should’ve been more clear, my apologies. Even if isomaltulose is released more slowly in the bloodstream, it’s quantity is higher in Soylent than one would prefer.
> Also, c'mon, a range of 825-853 calories? Nobody is counting calories that accurately and it would have been better to say "roughly 850 kCal per day".
That range might represent the precision of data they have for the formula mixture (if e.g. macronutrient data is only given to the nearest gram or half-gram and you consider the possible rounding error in both directions).
Probably something like Optifast. Kevin Smith (the filmmaker) dropped a ton of weight on it, and it was like 850 calories per day with weekly doctor checkins.
That is going to be a brutal 3-5 months. Worth it in the end though.
Also, c'mon, a range of 825-853 calories? Nobody is counting calories that accurately and it would have been better to say "roughly 850 kCal per day".