Preparing keto food can be an expensive, tedious process, so I wrote out some tips in this article.
So I’m doing ketogenic D.I.Y. soylent right now (the “nuclear option” for losing weight, as I like to call it). There’s info about ketosis in a previous post and info about how bad the “induction phase” recipe is in a different post (the “ongoing” one I’m using now is WAY better and quite tasty).
I’ve talked about some of the issues with doing ketogenic DIY before, one thing I didn’t cover much was how expensive it is. If you want to buy the stuff to start outright and don’t have any of the ingredients already it’s over $300 unless you can find smaller packages. The daily cost is around $5.50, which is quite a bit more than People Chow which is around $3.50.
What about preparing the stuff?
When I started on this I was dismayed that the official recipe doesn’t list how much water you need to mix it with(!), so I’ve had to wing it and come up with my own preparation methods.
I’m using roughly the same mixing method that I still use for mixing up People Chow (I mix for others, the masa smells really good when you can’t eat carbs): a big giant Utz cheese puffs container with ingredients for a weeks worth.
Unlike many other seeds, chia seeds are supposed to be just fine if eaten whole (you body can digest the hull). That said, you apparently don’t get the right Omega-3’s unless they are ground. So I bought a small coffee/spice grinder (cheapest I could find on Amazon with OK reviews) and run them through in batches grinding up the seeds. Another good reason to grind the seeds is so when the seeds soak up the water and form a gel (seriously, Google “chia gel”) it will be in smaller bits. Combine with the lecithin and you want it in small bits.
There’s really a lot of cocoa powder in the recipe too. Coupled with the coconut and a 1/2 teaspoon of pure stevia that I added and you get that “mounds” flavor I mentioned in an earlier post. The black flecks are ground chia.
One of the pillars of a ketogenic diet is the fat/oil. This recipe calls for 39.4ml of oils per meal which is 24 pumps of my newer, larger (hand lotion) measuring pump I got from Wal-Mart for $2. I just measure the weekly amount of MCT oil and Canola oil and pour both into an empty canola oil bottle I had. That gets put into my measuring pump as the pump gets low.
I found that I need to let the ketofood sit for a few hours for best consistency so I’m trying to mix it up the night before:
- Grab 3 blender bottles and remove the mixing ball or mixing screen or whatever
- Zero out my 0.1g scale and measure 81.4g of mixed powder into each one
- Put 24 pumps of the oil I previously mixed onto the powder
- Fill up the blender bottles about 3/4 of the way with water
- Mix it up really well with an immersion blender (I got this one from Walmart)
- Stick it in the fridge for tomorrow
I guess a progress update is in order:
By the way, did you know that even if you don’t have a Withings scale you can freely run their app, manually enter your weight from a different scale and get the cool graphs? It’s much less convenient and doesn’t have the other measurements their scale does but it will send weight data to other fitness apps like Up, Runkeeper, MyFitnessPal, Fitbit and others so you only have to enter data once. They also offer exceptionally easy CSV import and export of your data which is why my log goes back to 2006.
