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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion
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I tried that. It didn't work. If you have something specific to recommend that can replace meals instead of Soylent, speak up.
Go to a pharmacy and ask about a complete liquid diet for someone who had jaw surgery? They should have stuff that's pretty much Soylent, but more expensive and designed and tested by experts.
Yup, and the magic search keywords here seem to be "total diet replacement".
A quick & dirty Google search returns a recent paper, which lists Optifast, KicStart, and Optislim as brands "packaged and marketed as very-low-energy diets (VLED), defined as total dietary replacement with FMR [formulated meal replacements]". The "Price per serve" of those brands, incidentally, is given as 1.87 to 2.99 AUD in table 1.
They also seem to be intended for weight loss, so you might want to augment your calories with normal, high-energy foods. Or maybe you can double up on servings, I dunno.
Edit: amusingly, all of these mixtures made by the pros also seem to be deficient in various nutrients. Most of the VLED brands don't meet a "recommended dietary intake" or "adequate intake" baseline for protein, calcium, phosphorus, potassium or magnesium. Maybe you should nosh on some chicken, bananas, and a daily mineral supplement too?
I'm going to recommend something less specific-- researching what's going on with your metabolism, instead of trying things that seem to work for some fraction of other people.
Can you be more specific? How does one do that? Daily blood tests or something, and acquiring the knowledge to know what to measure and what it means?
These are some fast guesses-- my impression is that it can take years [1] to track down this sort of thing. Also, I don't know how much of this has already been done.
Start with five minutes thought. What does Eliezer know about his symptoms? Can anything be deduced by mulling over them?
I'd start with poking around to find out whether other people have the same pattern of symptoms. Does it have a medical name? What does medical research say about what works? What do people say about what works? Do the symptoms ever become better or worse? Does this correlate with something that could be experimented with?
Hire MetaMed, but also look for anecdotal information.
Exercise might be bad for some people.
I'm going to recommend some caution about experiments-- so far as I know, Eliezer has fairly good health. He's got some energy problems, an inability to lose weight, reacts very badly to missing a meal, and doesn't get any good from exercise. There's a lot of room for making things worse.
I'm in substantial agreement with this, but I do think the bad reaction to missing a meal is enough to be of at least a little concern. On the other hand, the cultural issues around fat are weird and extreme enough that it could explain the lack of thought that's gone into Eliezer's efforts to lose weight.
[1] Something in the neighborhood of 2 years or more for people who report success. Original research takes time.
Testosterone supplements should help with most of these issues.
Maybe. Blood tests first. And possibly research second.
Could you be more speciifc? (In particular with respect to macronutrient ratios, and whether you've ever been in ketosis and confirmed it with a blood or urine test.) I have a strong prior against people having tried all the things, even if they've tried to try them, since some of the strategies are easy to do incorrectly without realizing it.
Total meal replacement shakes exist, although I have no idea about pricing. However, going down this route is basically ensuring sub-optimal nutrition. We know a ton about nutrition, but not enough to have an optimal diet without food.
Very nearly every other diet is also sub-optimal. Most of them are quite probably worse than what we can do via supplementation.
I looked at what's available in Finnish pharmacies, and they seem to be in the $20 a day ballpark mentioned elsewhere in the thread if you aren't going to eat anything else.
I believe you can live off Boost for an indefinite period of time.