Nursing Tips

We've recently become parents and my wife has been having a lot of pain breast-feeding. I think we've finally started getting the hang of it, though, so I wanted to share what's been most helpful for us:

• Danielle Gauss' post, 7 steps to latch your baby, finally started us moving in the right direction. It's well worth a read if you're having problems. Specifically, we were having these two problems:
• We weren't keeping our baby high enough. It's recommended to bring the baby up to the lower part of the breast for feeding.
• We weren't keeping baby chest-to-chest with Mom. Instead he was rolling onto his back.

These two fixes have make the baby's latches significantly better. And now that Mom has experienced "better" latches, she is becoming more comfortable removing him and re-latching when the latch is poor.

We're still having some problems where he'll bite down when de-latching. But simply getting the first steps of less painful latches and suckles has been a tremendous improvement.

Eight Months on Hacker School Soylent

I've been drinking Hacker School Soylent twice daily for over eight months now (with some breaks for holidays and vacation.) This is a collection of recent thoughts on my journey:

Weight Loss

I've now lost about 20 pounds with the combination of increasing my daily activity and drinking soylent twice daily. Most exciting to me is that I'm only about 6 pounds away from an obese BMI to an overweight BMI. I expect to be "only" overweight by the start of July.

I still attribute my weight loss to the fitbit more than the soylent, though they work well together. The fitbit has helped me pay daily attention to my activity level and walk towards a daily goal (which I've just increased to 16,000 daily steps.) I've also found that I really do have to keep a food log and at least estimate the number of calories I'm consuming. Any time I try to just "eat well" I fail. When I actually write it down I am much more likely to keep under my daily goal. (Or at least not go 1000's of calories over.)

Soylent is Shipping

I'm excited that the official version of Soylent is finally shipping. After they're caught up on shipping, I plan on ordering some and using it as a different flavor to my variation of Hacker School Soylent.

I am surprised, though, that I'm not actually tired of Hacker School Soylent. In fact, on a recent vacation where I stopped drinking soylent for almost a week, I found that I was really looking forward to getting back to it. I suspect this is the side-benefits of soylent over the flavor and texture. But those things remain just fine, too.

Amazon's Subscribe and Save

Amazon's Subscribe and Save is surprisingly annoying. I'm disappointed with how frequently items just drop off of the service and how frequently they can't be fulfilled. Now where's that "Shut Up and Take My Money" picture of Fry when I need it?

Speaking of which, I should probably update the unmodified copy of Hacker School Soylent I put up on diy.soylent.me to reflect what Amazon can actually sell...

Snacking Before Bed

I have a CPAP machine to address sleep apnea. The neat thing about the device is that I get high-quality information about how frequently I stop breathing during the middle of the night. Apneas are generally classified as obstructive, where the throat collapses on itself and air can't get through the throat, and central, where the person doesn't even bother trying to breathe. I have some of each throughout the night.

I am finding that I have fewer central apneas when I have a large snack before bed. If I eat around 400 calories just before I brush my teeth, I tend to have fewer apneas than if I eat 200 calories before brushing, and still fewer than if I eat nothing just before brushing.

I don't have an explanation yet, and I'm still investigating the accuracy of the correlation, but for me pre-bed snacking really seems to be helpful.

Everybody Poops

I think I bring up poop every time I post, but I am just so happy about it. The one benefit of soylent that I've enjoyed more than any other is that my movements have changed from a 5 or 6 on the Bristol stool scale to being pretty consistently 4's. 4's are wonderful. They're not worrisome. I have found that, even the week that I was on real food for 3-meals a day, I still mostly had 4's and didn't creep back up towards the 6 territory. Honestly, I think this makes me more happy than the weight loss.

Six Months on Hacker School Soylent

A couple of thoughts after drinking Hacker School Soylent twice daily for six months straight (with one or two short breaks for holidays and vacation):

Soylent isn't a panacea. Six months on the Hacker School variety hasn't supercharged my brain, increased my virility, nor given me six-pack abs. But, to me, it seems like it can be a helpful aid on the way to some of those goals.

Weight Loss

I've started to lose weight. It's not because of the soylent, though. More than anything, it's because I bought a fitbit one and am now obsessed with watching my step count every day. (My daily goal is 14,000 steps.) But part of weight loss, at least the way I'm doing it, is watching calorie intake. And soylent makes that very, very easy.

Since two meals a day are soylent, I only have to pay attention to my snacks and dinner calories. And I can be certain that, regardless of what I eat during my non-soylent meals, I've gotten at least 2/3 of my daily requirements of all vitamins and minerals. I may not always eat what I should for dinner, but at least my breakfast and lunch were fairly nutritions and in-line with my caloric goals.

For weight loss, the fewer things I have to pay attention to, the more likely I am to stick with a plan. I know that I could use CRON techniques to work on my calorie and nutrition requirements. But that's work. Soylent is easy.

Formula Experimentation Has Consequences

While soylent isn't a cure-all, there is one change in my body that I can definitely attribute to it: my poops have improved. Before I started soylent I tended to have poops that were a 5 or 6 on the Bristol stool scale. Now I have mostly 4's. This is vastly more pleasant and one of the biggest reasons that I stick with soylent each day.

I have noticed that any time I change my recipe I always have a few days of... intestinal unease. For me it has been best to stop experimenting and just stick with one recipe.

Genetic Soylent Does Ratios

I've just pushed code to github to support comparison of ratios of nutrients. You will find the data at the bottom of the middle column.

The defaults are the optimal ratios discussed here, but as with other nutrients, you can modify them based on your own theories and beliefs.

Some recipes to play with:

http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=2potatoes-hacker-school-not-modified
http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=simplecheapvegannosoy-soylent-low-carb
http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=donals-complete-soylent-sedentary-1800

Daily Update: October 8, 2013

Weight: 226 lbs.

Servings of Hacker School Soylent: 2

Real Food Meals

Health Rating: 2
Chicken stuffed with broccoli

Hunger

Hunger Craving Rating: 2
Very snacky towards the end of the day.

Bowel

Bristol Stool Scale: 4.5
Two 4s, two 5s

Notes

Emotional Rating: 3

Genetic Soylent Can Now Optimize Cost

I just pushed an update to github that treats daily cost as yet another nutrient for genetic soylent recipes. You can use this to help minimize the cost of your recipe (or, I suppose, to help maximize the cost of your recipe if you want some Soylent Bling.)

A few thoughts:

• Remember that if the cost falls anywhere between the minimum and maximum value for the nutrient that it is scored the same--as 0 deviance. If you want to get the cheapest soylent possible, set the maximum value lower than you'd like to pay and the genetic algorithm will prefer to lower the value whenever possible.
• I recommend setting the priority on the cost "nutrient" down to .3 or .1 as a way of telling the algorithm that, all-other-things-being-equal, you'd prefer a cheaper soylent. The priority is a multiplier for the cost function, so a value of .1 means that you'd rather have less than a 1 unit difference in a nutrient than a $0.10 difference in cost.

Some recipes to play with:

http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=2potatoes-hacker-school-not-modified
http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=simplecheapvegannosoy-soylent-low-carb
http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=donals-complete-soylent-sedentary-1800

Daily Update: October 7, 2013

Weight: 225 lbs.

Servings of Hacker School Soylent: 2

Real Food Meals

Health Rating: 4
Ravioli and Asparagus

Hunger

Hunger Craving Rating: 2
I was a bit bitey today. Not terrible, but I snacked more than I would have liked.

Bowel

Bristol Stool Scale: 4
All 4s

Notes

Emotional Rating: 3

Daily Update: October 6, 2013

Weight: 228 lbs.

Servings of Hacker School Soylent: 2

Real Food Meals

Health Rating: 4
Dumplings and rice

Hunger

Hunger Craving Rating: 1
Low, and I did only healthy snacking.

Bowel

Bristol Stool Scale: 4.75
Two 4s, a 5 and a 6

Notes

Emotional Rating: 4
It was a bad week at work, which led to a lot of emotional overeating. Hopefully this week will be better.

Loading your recipe from diy.soylent.me

Those interested can now use a link to directly load a recipe for testing to play with the genetic soylent algorithm.

To create a link that will load your recipe do the following:

1. Go to your recipe on diy.soylent.me.
2. When you are on your recipe's page, the url bar of your web browser will be: http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/[recipe name]
3. Copy the [recipe name]
4. Append it after the following: http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=[recipe name]

A correct link will look like these:

• http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent?recipe=2potatoes-hacker-school-not-modified
• http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=super-food
• http://2potatoes.github.io/genetic-soylent/?recipe=minimal-price-recipe

Fun.

Daily Update: October 1, 2013

Weight: 225 lbs.

Servings of Hacker School Soylent: 2

Real Food Meals

Health Rating: 3
Chicken stuffed with broccoli

Hunger

Hunger Craving Rating: 1
Low. A bit hungry right before bed, but a piece of bread took care of that.

Bowel

Bristol Stool Scale: 4.25
three 4s and a 5

Notes

Emotional Rating: 4
I love normal days.