It does have some amount of choline.
I've been "eating" Soylent for over a month now, however I have not completely eliminated food. 40% of the days I have only Soylent (Usually work days), 50% of them I have one meal with Soylent for the other 2/3 of my day, and around 10% of my days I forego the Soylent altogether (Usually because I forgot to mix a batch the night before, it's too gritty to consume immediately after mixing).
Suffice it to say that I feel AWESOME. The only times I feel fatigued, sluggish, or slow-minded are when I've downed a fat cheeseburger or something equally fatty. I used to feel like that all the time. Most of the time I am overflowing with energy and although I still enjoy doing a bit of absolutely nothing at times, I've been extremely productive.
Food also tastes amazing after I've had only Soylent for > 24 hours.
Edit: Also forgot to mention I no longer consume caffeine on a daily basis. I used to feel like I had to have it to function and because of this I had tried to stop drinking caffeine many times, unsuccessfully. After I started using Soylent, it's almost like I forgot about caffeine because I have no need of it.
Nice, thanks for the review!
I am unable to do soylent due to (ridiculous) food allergies, so I went an alternative route: Fruitarian. It's a surprisingly similar idea. You can still eat regular food, but you don't do fruit afterwards (fruit digests in 20 minutes, cooked food in 2 hours - you get horrific gas if you consume a lot of fruit following a cooked-food meal). You can do 100% fruit or fruit during the day & then a regular dinner at night. Well, almost 100% fruit - most people follow a raw vegan version that includes dark leafy greens, seeds, and nuts to get some extra nutrients in (iron, good fats, etc.). Plus there's a lot of fruits that people generally don't realize are fruits - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc., stuff that you can make a decent salad with.
I can tell you I've
never felt better on any other meal plan in my life. I did it consistently for nearly 2 months. You get an amazing amount of physical energy & clarity of mind. Exercise recovery times are incredible, faster than any other diet I've tried. It's super easy to follow as well, since you never cook anything - the most you do is blend fruit up into a smoothie to consume it faster. The core idea stems from the 80-10-10 diet: (80% carbs, 10% fat, 10% protein)
http://foodnsport.com/index.php
It
is a large amount of fruit, but it's pretty easy to do. The key is to manage your fruit inventory and to eat fruit when it's ripe. You can freeze some if you want to shop less. For example, a lot of fruitarians consume about 20 bananas a day, which sounds ridiculous, but when you blend it up, that's basically 2 large smoothies. So pretty much just a couple of large protein shakes a day (that's about 13 grams of protein each, which is 5 times as much as you need to survive), not really any different than your standard bodybuilding diet, plus some other fruit for the meals. I did a lot of fresh dates and mangos as well. Fresh dates are amazing, I had no idea fruit could be that good! Plus there's an enormous variety of fruits out there, something like 2,000 different kinds of fruit from what I've read, and then different varieties within a type of fruit (there's over 7,500 different kinds of apples, for example). Fresh dates was new territory for me; it was amazing just how different each variety tasted - deglet noors, black sphinx, medjools, etc. Here's a basic list of fruits on Wikipedia; we eat a pretty small sub-set of those in the U.S.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_fruits
Fruit goes through your body really quickly; you have one or two bowel movements a day on this diet. I think that's one of the biggest things I've learned about my body with this style of eating - how much food in your gut affects how you feel & your energy levels. I mean, ever since I got into H&F five or six years ago, I've been eating fairly healthy, so it's not like I live on a junk food diet anymore, but eating 100% unprocessed, raw, natural foods is just amazingly
different feeling. You never feel weighed down at all; again, not that I really did before on a healthy-food diet, but it's like taking off your shoes & socks at the end of the day - just a much lighter feeling of freedom, you know?
There are some downsides. First all of, it's not super socially-acceptable - most people don't sit down to a large meal of fruit when they go out to eat. I already have severe food allergies, so this was a non-issue for me. Second, it can get repetitive. I love food and eating fruit every day, especially stuff like bananas, can get old. Third, I like cooking & hot food. Plus you miss out on vitamin B12 by not eating meat, so my philosophy is that if you're not a vegan for ethical reasons, but want to do the fruitarian diet, just have a steak or burger once in awhile when you feel like it. Also, although it's a lean diet, it's not really a "diet" in the sense that you're going to lose weight - my weight stayed pretty much the same the entire time I was following it. You do need to eat a lot more calories on a fruit-only; they recommend something like 3,000 calories a day for an adult meal, so it is a lot more food than normal. But it's not a crazy amount...like a meal of say 10 mangos is 2,000 calories, but once you cut it up, it's pretty much just a large bowl of sliced mango that you can eat pretty fast.
So while it's not a powder like soylent is, it's similar in that you're just eating one thing (fruit) and getting a lot of nutrients packed into it, with no real food prep to worry about. You can literally eat everything raw (apples, bananas, mangos, dates, pears, watermelon, berries, etc.). It's not for everyone, but if you like to experiment with food, give it a try. It takes about three days to clear your system out completely, so if you're going to try it, give it at least a week to let your body adapt to it. There are no issues with the high amounts of carbs or sugars since fruit is generally low in fat & high in fiber (the sugar doesn't absorb fast & moves quickly through your bloodstream), so it's fine for diabetics & other people with blood-sugar issues (there are some resources & books on it, if you're interested in that).
So it sounds extreme, but in practice, it's not really extreme...kind of like soylent. When people tell me they start out their day with sugar & caffeine (donuts & coffee), then eat highly processed, high-fat lunch with a large amount of refined sugar (bacon double cheeseburger at McDonald's for lunch with a large Coke), etc., and then question the validity of a high-nutrient diet like soylent or fruitarian, it kind of makes me laugh because both of those are a step up from what a lot of people eat on a regular basis. But I'm just as addicted to junk food as anyone else, so pass the bacon & Oreos! :awe: