Tag: yogurt

Diet Fail 2019 – Day 10: I Failed as Expected – But Look at This Yogurt!

OK – everybody’s got ‘stuff’ they have to deal with. If you want to avoid this:

  1. Don’t love of care about anyone
  2. Sell all your possessions
  3. Move out of your house / condo / apartment
  4. Live on a mountaintop

Or be this guy. He’s probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s (as far as I know at present) homeless, has one bag of possessions, and sleeps on friend’s couches.

Like Thoreau, it’s kinda not real. Thoreau also talked about living a simple life, but as I understand it, Walden was not far from his perhaps not rich but comfortable family’s home (they made pencils, if I recall correctly). At any time, he could have called it quits and gone back to the Real World. Same as the guy above. At any time he can give up his minimalism, buy a mansion and a yacht, and be done with his couch surfing.

Most of us don’t have this luxury.

We’ve built lives step-by-step and for most of us, riches do not appear. People came into our lives and we allowed ourselves to love them, though love almost always leads to heartbreak in some form. For some of us our love created new people who will always break our hearts as they grow up and grow away as they must to become their own persons. The great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said that a child’s love is the most tragic as it must always fade or the child becomes a cripple of sorts – a Norman Bates. It does not mean they stop loving their parents, but that golden time where Mom and Dad were their entire world must pass as they grow and we are revealed as human and fallible.

We invested our time in careers and the money that came from that work into possessions, experiences, and investments. Most of the possessions seem of much less value after owning them than before. The experiences fade from memory and become a series of photos that form some narrative that provides glimpses of the truth – or just provide an image from the past with no memory at all. Our investments are a hope for our future but can disappear in an instant as the future holds no certainties for those of us that inhabit the middle class.

So I failed because ‘reasons’. I haven’t given up, I’ve just had a setback. I’m not going anywhere – I’ve been here – failing – since 2007.

But let me tell you about my latest batch of yogurt!

It was done today and – wow – what a beautiful batch! People who make this yogurt often complain about it being watery. Take a look at this pic:

This is how thick the yogurt comes out

My aged yogurt used as the starter after more than a dozen batches still got the goods and made a fine, beautiful batch.

Now, when I get back on my diet, it’s waiting.

Instant Pot L. Reuteri Yogurt – The Exact Instructions

This is how thick the yogurt comes out

(Note: this post contains links to products I used. I DO NOT make any money off these links. Buy ’em – don’t buy ’em – I don’t care.)

UPDATED 08/13/19 with a few more tips.

The big first tip: It’s really easy to make once you get the hang of it! I make it sound awful but when you take the time to get it right the first time, it’s easy after that.

I have read Dr. William Davis’ Undoctored and decided to finally take the plunge and go the full monte. In a nutshell, he recommends a ketogenic-ish diet and specific supplementation so it’s not far from my usual attempt. It’s a ‘clean keto’ where grains are prohibited as well as artificial stuff. I think it is well thought out and I like how he presents it: as a cardiologist, he sticks to science and where he prescribes a certain course of action that might not be accepted science, he notes that his approach is experimental and as new information comes in he will refine his approach.

That’s the kind of scientific thinking I like to see. I don’t take is as he’s pushing snake oil as much as he’s saying: “Try this. It might work for you and it’s unlikely to harm you. Let me know your results and I’ll continue to refine my protocol.”

Alas, it is a fussy diet in that the doc states it must be followed in full to get the synergistic benefits – doing it only halfway gets you far less than half the benefits.

One of the trickier aspects – at least to me – is you have to make what I call his ‘magic yogurt’. Even Dr. Davis refers to this as ‘wacky’ in one of his videos. I’d even say it sounds ‘quacky’ given all the benefits he attributes to it (you can read them here). I have no idea if the stuff actually does anything or if Dr. Davis is full of shit, but I don’t think so – at least I believe *he* sincerely believes it helps – and I’m up for a new experiment.

This was the one part of the diet that I waited until now to try. I started the  diet 15 days ago and have been dialing in all the different parts. The yogurt is the last piece, I think.

To me, the instructions to make the stuff I found on the Internet were vague and a lot of people were spending a lot of time to fail at the attempt and throw out batch after batch. I did a lot of Google searches, came across recipes that didn’t provide me the details I wanted, and even did a chat with Instant Pot which yielded little help.

The problems with the instructions are that they try to cover too many different scenarios. I found it confusing (maybe I’m stupid).

This week I took the plunge and made the yogurt. I’m detailing here the EXACT steps I took for my own records and thought I’d share.

Continue reading “Instant Pot L. Reuteri Yogurt – The Exact Instructions” →