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Except for the faint aftertaste of leather.

With effort, I think I could get used to collagen coffee.  Except for …

Seriously, I tried adding hydrolyzed collagen protein powder to my morning coffee.

I didn’t much like the results.

Edit:  A bit over a week later and I no longer have any ability to taste this in my morning coffee-with-a-spash-of-milk.  So, whatever it was that I found faintly objectionable, in this first taste of hydrolyzed collagen, in black coffee, it’s no longer an issue.   Unclear as to why.

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End of weight loss is not as fantasized.

You picture the end of a diet as being like … I don’t know — like filling a punchbowl with ice cream, and plunging your face in.

But that’s not reality.  Every diet has a “maintenance phase”.

For me, the end of weight loss has become a matter of fine-tuning my now-existing diet.  Tweaking the knobs a bit.

This is one such fine-tuning.  Tweaking my protein input, to try to help my joints recover faster from exercise.

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Easter Bunny, meet Tasteless Hydrolyzed Collagen.

Tasteless?  Nope.  Not quite.

The back story is that I’m going to try eating about an ounce a day of hydrolyzed collagen protein powder, hoping it will benefit my joints.  This, in response to a very slow recovery of those joints after a recent mountain day-hike.

In any case, as tested above, in coffee, I get a distinct “leather” aftertaste that is, unhappily, turning out to be difficult to disguise.

This, admittedly, from a sample, of a product.  And it was an acid test — big dose, straight up, in freshly brewed coffee.

I’m not sure how generic this issue is.  Rather than curse all such, I’m going to buy a jar of the top-shelf stuff from my local Vitamin Shoppe (not a sponsor).  So I will give this a retry with better stuff. After I eat my way through the five-pound bag of the stuff I just bought.  There’s a reason I am not allowed to enter Costco.

I side-by-side taste-tested my own coffee.  The Nescafe mug contains 10 grams hydrolyzed collagen, nicely dissolved in fresh coffee.  I compared the taste of this to the same coffee, unadulterated.

Blinding this — so I didn’t know which was which — would have done no good, because you can tell the coffee-plus-hydrolyzed-collagen from the mouth feel.  (The “silky” mouth feel is noted on the internet.  FWIW, it gives the same “throat-soothing” mouth feel as dense homemade chicken broth.

But back to taste.

The cup with the 10 gram (third-ounce) dose of hydrolyzed collagen protein powder had at the minimum, a faint aftertaste of … a badly-rinsed canteen, say.  Like you’d accidentally chewed on a piece of untanned leather.

It’s like you’d accidentally taken a bite on a piece of rawhide.  Maybe bit down on a rawhide lace to hold it taught temporarily.  And spat, say.  Maybe rinsed and spat.  But you inhaled through your nose soon after, and could still taste it.  Kind of like that.

Slightly mildewed rawhide.  Old canteen.  Along those lines.  Just a whiff.  Nothing that I particularly want in my coffee.

I tried disguising it with sweet chocolate, by adding a heaping teaspoon of chocolate whey protein from Costco.

It was a good try.  Definitely tasted better.

But that’s when I discovered that a chocolate taste, no matter how nice, does not cover up a lingering leather aftertaste. 

 

I got that cup down, but it was partly a chore.

It’s unclear what to do next.  Try to minimize it, try to get used to it, try it in some other format, try it at lower concentration.  Try it in some other liquids.  Try a different product.  Something.

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Do not underestimate the power of Mucilage

For added fun, hydrolyzed collagen protein powder is a mess to use.

Spilling this powder (hydrolyzed collagen) on your kitchen countertops is like dripping glue on them.  You’d like to get it up before it sets, and it smears when you try.

(I have already explained the fundamental stupidity of stone countertops, owing to stone being a high-surface-energy material, and thus sort of the anti-teflon of cooking surfaces.  See Post #1790 on Formica.  So I’m a bit sensitive to the issue of having bits o’ crap stuck to my kitchen countertops.)

Spills can result in hard patches of what is, essentially, mucilage.  Hide glue.  On your countertops.

Lovely.

So, where cleanup of spilled whey powder is a snap, you just don’t want to spill any of this hydrolyzed collagen powder on your countertop.  At all.  Not unless you enjoy scouring them to get what’s glued itself to the countertop, off.

It is for human consumption and all.  It has the aminos I’m looking for, for my joints.  (See prior post).

But from the standpoint of clean-up, it’s water-activated hide glue powder, with an open time of maybe five minutes. Get it moist, and first it turns to slime, then it sets like glue.

I don’t need that at 6AM.

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Conclusion

I’ve done my first head-to-head comparison between two animal-derived protein powders:  Whey and “hydrolyzed collagen”.

As I crudely understand this, the first (whey) is a waste product of the dairy industry, and the second, you just don’t wanna know where it comes from.  It’s made from waste products of the meat packing industry.

Admittedly, this was an acid test:  dissolved in my morning coffee.  And taste is subjective.  And it’s a first-time effort.

I’m going to call collagen coffee a fail, as noted above.  The product I used, at 10 grams in a cup of coffee, dissolved nicely in hot coffee, but was unpleasant due to its persistent aftertaste.

Separately, and not reported here, when I put some of that in literal chicken broth last night, I didn’t catch the leather after-taste.  So I’m sure I can find a way to eat it that won’t bother me.  Yet coffee would be ideal, because coffee is part of my daily routine. I suspect that if I can work this into my diet, it’ll be in savory soups (like chicken broth), or maybe with V8 juice.

Edit:  Second 10-gram dose of the day, in chicken broth, and the taste of the hydrolized collagen is not even remotely noticeable.  Whatever taste it has, it seems to blend in and get lost in the overwhelming umami of chicken broth. 

Second edit:  This stuff also seems to work OK with cold V-8 juice, at the rate of 10 grams of hydrolized collagen (a rounded cutlery teaspoon, plus a bit) to a 12 ounce glass of V8.  A bit of clumpage when merely mixed with a spoon, so this might require use of a frother or some such.  But it tastes fine, in the sense that I can’t taste it.

So, this new stuff — this broken down gelatin — if it doesn’t poison me, or disagree with me, or remind me of its origins in any way — this should work just fine, as a steady source of the amino acids I need to build joint-adjacent connective tissues.

It’s not a treat, the way the whey protein turned out to be.  But as long as I don’t put it in my coffee, I should be fine.

It’s also far from clear that I’ll be able to tell whether or not this helped, to any material degree.  I’ll have to take three equivalent mountain day-hikes this fall and see how badly my joints hurt afterward.

Finally, if this protein source doesn’t work out, I’m pretty sure I would get the same amino mix if I just ate Jell-O.  A whole lot of Jell-O.  An ounce of protein works out to more than three standard store packages of Jell-O, per day.  (A typical box of sugar-free gelatin weighs 0.3 ounces.)

Source:  https://swolverine.com/blogs/blog/whey-vs-beef-protein?srsltid=AfmBOoqBdkyF6MHbkEmPtHoLpWL_K6ROO9C_I_-VV3PJUda-SnUQiHn1

In any case, this stuff provides the aminos I’m looking for,  for my joints.  Or, if not this exact stuff, something very much like it.  And I now own a five-pound bag it.  It’s just going to take me a while to figure out how to eat it.

I had hoped that this new protein powder would be plug-and-play swapable with the whey protein powder that I already incorporate in my diet.  It’s not.  But it’s workable nevertheless.

By way of comparison, it was easy to incorporate whey protein powder in my diet.  The whey powder (which will always include emulsifiers) was a joy to use.  The chocolate-flavored whey powder from Costo is a plus in my morning coffee, despite needing to take care not to curdle it with the hot coffee.  It tastes just like coffee flavored with chocolate Ovaltine.  Separately, unflavored whey imparts no detectable taste to Jell-O sugarless instant chocolate pudding, which is then poured over frozen fruit, providing a full serving of protein in the form of a sweet treat. 

I should probably have some safety concerns, with this stuff.  As I said, you really don’t want to know what it’s made from.  But (e.g.) literal leather (cow skin) is certainly one of the likely initial sources.  Perhaps one of the less-unpleasant sources.  And yet, my guess is that that have to decompose (what is essentially) the impure gelatin that is the input, so hard, that any potentially harmful proteins (e.g., mad-cow prions) should be destroyed in the process.  Kind of ultra-ultra-pasturized.   I should probably look into that more before I get all gung-ho about this.

 

I weighed 185 this morning.

For the first time since high school, I’m not overweight.  I have reached normal weight, based on my body mass index (BMI).   No drugs involved, just diet and exercise.

Even as recently as last year, I thought this was an impossible goal.  I was more-than-satisfied with the results when I finally made it to “overweight”, rather than “obese”.

But “normal”?  Not in my wildest dreams.

And now that I’ve made it, it’s kind of an anticlimax, really.  As I explain below.

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Let’s just get all the standard successful-weight-loss stuff out of the way.

Based on what I see on the internet, I have to start this post by crowing about my weight loss in as many ways as possible.  Show some pictures of me holding up some now-comically-large clothing.  Maybe some side-by-sides of obese-me versus normal-me.

Skip that.

I’ve lost 100 pounds, from 285 to 185.  I’ve lost a foot off my waist, from 46″ to 34″.  I don’t think I need to belabor it.

This resulted in all the changes you might expect, and then some.

I’ve lost enough weight that I’ve had to adjust not just my clothing size, but a bunch of other things, as detailed in my prior posts on weight loss.  Shoes.  Eyeglasses.  Bed.  Patio furniture.  I hit another one just yesterday:  I’ve lost so much weight, I’ve had to reset the suspension on my bike.  I thought the air shock suspension on the bike had gone flat.  To the contrary, it’s just way too stiff, having been set for a guy who weighed 100 pounds more than me.

Turns out, there’s a lot of stuff in your life that conforms to how fat you are, and it takes quite a while to find it all, once you’ve lost the fat.

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Surprisingly not difficult

I’m also supposed to belabor the struggle, how difficult things got as I got thinner, and on and on.  Those awful weight plateaus, and the effort it took to break through them.  As if it took some sort of super-human willpower to get through this.

But that just didn’t happen.   As you can see above, the weight came off almost like clockwork.  Even now, I’m pretty sure I could just continue losing weight until I starved myself to death.  The point being that nothing about my body’s reaction to weight loss did anything to stop further weight loss.

That’s not to say that this was costless or effortless.  I have, in fact, changed more-or-less everything about what and how I eat.  Put up with some hunger.  Had some bad days.  And so on.

But the facts are that:

• I proceeded slowly.  I didn’t try to jump into some all-new lifestyle.
• I changed my diet initially merely by addressing my worst bad habits, starting with alcoholism, and working down from there.
• I monitored the results and adjusted as necessary.
• As my diet changed, my cravings faded, and my sense of hunger faded.
• And, eventually, I settled on:
  • a modest 500-calorie-per-day deficit,
  • eating nothing but small meals and snacks throughout the day,
  • eating no (or nearly no) starch, “empty calories”, junk food, fast food, or takeout food.

The fact is, although I started off merely trying to achieve sobriety, I ended up with an almost-completely-conventional weight loss program.

In the end, I aimed for very slow weight loss (5 pounds a month).  The theory is that this prevents your body from over-reacting to the calorie restrictions.  And, near as I can tell, that worked.

I eat a ridiculously healthful diet, but not by choice.  Turns out, if you restrict your calories, and you want to meet your RDAs for nutrients, you have no choice but to eat high-nutrient-density foods.  Just as a matter of arithmetic.

In other words, restricting my calories, by itself, resulted in big improvements in the quality of my diet.  I could not meet RDA targets for nutrient and continue to eat empty calories (e.g., pasta).  As a result, one decision at a time, all the empty calories (e.g., potato chips) get slowly squeezed out of the diet, in favor of your classic fruit, vegetables, fish, lean meat, nuts.

I’ve had to resort to whey protein powder as a protein source.  Otherwise, to meet a dietary protein standard (1 gram per kilogram body weight, per day), I’d have ended up eating nothing but meat, all day long.  Whey protein gives you high-quality protein for the fewest possible calories.

Otherwise, I eat what I want.  For example, I put high-fat blue cheese dressing on my salads.  Why?  Because I like it.  Every piece of diet advice says to use vinegar or some other no-cal salad dressing.  But without the fat, my body simply does not register salad greens as food.  So I eat high-fat salads.   So sue me.

Under my weight loss plan, any food is fine, as long as three things happen:

• I stay within my daily total calorie limit.
• The food is not a high-glycemic-index food or otherwise stimulates hunger.
• The food is not “empty calories” (except possibly in small amounts).

Separately, regular exercise, properly timed, has two direct and obvious benefits. 

• Sure, it burns some calories.
• But, it also temporarily kills your appetite, and takes up time that you can’t spend eating, or thinking about eating.

Every other day, my wife and I hit the gym mid-morning.  The principal advantage of mid-morning exercise is that it resets that day’s “diet clock”.  We’ll get back from the gym around lunch time, and at that point, my combined diet-and-exercise calorie total for the day is negative.  I won’t hit “break even” until about 2 PM.  And so, in effect, I get to eat a day’s worth of food, in the last eight or so hours in the day.  Plus, being able to eat a bit more, on gym days, is a great incentive to get to the gym.

Finally, the only big downside, so far, is that I have a wrinkly tummy.  (And probably ass, but I can’t see that in the mirror, so I don’t much care.)  Wrinkly enough that it looks weird.  I’ll wear a rash guard when I go swimming, and that’ll cover that.

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What’s next?

Not much.  That’s what makes this such an anti-climax.

Now that my weight should be stable for a while, I’m going to buy some summer clothes.

I’ll eat maybe another 500 calories a day.

That’s about it.

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Conclusion

My unshakeable conclusion is that more-or-less all the standard, mainstream diet advice — such as you might get from a physician or other medical professional — is correct.

Don’t:  Be an habitual drunk, eat junk food, eat empty starch calories, eat without limit, be sedentary, eat large amounts of sugars, starches, and other high-glycemic-index foods.

Do:  Eat high-nutrient-density foods, subject to a calorie limit, and get regular exercise.

That’s boring advice.

But sometimes boring is good.