To put it simply, I hate cooking, cleaning up, food shopping, and don’t enjoy the act of eating that much. So Huel seemed like a very good option.
I wanted to see how my body would manage on 100% with a blood test before and after to show results.
Me
Age: 25
Sex: Male
Height: Short at 166cm
Start Weight: 64kg
End Weight: ??
Job: Sat in office 9am-6pm
Exercise: Cycle 2.5mile each way to work, 5 days week. Before starting huel I started German Volume Training (not the best idea) – so working out 3 times a week.
Eating before Huel: Prior to this I ate heathyish, 3-5 veg a day and different variations of chicken most evenings and about take away/eating out about once every week. Also love sweets / Haribo.
How much Huel
To make some things more searchable for people, I create another post on this here as I suffered a little. I have not touched a solid bit of food at all, not even a hula-hoop.
Leading up to day one I had Huel 1/2 times a day to ease my body into it.
Day 1-6 = 4 shakes (3 scoops) -> 2000 calories
Day 7-11 = 5 shakes (3 scoops) -> 2500 calories.
Day 12 -15 = 6 shakes (3 scoops) -> 3000 calories (problematic)
Day 16-17 = 5 shakes (3 scoops) -> 2500 calories.
Blood Tests
Got a private basic blood test from Medicheck (not affiliated). They do a home kit, which to put short was a bloody nightmare, and ended up in me pricking my fingers 16 times with large clickers. Seems that I have stubborn blood. The second test will be done by a nurse to avoid this.
Firstly I should point out when doing the first blood test, my blood clotted. Therefore when I got the results half of the things I wanted to see differences in, required another test. Unfortunately by the time I received these results I was over 1 week in and did not want to start again. Therefore we can only really look at the differences in the data the blood test collected.
These are the first results (will post ending results after completion). There is not a great deal to mention about this until we get the other results to compare to. It is obviously extremely annoying that my blood clotted and this will not find as much as originally hoped, but I wanted to share regardless.
One thing to note is my fasting blood glucose. I wrote another post here to explain why this is important for me and maybe other people who have found they fit into the ‘pre-diabetic’ category.
Alcohol
I am young, outgoing and like to have a drink or 5 at the weekend. Because I was doing a blood test based on how Huel affected me, I didn’t want to change anything that I would normally do. If I stopped drinking this may have affected my results because of that and not Huel. In an ideal world I would have not drank for a month before then started this, but I love going out so that didn’t happen.
I have been drinking 1 evening a week (Friday/Saturday) for the month.
Experience
DAY 17: Everything offered, in my eyes, from Huel is positive. Reducing waste, cooking/cleaning time and enabling a controlled healthy diet in a non controlled society. 17 days in right now and I would say we currently love hate relationship. My ability to smell as massively increased (suffer with a lot allergies to day to day stuff), but I cannot specifically say what or how this has changed, I just have a completely sniff-free nose! This is fantastic, as I have always suffered from Allergic rhinitis. However, this is turn makes my journey even harder. Sharing a house with 6 others, I now constantly smell incredible curries and other fantastic smelling foods. This doesn’t just apply to food, but to bad things like BO / Feet / morning breath as well. Either way, this is a massive positive for me.
DAY 17: Doing 100% liquid diet seems very foreign to us. But I have noticed my junk food cravings die off (about 1 week in). I think there is a lot of bad stigma around the “not chewing” rubbish that people excuse themselves from doing stuff like this. I have not once missed the act of chewing, if you do get some gum!
DAY 17: Throughout the week I find Huel so practical. Breakfast – Done, snack between lunch – Done, Lunch – Done…. Where I have struggled so far is weekends and the social side to eating. Its made me realise how much we structure our lives and time around eating and breaks. I have noticed I/we plan so many social events around eating and this is the hardest thing for me.
Hopefully this has helped someone take the plunge or motivate them to keep going. I will continue to update and obviously post the blood tests I get at the end when I get them, regardless of the results. Thanks to the guys to Huel for producing this, I really feel this has changed the way I look at food.