Hello!
I’ve just come across huel and the nutritional aspects look pretty decent, how ever I note that many people will feel like a full 4 meal liquid diet might be a goo way to start out.
My question is, similar to other full liquid diets, isn’t this bad for long term health? As the body needs something solid to digest from time to time?
Are most people just having 1-2 shakes followed by an evening meal?
Hi, welcome.
I spent a good deal of time looking int Huel before biting the bullet, I’ve tried a few liquid meal plans in the past but the difference here for me is that those other ones weren’t created for a sustainable diet whereas Huel seems to have everything you need to sustain a healthy balanced diet. So having only Huel and nothing else in theory is fine and there are people who do just that.
However, for most people, we’ll use Huel to replace a meal or two over the day. I started off with a regular breakfast, Huel lunch and regular dinner. I’ve since progressed to replace breakfast and lunch and will still have a regular dinner. On occasion when I’ve gone out I’ve replaced all three or planned a solid lunch.
The idea is you adapt Huel to your lifestyle. However, most will recommend to start off slowly replacing just one meal a day and see how you fee, if that works then progress onto more meals if you want
100% Huel is great. Made a big positive improvement on my health. The only thing you need to be careful with is to not go 100% out of the blue. Build it up slowly over a couple of weeks. Good luck!
Someone was on 100% huel for a year and felt his teeth were looser from lack of chewing (going from memory of posts read on this forum). So chewing gum is probably useful. But you can use huel to bake bread and so on, so in theory you can have an almost 100% huel diet without it being a 100% liquid diet.
Giving up solid food completely is difficult due to the social aspect of eating, and for weight loss it’s easier to stick to a diet if you can still have some of your favourite foods.
I live alone and started Huel just over a year ago. Within a couple of weeks I was up to 100% and only have the occasional sandwich on the odd occasion I’m away from home and feel my blood sugar dipping a bit (I have diabetes and HIV). Since I have a pretty sedentary lifestyle (forced to by neuropathy) I have about 1200 calories’ worth of Huel a day, topped up with nuts or bombay mix as snacks. I do, however, use frozen fruit or juice to flavour my Huel. I’m maintaining a pretty damn good blood glucose level, and as near as I can get to the rest of my bloods being average. So, no problem with 100%… besides, with plate food, if you’re chewing it, it’s a liquid mush by the time it hits your stomach anyway 
“My question is, similar to other full liquid diets, isn’t this bad for long term health? As the body needs something solid to digest from time to time?”
Why would this be? If you were chewing food properly and breaking down food in the mouth then wouldn’t each swallowed mouthful be a liquidy solution? There would only be something solid to digest if you swallowed it as such.
There is nothing in the ingredients list of Huel that if consumed in reasonable quantities over a long period of time would or should lead to any health issues. If anything with 100%, the fact you are consuming all of your daily needs will be beneficial and would likely eliminate any deficiencies over a period of time unless you have other medical issues that impact on that.
The most difficult part I think would be the mental side of living off Huel. I know when I’ve tried 100% for a couple of weeks I start to miss savoury food, spicy and solid foods. Savoury Huel just doesn’t work for me, I only really enjoy it when its Vanilla, or Vanilla mixed with coffee or Vanilla blended with fruit.
I drink huel 100% and I just feel fantastic all the time high energy brilliant mood not a single downside, except maybe farting in enclosed spaces can clean a room of its paint. But I go straight into 100% huel with no problems. No stomach problems at all. I’ve gone 2 months on it. Lost loads of weight easy and had no problems. But I think it’s easy for me, I’m not the biggest fan of food, I just over eat on the sweets, but going cold turkey from the sugar really helps aswel.
If you don’t have stomach problems there is t anything wrong with going full huel I really haven’t found any downsides. As someone mentioned just the social aspect of eating food to contend with.