100% Huel for 1 month - Blood Tests, experience & results

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.

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Thanks for that story. It really mirrors my own experience. It would be really interesting to see the results of the second test.

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Good info - thanks. Look forward to other updates

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Hi Oli

I’d really love to know what happened at the end of the story? Did you last the month and get the blood results - I’m currently on 100% huel trying to beat a Diabetes diagnosis (mainly via weight loss and carb/sugar reduction mixed with exercise and dark chocolate) and reading your story has been helpful

I never updated this in the end.

I did the full 30days without food and did the blood test after, which I will share later as I dont have a scanner at home. Everything in the blood test was healthier after 30 days of huel. So I can say it was a success.

Here is a picture of me eating my first bit of food:
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What happened between day 17 to day 30?
I stayed at 2500 calories and had to stop working out. I started adding coffee powder in the morning to make it taste nicer. There was not much change really. My energy levels where absolutely fine, apart from working out. Taste wise, I was happy with the vanilla. It didnt really get boring, but I can eat the same meal everyday for a week and it doesn’t really phase me.

What did I learn?
The hardest thing for me was the social side. I am 27 now and a lot of social gathers are around food and drink. If you head out for the day, at some point your going to have to get food and this is were this experiment was hard. I feel Huel is fantastic as 50-75% of your food. Personally I don’t care what I eat for breakfast, lunch but sometimes I do want to head out for dinner or I want to make something nice. So this works perfect.

Cost
I live in London, going to get sandwiches and crips at lunch is at least £4-5 and they are full of sugar. Huel is sub £2 and its actually nutritious. It’s changed the way I eat lunch.

Did I lose weight?
Yes. I never planned or wanted to. I made my way up to 3000 calories (see the post here for why that was a bad idea), and then had to go back down to 2500. I did have to stop working out while doing this. It made me lightheaded and I was weak. I tried this about 5 times and everytime it was the same so I am pretty sure it was down to the 100% huel. I lost 5kg in 30 days. Because I stopped working out, some weight loss could have come through losing muscle but a lot of friends were commenting about how much skinner my face and neck looked. I would be interested in knowing if this has anything to do with it being a liquid diet?

Would I do it again?
This was an experiment and I can only assume Huel are not making this product to be consumed 100% of your meals so the aim here was not to see if I could convert to 100% Huel, but more to see the effect on my body. I could do this again, but I would probably not. Would I recommend it? For people looking for a change in lifestyle or a reboot, then 100%, it was hard work but it was something challenging to do for yourself.

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Do I still take Huel 2 years on?
Yep. I have been taking it ever since. Literally with no breaks. I normally take:
2 scoops for breakfast (with coffee)
3 scoops mid morning

I hope this update has helped someone even though its 2 years late haha.

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Grrrrr why do people use the verb “take” in the context of consuming Huel?! You’re EATing Huel, HUEL IS FOOD.

Other than that, really interesting to see healthier bloods. The weight loss is odd. Losing weight at 166cm is baffling as I’d guess your TDEE is somewhere around 2500 as is. Water weight maybe?

I’d be interested to get my own bloods done, been eating Huel for a couple of years now, maybe 50% of my food intake.

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Are you not DRINKing Huel? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Damn, played at my own game… :frowning: I guess you’re right :frowning:

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Nah man, not played, PLAYED :grin:

What happened with the farts and toilet troubles?

Did they go away once you dropped down to 2,000 calories of Huel per day?

CONSUMED?

Any better? No…? OK I’ll see myself out. :wink:

Thanks for the update. Really interesting to read that.

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