So just a brief introduction here, I am an IT guy and I lead that life of being awake for 20 hours a day and sitting in front of a screen. I rarely move around other than between windows…
For the last 5+ years my diet has consisted of very few things primarily pork sausages, red bull and anything that would fit in a tortilla to be wrapped up for quick consumption. I have always favoured red meats and high protein foods e.g would think nothing of eating 12 boiled eggs in a single sitting or a whole chicken. Resulting weight is around 120 kilos which at 5ft 7 is pretty heavy. Now far be it for me to be boastful over this however despite my weight and general unhealthy life style I am damn near indestructible health wise never ill and I can pretty much bench press my car despite never going to the gym. I have always put this down to my genes.
At a recent GP visit where they told me for the lord knows how manyeth time I should probably be dead already and was a high risk of diabetes and etc etc (the usual I have heard for 4 years +) I decided to have a look for a solution and found Huel.
So ordered last week was step one and post listening to many comments on here decided to go for the ease in approach. I started with replacing one meal and then replaced another so breakfast and lunch. I have successfully it seems made that transition and aside from one monster fart at which point our cat left home, assumedly propelled by the noxious gas cloud I have been fine with it.
Now on to my question. Given I am a rather big man generally and people on here are generally saying they find Huel to be filling and I am at the stage tonight that I am considering hunting for my methane propelled cat and eating it, can someone give me their thoughts on portion size for fat b*sterds to start with. I am open to the fact that I may be looking at a less easy ride here than some others owing to a life time of abusing my self and eating over sized portions not containing veg at all.
What I am really looking for is advice on how I should be working at this, Should I increase my huel portions and work my way down to allow time for my over sized appetite to die out ?
Really at this point adding it to batter, putting that round a chicken stuffed with macaroni and cheese and frying it inside a slab of lard and eggs is high on my thought chain so advice greatly appreciated.
I’m the same. I find that I am so hungry that I blow all my calories on an evening meal. My weight has pretty much stayed the same.
My wife is on the Shake the weight shakes.
I compared them to Huel and they are pretty much identical calorie wise, just 3x more expensive with more sugar and less fibre in them!
They come in packs of 34.5g and have 135 calories in them. They cost £1.25 a pack!
So that’s 1g for 36p compared to Huel 1g=0.016p
I’m thinking of mixing my Huel in smaller doses of 35g in 250ml of water but 6 times a day and then an evening meal.
I find with the 100g, I neck it, feel full and lethargic, then get really hungry again.
Also, my problem is I can be brilliant in the week, lose 2kg and then put it all back on over a weekend.
I had 3 scoops for breakfast about 2.5 hours ago, I am now feeling ravenously hungry so much so I am struggling to think about anything else other than my hunger.
I was trying to workout the calorific content of a typical breakfast for me
Fried Egg 2 160
Bacon 4 208
Sausages 3 618
Baked Beans ½ Tin 140
So thats roughly 1k ish I would normally have eaten discounting the toast I would normally eat.
3 Scoops is 456 calories so really its half what I normally take in for breakfast.
Just wondering if I should bolster my intake short term or have a couple of boiled eggs to put some concrete in my stomach or am I just being soft and I should just deal with this short term and hopefully it starts to tail off when my body realises it didnt actually need 1k for breakfast.
Fat people burn more calories. Our bodies work harder to move, etc. Are you trying to stick to 2000kcals a day because, to my mind, that would be madness. I’m a 5’6" female and I weigh about 85kg and I routinely burn around 3000 calories a day (but I’m a runner) My base line, staying in bed all day, is 1600kcals a day.
I would eat to satisfy your hunger - anything else isn’t sustainable and will send you, rabidly, searching for that cat to spit roast. If 100g of huel isn’t enough eat more. Play around and see what works for you, it doesn’t matter if you make some mistakes along the way.
You could snack on nuts? High in calories, as well as protein and fat so fairly filling.
Your TDEE is probably around 2800 calories, so if you start having 456 calorie Huel breakfasts and similarly sized other meals then you are going to be VERY hungry and losing weight dangerously fast.
I was just working this out as a rough guestimate my general calorific intake. Please look away if your a healthy average person as it may alarm you. I am in no way shape or form saying this is anything other than disgustingly unhealthy however it is and has been my rough days calorie intake for the last 4 years and its pretty much daily. Of note, no I am not dead.
Breakfast
Fried Egg 2 160
Bacon 4 208
Sausages 3 618
Baked Beans ½ Tin 140
Lunch
This is typically burger and chips at my local flaming grill. Some call it a challenge burger, I call it lunch
Calories 2,980 Sodium 4,729 mg
Total Fat 153 g Potassium 0 mg
Saturated 61 g Total Carbs 224 g
Polyunsaturated 0 g Dietary Fiber 25 g
Monounsaturated 0 g Sugars 26 g
Trans 0 g Protein 164 g
Cholesterol 0 mg
Dinner
Probably a Dominos pizza or similar
Calories 2,280 Sodium 4,960 mg
Total Fat 76 g Potassium 0 mg
Saturated 32 g Total Carbs 288 g
Polyunsaturated 0 g Dietary Fiber 16 g
Monounsaturated 0 g Sugars 40 g
Trans 0 g Protein 104 g
Cholesterol 200 mg
Sides and Extras
Monster - 8 Cans ish per day
Calories 1,680 Sodium 2,960 mg
Total Fat 0 g Potassium 0 mg
Saturated 0 g Total Carbs 432 g
Polyunsaturated 0 g Dietary Fiber 0 g
Monounsaturated 0 g Sugars 432 g
Trans 0 g Protein 0 g
Cholesterol 0 mg
So my overall calorific intake is closer to 7.5k…
So… Am I running a risk here of dropping weight to quickly, if so how much should I bolster it, double up or eat nuts. I could quite gladly eat a kilo if nuts if required as they were realistically probably consumed in half kilo bags daily up until last week which is not listed above.
Please don’t eat those kcals in Huel, you run the risk of eating too much or various nutrients (the poison is in the dose). I know @JamesCollier has reassured us that he is looking into the effects of eating more that 2000kcal of Huel, and thinks there should be no problem at all in 1.5 times that amount (3000kcal) but 4 times that amount defiantly puts you in a danger zone for a number of things. Vitamin K and fluoride are the things that springs to mind, but I suspect there would be other problems too.
Note that nuts also may not be a benign solution, for example 150kcal of cashews is aprox 10% of your RDA of vitamin K. I know it lacks a certain attractive simplicity, but getting the remaining calories from a variety of sources might actually be the most sensible route. Some nuts, some oats, some rice etc. Maybe James has a more educated opinion on that part.
I have hard boiled eggs in between my Huel shakes, they take the edge off the hunger. Probably have my shakes around 4-5 hours apart with an egg or a protein bar as a snack halfway
For now I have gone to my local nutrition shop and asked for opinion.
They were aware of Huel already and the guy was a body builder type. He said that probably my hunger is stemming from the sheer mass of food I was taking in before rather than its nutritional or calorific content. His advice was to grab some protein bars and snack on those in between and eat potatoes mashed and or eggs to fill the void.
I came home and had a few eggs just now and I feel a bit better about life. Cats safe for now.
It has been a hard few days on the switch so I may alternate hard boiled eggs and spuds in between. I was looking at the protein bars however the chap in the store said that I should not go that road as Huel has a lot of the things in it which are in the protein bars and I may as someone suggested above poison my self by overdosing… on a good thing
I will let you know how I get on with this over next few days.
Thoroughly looking forward to seeing how quick I clear a room with Eggs and Huel. Avoid the Oxford Circus underground around 5pm if at all possible…
Most people eat high doses of micronutrients just from a normal diet. You’d have to go some to have too much vit K and we’ve completely removed fluoride from Huel - so if you did have any concerns about fluoride, there are none now.
At the moment I am having 6 scoops for breakfast, then another 3 scoops about 3 or 4 hours later, then so on throughout the day as I feel like it, usually totaling about 15 scoops per day. So it’s really no surprise that you’re hungry 2.5 hours after having only 3 scoops. Have as much as you feel you need.
Definitely get more physically active, though. You really need to break your habit of sitting for so many hours of the day without moving. Even if you feel you have too much work to do, seriously, f*** it. Your health is the most important thing. Also, the longer you work without a break, it’s really a case of diminishing returns. You will slow down and become less efficient, even if you don’t realise it.
I work at home in front of the computer all day. I work in 1-hour blocks with 15 minute breaks in between, and 30 minutes at lunch time. If the weather is nice I go for short walks. If it’s raining, I clean/tidy or do some pressups and stuff. Then I return to my computer refreshed and ready to continue with focus and enthusiasm.
But even when I used to work for a company, I insisted on having mid morning and mid afternoon breaks. I used to walk to the public toilets across the street just to force myself away from the office for 10 minutes.
One thing I’d say is to try drinking more water, I find if I have Huel (3scoop) mixed with 500ml water and then have a drink of water or cup of tea in the next half hour / hour I feel very full, uncomfortably sometimes.
Planning for tomorrow I have boiled 12 eggs and mashed up a pile of spuds.
I have filtered 4 litres of water and put it in the fridge.
My battle plan is to bolster the morning Huel mid morning by mashing the eggs into the potatoes and eat that and same in afternoon. Hopefully that allows me to make it to dinner time before looking at the fish tank and wondering if they would indeed microwave.
Just checking in, I did as I said I would and its been going fine.
I had my Huel for breakfast but I made it last night and put it in fridge so it was a bit more stodgey. Mid morning I had a couple of eggs and some potatoes.
Lunch I had a 3 scoop Huel. Afternoon some eggs and Spuds and I have made it to now at 5pm and time for dinner so its definitely made a difference to throw in some bricks in the mix.
