The scoop isn’t that accurate and scales are, I just tend to tap the scoop a few time to get it level but scales are more accurate is you are strict on calorie counting.
Hi Seema
A level scoop of will be (very roughly) 38g of Huel, but only if you don’t compress the powder into the scoop. If you compress it, you can easily end up with 42g or more. That means a three scoop meal would end up being 504 kcal instead of 456 kcal… 48 kcal more than you intended. Three of those a day, and you’ve consumed 144 kcal extra that you weren’t expecting.
After the first week or two, I switched to using electronic kitchen scales to weigh my Huel portion sizes. That way, I know exactly how many grammes (and, hence, calories) I’m consuming 
I think you’ve used the daily calories for 3x3 scoops in place of 3 scoops. Not to take away from the point that scoops are potentially inaccurate but if a 3 scoop meal is 1368 calories we are all in trouble.
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Sorry, I got that spectacularly wrong, didn’t I? In my defence, I had very little quality sleep last night, and hadn’t had my morning coffee when I wrote it 
I’ve edited my post - thanks for the nudge 
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Here’s my advice. Ignore the scales, throw them away even, or lock them in a cupboard and only get them out every 3 months to see your progress.
Next, get a calorie logger something like my fitness pal and log all you calories for a couple of weeks this would be plenty of time to understand what calories you are consuming.
Work out your daily calorific needs - go to several sites and take an average. Now you are all set, I’d start at a 500 calorie deficit and go from there… If you find you are starting to lose weight and feel fine, great, carry on. If you are feeling hungry and lacking energy try upping your calories a bit for a week or two and go again. Keep making small changes and give them time to kick in. Eventually you’ll begin to understand your body and what it needs - then you are in control.
Don’t weight yourself every day once you become a slave to the scales your in for a lifetime of disappointment.
Good luck, and keep us posted on your success!!
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Will ignore all about the calories in and Just put in 3/4 of scoop.
Stuart that great advice, so true Will definitely re read ur post when the kids are in bed. Thanks
Probably mentioned already elsewhere in the comments, but 1,200 calories a day is teeny-tiny!!! Your body is going to go into protection mode and prevent you from losing bodyfat for fear of kicking the bucket! 
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500 calorie deficit is always a good marker for losing body fat, and the scales of doom should most certainly be locked away and only taken out every 3 months. God…the scales have been responsible for causing so many people to give up.
Well advised Stuart.
I used thé calorie calculater on huel to calculate m’y carolie intake needed. It said 1225 for losing 2lb à week. Its confirmed i got myself weighed at doctors…82 kg. Have put on 2kg in five weeks of using huel. It has to be the bulking up of fruit and density and cashews in between.started fresh yesterday. Make it on the spot and no fruit or banana. Just powder flavour. Thats it.
Just to re-emphasise: if your 79kg weigh-in wasn’t under controlled circumstances, it means nothing. I’m sure the doctor’s scales are good and well calibrated, but unless your 79kg measure was on those same scales at the same time of day after the same sequence of meals and visits to the loo as the 82kg one, they’re incomparable. As others have said, if you want to pay attention to weight, at least ensure that the circumstances of weighing are controlled and consistent, and don’t take any pattern seriously until it’s maintained itself for a week. One weigh-in will easily vary by plus or minus several kilos, and if you’re gonna stress about it that’ll have an impact too!
Seema, you’ve had lots of sensible and detailed advice here, so I won’t repeat it, but would emphasise this: get your kitchen scales out and weigh your scoops - it’s amazing how much a compacted scoop can weigh, and the calories can creep in, so take the guesswork out of your measurements! The other thing, as a dieter who also got to feel wobbly with hunger around 4 pm and dinner felt like far too far away, I found a small banana then, or about 18 almonds (yes, I always counted!!) really helped. Huel is great for fibre and carbs, so a low-carb. evening meal with protein and salad or green veg works well for me. But babies and toddlers can bring chaos to anyone’s sensible eating and sleeping plan, so don’t be in too much of a rush to lose that baby weight, and good luck!
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I can only echo what others said - I’m bad at estimating how many calories food has and how much is on my plate, so the only choice is to religiously weight it. (Most people underestimate massively if left to their own devices.) I use digital scales. I can recommend FDDB as a great free service.
Also, track your expenditure - losing body fat means less taken in than used, there’s no way around that. You can track activities manually using FDDB, or get fancy and use a tracking wrist band (which can be good motivation).
I would suggest to do daily weighting, at a consistent time in the morning. Any single result can be ignored or off (water retention, food still being processed, bad sleep, …), but over time, trends emerge. (Any of the fitness tracking tools allow you to graph that.)
The fact that your body goes into a “protection mode” to prevent you from losing weight is a myth. How would it do that, where would the energy to do your activities come from if not from either the food or the fat? That is, after all, what it is there for.
At the same time, if you’re reducing calorie intake significantly and especially if doing so for longer, do pay attention to nutrition, vitamins, minerals, etc. Huel for example seems to deliver all of them at an average intake of ~2000kcal, so if you’re aiming at something like 1400, that’s 30% less of those as well.
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1,200 Calories a day? Unless you’re on some kind of emergency crash diet, I think that’s too low.
I would recommend you try for no less than 1,540 Calorie. (You can bring that down slightly as you lose weight. Slimmer bodies need fewer Calories.) You should find that much more sustainable and, all being well, you’ll reach a healthy weight in time to have your pick of sexy Hallowe’en costumes. (Details of calculations at end.)
On present course, you’ll hit two serious problems:
- You’ll be hungry and miserable all the time. (I think you’ve noticed that already.) Any small setback, whether real or just an artefact of unreliable bathroom scales, will make you give up.
- As far as your body is concerned, a crash diet is a famine. And after a famine, what will your body do? It will try to replenish its fat reserves again, to prepare for the next one. Your Basal Metabolic Rate will slow down, and it will stay slow until you’ve gained all that weight again. (Read about it here.)
As for the 79 kg / 82 kg thing: that’s meaningless. That’s just normal day to day fluctuations. In the short term, those fluctuations will swamp any effects you’ll see from your diet. You’ll need a few weeks before the effects of your diet become noticeable.
Calculations
Daily Energy Expenditure
Using the well-known Mifflin–St Jouer formula.
Height: 160 cm
160 cm × 6.25 kcal / cm / day = 1,000 kcal / day
Body mass: 80 kg (ish)
80 kg × 10 kcal / kg / day = 800 kcal / day
Age: 30 years ??
30 years × -5 kcal / year / day = -150 kcal / day
Sex: Female
-161 kcal / day
(+5 if you’re a man)
Basal Metabolic Rate: 1,000 + 800 - 150 - 161 = 1,489 kcal/day
Adjustment for activity level: Moderate activity (little hard physical exertion, but don’t get to sit down much and probably losing a lot of sleep)
Adjustment factor: 1.55
Daily energy expenditure: 1.55 × 1,489 = 2,308 kcal / day
Target Energy Intake
Target change in body mass: -0.1 kg / day
(I think this is a sensible target. Feel free to disagree.)
-0.1 kg / day × 7,700 kcal / kg = -770 kcal / day
Target energy intake: 2,308 - 770 = 1,538 kcal / day
Time to achieve healthy body mass
Healthy Body Mass Index: 25 kg / m2
Height: 1.6 m
Healthy body mass: 25 × 1.6 × 1.6 = 64 kg
Weight loss needed to achieve healthy body mass: 80 - 64 = 16 kg
Time to achieve healthy body mass: 16 / 0.1 = 160 days
So you can expect to achieve a healthy weight on 20th October
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Just in case anybody saw my post above before I edited it: I should have said 1,540 Calories a day, not 2,200. Sorry for any confusion caused.
I weigh myself nearly every morning, in the time between going to the toilet and eating breakfast, to give myself the most consistent, reliable readings possible.
Here are my records for the past week:
Mon 104.4
Tue 104.7
Wed —
Thu 103.0
Fri 101.6
Sat 104.2
So I gained 2.6 kg since yesterday for no reason whatsoever. That’s 2.5% of my body mass, and I don’t even have a menstrual cycle to worry about!
Thank u so much. Yes since taking the fruit out which to be honest was around 1500 calories a day with the fruit, nuts and snack and huel i felt full and not hungry. Since taking the fruit out and stopping the nuts i am starving starving! Constantly. I honestly dont know how to structure it. The calorie calculator i used in huel says 1450 i need. So with 3 huels a day, 3 scoops in each i need to add some snacks which i think should be around 4 pm my trigger time.
Yesterday i gave up and pigged out and had about 3000 calories of junk and just thought i cant do this anymore. I feel absolutley misreable.
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Yes i agree i get that scales weighing dont mean anything.
Height is 15cm, weight 82kg, female, age 38.
EDIT: Sorry, bad numbers again. Fixed them now.
Glad I could help. And through writing this, I found an error in the spreadsheet to keep track of my own diet, so it’s been useful for me, too.
Maybe you should suspend the diet for a few weeks and give your body time to regain its equilibrium, and then start over with a less aggressive calorie reduction target?
By the way, to give you an idea of my attitude to dieting, here are my results from yesterday:
Saturday 13th May
- Big Mac
- French fries, McDonald’s, medium
- Ketchup, McDonald’s, 17 g × 2
- Huel, scoop × 3
- Coffee, instant, Douwe Egberts, added to 3 scoops Huel
- Coffee, instant, Douwe Egberts, made at home, mug
- Milk, whole, added to instant coffee
- Sugar, Tate & Lyle, cube
- Lidl Chef Select Chicken King Prawn & Chorizo Paella
- Banana
- Hatherwood Craft Beer Company, The Ruby Rooster Ale, 500 ml
Energy intake: 2091 kcal
Age: 40 years
Height: 183 cm
Activity level: Sedentary
Energy expenditure (calculated from Mifflin-St Jouer formula): 2,358 kcal
Energy deficit: 267 kcal
Estimated change in body mass: -0.03 gCurrent body mass: 101.6 kg
Body mass index: 30.3 (Moderately obese)
Healthy body mass range: 62.0 – 83.7 kg
Change needed to achieve healthy body mass: -17.9 kgTime to achieve target body mass if I go on losing weight at this rate: 518 days
Yes, I had a Big Mac & fries and a bottle of beer yesterday, and that’s perfectly normal for me. It doesn’t stop me from losing weight.
I usually consume slightly fewer calories, but not by much, but even if I didn’t, that would be fine by me. This isn’t a race. I’d much rather lose weight slowly and comfortably than quickly and miserably.
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