I’m a 44 year old male and thought I’d share my Huel experiences, in case anyone is interested. Back in the spring I weighed almost 125kg and through dieting and exercise got down to about 117kg, then fell out of both dieting and exercise for various reasons having to do with craziness at work. I’d used Huel a bit at the time, but found that I couldn’t use it for more than a snack to get me through to the next meal. If I tried to push it beyond that, and had two shakes in a row (a few hours a part), it felt like I was starving and then I would eat too much later.
Recently I decided to get back to the diet and exercise routine and also to try going 100 percent Huel, at 2000 calories a day, just to see what happened. Frankly I thought it would be impossible and that I wouldn’t make it a day. I am only on my third day so far but it has actually been pretty easy, and way easier than trying to stick to 2000 calories a day via normal cooking. My routine is:
wake 5-6 am
Then 400 calories shakes at 8, 11, 2, 5 and 8
then sleep about 9 or 10pm
What I tend to find is that by 2pm and 5pm I am definitely very hungry, especially 5pm, but it is a manageable, sustainable hunger, it’s not the desperate craving that causes you to rabidly binge on doritos or whatever. I haven’t been exercising much, maybe 1-2 hours a day of dedicated walking, but between that amount of exercise and a strict 2000 calorie diet (if I can keep to that in the weeks to come), I should lose weight quickly but not at too fast a pace.
The main positives at this point are:
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hugely valuable to not have to think about food and make millions of little decisions about what to eat, when to stop, and so on. I just know “wait until 11am. Drink shake. Stop when done. Wait until 2pm. Repeat. Etc.” This alone makes it dramatically easier to keep to the diet. My willpower and self-control aren’t fractured across thousands of different fronts.
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no ups and downs that I can tell. I mean, it doesn’t feel like there’s any blood sugar swings at all and I don’t get carb coma or whatever after eating a dinner. This makes sense, given that I’m eating 5 modest meals a day at regular intervals. I feel lighter and more energetic generally. Some of this is probably just the enthusiasm of being on a new routine but it feels like more than that.
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no hint of headaches or gastro problems, both of which I’d noticed in the past when I only had one or two shakes a day. Not sure why that is. I tend to mix 50/50 of the vanilla and the unflavoured/unsweetened.
Although this isn’t the point of the exercise, I’m finding the ease of making meals and cleaning up and the cost compared to what I normally spend on groceries and eating out huge.
Anyway, these are just my experiences so far. I’ll try to update regularly. Only time will tell whether I stick with 100 percent Huel or abandon it.
Nick
