Negative Weight Loss with Huel - Get those GAINS

I’ve always had the opposite problem of most people, I struggled to gain weight.

So I think after 5 years of Huel I finally figured out the laziest way to achieve my gain goals.

TLDR in middle.

I tried many things. Blend it. Add a banana. Smoothies. Olive Oil. Peanut Butter. Counting calories. Bla bla bla.

In the end every solution always came down to force feeding, which was very unpleasant and therefore I never sustained it. Also the effort of planning, buying, carrying, preparing etc food was annoying. Sadly the obvious lazy choice of more Huel didn’t work, as I could never do more than 3 times 105g Huel shakes per day as it, well, just look up the “Errrm, Huel Poop” thread…

After talking about gaining weight and muscle and Huel with a guy in the gym he suggested I should add milk. Now I never really paid much attention to milk, cause I’m lactose intolerant. So I grabbed lactose free milk, did the maths and pumped 420g of Huel and 2 litres of milk per day. Somehow when mixing with milk I managed to do 4 shakes a day instead of 3 without explosions for some magical reason I do not understand. This netted me 2600 calories by 18:00. And I had room for some dinner.

This was magical for me, but after ~1.5 months it really fucked me up.
I think it was the (cow’s) milk proteins causing inflammation combined with high sugar intake(?) which in turn yielded a whole host of issues:

  • memory problems
  • brain fog
  • chest pain (sting to the heart)
  • joint pain
  • chronic fatigue

Since I didn’t wanna die I looked for alternatives: Rice milk, Almond milk, Coconut Milk and Oat Milk. Almond milk has too few calories for my purposes, as does coconut. Rice milk was disgustingly sweet. And from reading it also seemed Oat milk was the best choice to be consumed in large quantities without near immediate death type of consequences.
However, there was one problem… After buying Oat milk and drinking a litre I had gas. Lots of gas! 8h worth of gas until I went to bed after which probably it was good I was alone in the room. After telling my friend the next day, he suggested Gluten intolerance, however oats don’t have gluten… but they were contaminated. Gluten free oat milk works perfectly. Also, just explained many things in my life lmao. Switching from beer to cider also btw…

Anyway… time for the

TLDR
Daily intake
420g of Huel Black
2l gluten free oat milk
equals 2866 calories per day
£10.5 per day (£3 oat milk, £7.5 huel)

Nutrition breakdown:

From Huel only:

Source Amount (g)
Fat (sat) 12.6
Fat (monosat) 11.7
Fat (polyunsat) 56.0
Fat (Total) 80.3
Carb 53.7
Sugars 21.0
Carbs (Total) 74.7
Fibre 38.7
Protein 186.7
Salt 4.7

From Oat Milk only:

Source Amount (g)
Fat 40
Unsat Fat 8
Carbs 56
Sugar 70
Fibre 10
Protein 16
Salt 1.8

Total (Huel + Oat Milk):

Source Amount (g)
Fat 128.3
Carbs 109.7
Sugar 91.0
Fibre 48.7
Salt 6.5
Protein 202.7

Switched away from cow’s milk about a week ago and not feeling like dying anymore. My only worry is the high sugar intake of 91g.

Anyway, hopefully this is interesting to someone.

All feedback appreciated! :grin:

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Thanks for sharing Philipp! Sounds like you’re on the right track.

You can get oat milks with a lower sugar content (usually they’re labelled as unsweetened) and that should be all your issues solved then!

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It must be difficult… the inability to gain weight.

I used to be a powerlifter and remember seeing guys in the gym struggling to gain weight. I never had that problem at all, I could pack on muscle and fat easily enough. But some guys no matter how hard they worked, or seemingly how much they ate just couldn’t gain mass.

Good on you for finding something that works for you though, through some serious trial and error, but sounds like you’re getting there.

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That’s me! Played senior rugby for many years. Target weight of 80k, rarely got above 76k and I trained a lot because I enjoyed it! Lots of weight training…did make me much stronger but it just didn’t show.

Is there really any hard evidence that cow milk causes such symptoms? Does it really lead to “inflammation”?

For basically everything one can find articles claiming that it contains toxins, is proinflammatory, carcinogenic etc.
Regarding nutrition, there are just so many myths out there.

And anyway - what does “inflammation” mean? The human immune system reacts all the time, killing aberrant cells that would otherwise lead to cancer. Or preventing that bacteria or viruses kill the body. So it is not automatically “bad”…

It’s a good point. There is some evidence for both sides, I quite like this article as a summary. The only way in this case is an elimination diet and switching out milk which is what Philipp has done. As long as the substitute foods are replacing the nutrients that milk provides, then I think that’s okay.

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Oat milk can be made cheaply and easily by simply soaking oats over night/24 hrs and squeezing them out. No added sugars either.

Or blending the result

I honestly did think I had long covid or something, but here’s the thing, I’m triple vaxxed & had covid together with the second jab (got it from a girl 2 days prior), so my immune resistance is likely as strong as a horse. I never worried about catching it anywhere and have been out and about with many people, very frequent night clubbing etc so I am very confident in this statement.

So then where did those symptoms come from? I’m not a 90 year old geezer who should have any of these issues.
Timing fits as well.
Diet wise, it’s not the Huel, as I had Huel for about 5 years now. Which then leaves next to nothing else left over… I usually did have some dinner after the 4 daily shakes, but never the same thing over and over, so that I could have consumed something else so regularly and in high enough quantity to cause these wild symptoms. Also I am a lazy cook, so I eat similar things to before, so why wouldn’t I have gotten symptoms earlier from these foods?
And then stopping the consumption stopped the symptoms.

Basically it really just makes sense in every single aspect I can think of.

And the research I’ve done about cow’s milk fits in, too. I had very varying symptoms, from brain to body, so it has to be something underlying that causes all of this at the same time - inflammation.

Likely most people never consume quantities that cause noticeable symptoms. I mean who the heck drinks 2L daily? Hardly anyone. But there is research that links cow’s milk to these negative things. For years milk was meme’d to make strong bones, the research shows the opposite. I mean half of humanity can’t consume cow’s milk, that should be our first hint. So we engineer the Lactose out, but there’s also those who wrongly think they are lactose intolerant and they get symptoms from the milk proteins. Maybe engineering those out could do the trick? I don’t know. I won’t test it again any time soon xD

Also, beware there’s a huge distinction between dairy in general and cow’s milk. Cheese etc I never had issues with. Likely the bacteria eats 1) the lactose (milk sugar) and 2) seems to change the milk proteins.

@Dan_Huel
I am already using “Unsweetened”, so I don’t think I can reduce the sugar intake sadly

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There are other brands out there with lower sugar contents, so it might be a case of shopping around.

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