Hello! I used a calculator to work out how many cals I would need to consume in order to lose 1lb/week. I’m sure it was somewhere on the Huel website or in an email…can anyone help?
Basically you have to create a 500 cal deficit to lose 1lb/week. So I worked out that I’d need 1,400 cals per day. Then you are advised to split this into 3 for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I only have Huel for breakfast and / or lunch. I prefer to save a few more cals for the evening meal so I can have what everyone else is enjoying and not rabbit food. So I have 250 cals per Huel, adding up to 500. Amazingly I have not felt hungry on this, whereas I would with a diet meal replacement shake.
One caution would be to start with just one meal and work up to 2 after a week, otherwise you might experience some digestive turbulence as your system acclimatises to the extra fibre / protein.
Good luck - I have already lost weight and am chuffed!
So if you calculate how many calories are in your family dinners, you can take that away from the 2000kcal to see how much calories you have left for your Huel.
Then you can use another online calculator to find out how many calories you need to eat a day to look 1kg a week (I’d suggest using MFP).
As already mentioned, firstly you need to work out how many calories you need per day to maintain your weight. There are a number of free online calculators to do this for you based on your height, age, sex, current weight and daily activity. This figure will be based on how active you are, ie, a desk worker will use less than a tradesman. To lose 0.5kg per week you need to eat a deficit of 500kcal (calories). I wouldn’t aim to lose 1kg per week as it’ll be very hard and you may naturally float somewhere between the two anyway trying to lose 0.5kg.
One thing you MUST do is take calories and what you eat seriously. I recommend you use the free web/app service called myfittnesspal. It’s a great tool to assist you in this. You enter your body profile and it’ll calculate how many calories you need to consume per day based on your target weight loss (or even gain). There is an enormous food database (not all of it is correct though so do check) where you can enter what you eat and it’ll track your calories. You can also enter what exercise you do and any calories burned exercising will be added onto your daily total. Having some kind of framework for this is vital otherwise it’s all a bit finger in the air and you may put a lot of hard work in and not actually achieve anything.
I am currently trying to lose about 7kg and I track everything in MFP. Before if i was hungry I would just buckle and eat whereas now when my calories are up for the day that’s it. Having a framework makes you more disciplined.
