Apologies in advance for this excessive ramble (my wife’s always telling me to stop it)…
Hello all!
My very first delivery of Huel arrived today, so I figured I would share my experience as I start using it from tomorrow. More for my own benefit as a sort of motivation rather than thinking it will be of any real interest to anyone else. Maybe someone in a similar situation will stumble across this one day and find it helpful one way or another.
I’m a guy in my mid-30s, married for 6 years with two kids under 5. For most of my working life I worked in retail – starting as a shelf stacker and working my way up to a relatively senior manager role in a large supermarket chain. Every day I walked 2 miles to work, walked around for 10+ hours then walked 2 miles home again. I played 5 a side football twice a week and trained and played for an 11 a side team as well – lean and athletic, but never lifted weights or anything so fairly scrawny. My diet was never atrocious, but I pretty much just ate whatever I wanted and never gave it a second thought – toast, pre-pack sandwiches, chocolate, crisps, fizzy juice, out every Fri/Sat/Sun getting pissed with my mates, etc. Dominated by carbs and sugar.
Aged 28 I meet a girl who lives in another city 3 hours away. Long story short I end up moving and transferring my job, then leaving the company 5 years on, I’ve been working behind desks for pretty much the whole time and need to drive to work. I also run my own business which sees me at another desk most evenings.
My diet has been better as we make most of our evening meals from scratch and I drink a LOT less. The problem is at work, where I can stuff my desk with chocolate biscuits and crisps and snack the whole day. Hence I still have the scrawny arms and legs, but now have a big dad belly in the middle and I’ve become really self-conscious of it. I’ve joined a gym and have been going 4 times a week at lunch time, and feel like the next single biggest thing I can do is to curb my snacking – enter Huel.
I don’t expect Huel to do the work for me, but if it can hold off the snack cravings and balance my macros then hopefully it can be the springboard to making better choices and being more active again. I’m naturally quite cynical about things like this, but ready and willing to be convinced. My introduction to Huel was from Dave Gorman a few years ago – who did a pretty excellent job at convincing me it was a horrific idea. A lot of the blogs and columns you find are also pretty negative, so I’m coming into it under no illusions that it’s going to be some sort of magic wand.
As an example, here’s what a typical day would look like for me:
Breakfast: 2 slices of toast, cup of tea (skimmed milk, 1 sugar)
10am: Cup of coffee, snack (corn thins w/chocolate, cereal bar, etc)
Lunch: Pre-packed sandwich, crisps, chocolate bar, fizzy juice. 30 minute brisk walk
4pm: Cup of coffee, snack
7pm: Home cooked meal from scratch
My plan is to replace breakfast and lunch with Huel shakes, continue the evening meals as normal and continue going to the gym - mostly cardio for now, but moving to some weights as I get some fitness back.
I also fully appreciate that it’s highly unlikely I’ll see any noticeable benefit at this time of year!
Starting point: 82kg (height 5’11”)
) so hope it does the same for you!
