Here’s my story, I’m 33, 6ft 1 and last year my weight balloooned to 18 and a half stone. I have got that under control a little and having weighed myself this morning I am currently sitting at 17st 9lbs. My target weight is 13st.
My relationship with food is extremely poor, I binge eat, take in a lot of sugar (sweets, cakes etc) I also used to drink a lot of alcohol, beer being my vice however I have now completely given up for health reasons.
I am expecting my first delivery of Huel to arrive today , 2 bags of vanilla. I’m not sure what approach I should take, go 100% Huel and break my relationship with food or try a 2 meals Huel and a normal meal?
Great to have you on the team, thanks so much for choosing Huel - welcome to the forum! It sounds like you’ve got some big targets and that is great, Huel will certainly help you get some consistency and more control in your diet. You’ll find a wealth of information here on the forum, so do have a surf around
Definitely don’t dive in 100%, that can lead to a lot of wind and sometimes can be a little uncomfortable on your gut, simply because it’s a big transition to make!
We recommend that when you start your Huel diet, you first try replacing 1 meal with Huel, and then after a while (approx. 5-7 days) you could progress to replacing 2 of your daily meals (and then 3, 4, etc. if you want to go 100% Huel). This will allow your body to slowly adjust to Huel.
If you switch from one diet e.g. vegan to paleo, you can experience flatulence and irregular bowel movements, tiredness and/or cravings, etc. It’s not that the diet is bad it’s due to changes in the gut’s microbiome based on their new food source.
Again, great to have you on board and fire away if you have any other questions!
Thanks for the swift response and all the advice makes sense to me. Just got the tracking message to say my order will be here just after lunch so I’m going to have a normal lunch today and try Huel to replace my evening meal which lately has been unhealthy takeaways!
The hardest part will be breaking what is, let’s be honest, an addiction.
It’s easy to throw the Huel in the cupboard and ruin your efforts with a binge of processed carbs whenever you feel down in the dumps.
When I made my transition from being fat to turning into a fitness addict, my first step was literally binning all of the crap in the cupboards - Sweets, crisps, cakes, biscuits.
Two years in an I’m a lot better for it, so stick at it. Remember, addiction is You vs You, so it’s a tough battle.
In relation to what GTIPuG talked about, one thing to remind yourself of is that if you want to do away with the habit of eating to trigger your reward centre, you most likely need to make sure you are satiated throughout the day, and before bed. If you let your willpower simultaneously fight hunger and the need for the illusionary easy satisfaction from food, it will give in under the double challenge. Either immediately, or in a massive boomerang effect.
So I would recommend you calculate meaningful kcal values for your Basal Metabolic Rate, as well as your assumed Total Daily Energy Expenditure [I do not particularly condone that website, and I think their subscription emails are pure spam, but their calculators are very realistic and healthily balanced] to go off of, and start by getting used to averaging that latter amount, distributed evenly throughout the day, until you start feeling satisfied with maintaining your weight (I’d say two weeks to two months, depending on when you feel comfortable with moving on).
No matter how much of that is Huel, the main contribution it will bring in this stage is just to help you make sure you can get nutritious food when you are hungry, helping you to avoid binge eating after hunger streaks, when you didn’t have time to cook something up, and didn’t want to succumb to fast food at first.
Once you reach that point, you’ll probably know how much you want to decrease your calorie intake from what has worked with previous reduced calorie diets (such as the one you have recently started to gain back control with).
You like the taste because it’s sweet, and you like sweet… it’s not rocket science…
The trick for weight loss that works for you may be to put sugar or another sweetener on healthy food. Some healthy food are also naturally sweetened, most fruits and also sweet potatoes.
After you’ve transitioned to healthy food (and Huel is rather healthy but not perfect), if you’re still overeating, then you should consider doing some further changes (like, reducing the sweetness of food).
