They found that a thick soup stays in the stomach longer than if you just drank the water with some solid food. Maybe when you have thinner Huel, the stomach treats it a bit more like water than food. It could actually be that when thick Huel is in the stomach, the stomach thinks “Ahh, this is all real food”.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the flavouring system in vanilla Huel has gum arabic in it to thicken it. Maybe when we have thinner Huel, there is less gum arabic to hold it all together, so more of the water slips through? Just a theory…
+1 for the opinions already stated: break up into smaller meals (like smaller meal every 2 hours is quite reasonable) AND eat up the amount of Huel consumed until you find the amount that keeps away the munchies.
Continue monitoring your weight. I think you’ll find it won’t increase noticeably. Not a dietician myself, but I think on the right nutrition the body is able to cope with a considerable calorie over-consumption.
Very good thread, thanks for sharing your experiences @tinkerbell and suggestions from @Marcus. I prefer an even thicker mix (120g Huel with about 450ml water) and i take these bottles as a full meal. Its not “If I eat a little bit more, i burst”-full but its okay and enough to reach the next meal
Yesterday, I experimented with 100g vanilla Huel, 300ml water, 200ml unsweetened almond milk and couple tablespoons (guess by eye rather than measured) of chia seeds and this made a really thick shake that I had to eat with a spoon.
I actually blended it in my Vitamix blender to break up the chia seeds and it was great…and very filling.
Instead of recalculating calorie intakes, I think titrating your consumption based on your hunger and weight lost, makes a lot more sense. You generally can’t do that with “regular” food, as it’s too difficult to accurately calculate your calorie intake. That problem just disappears with Huel
When I’ve lost weight via Huel, I simply ate too much initially, watched how much my weight went up over a period of a couple of weeks, then titrated the intake down over a period of a few weeks, until I hit the sweet spot at which I lost the required amount of weight. Then I sat at that consumption rate for a month until my goal weight was reached, then I titrated it back up until my weight loss plateaued.
This is guaranteed to work. Calculations … not so much
Definitely. The problem with calculating calories is you could easily get the calculation wrong. Also, each day is going to be different because we don’t do the same amount of physical or mental activity each day.
Add to that, I don’t have much of an idea how many calories are in my evening meals, so it doesn’t really make much sense to calculate the calories in my Huel but have no idea what my evening meals add up to. I eat something different each evening, and I’m just not going to analyse every meal each time to calculate how much Huel I should have for that day leading up to it. That is the behaviour of someone with far too much time on their hands, and as we all know, many of us have Huel to save time.
During the day, if I’m hungry I have Huel. When I’m satisfied I stop. When I’m hungry again I have some more. For my evening meal, if I’m feeling satisfied after dinner then I stop there. If I’m still hungry after dinner then I’ll have something extra like some nuts or a small amount of Huel.
If I notice my weight creaping up, I can consciously pull back a bit. If I notice I’m losing weight, I can consciously have a bit more.
