To H&S or not to H&S full time?

Nutrition
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Hey everyone, I’ve religiously been checking out the discussion board ever since I purchased my 3 bags of Huel - of which I absolutely LOVE. This isn’t just a New Years ‘diet’ change, but a lifestyle change - as the food is actually nice. Even to the point where I’m mixing combinations like Mac n Cheez and Tomato & Herb to create new flavours. Love love love the flavours, experiments, and everything Huel stands for.
I love my new life of being able to chow down nutritionally complete space food - it’s awesome!

So to cut a long story short, I used to be a highly active person speeding through mountains and practically jogging to meetings in high heels (brave I know) until the pandemic and I feel like I’ve got legs of spaghetti and now my job is always at home, so we’re doing our body no favours by not exercising.
One month ago I started Huel to un-spaghetti my legs and get in all the protein and all the fats so I can start strutting off again. Which has helped some what to gain some strength, but I fear gaining weight.

My question is, can 3/4 meals a day of Huel sustain a home-office lifestyle for someone who’s trying to get back into exercising, is it too much fat? too many calories? too many carbs?
If it helps I’m a 5"10 female weighing around 13 stone - I still don’t know how many of everything I should consume as all websites are different with RDA’s. Any help would be HUGELY appreciated!

Someone please enlighten me, I want to get my energy & strength back :slight_smile: xx

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Hey Stephanie! Welcome to the forum, so nice of you to take the step from lurker to poster :hugs: Your H&S experiments are great, get in the lab/kitchen and make Huel your own :raised_hands: :woman_scientist:

You’re gonna get there Stephanie. Huel won’t be your silver bullet, but it will be a big helping hand along the way!

Your diet is super important when you’re looking to gain some strength and fitness, but you would be better off considering the broader calories you consume in the day and the exercise you do, rather than getting hung up on individual macros. One of the great things about Huel is that it’s been designed by a team of registered nutritionists. That means you don’t really need to worry about the nutrition, they’ve done the hard work for you. There is fat in Huel, but fat is fantastic and essential to your diet. We only include the good stuff. Some nerdy stuff here on good fats and bad fats :nerd_face:

So, find out how many calories you need and how many you burn roughly each day. Track your calories for a few weeks to get an idea of the foods you eat regularly, you can then drop it. It sounds like your goals are around fitness, not weight loss so you don’t need to be as scrupulous with your calorie counting - a basic idea of what you eat is enough.

Maybe, but do the calculations. We’re all different so others will not find 3 meals of Huel a day is enough. And as I said, just think (but don’t worry :blush: ) about the calories.

One thing we’ve not learnt is your exercise! We can’t build strong legs with our challenging them! Are you exercising much at the moment? Fair enough if you’re taking it slow to get back into good habits. If you want, we have some workouts on our instagram, lemme find them

There’s a guide here

Also, we have some articles about calories and things, might be helpful.

tl;dr

Our top tips:

  • The easiest way to calculate meals and days where multiple different foods have been eaten is to use an app like MyFitnessPal. All you have to do is input the foods you eat and it will calculate how many calories you’ve eaten for each meal/day.
  • Be careful that you’re getting the correct serving sizes. Processed packaged foods often have teeny-tiny serving sizes to make them look healthier than they actually are. Sneaky…
  • Investing in a kitchen scale may help here with the above tip and help you with your portion control too.
  • Once you’ve got to grips with calorie counting and have a good idea of the foods you eat, you could stop counting which can give you more freedom and flexibility.

I think that’s everything. Anyone else chime in with their own personal experience, what I’ve written is very much the science and general advice! Good luck to you and we’ll be here every step!

Edit: realise I didn’t answer the question in the title. We don’t recommend going Huel 100%, not because you can’t (many do), but it isn’t the best experience. We recommend integrating Huel with other balance nutritious meals for long term success!

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