Under-eating / Nutritional Help

Hey all!

I recently started on Huel a few weeks ago, and have been testing with it to try and replace meals and see how I get on. I’m now at the stage where I’m extremely happy with the product and I’m ready to start replacing meals on a daily basis.

I am currently faced with a nutritional question, as I’m looking to lose weight and use Huel to assist me with this.

I currently weight 15st 7lbs and I’m 6" tall. I’m currently using a FitBit to track my exercise and water/food in-take to keep everything balanced, and my current ‘goal’ is to have a calorie deficit of 1000, so I would be consuming a total of 1500 calories per day.

I’m currently walking roughly 12KM every weekday and I’m also doing some other 15-30 minute workouts when I get home from work before winding down for the night. I’m also looking to start running on weekends in the morning on-top of this.

My diet as of now is consisting primarily of some kind of protein for breakfast, usually just some boiled eggs, I tend to have two pieces of fruit (morning & afternoon snack - usually apples / bananas) and then Huel for lunch and Huel for dinner (after workout at home).

My FitBit is telling me I’m burning in excess of 3K Calories per day, but of course the FitBit itself counts passive calorie burn. My passive calorie burn is at 2038 and my exercise raises this figure to about 4000 total calories ‘burnt’ in a day.

Should I be eating more? I’m really eager to start losing some weight and start getting more in shape.

Thanks everyone!

If you think you are burning 4000kcals/day (in effect your TDEE) then yes you’d want to be eating more e.g. 3000kcals/day, which would result in a 7000kcal deficit over a week which should result in a 2lb weigh loss per week.

But, wouldn’t it be easier to cut back on the exercise, so your TDEE is around 3000kcals, thus needing to consume only 2000kcals a day? You’d need to eat less for a start, plus spend less time exercising! Not that I’m saying exercise is bad, but I don’t see the point in doing more than an hour a day unless you’re training for an event etc.

It’s not as if I’m purposely doing the exercise (other than the exercise when I get home)

I walk to work, which involves (currently getting a lift to the train station in the morning for now) but after getting off the train, I walk for 40 minutes to work, and then after finishing work I walk for another 40 minutes back to the station and then walking home for another 35-40 minutes.

It just almost seems counter-intuitive to eat more, but I guess eating too little can stop you losing weight altogether.

No it can’t, this is a myth. What it can do is lower your basal metabolic rate somewhat, but that decrease will never exceed the decrease in calories from eating less - if it did, anorexia would not be a thing.

The reason eating so few calories is generally a bad idea is it can easily lead to uncontrolled binges, and that combined with the slightly reduced metabolic rate leads to putting on weight. However it is not true that if you maintained the low caloric intake that you wouldn’t lose weight.

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