theFIREstarter

It’s been around a month since I started trying out Huel, a liquid food that could in theory provide you with all the nutrients and energy you need, without eating anything else at all. Before a more in depth look at my thoughts and tips on eating Huel, here is a quick TL;DR FAQ stylee:

• Would I recommend Huel? – Yes!
• Do you like it? – After experimentation with flavours, yes I found it to be actually quite nice to eat/drink.
• Are you / how much are you going to eat it going forward? – Yes! I still wouldn’t want to eat it for every meal although may do an experiment for 4-5 days just to see what that would be like. But long term I can easily imagine this being a breakfast and occasional lunch solution as I’ve been doing for the last month. Definitely sustainable for that kind of usage IMO.
• What were the primary benefits? – It was mainly down to hunger/energy levels, which for me and I reckon most people are very much related. I found I would often get an energy level crash around 11:30am and definitely one in the afternoon (I am guessing this is when my blood sugar levels were dropping like a stone). I never really got this when I’d had Huel for breakfast and lunch, and sometimes even manage to avoid the afternoon one if I had Huel for breakfast and not for lunch. Another telling thing was that in my squash games, which are usually scheduled around 12 midday, I would often feel a total lack of energy after around 4-5 games, and my arm would literally feel empty with nothing left to hit the ball with. This never happened when I’d had Huel for breakfast, I just felt completely normal throughout the whole game even if it was a particularly intense one. So a side benefit is that it could well help improve your performance with endurance type sports and general fitness as well.
• Will it help me lose weight? – I’m not actually trying to lose weight but I would imagine the above “energy/hunger” factor would make it a lot easier to avoid snacking, stick to a calorie counting diet and therefore lose weight (along with the usual prescription of some intense work outs 2-3 times a week minimum of course!)

If you would like to give Huel a try please consider using this link here which gives you £10 off of your first order (and me £10 off my next order! Thank you if you do!)

Now onto some more long form thoughts and a few tips from my experiences with trying out Huel for a month.

HUEL – HUH?! – What is it good for?! – (Benefits analysis)

As well as the better energy levels / less hunger described above, there are a few other purported benefits to using Huel.

• Save time – Due to less time preparing and clearing up after making food, you will save time. I think that for a lot of people this could be true, but I didn’t really find I had that much more time. As I’m only replacing breakfast which takes 5 minutes to make anyway, and the occasional lunch at work, where admittedly I did save time because I could just work properly while drinking it. I often eat lunch at my desk but it’s quite hard to type properly holding a knife and fork or concentrate with a sandwich stuffed in your gob! So I guess, yea marginal time benefits for me, but definitely scope for this to be a tangible benefit for many people. It’s probably worth pointing out that I like to save time eating lunch at work not because I love working through my lunch break, but because I often go out for a run or play squash at lunch, so need to eat as quickly as possible so as not to run over the 1 hour you’re supposed to have!
• Save Money – I think this is at best break even for us as we are only replacing mainly breakfast which is very cheap on the whole, or sometimes lunch which is also normally quite cheap. If you normally go out for lunch/breakfast and spend £5+ a pop though, obviously you will save money! In terms of cost per meal they reckon it would be about £1/meal but I reckon this is on the high side. Depends on your own appetite of course but we spent £50 and have had around 50 meals between us so far, and still have around half of our original stash left! ¹
• Better Energy – Already discussed this above but one extra thing worth noting is that after a few weeks on Huel, if I then did go back to eating normal food for a day or so, at weekends for example, or ate some crap such as a takeaway which would usually leave me feeling rubbish for a few hours, I am pretty sure I didn’t feel quite as bad as I used to. So I get the feeling there are long term benefits to your overall body here and it’s not like “Eat Huel for 2 weeks, have energy, the next day don’t eat Huel and lose that energy straight away” – not a great way of putting it but hopefully you get the point. My guess is that it helps your body regulate blood sugar better and so it makes sense that this can be a longer term benefit, but clearly I’m no doctor so don’t take this as medical advice!
• Save the Environment – I’m not sure exactly how Huel is made (for example how much of the Pea is wasted when they extract the “Pea Protein”?) but being totally plant based I am going to stick my neck on the line and say it must be far far better for the environment than eating a bacon sandwich every morning. Also the amount of meals you get in one package is great in terms of creating packaging waste, although according to this they are unfortunately not recyclable right now.
• Sharper Mentally / Being more up for getting sh*t done – I think there has been a marginal improvement in this area, but one thing that struct me is that this could well just be the placebo effect of my brain thinking I’m doing something healthy and therefore thinking I feel better/sharper, and then naturally going into one of my “productive” periods which will tend to happen every so often anyway. Also if you are focusing on a challenge/experiment like this I will find you will also do other things better as well, such as drinking less alcohol, doing more exercise, and getting more sleep, which will obviously make you feel better. Even if that is the reason, and these benefits are not directly to drinking the Huel itself, if just by drinking Huel it makes me more consciously do that other stuff, I am happy with the final outcome. Anything that will “trick” me into better habits can’t be bad! 🙂

Negatives?

Apologies for any graphic descriptions in advance 🙂 – Some people report some negatives such as:

• Toilet/Gut issues – I didn’t personally have any issues and just carried on “going as usual”. Maybe slightly more wind than usual on certain days but nothing much to worry about and could have just been other stuff I ate anyway!
• Taste – Some people just can’t get on with the taste, and as mentioned above if the original Vanilla was all that was on offer I don’t think I could have kept this up long term. But with the different flavours and experimenting with adding flavours and other foods, I would imagine 90% of people can find something that works for them.
• Consistency / Drinking your food is gross – Some people are obviously going to just find it gross that they are drinking a meal. I had no issue with this and in the end my chocolate/banana shake turned out to be something really rather tasty (see below!)

I couldn’t find any other negatives online (great marketing or just no other downsides!?) but Raptitude has a few other negatives in his 30 day write up, although it’s worth pointing out he was making his own version of Soylent, not Huel (as it wasn’t even invented back then as far as I know!)

• Being Restless – Nope didn’t find this at all, although it is worth saying David works from home I think, and doesn’t have a 2 year old kid!
• Crash after eating – Definitely not in the morning, sometimes would still get the afternoon post lunch “crash” but it was a lot more short lived than if I’d eaten a normal lunch.
• Lingering taste – Nope, did not get this.
• Standards are much higher – This is a bit of a fake negative really, he is saying he feels so good generally that when he feels slightly less good it annoys him I guess. I don’t think I felt this one, although I don’t think I have felt as much an improvement in general wellbeing as David reported after doing his Soylent experiment.

Other thoughts / tips

Buying it

What you might expect to find in your first delivery of Huel

As mentioned above if you want to try it out, you can get £10 off your first order by using this link. Please note that you have to spend over £40 to get the £10 off though! Our first order included 1 x Original Vanilla flavour, 2 x New Improved Vanilla flavour, a free shaker and T-Shirt, and a flavour tester pack with 10 different flavours to try and it cost bang on £50 (that’s including £10 off as I used a friends £10 off link!)

The Shaker

I didn’t really like the shaker they provide you with, apart from the price which was free of course! The cap which is attached to the lid is just attached by a bit of bendy plastic, and I found that when I was drinking it through the hole the cap kept on wanting to bend back towards the “closed” position and hit me in the face, which was annoying. You might be fine with this though. I bought another shaker from here (no affiliation with site or product) which I found to be much better quality and most importantly, the cap was on a hinge so would stay out of your face when drinking. Not being hit in the face was worth the £5 I thought! Please be aware this shaker is slightly smaller and thinner than the standard Huel one, and our blender luckily just about fit to the bottom, so if you have a really wide blender it may struggle!

Blenders and Shakers

You can of course just stick a couple of scoops into the shaker with some water, shake it up and drink, but you will probably find this makes it taste rather gritty which is a bit unpleasant. Unless I’m really time stricken I will always try to blend it for at least 30 seconds if not longer. You might think nothing is happening after the first 10 seconds as it looks like it’s blended, but it does make a difference and will taste much smoother with a slightly longer blend.

TF-Mess

I found it quite hard to scoop out the powder and blend it without making at least some mess pretty much every single time. Maybe I am just cack handed or that it was normally 6:30am when I was doing it. Anyway, do it on an easy wipe surface and all you need to do is give it a quick wipe and you are good to go! Huel seems to be the sort of substance that will wash away very easily at first but if you allow it to dry out it may be a lot harder, so you definitely want to be cleaning things as soon as you can, including the blender and the shaker once you’ve drunk your portion!

Average amount of mess after blending!

What’s your Flava?

We tried a few of the flavour packs in our tester pack, but honestly I didn’t rate many of them so gave up on the rest as I found my perfect recipe already (see below). Anyway here were our thoughts on the base Huel flavours and the extra flavour packs we did try:

• Original Vanilla – I wasn’t a massive fan of this but Mrs T liked it.
• New Improved Vanilla – This was the reverse of the above. I guess the best thing to do with your first order is get one of each and see what you like best. They aren’t that different, but obviously enough for us to both have our preference, so trying them yourself is probably worth it!
• Banana – Tasted a bit “fake”, was not for me.
• Mocha – We both liked it. I don’t even like coffee and I liked it!
• Chocolate/Cacao – These are actually 2 different flavours but I couldn’t really taste the difference. They were both decent enough but not chocolatey enough for my liking (maybe I didn’t put enough in)
• Strawberry – Mrs T liked this, I didn’t try it

DIY Flavours

Of course you can add whatever you like to Huel so I would recommend that you experiment yourself before shelling out £7.50 for any of the full flavour packs. Even though this “only” works out at around 10p per serving according to them, I’m almost certain you can get similar flavours in a lot of the cases for cheaper… for example:

• Instead of chocolate Huel flavour just stick some Cocoa in it instead? A tin of Cocoa is about £1 as opposed to the £7.50. I tried this and it was pretty nice
• Instead of Mocha Huel just add a spoon of instant coffee. Mrs T tried this and said it was nice, although she did prefer the Mocha flavour slightly.
• I whizzed up a banana into my Huel and it was very nice. OK this is more expensive per serving than 10p but you are getting the nutrients of the banana and it tasted much nicer than the fakey banana Huel flavour.

My Fav Flav

OK so what was my perfect recipe in the end?

• ~400ml cold water (after blending if you find it too thick just add a bit more cold water and shake until you reach the desired consistency!)
• 2 Scoops of New Improved Vanilla
• 1 huge teaspoon Cocoa powder
• 1 banana (preferably a very ripe one)
• Blend very well for 30-60 seconds

I am quite shocked how much I am loving this combination compared to tasting Huel for the first time! It’s like a really naughty treat of thick choccy and banana milkshake, but it’s basically full of goodness that your body needs.

You may well hate the above recipe but the bottom line is experiment and see what works for you, I am sure most people can find something they will really like and can eat at least once if not twice per day if they so wish.

The Great British HUEL Off

One thing which did excite me was that you replace flour in recipes with Huel and therefore make slightly healthier versions of some treats. I thought I’d give pancakes and cookies a go.

Huel Pancakes

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a recipe here as my usual process with pancakes is to just stick the ingredients and mess about until I get the desired consistency. Obviously it contained an egg, some Huel, milk, and probably a tea spoon of baking powder, and I chucked some raisins in there as well for a laugh.

However I can say that my first attempt wasn’t that great, they looked pretty good, but were a little floppy and very hard to flip over without destroying. I get the feeling that Huel, although powdered, just hasn’t got the same “binding power” that flour has. Maybe next time I will blend the pancake mix with a blender as that tends to make Huel go a bit thicker and more “gloopy” like a pancake mix should be. Also I think I should put less milk in it, and/or try a 70/30 Huel/Flour mix just to give it some extra bindiness.

Anyway, they tasted OK which was the main thing! Although TFS Jr did eat a decent portion of the first one, but didn’t want any more (although can be very fussy even with normal pancakes so I wouldn’t read too much into that)

Here are some pics:

The mix plus starting to cook

Looking pretty good!

As mentioned they looked pretty good, just consistency was a little weak.

Huel Cookies

I’m not as slap dash as I am with my pancakes and decided to modified the recipe from here, the soft and chewy title really caught my attention! So here is roughly what I did, and I think this made about 12 decent sized cookies in the end:

• 125g butter
• 100g caster sugar (down from 160g + 60g – due to Huel mix already being quite sweet)
• 1 egg
• No vanilla essence (down from 1 teaspoon due to Huel already being Vanilla flavoured)
• 70g self-raising flour (down from 150g + 120g plain flour)
• 30g Cocoa Powder
• 170g Huel
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• Various Chocolate chips + Marshmallows (didn’t measure just chucked em in!)

Then I followed the rest of the recipe as usual:

TFS Jr “helping” me make the cookies, aka shoving marshmallows and chocolate chips into her mouth as fast as possible before I took the bowl away! 🙂

The mix looked really good! And was very easy to fashion into cookie shapes just by hand:

Pre-oven cookies!

The finished article!

Once again, the cookies were not perfect by any means, but as a first attempt I will take them!

They were a little dry and definitely not gooey, chewy or soft, which was annoying as that was what the recipe promised, although obviously maybe the Huel was the thing that changed that. Next time I may have to up the sugar levels (especially the brown sugar seeing as I put none in) as I can imagine that will help with the softness factor. Also I think I cooked them a little too long so will take them out earlier next time! Definitely some low hanging fruit to pick off before concluding it’s all Huel’s fault they weren’t perfect that’s for sure.

Anyway, the most important critic, TFS Jr, absolutely loved them! It was really great to be able to give her a treat whilst knowing there is some decent vitamins, minerals, protein and fibre in there. So definitely a +1 for Huel on that point and I will definitely be making another batch soon!

So there we have it!

As usual please let me know your thoughts and throw any questions my way in the comments!

Cheers!