HUEL for breakfast & lunch - ok for Thrive?

Hi everyone! My first post here. I'm 10 months in the beginners GST program and I feel frikkin great. So, I went on to do the Thrive course. 

So I just recently bought the nutrition pack "Huel Unflavored & Unsweetened (Gluten Free) v1.0" (full nutriant-specs: https://huel.com/pages/nutritional-information-and-ingredients) . In short: it is powder from blended natural ingredients and it gives your body everything it needs. Basically you don't have to eat anything else than this. 

My question is, when you see my food-intake below, am I getting all I need for Thrive? I asked the support and they told me to mention you@Jeff Serven.   

Have in mind that I do like meat yet for the environment I want to bring that consumption down. Huel helps me with this. 

Breakfast: 1 1/2 scoop of Huel together with 5 almonds. In my green tea I have 1 tbls of coconut oil. Done. 

Lunch: 3 scoops of Huel and a fist of salad with 1 tbls of oliveoil. 

Mid-snack: 1 scoop of Huel or often nothing. 

Dinner: a real meal inspired from the Thrive course. Always a fist of broccoli, alternating between salmond/chicken/Halloumi/vegan things together with Quinto, black rice, bean-pasta. And some oliveoil actually. 

All the best! 

Pär

I just can t believe a company is selling a SUPLEMENT saying is a meal substitute. There are no meal substitutes. 

I d like to know what is your reason to eat like this? Not cooking? Time saving? Enviromental? Loosing fat? You wannna hate your life? Hahaha, sorry, I don t mean to be impolite. It s just hard to understand in why eating this way.

Jeff Serven doesn t show in the forum like for years so we have to take care of ourselves. However, I m pretty sure he d say you need to start eating real food. Actually you are eating fast food, fake fast food. They may add all vitamins and minerals but in the end is fake, not to count that you are not chewing your food what is indispensable. 

If you put together the real food you eat before dinner that s: 5 almonds, one tablespoon of coconut oil, one tablespoon of olive oil and a fist of salad, so you basically don t eat, you just have to chew  5 almonds and the salad.

By the way, where are you in the course, have you finished it? Then you d know your meals are not Thrive approved. If you have not completed Thrive yet, then you should be aware it s a step by step course and all the info wil be clearer in a few weeks.

Good luck with it!

Hey Pär,

Great to hear you're feeling awesome after nearly a year of GST! I can't provide an official answer, but personally, I wouldn't count this powder as fulfilling any of my Thrive tasks. I'd use it as a supplement, sure, but not as a meal replacement. As Antonio already said, it's probably better for you to get more of the real foods Thrive prescribes.

Since you're trying to reduce your meat consumption, I  can see the appeal of a powder like this, but it is worth considering whole food, plant-based protein sources instead. That's still bending the rules of the course, but I'd much rather see someone counting higher protein whole foods as their protein source over powders since I know for sure that they're healthy and sustainable options. When it comes to "meals" like Huel and Soylent, I'm just not sold and don't know of anything that shows they beat out real food, especially longterm.

How long do you plan to eat Huel for? 

Hi and sorry for the late reply! 

Thanks for your input :-) 

First of, here are the two reasons I eat Huel: 1. Convenient. 2. Vegan-friendly. And regarding Thrive, I finished the course today! With Huel ;-) For sure you could eat exactly what the course is telling you. Yet since there are not many (as I see it) examples of how you can get a GST diet without adding meat, I wanted to try things on my own. I see it like this: if 6 eggs give me X amount of protein and I could match that with Huel - well then I'm fine. Then, of course, I would also get some extra things on top of that that might not be optimal. 

So, what I'm interested in is: why is it so Antonio, that you count this as fast food? Is it because you read there from the Nutrition-specs that it's too much salt/fat/other things? As I understood it's basically raw food (like beans, rice, peas etc.) and shouldn't be harmful in that way. Then I tried to do a quick search around Xanthan gum and how that affects my body. And I admit it sounds strange. With that said - would it be Thrive approved if I skip the meat and only eat plant-based food instead: yes. Huel? When reading the nutrition specs - what do you see could go wrong? 

And one more thing that Huel does for me, that I did not expect at all: if so this powder gives me everything I need but it's 90% good for the body rather than 100%, I have found that I have so much more time. Time in which I spend on taking a walk or exercise. This alone helps me bring down my stress and I feel a heck better just by that. Huel is here to stay for a long time until proven it is total crap for me ;-) 

Other topic: where are both of you in your GST training? Always fun to hear where people are at. I have some more "body-fixes" to do, then I'm soooo keen on the handstand session.

All the best

/Pär

17 hours ago, Pär Söderlund said:

Hi and sorry for the late reply! 

Thanks for your input :-) 

First of, here are the two reasons I eat Huel: 1. Convenient. 2. Vegan-friendly. And regarding Thrive, I finished the course today! With Huel ;-) For sure you could eat exactly what the course is telling you. Yet since there are not many (as I see it) examples of how you can get a GST diet without adding meat, I wanted to try things on my own. I see it like this: if 6 eggs give me X amount of protein and I could match that with Huel - well then I'm fine. Then, of course, I would also get some extra things on top of that that might not be optimal. 

So, what I'm interested in is: why is it so Antonio, that you count this as fast food? Is it because you read there from the Nutrition-specs that it's too much salt/fat/other things? As I understood it's basically raw food (like beans, rice, peas etc.) and shouldn't be harmful in that way. Then I tried to do a quick search around Xanthan gum and how that affects my body. And I admit it sounds strange. With that said - would it be Thrive approved if I skip the meat and only eat plant-based food instead: yes. Huel? When reading the nutrition specs - what do you see could go wrong? 

And one more thing that Huel does for me, that I did not expect at all: if so this powder gives me everything I need but it's 90% good for the body rather than 100%, I have found that I have so much more time. Time in which I spend on taking a walk or exercise. This alone helps me bring down my stress and I feel a heck better just by that. Huel is here to stay for a long time until proven it is total crap for me ;-) 

Other topic: where are both of you in your GST training? Always fun to hear where people are at. I have some more "body-fixes" to do, then I'm soooo keen on the handstand session.

All the best

/Pär

 

So the most important thing is that is working for you and you are enjoying more your life by using huel and you are feeling physically and mentally good. In that case, I d say go for it. 

I called it fast food, because is fast, no prep, no cooking, no variety, not because it s bad for your health.

I d just recommend you to check the quality of aminoacid profile and if there is some deficiency in huel try to fix it by including the right plant based foods (beans, potatoes, rice, nuts, seeds, veggies, etc).

By the way, i hate cooking but i also hate drinking a powder shake as a meal, so i end up eating out too frequently, being also not optimal many  times (sugar, flour, refined oils...)