Food replacements

I have found a food replacement and i'm sure its been done before but i want to try to replace my food for a month with this https://huel.com/
anyone on here done it before? Any tips? felt we needed a discussion on it. ill probably document it or something idk.
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  • This... Is pretty cool.... :O
  • My choice of food replacement was Soylent. I can't entirely say that it was a positive experince, but I am glad I did it. I went for 7 days without food, and it was actually pretty tough (although, I don't have much self control).
    One of the biggest issues for me was the taste and texture. Oh god it was weird. It didn't taste bad by any means, it was actually remarkably neutral. The same way that I imagine that if the color blue could have a flavor, then it would taste like a blue raspberry icee. If the color beige had a flavor then that's what it would taste like. The texture was also pretty weird. If I didn't mix it enough (I did the powder) then it could get weird and gloopy. Once the novelty of not eating wore off it wasn't very fun.

    Some negatives:
    - Breath Smelled Horrible (nobody told me till after...)
    - Had the runs quite often
    - Always had a rumbly stomach (both from hunger and diet change)

    Some positives:
    - Awesomely convenient 
    - Pretty cheap calorie - for - calorie 
    - Felt pretty damn healthy from the lack of junk food/sugar

    If you have any other questions let me know!


  • I think the idea idea of fully replacing food with stuff like this, is fundamentally flawed. This stuff really should be used as an alternative to some meals, but not all. Your not a robot, you're made of meat, and as such require more than what comes in that bottle. Most of soylent is oil, so really you're drinking a bottle of oil with some flour in it. To be fair, I quiet like the coffiest version of soylent, but only use it as an occasional breakfast. The taste is far better and i like the little bit of caffeine. Any more than occasionally 1 for breakfast and it makes me sick. And this is a fairly common problem, but makes sense when you think about the oil thing. It's got too many carbs to count as keto so its not like your body will process the oil properly. Even if it was keto, it's still a lot of oil all at once so would go down funny (see: stomach ache and the runs).
  • I tried soylent for a while and just couldn't get over the fact that it wasn't too cost effective, and the taste was so bland. However, I just got a shipment of Joylent yesterday, and so far it tastes a ton better. 

    If you are keen on finding a meal replacement that works best for you, take a look at Blendrunner. It has a list of everything on the market, as well as breakdowns by price, nutritional value, and energy per serving
  • @chironex Blendrunner also has an option to sort by oil content. I'm surprised to see Soylent at the bottom of the list, so your theory about it being fundamentally flawed may be on track. However, I don't think that it isn't something that your body isn't capable of adapting to, as there are plenty of people that live off of this stuff without too many complaints of stomach issues after the first couple of weeks. At $5 a day for all of my nutrients, I'll deal with an upset stomach for a week or two. I'll let you guys know if I have and adverse reaction to a (nearly) pure Joylent diet over the next month. You are right, though, it is hard on the stomach starting off
  • People still understand so very little about nutrition that I think any meal replacement will eventually cause problems, and maybe not ones that will be apparent for a while. That being said, meal replacements are probably better than surviving off of mac and cheese and multivitamins, so if you aren't eating well to start and value time more than health, flavor, or social aspects of food, it's probably worth a shot.
  • This would not work for me one bit. Not only am I mostly a carnivore but also I'm not a little guy. I would probably be a very angry person feeling hungry all the time. My wife tells me I need to eat because my attitude shows up ;)
  • It's 3 days later, with at least 2 meals a day being joylent, and I'm having zero issues. If anything, I feel pretty damn great. Of course, this is purely anecdotal, but I don't seem to be having any problems living off of this stuff. There is an obvious difference in fiber content in this stuff compared to soylent, and excrement is more normal than the white paste that soylent users report. This is obviously affected by the fact that I've been eating some solid food with it, but It's not nearly as bad as the soylent.
  • Three days doesn't mean much. I did a salt water cleanse (not because I believed in toxins or any of that garbage, but because it was a challenge and I was curious about some "intestinal lining" claims) and didn't eat at all for 14 days, and I felt amazing for most of that time.

    Also, any nutritional problems would take months or years to show up, as the body is designed to withstand periods of feast and famine.
  • edited December 2016
    You have a point. I need to start a journal for this...
  • I find this sort of thing super interesting. I'm probably going to use it to get a boost of calories as I don't regularly eat lunch or breakfast. that being said if i do i will have a sweet pastry or something.
    anyway this is for the new year! im going to go off by living off of this stuff for 2 weeks and share my experience as a google doc then ill just replace some meals with it. I plan to take it with milk and probably strawberries or some kind of fruit just to make it more exciting.
  • we don't have a nutrition part of the wiki!
  • One of the reasons nutrition is so hard and we (as a species, not as a community) understand so little about it is because it's super not one-size-fits-all. Different people are likely to have very different nutritional needs. So a wiki might be hard, but as a catalogue of personal experiences it could be useful.
  • @tekniklr I second that fact being totally vegetarian (not vegan) but I base my diet on ph and color I try to eat all the colors every day :)

    Some ppl think diet and blood type are related I just don't buy it though
  • "Some ppl think diet and blood type are related I just don't buy it though"
    blood type is genetic?
  • Metabolism, nutritional needs, and allergies/intolerances are probably mostly genetic, but dietary choices obviously aren't.
  • "Different people are likely to have very different nutritional needs."
    "Metabolism, nutritional needs, and allergies/intolerances are probably mostly genetic, but dietary choices obviously aren't."

    Well, kind of. And obviously dietary choices are not in this category.

    While there are some people with genetic or medical conditions that require specific diets, most people are not that different. The key word here is "Needs".

    A diet that is high in a variety of vegetables, that gets most of it's energy from lipids, with lots of fiber, and a moderate amount of protein, really is the baseline here. Vitamin and mineral intakes are also very standard.

    I ran into this lady at whole food whose entire shopping cart was filled w/ tubs of cubed fruit and vitamins. After some delicate questioning, she explained that she had been listening to her body and her body just needed fruit. The vitamins were to help with the fact that she was just eating melon all day.
    This lady doesn't have different dietary needs. She's just being a picky weirdo.

    The benefits of intermittent fasting are well documented. So is cycling ketosis. 
    There shouldn't be a reason that diet isn't discussed, as long as people don't take it personally when certain things contradict their choices.
  • @Xaion27 I should have been more clear, some people believe some diets to be better for some blood types

    Yes blood types are genetic
  • Some people believe the Earth is flat, too.
  • edited December 2016
    And some people are just negative ,I had that little epiphany after reading "your comments" belief can be a powerful thing whether "right or wrong" @ightden
  • I drank soylent and only soylent for 3 months the first month was 1.4 and the other 2 were 2.0. I felt fine and honestly better than I did before. But it was kinda spendy with my poor kid ass.
  • edited December 2016
    @chironex: I wouldn't say that "we are not a robot" as justification. Cells are pretty much just complex factories that turns things from A to B, just that there are millions of complicated steps with lots of As turning into lots of Bs. The fact is though the process is highly complex and it isn't easy to replace normal food, and eating normal food is much cheaper and easier anyway so there's not really much point in "food replacements" aside from using that as a means to further understand how the body process food.
  • The  model of the cell as a factory works in some situations, but not in this case. It's right up there with "the brain is a computer".
    Taking something as complex as a cell and comparing it to even the finest factories we have, is a lossy metaphor.

    But I agree with your second bit. Food replacements seem to actually only be good for fillers and experiments. Also, most of your food replacers are made from foods. You're not replacing food per se, you're just eating with extra steps.
  • edited December 2016
    I would argue that the fact that it is million times more complex than the finest (chemical) factory in existence doesn't make it less a factory.To say otherwise would be to say it is a magical voodoo thing that doesn't convert things from A to B.

    Also, I would argue that brains differ from computers in ways other than complexity. For one computers don't have neurotransmitters.
  • Maybe I should have clarified. It's not just complexity. We literally don't understand how most biology works. So it's usually a bad idea to look at 2% of something and say "the rest of this is just like that 2%". Therefore, saying cells are pretty much complex factories is quite possibly erroneous.

    And yes, it's not just complexity for brains as well.

    We're agreeing on most of this.
  • We really have no clue what vitamins can be synthesized in a form that we can absorb, for example. We're incredibly ignorant when it comes to nutrition.
  • edited December 2016
    Fair enough. 

    However, I should also point out that while we only know little about the details, we do know that for cells, some stuff goes in, and some stuff goes out. We don't know all the stuff that goes in for each type of cell, or all the stuff that goes out, or everything that happens in between including all the receptors that regulate, directly or indirectly, that process. When I say that "cells are like mini, highly complex factories" I mean that they take in a bunch of stuff, most of the time does some stuff to them to turn them into other stuff unless it's something that they transport (eg ions), and then pumps them out. Everything, from drugs to nutrition, we know about the cell is based on this model. So unless someone here can come up with a much better theory out there (life force? Chi?) that would explain the mechanisms of drugs and nutrition that we know so far, plus extras, I really cannot see how we can jump out of this model of "stuff comes in, stuff comes out".  
  • I don't really see how "stuff comes in, stuff comes out" helps much, when we can, at best, only know with some confidence what is going in. And even then, we can only sorta measure it on organism scale, not on cellular scale.
  • edited January 2017
    In this instance? Not really. But then again, "treat biology as some super magic voodoo that we do not understand at all and works outside of physics and chemistry" doesn't help either. In fact, that is worse in the long run.
  • edited December 2016
    I've been about 95% Soylent for almost 2 years. The taste of the earlier versions was tough but it only took a few meals to get used to it. I eat muggle food when we go out to a restaurant or visit people but at home or work it's all I have. I can say I "feel better" but the major quantifiable changes are that I lost 25 lbs without changing any other habits, my cravings for caffeine went away on their own without any specific effort to reduce it, and my personal food budget is down about 25%. I only eat the powder versions. I don't enjoy the taste of the liquid version and it's pricey and has a lot of additional waste. The bars were really good, but very expensive. The coffee version was expensive too and it tasted acceptable, but not as good as making the powder with my own coffee. Now that I don't require caffeine, it's irrelevant to my needs though.


    My wife and parents also started having Soylent for most breakfasts, lunches, and some snacks.

    I haven't tried Huel or Joylent but if I could get them for the same price I'd certainly try them.
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