We here at The Roarbots are an inquisitive bunch. We are always asking important questions such as:

“How can you be digested for a thousand years of pain and suffering? Assuming there’s even a breathable atmosphere inside a Sarlacc, wouldn’t you, like, die of thirst in a few days?”

and

“If an earth bender and a water bender can have a mud fight because there are elements of both in mud, and given that there is ‘air’ in everything, aren’t air benders basically gods?”

and

“Why can I feed my dog a perfectly balanced, scientifically formulated food that is specifically designed for his age, weight, and activity level every day for 15 years, but the best scientific minds of our time have determined that, for me, the optimal solution is, ‘Um, eat some of this and that, and try to avoid this and that. Also, we’ll change our minds in five years.'”

It’s this last question that set me on my 90-day Huel adventure.







For the uninitiated, Huel is “nutritionally complete, convenient, affordable food with minimal impact on animals and the environment.”

“Oh, you mean it’s SlimFast?”

No. The purpose of SlimFast and its ilk is to reduce your calorie consumption. You drink a shake – with like 20 grams of sugar, by the way – that has 180 calories. Then you hope your body forgets that it’s hungry for a few hours. After days of this calorie-deficit eating, you lose weight.

“So, you didn’t lose any weight with Huel, huh?”

What? No, I wasn’t trying to. I’m 5’8″ and 148 pounds, just as I was at the beginning of the trial. The purpose wasn’t to lose weight; it was to find a simple, non-dairy, gluten-free food that…

“Ah, you’re one of those ‘gluten is evil’ people! You’re just jumping on the latest bandwagon of whatev…”

For the love of Josiah J. Gluten, would you please shut the hell up? There will be a Q&A session at the end of the article.

I’m not saying dairy is evil or gluten is evil. You are welcome to eat what you want (although Huel being vegan is a nice boost to my environmental ego, considering how bad cows are for the environment, but that’s another article). I choose not to eat dairy or gluten because when I do decide to wolf down a couple bowls of Raisin Bran or a chocolate and marshmallow shake from Dairy Queen, I feel like someone’s jumping double-dutch with my digestive tract, and my toilet bowl… well, imagine a monkey was given a canvas, five tubes of Bob Ross™ Dark Sienna oil paint, and a handful of methamphetamines, and you get the idea.

“Ew.”

Right? Also, there is no Josiah J. Gluten.

So, on July 1, I received my Huel starter pack. It came with a bag of Chocolate Gluten-Free, a bag of Vanilla Gluten-Free, a shaker bottle, and a t-shirt. Following the instructions on the bag, I put the shaker ball in the bottle, added 14 ounces of water, two scoops of Huel, and three ice cubes. After vigorously shaking the bottle for a few seconds, I topped up the bottle with water and shook it some more. The instructions didn’t specifically mention the t-shirt, but I put it on just in case. I took a deep breath, steeled myself for the taste, and took a drink.

The Flavor

You know how you can set expectations for something, and then when your expectations aren’t met, you get this weird, visceral shock? Like when you grab what you think is a Coke and it’s a Dr. Pepper? You enjoy both, but your brain is expecting one thing and then, BAM, “Here, have something completely different!”

This wasn’t anything like that.

I knew it wasn’t going to taste like a chocolate shake, and I hoped it wasn’t going to taste like something you chug before a colonoscopy. My expectations lay somewhere between those two, and I’m happy to say that Huel fell very near the chocolate shake side of the scale. I didn’t imagine it replacing hot fudge-coated strawberries as a dessert of preference or anything, but I had no trouble drinking it or the vanilla. On the next order (spoiler alert, I ordered more), I chose the berry flavor, and it was even better than the other two. I had no issues drinking them without any additives at all.

Huel does have “flavor packs” you can add. I tried the caramel, and it was okay, but the Huel was good without it, so I didn’t bother with any other varieties after that. One awesome blend I did discover was Vanilla Huel + caramel flavor + Starbucks Nitro Cold Brew in place of the water. Pick up a treinte (trente? trientay? whatever the hell passes for 30 ounces in Starbucksese) on the way home the night before, put it in the fridge, and it’s a perfect wake-up breakfast.

The Consistency

I say “drink” when I talk about consuming the Huel, but that’s not quite the word. Nor is “eat.” It’s not powdery like some protein shakes, but it’s not smooth like a, well, smoothie, either.

The best thing I can liken it to is when you make yourself a bowl of oatmeal at 7 am, your still sleep-addled brain accidentally adds the water twice, and when the microwave dings, you look at the bowl with resignation, knowing you’re not going to go through the effort of making another one in this state, so you say, “screw it,” stir it up, and chug it down.







You can get a much smoother consistency by either blending it or making it the night before, but let’s be honest, if you had the kind of dedication to do that day in and day out, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article. You’d be building a sailboat or genetically engineering giraffes to grow wings or whatever it is you super-dedicated people do between Nobel prizes.

The Price

Each $60 order of Huel ($66 for the gluten-free) contains enough Huel for 34 meals. For those of you reaching for your calculators, that’s $1.76 / $1.96 per meal.

“Wow, that’s pretty cheap!”

I knew you couldn’t wait for the Q&A session.

Yes, it is. Each meal is 400 calories and a perfect blend of protein, essential fats, fiber, carbohydrates, and 27 essential vitamins and minerals. If you’re a lazy desk jockey like me who needs about 1,600 calories per day, that’s four meals at a total of $8/day.

This is one of the driving forces behind Huel; they want their product to be available to everyone. In fact, with this kind of product, you’d likely assume it’s also organic. You would be wrong. Huel has chosen not to organically source their ingredients precisely because to do so would take the cost of the product out of the reach of many people.

The Convenience

One of the best parts of a Huel diet is how little thought and effort I put into meals anymore.

Steve Jobs was famously known for wearing the same outfit every day so it reduced the number of decisions he had to make that day. While I’m not suggesting you rely on Mr. Jobs for nutritional advice, his business acumen is hard to question. Decision-making power is a static resource, just like physical energy or mana (the fantasy magic stuff, not to be confused with manna, the bread from heaven stuff, which coincidentally is not a static resource). Using up this energy leads to poor decisions like, “Dude, it’s 7 pm. I don’t even know anymore… Smashburger?”

A good example is our camping trips. The fall is our time to load up the Jeep, head out to the national forests, find a difficult-to-access campsite, and spend the weekend enjoying nature: driving the trails, watching the wildlife, pooping in holes in the ground, etc. In addition to our regular camping supplies – tent, sleeping bags, poop shovel, etc. – a normal weekend of food packing would include many, if not all, of the following:

A bag of bread, peanut butter, jelly, knife

Eggs, butter, sausage, a camp stove / campfire grate, a cast-iron skillet, or

Pop-Tarts / donuts / some kind of bagged breakfast food

A cooler full of ice for the refrigerated stuff

Snacks

Drinks

On our last trip, we took

A bag of Huel

Water

Snacks

Margaritas

The Result

I’m not dead.

I began this experiment because I was tired of trying to find healthy food that I could eat regularly without a whole lot of preparation. My entire goal was to fuel my body.

Mission accomplished.

Here are the results I wasn’t going for or did not expect:

An overall feeling of “wellness”

I wasn’t sluggish like I had been, and no, I don’t do the 30-oz. cold brew every day. I also seemed to ache less. I know some foods can trigger joint aches, and I was happy to find Huel wasn’t one of them.

Happy bowels

You can set a clock to the movements, and there have been zero meth monkey Monets.

Extra time

When your meal takes literally two minutes to prepare and consume, that lunch “hour” is now 58 minutes of reading, catching up, organizing my recipes, and then chucking them in the recycle bin because I’m done making food that tastes good yet is slowly killing me.

Super powered taste buds

Most people can’t stand healthy food because their taste buds have been trained to only like overly sugared or salted food. Once you remove that, it’s incredible how good other things taste. I didn’t go whole-hog and only eat Huel for 90 days. I still went out for Taco Tuesdays, visited the Indian lunch buffet, made some scrambled omelettes, etc. Not grabbing something crappy because it’s quick can really readjust your appreciation of other food.







Q&A

Okay, let’s go.

“Don’t people need to eat a variety of foods?”

I’m no doctor or nutritionist, but if you think that is in any way going to dissuade me from weighing in on this question, you probably haven’t been paying attention. So, all you nutritionists put down your 812-meal Facebook apps and stretch out those angry-reply-typing-fingers because here we go.

No, I don’t believe that, on a planet of 8.7 million species of carbon-based life, there is exactly one that can’t thrive unless it eats 500 different foods, most of which their genetic ancestors never had access to.

What I do believe is that people are complicated, emotional animals whose individual mental health is based on a number of things, some of which may be their eating habits. While I believe that anyone can eat the same thing all day every day for the rest of their lives, some people may have trouble emotionally coping with this. I am not one of these people.

“Isn’t a liquid diet bad for you?”

You didn’t go anywhere, did you, nutritionists? Okay then. Round 2.

First, Huel is not a “liquid diet.” It’s real food. The ingredients aren’t “milk, water, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, a bunch of chemicals that give you vitamins and minerals.” It’s made with real food like oats, sunflower, flaxseed, coconut, peas, and rice… plus a bunch of chemicals that give you vitamins and minerals.

Second, the entire idea behind why liquid diets are bad is because humans are used to eating. The acts of smelling our food, chewing, swallowing, belching, and picking our teeth with car keys have all become ways to say to our bodies, “Hey, you can stop being hungry now. We took care of that.” If you quickly drink your food, you may still be feeling hungry afterward. For some people, this can lead to overeating. You have to know your own personal willpower. If you can’t go a few hours feeling a little hungry without murdering coworkers, not only may Huel not be right for you, but you should probably reassess your eating habits. Also, maybe work from home.

“Do you have to pee a lot?”

I’m not gonna lie. At first, you’ll be making more than a few trips to the bathroom until your body gets used to drinking a gallon of water a day. Like most things, though, your body will adjust, and the frequency, if not the duration, will diminish.

“But I like food.”

Not really a question, but okay.

Then eat food. Hell, eat 100 new, different things in 9 months if that’s your thing.

My wife takes a Berry Huel to work with her in the morning. It’s fast and gives her the energy to get through her classes (she’s a fitness instructor). For her, it’s a way to eat quickly without worrying whether she’s doing so healthily. She still eats her regular egg-avocado-bacon-toast, crates of roasted vegetables, and weird-ass salads with shit that shouldn’t be eaten together topped with “balsamic,” which based on the smell is Italian for “grapes stored in the armpits.” We both also still enjoy the occasional pizza, Chipotle, Panda Express, Indian Kitchen, etc.

For that matter, eat steak, milkshakes, and Crunch Berries if you want. But if you want another item to throw into the mix, that’s fast and actually healthy, then Huel is pretty good and has a shelf life of like a year.

“Really, Panda Express?”

Don’t judge me.

“How much is Huel paying you to write this?”

Nothing. I didn’t even get some kind of “please write about our product” sample pack. I researched foods, found that Huel looked like a good option, and bought it. Since then, I’ve purchased seven more bags of the stuff and am now on a subscription – it’s cheaper like that – of three bags every three weeks.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though. If Huel wanted to toss a couple of bags my way, I wouldn’t stand on some moral high ground.

…

Huel?

“Then why are you writing 2,000 words about it?”

I don’t know… I’m bored?

I guess I want other people like me to know that they don’t have to constantly stress over food choices, standing in the kitchen trying to decide between the effort of a healthy chicken sandwich or the ease of that bag of Dove chocolate in the pantry. You can get up, fix something in two minutes, and go on with your day. Or you can step away from your desk, grab a quick Huel, and get back to work without throwing darts at a wall full of takeout menus and spending an hour waiting on and eating a meal, the only positive outcome of which is that your job pays you to poop.

“I’m not only lazy, I’m super lazy. Like Droopy Dog moves in with Jigglypuff lazy. Is there an option for someone like me that doesn’t want to take two minutes to dump some powder into a bottle and shake it?”

Oddly enough, Huel has apparently anticipated the Überslacker such as yourself and sells ready-to-drink Huel as well.

“Okay, I’m convinced. How can I try it?”

You can go to their website and buy some, or you can click on this link, which will give both you and me $10 off our next orders over $50.

“Aha! J’accuse!”

Fine, here’s a link you can use instead to pay full price.