How (and why) I developed my own real food replacement for meal replacements

I created my own meal replacement shake to lose weight and it worked. But before it worked, it didn’t.

There’s an elephant in the room. It’s me. I’ve been trying to lose weight since 2019 and, in the beginning, I did pretty well, counting calories and using meal replacement shakes. Between August 2019 and September 2020 I lost about 60lbs. You can probably guess what’s coming next.

Sticking to a strict diet regime during COVID has been… challenging. And the challenges have not been simple either. There have been a series of them, all with different effects on different parts of the process. So many that I couldn’t begin to deal with them in one post — so I’m not going to even try.

Instead, let’s deal with them one at a time, one post at a time — starting with how my plan to count calories using a meal replacement shake skidded off the tracks and into a ravine.

Falling off the diet wagon

During the early stages of my weight loss, using a meal replacement shake was central to the strategy. I have a medical condition that makes me prone to episodes of low blood sugar, which in turn make it difficult to lose weight (because the only proven way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat).

The meal replacement shake I chose, Huel, is fantastic for this. It contains a predictable number…