I have been using Huel for about a year now, for breakfast and lunch. I lost 20-something pounds fairly quickly, but have plateaued for quite a while without losing more weight. I usually add a little coconut oil and a scoop of superfood to each shake.
Often, after the lunch shake, I get a rather persistent pain under my lower left rib cage. It lasts for several hours. I have looked up all the normal diagnosis for pain there, and none of them apply.
Something is irritating my stomach, or intestines, or upper bowel, but I don’t not what or why. Could be the added coconut oil, or the coconut already in Huel? It doesn’t cause any other gastric distress or unusual BMs, just pain.
The easiest way to answer is to eliminate the added coconut oil from the next few Huel doses and see if the symptom disappears. This would be considered a “positive de-challenge” in the Naranjo Nomogram (a tool sometimes used in the pharmacy world to correlate the likelihood of a drug/food causing a specific adverse effect.). You already show the first step of the Nomogram, “established a temporal relationship”, meaning that the symptom appears after consumption of the food.
If this doesn’t uncover the coconut oil as the culprit, then try removing the greens powder.
Question: are you taking any NSAIDs? Ibuprofen, naproxen, Meloxicam, aspirin doses > 325 mg/day, etc? Just trying to rule out one of the most common causes of stomach upset and stomach/duodenum ulcers.
This is very strange and I’m not aware of Huel ever causing these kind of symptoms. The best thing to do would be to swap out your lunch Huel/the other ingredients like Deron said for another lunch to see if you can determine what the issue is.
Have you tried drinking water or juice when having these pains or mixing Huel with more water? The fiber absorbs a lot of water so if you look for example at how “thin” the drink is if you mix it and then let it sit for a while it gets thicker, try consuming enough water to make up for that, that way it’s not a glob in your intestine and it flows through instead of just sitting there.
Dentonhueler, pain under your left ribs is a classic sign of chronic pancreatitis. Get yourself to a gastroenterologist who specializes and ask for fecal elastase and an EUS. Ask about TPIAT. Take it very seriously and pop into the pancreatitis forums on FB. I am losing my battle with it, and it’s horrible. I bought Huel for when I’m put on a feeding tube. Best of luck.