If you don’t want to read the whole post – jump to conclusions.
After incessant advertising (regularly on YouTube, Duolingo… everywhere I looked) of nutrient shake meal replacements, I gave in. So I signed up for the free trial of Abnormal.io. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, so I decided to write my thoughts on the process. I made a plan to replace 1 meal each day and make sure that I still ate a reasonable amount of other food – so that I was not hungry.
I paid for delivery for the free trial and got the box on the given delivery date, which is good, though should be expected from a service that provides food.
Bear in mind that each bag is only 350kcal, so if you want to reach your daily calorie goal, you may need to modify your other eating habits accordingly. For me, this seemed like a small meal, so I made sure I ate a reasonable amount throughout the rest of the day to make sure that I wasn’t hungry.
One good thing is that the bags are fully paper, so are totally recyclable. Many other companies providing a similar thing have plastic packets, so well done to abnormal for this.
First day
First day I had a chocolate flavoured shake and the flavour was reasonable. For me, I still miss the texture of solid food. However, it wasn’t totally unappealing to be able to just drink a shake and get lots of necessary components in a short timespan. It took me (since it was the first time) about 5 minutes to work out what needed to be done, but I’d imagine in the future it’ll take about a minute or two to prepare.
I had this for tea (dinner), and I’m not sure if it was a reaction of my body to it or something, but when trying to sleep that night I felt as if I was ‘buzzing’ and it took me an extra hour from my normal bedtime to get to sleep. Take this with a pinch of salt though since this could be caused by any number of other things in my day (or just a weird placebo) but I thought I should note this. Because of this, I’ll take the next 6 shakes earlier in the day to avoid any chance of this happening.
Rest of the week
Throughout the rest of this week, I have continued to have the shakes. I prefer to use them for breakfast and this helps me start my day a lot quicker than when I prepare breakfast. In terms of the flavours, out of the three I preferred the Chocolate followed by the Vanilla and then the Strawberry though none of the flavours tasted bad to me – though I am not a fussy eater generally. I also didn’t feel like I lacked in energy, compared to my normal breakfast (porridge and fruit/nuts). Personally I still rather the texture of solid food but for a replacement when I don’t have time, I feel like these are a good alternative.
On the abnormal.io website they say these shakes are optimized for you, and while this is probably a little true – as they do make you fill out a survey on your weekly activities and other things specific to you – I feel like this is mostly just branding (aiming to target people who are enthused by the idea of a meal tailored specifically to ‘them’ – when really the meal is targeted to a larger group of people with vaguely similar traits). Their claims of extra energy and other benefits were not significantly noticeable compared to a normal, well-thought-out meal.
Conclusions
Note: This post comes from a point of view of someone who does not regularly drink meal replacement shakes therefore no easy comparisons can be made towards other shake plans. If any other shake plans are tried in the future, this post will be updated to reflect them.
Overall, balancing my thoughts and opinions with the pricing – it works out at about £2 a meal once the trial is over (£4.99 for the free trial – 7 meals) – I wouldn’t be persuaded to spend this much on a meal that is smaller than average for me – although it was a certainly interesting trial and worth the price within this period. I can buy a mix of healthy foods and still manage to cook larger meals under this price.
On the other hand, for someone who does not have time to prepare meals or is happy to spend this much on a shake variety, then I would recommend at least trying abnormal.io. The flavours were nice, and the meals seemed ‘nutritionally balanced’ or at least nutritionally complete. It would be hard for me to tell whether the meal was actually nutritionally balanced without being a nutritionist or spending a long time researching. Abnormal.io say it is nutritionally complete, so I will take their word for it. The customer service also seems good as far as I could tell.
Unfortunately at the moment there are only three flavours – vanilla, strawberry and chocolate, though maybe this will change in the future. Maybe if there were new flavours there could be something a bit more ‘savoury’ rather than sweet. As far as I can tell through a bit of online research, it seems that many meal replacements are generally sweet or unflavoured, so just a few extra flavours would be a start.
I hope this helps some people when trying to make a decision whether to try abnormal.io. With the price, I don’t see many reasons for not having a go. If you do give it a shot, I hope you enjoy it, and let me know in the comments your thoughts!
If anyone has any pictures of their abnormal.io boxes with different ingredients to mine (as shown further up) please reach out to me if you are willing to share this. I’d ideally like to add a short comparison of the ingredients list to this post.