My experience with FUELIN program
While many people have had positive experiences using the Fuelin app/program, mine has been less so and have exposed what I believe to be significant issues within the core of the product and blanket claims they are making. In telling my experience, I will be having to disclose some personal information that I’m not exactly comfortable stating (like weight). However, it’s important that I am as transparent as possible from here in. Up until this point, I have not said anything public about my Fuelin experience. Information has only been shared ether directly with Fuelin or in the private Fuelin Athletes Facebook group.
I will start out by saying I am not the “typical” endurance athletes’ weight, shape or size. I Sit somewhere in the 113 to 117kg weight range. Yes, I’m heavy and yes, I’m fat, that’s just my situation. I have always been heavy. Even at my leanest (a lifetime age), I was 85kg even though people thought I looked 10kg lighter. I also have a typically higher performance output than average for this weight class. For example, in the past 3 months I’ve run a 45:19 10k at 116kg. These two things were given as reasons/excuses as to why there may be issues with the app working.
Onto my experience. I first signed up to Fuelin in late December 23. When I first played around with it, I felt like the fuelling recommendations were on the low side. I used it for a week or 2 and gave up on it a bit as I didn’t have confidence in the product. This was also the first time I raised some potential issues around the app. In April, I decided to fully commit to giving the Fuelin program a longer and more committed go. This was not only intended for my own benefit but also was to test a product with the aim to be able to recommend it to athletes I coach.
When I ran my training through the app, I double checked the calorie recommendations against my own energy expenditure calculations. To work out my energy expenditure, I used the methods outline in Episode 74 of the Fueling Endurance Podcast, which featured Fuelin co-founder Scott Tindal and hosted by Fuelin Coach Dr Alan McCubbin. This is important as I’m using methods they have talked about publicly and putting it against the product they work for. I also Calculated energy expenditure in a couple of slightly different ways as well, such as excluding training hours from non-training energy expenditure.
In doing these calculations I had my initial doubts about Fuelin under calculating energy expenditure confirmed. The Fuelin app was under prescribing daily calories. In some cases, Fuelin was over 1000 calories under what I had calculated. I then calculated the total difference over a week. This is important due to the way the “fuel for the work required” framework operates. Over a total week, I calculated Fuelin to be between 8 to 21% lower than my own calculations depending on methods used.
I made the Fuelin team aware of this concern I had around this as well as a few other related concerns I had about the app (more on that later). After some back and forwards in the Fuelin Athlete Facebook group, which including them recommending me working 1:1 with one of their coaches (a pretty expensive solution) to be guided through the issues I was experiencing, I said that I’d leave it for now as all “I’m doing now is getting frustrated and upset because its yet another thing in performance endurance sport where because I'm not the norm it doesn't cater for me”. While this might seem like an extreme statement, you actually don’t realise how much this happens across the endurance sports industry until you are the one living it.
After this Scott replied saying “Your situation is not the norm for the majority of triathletes and that is why I think what you are suggesting is a little unfair to the program. Being 115kg is certainly on the outer edges of what we typically see for a triathlete. It is not to say the system cannot handle it, I am suggesting in some special cases that a consultation along with the autopilot or copilot plan would make the initial transition into Fuelin far easier than navigating it by oneself.”
Now I had my problems with this statement, because ultimately if the algorithms used in the program where robust enough, they would scale no matter an athlete’s weight or energy output. After all, Fuelin to claim to deliver “A nutrition program that is personalized to match your daily needs, training plan and individual requirements.” I shouldn’t need to pay extra for my numbers to be altered because the app isn’t able to cater for me.
I was also very aware of how the “fuel for the work required” concept worked as well as the traffic light system. I first heard of the traffic light system being used by Dr James Morton with Team Sky way back in 2016 for carbohydrate periodization. I had read research, listened to educational podcast and lectures from some of the world leading practitioners and researchers in this field. People such as Dr Sam Impey, Dr James Morton and Dr Louise Burke to name a few. The reason I went with Fuelin was that it was meant to automate my nutrition requirements for training, saving me time.
Despite of all the issues, I found the extra money ($200us) to sign up to the co-pilot plan with Scott, so I could be further helped (as suggested). I was also open to working with Fuelin to help them improve the product and algorithms as I was someone that would most likely “stress the system”. When asked, I sent Scott my spreadsheet showing all my calculations for a week’s training and what the app had prescribed me. This was done so Scott and Alan could review and compare my working out. I did request that if there were any problems with my calculations to let me know. I never heard anything back, so I presume my calculations were correct.
Now I will say that early on I did see success with performance improvements in the first 5 weeks or so of using the program. This is because that while prescribing less calories than expenditure, it was more calories than I had been eating in the month or so before using the app. There was most likely an improvement thanks to me becoming more aware of what I was eating and how much. I also for the first few weeks, was struggling to eat the required amount of food as I had also made a conscious effort to improve my food quality. My GI system was not used to handling the volume of food required. Previously, I had resulted to unhealthy options, such as fast food, to help meet energy demands. It was a discussion I had about my training and performances over several years with another coach where we discovered that I performed better eating this way, despite potential negative health consequences, because energy demands were met compared to times where I tried to eat healthy. This conversation is what triggered me to explore my nutrition further. While I did improve, training wasn’t going quite as well as when eating the fast-food diet where calories were higher. Recovery between sessions was affected and had to alter my training to suit.
During this period, I was consistently providing feedback to Scott about how things were going. I did mention that I had to adjust how I was training to better align with what I was eating. I also talked about how I was at the limits of my GI system for food volume. I was also asked by Scott if I would be willing to share my positive experiences in the Facebook group, which I agreed to do. I was positive with my post and was attempting to “make good” after my earlier post. I also had hoped that an improved algorithm would be launching relatively quickly.
After this first period, in which I had established a baseline, I decided it was time to attempt a weight loss phase. This is where I made the mistake, I should have never attempted this with the concerns I had about the app. There were also further concerns as when I put the app into weight loss mode. It had been already highlighted by Scott in the FB group that there were some potential issues with the app in weight loss mode for larger athletes. Knowing this, I did ask Scott to double check that everything was ok with what the app recommended. All Scott did was adjust my goal weight (which doesn’t affect calories).
The next 2 and a bit weeks were pretty grim. Calories had dropped a significant amount and training performance dropped considerably. My energy outside of training dropped, mood was negatively affected, I struggled with focus at work and started suffering headaches. They only thing that wasn’t really affected was the scales. I was in a bad enough state that my family questioned what I was doing. My response “I am struggling but I need to give this a few weeks to see if it works or not’. After I told Scott about my struggles, he did slightly adjust a meal or 2 around key sessions but it was too little too late. My training sessions had been adjusted to account for reduced energy availability and still couldn’t hit targets. I ended up running myself into the ground and got sick. In the last session before coming down sick was my “key” bike session of 4x8min @ 90FTP, a fairly easy quality session, especially as that’s the only quality bike session I had each week. Well in that session I managed 85% FTP for the first effort, in the second effort I struggled to hold 80% FTP before pulling the pin on the session, a broken man. In this period of dieting, I had one good session that happened to be my 45:19 10k effort.
After just over a week of sickness I reached out to Scott and explained everything that had happened. I told him all my symptoms of Low energy availability (LEA) and told him about the drop off in performance in the 4x8min @ 90% FTP session over the weeks. He did say that we didn’t want me in chronic LEA and didn’t want me getting sick. He then went onto say that men can normally handle acute LEA and just lose weight. Then he went on to say that it’s not unusual for performance to be affected in 1 to 2 sessions due to LEA. Even though I’d explained the key session to Scott, he thought I was too concerned about hitting peak numbers. Now most coaches and athletes would understand that the session prescribed is nowhere near peak number. I then explained to Scott that it’s already a modified session knowing that I would be in a calorie deficit and raised concerns. Scott said “if it’s happening repeatedly and I don’t feel good let’s bump up the intake”. While I hinted that I may have always been in a low energy state, this was never considered as a possibility from Scott.
This is where my Fuelin journey ended (24th June). In the end I lost all confidence in both the product and Scott. I haven’t used the app since then and while still a paid-up customer, I haven’t had anyone check in with me about why I stopped using it. I also have access to Fuelin competitor’s app, Hexis, so I decided to test the two against each other and against my own calculations. Both Hexis and my own calculations were within a very close margin of each other with Fuelin being significantly lower. Hexis also did something else that Fuelin didn’t do, it adjusted the carbohydrate amounts for low, medium and high carb meals. I raised this as one of my other concerns in the first Facebook post and was told there wasn’t much point to it. I have since heard Dr Sam Impey, co-founder of Hexis and more importantly the lead author on the fuel for the work required research paper, has stated that low, medium and high carb meals should be adjusted and relative to the individual. While sticking to blanket recommendations for low/medium/high meals might be convenient and make the app easier to use, it does limit it’s ability to individualize the nutritional recommendations.
Ultimately, I have found the Fuelin app to have several issues and/or flaws with the core of it’s product. It’s nice having all this fancy stuff like AI voice food tracking but if the core of the product doesn’t work, the fluff around the outside means nothing.
As started above, their algorithm doesn’t work for everyone. There are several reasons why this is the case. First one, while claiming to be able to tailor your nutrition to your training, it can’t. The app just guesses to an extent. Fuelin only knows the duration of the activity and what Zone you are doing it in. It then very basically goes Z1/Z2 rides are low intensity and Z3/Z4/Z5 rides are high intensity. It then goes low intensity rides get this and high intensity rides get that. The app doesn’t know energy expenditure nor does it account for peoples FTPs. A person with a 200w FTP and a person with a 400w FTP at the same weight would receive the same nutritional recommendations yet having a vastly different energy output. To me that’s not personalising my nutrition to my needs.
Second issue - Fuelin presumes that everyone’s daily non exercise activity is the same. Now this is ok if you’re someone working an office job. The app is set up for someone like you. If you have a more active job however, you are neglected and treated as if you worked a desk job. This can lead to underperforming in sessions and impair recovery, something that as a more active person you a battling with already. Once again this means fuelling is not tailored to an individual’s needs.
If you can’t account for these two variables, how do you expect to cater for a wide variety of athletes? Sure, your app is going to work for a core group of people that are close to the “average”, it’s even potentially going to work for people when not giving correct recommendations because it’s improving their eating habits. It is however far from catering for everyone.
Another related issue with the app is the way it handles double days where both sessions are 60min or shorter. This type of double day during the week are common for me. Often, it’s a run before work and a ride after work. On these days, it’s not unusual for energy expenditure across the two sessions to be around the 2000 calorie mark, if not higher. I did bring this issue up when I first used the app. I also asked if a small amount of carbs (30-60g) should be consumed during these short sessions if it was high intensity. I was told this was not required. Interestingly when doing the comparison with Hexis, I noticed Hexis was recommending that I fuel with a small amount of carbs during these high intensity, high energy expenditure 60min sessions.
There are other small issues that I have with the app, but these are minor in comparison to those stated above. One of these is that the daily wellness feedback seems to not have any impact in changing how Fuelin prescribes fuelling. It’s a great feedback tool but if it doesn’t affect the programming, it’s just a waste.
At the end of the day, while I’m disappointed with Fuelin, I’m more disappointed with myself. I’m the one in charge of my performances and I’m the one that decided to push on with Fuelin even though I believed there were issues. I should have not gone against my own judgement, or dismissed my own knowledge so easily.