We started Bolus around a problem our founder has lived with for a lifetime. Charlie has had type 1 diabetes for 28 years, most of his life. That is 28 years of thinking about food: not once in a while, but at nearly every meal, every snack, every shop, every plan that got in the way of eating.
Diabetes turns eating into a job. You learn a lot along the way: what different foods do, how a normal week actually goes, how quickly good intentions come apart on a tired Tuesday. And the conclusion we keep coming back to is simple. People do not struggle because they do not know what to eat. They struggle because knowing was never enough on its own.
Why eating well is so hard, even when you know how
It is easy to assume that people who eat badly just need to be told better. Spend any time living with a condition that hangs on food and you learn the opposite. The knowing is the easy bit. The doing is where it falls apart, and it falls apart because the world around you is built to make it fall apart.
The healthy choice is the slow choice
By 6pm you are tired and hungry, and the quick option is nearly always the worse one. Cooking well from scratch competes with a fridge full of nothing and a takeaway that arrives in twenty minutes.
The supermarket is designed to trip you up
Cheap, heavily processed food is engineered to be moreish and put right in front of you. Working out what actually earns its place in the trolley is a real effort, every single week.
Every decision has to be made again tomorrow
Eating well is not one good decision. It is hundreds of small ones, made when you are busy, distracted or worn out. Willpower runs down long before the week does.
One bad day feels like proof you have failed
Miss a few meals or have a weekend off and it is easy to decide the whole thing is off. So you stop, instead of picking it back up on Monday like nothing happened.
None of this is a personal failing. It is the food environment we all live in. And a leaflet telling you to eat more vegetables does nothing to change any of it.
Everyone hands you advice. Almost no one hands you support.
This is the gap so many people fall into, and we do not think it is unusual. When you are diagnosed with type 2, told you are pre-diabetic, or living with type 1, the world is quick with advice and slow with support. You get told what to do, then you are on your own to do it, in the exact conditions that make it hard.
What you usually get
- "Cut down on sugar and carbs, and lose some weight."
- A leaflet, a website, a list of foods to eat and avoid.
- An appointment in a few weeks, if you are lucky.
- Then the hard part, every day, entirely on you.
What actually helps
- The week's meals already decided, around how you like to eat.
- Help to buy the right food from your normal supermarket.
- A healthy eating coach to ask any hour, no appointment.
- A faster option ready for the nights it all falls apart.
Why we built Bolus
We set out to build the thing that was always missing: something that makes eating well easier to keep up, not another reminder that you should. Not a diet, not a lecture, not a list. So we built Bolus, a healthy eating company with one job: to do the hard parts with you and turn them into a weekly habit that survives a real life.
Today, Bolus sets up a week of real meals around how you actually like to eat. It supports you to buy the right food from your usual UK supermarket. It keeps a quicker option ready for the nights that fall apart. And it gives you a healthy eating coach built into the app you can message any hour, with no appointment and no judgement. Once a week you tell it how things went, and the next week shapes around the meals you actually cooked and would make again.
Bolus is for people with type 2, pre-diabetes and type 1 diabetes who broadly know they should eat better but struggle to make it stick, week after week, in the middle of everything else. If that sounds like you, that is exactly who we built Bolus for.
Support that fits real life
Bolus helps eating well become a weekly habit that finally sticks, without counting anything or thinking about food all day.
Start the programmeBolus is a healthy eating programme, not a medical device. It provides general healthy-eating support for food and lifestyle only, and does not give medical advice, diagnosis, treatment recommendations or insulin dosing guidance. Please review your own care with your GP or diabetes team.