I eat One Meal A Day / OMAD. OMAD enables planning, results in overall higher quality of food intake. It’s very easy to avoid eating garbage if you eat once a day. I think it’s much harder to avoid eating garbage if you’re only on a time-restricted meal plan, something like a 4-8h eating window. You’re very excited for your meal with OMAD. People in ancient times didn’t eat all day long either. OMAD shows you that short-term hunger, the one that comes after only having eaten half a day ago, is a chemical illusion, because on OMAD, you won’t have hunger during the day. OMAD shows you that many people have a food addiction, but it’s not recognized as such, because it’s normal to eat and snack so much. Only after changing to OMAD, I’m now realizing how unusual and chemically unnecessary it is to feel hungry during the day. Beyond this seeming addiction to eating more than just OMAD, one also needs to know that food is something like a psychological fallback mechanism. People eat when things aren’t great or are stressed, but that comes with the danger of a negative spiral. Another thing is that food can be a natural anti-depressant, which is great to know, but in itself a double-edged sword. Carbohydrates basically are anti-depressants for normal people (Carbs -> Tryptophan -> Serotonin), but they’re not necessarily great food. If I eat too many carbs, I’m not peak performance next day, even if it’s “whole grain” pasta or self-baked bread. I avoid carbs by and large to shift into a higher gear / reach a higher baseline, which are mental models of mine. That’s because I view things in networks, and next to complex sugars are simple sugars (fructose), which is poison. Normal people avoid poison because it’s poison. Smart people avoid Fructose because it’s poison. I think one can top that by avoiding adjacencies to poison, too. More importantly, if you generally are in a higher baselines, feasting, enjoying, cheating – stuff like that – makes even more fun, because it’s special. A self-baked bread tastes like cake this way. A seven-day holiday where you eat whatever you want feels like joyous indulgence.

The further you come in the journey of treating yourself well, getting healthy, the easier you can also unbundle things (like food & nutrition) and develop a conscious, deliberate relationship to everything, including food. Your focus isn’t impaired with OMAD either, instead the opposite happens, because energy isn’t diverged from the brain to your stomach. Saves money, saves huge amounts of time, surely also makes you feel great, because you’re one step further away from the craziness, absurdity, mediocrity, and masochism that’s called normalcy, which by and large means eating the SAD, the Standard American Diet, which of course reached global presence, so there’s nothing much American about it anymore.

OMAD enables you to just get up in the morning and do what you love – and not think about food. OMAD is great regarding all the seemingly innocent micro-parameters that you should care about, such as cortisol levels, or keeping a low blood glucose level, low blood pressure, low inflammatory levels, maybe even gut-health. All of these are examples of excellent, “globally optimal” resource management.

It’s more speculative to think like that but at least with capital, energy, natural resources, if you manage to free up resources, you can reinvest it elsewhere. I think it’s not the worst thing to give your body longer periods of non-ingestion. In fact, the very same thing might very well be called autophagy. This is not the space for autophagy, but if I’d add original thoughts, I’m understanding autophagy as body-internal resource allocation that’s enabled by not keeping the body busy with too much digestion.

OMAD is something I’d strongly recommend to try out. Much easier than eating two meals a day, imo. Further benefits: You can really focus on getting your one meal right, you can count calories, you can bundle and unbundle what you eat, basically create a baseline. Of all the meal plans, if I’m not mistaken, OMAD is the one best for weight-loss. Don’t forget that things are synergistic, so I’d assume OMAD+sport+Keto+Cold showers+Calory counting is one of the best ways to lose weight, if you aspire to do so.

OMAD reduces complexity, makes it much easier to get your one meal right, experiment, see how you feel. You can go deep into the individual components of this one meal, plan it meticulously.

You do not need any food when it comes to sports, I’ve confirmed that through listening to many, many elite athletes who are on OMAD.

You believing you need food pre sport again is psychological. There’s no basis in science, it’s a matter of maladaptation. Your initial resistance thus is psychological, too, but once switched, you’ll realize there’s a platform on a higher level with a better perspective on reality.

If you can’t eat OMAD, try a 6-8h eating window. Studies show that people who say they eat in an 8h window actually cheat at the edges.

Relating to food, some more major do’s and don’t’s: The best meal plan is the one you can stick to.

Don’t eat after getting up, avoid eating until 10am. Don’t eat 2-3h before sleep. If that’s the rule, I’d extrapolate a bit and push it even further, i.e. at least three hours, preferably more.

Some more benefits regarding OMAD. One meal in the evening (my current schedule) enables me to only floss and brush my teeth twice a day while feeling fresh anyway, saving lots of time. One could even cut this to once per day, if one wanted to, namely after eating.

Gluconeogenesis: Glucose production from the liver, a process your liver gets good at, once you don’t eat all the time. Also seems to be a reason why I have less hunger than ever during OMAD, or even fasting for days. After a period of adaptation (2-3 weeks), you’re liver will produce glucose at a steady rate.

Eat fiber and protein first, then your carbs.

Eat apple cider vinegar or cinnamon before eating, especially carbs, to keep blood glucose levels low.