Randomly decided to start eating one meal a day (for autistic reasons, not losing weight) and couldn’t find any guides that don’t devolve into “it cures cancer”.
I’m doing mostly fine, but I don’t want to learn that I accidentally screwed my health by doing something very wrong way after the fact.
You mean like by eating one meal a day?
Humans are foragers, our digestive systems are designed to constantly have something in our stomachs, that is because we need energy throughout the day (both for physical and mental exertion). What isn’t immediately used for energy from that one meal will either be stored (as fat) or excreted. The fat stores only get tapped into by strenuous physical activity, so what’s likely gonna happen is that you’ll be hungry for most of the day, and once you do eat you will overeat (cause the thinking goes: oh it’s only one meal, I have to eat for the whole day).
Please don’t do it, it isn’t healthy. My prediction is that you will be tired most of the time, you’ll have trouble remembering things, you’ll sleep longer, and you’ll feel a general lack of energy for most of the day. Eating one meal a day is basically starvation with extra steps.
This is terrible reasoning and even worse understanding of human evolution. Humans evolved to not only be able to live without food for extended periods of time but to utilize fasted time to clean out metabolic junk. People have fasted for all sorts of reasons for longer than the “3 meals a day” diets existed. Imagine thinking humans would have evolved with such a massive defect that if they got without 3 square meals a day they just lay down and die.
Studies have shown that the body increases metabolism when in a fasted state. It’s the bodies way of supplying you with energy so you can be motivated to go hunt and find food. It also increases focus and mental clarity. Similarly aiding in ones ability to locate food sources. The only reason people feel bad when going a few hours past their mealtime nowadays is due primarily to their bodies not knowing how to deal with it and be sure so much of people’s diet has high amounts of processed carbs and sugars which causes massive fluctuations in blood glucose and insulin levels.
Additionally it is amazing diabetes prevention. Causing your insulin levels to drop to baseline between meals and increasing insulin sensitivity. I was pre-diabetic before I started OMAD many years ago. Within 3 months my levels were back to perfectly normal even when not practicing OMAD. My Doctor took me off meds and I haven’t needed them since.
Here is a good video about some of the data behind therapeutic intermittent fasting.
https://youtu.be/7nJgHBbEgsE?si=wh8gN_YPkWA_4VdF
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I disagree with this line of reasoning. Humans are also hunters, which means less frequent meals. However, even if prehistoric humans ate more frequently, this doesn’t translate 1:1 with what is optimal for humans now.
A lot of people eat one meal a day or in an intermittent fasting style, and while I’m no expert at those topics I haven’t heard anyone mentioning the negative effects you list. I can also chip in my own personal experience, when I was mostly eating one meal a day for a couple of months without those things happening to me.
That’s meaningless sensationalism. Every caloric deficit can be called “starvation with extra steps”.
They would still eat snacks inbetween hunting via foraging, I watched a african tribe talk about how they ID what is safe to eat while out hunting and they said ‘watch what a monkey eats’
In intermittent fasting when you eat one meal a day you only do it for two days out of the week, and the rest of the week you eat normally. Even when you split your day 18/6, not eating/eating, the 6h hours allows you to eat two meals a long time apart. Enough time for your body to process the food and absorb the nutrients, and ready to get started on the next batch when you eat before the 6h is up.
I guess it depends how much you have in reserve. OP said he’s not doing it for weightloss. If someone who maintains normal weight by eating normally, cutting that down drastically and suddenly might negatively affect them.
I was mostly talking about how it might make one feel.