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.
I guess I’m going to ask you my dumb questions then.
Should I eat snacks outside the meal time? So far I’m eating fruits or the odd boiled egg, but I got mixed messages on whether that was necessary. I’d prefer to keep all eating to meal time eventually, but I’ll accept the inconvenience if it’s for the best.
Is there some kind of food I should really watch out for? Like pasta, cheese or something like that?
If doing this as a lifestyle, how could one deal with some kind of eating event (say, a late night pizza party with friends) that falls outside the normal window? I assume it’d not be very cool to fast for longer than 24 hours, but I also wonder if there are any risks to a sudden doubling on eating times after the body gets used to it.
Sorry if any questions sound silly.
If you have snacks then you aren’t doing OMAD. lol. The entire purpose is to fast for essentially 23 hours ever day. One meal a day mean you eat once a day. I usually do a mix of OMAD and a 20:4 fast. So one day I might eat the OMAD and another day I have a 4 hour eating window, usually between 2-6pm.
I would stay away from meals with high amounts of process carbs and sugars. Pasta being one of them. You don’t HAVE to but they will spike your insulin like crazy and crash you hard and make hunger way worse. Those sorts of foods digest fast and leave you feeling hungry and unsatiated. Fats and proteins are more filling, digest more slowly, and will leaving you feeling fuller, longer. I primarily focus on protein. Your body wants to eat for protein first. Proteins from whole foods are best. Make sure you get in enough protein.
Side note, also stay away from processed seed oils. Basically any “vegetable oil” that’s not olive, coconut, palms, or avocado. Most all other vegetable oils come from highly processed seeds (soy, canola, corn, cottonseed, etc) that involves lots of repeated heating and mixing with chemical solvents to purify them. By the time they make it to the bottles they are already rancid. These oils are essentially poison and they are also in fucking everything.
So first off, fasting for longer than 24 hours is fine. Just make sure you are taking in proper electrolytes. Being on keto makes it easy. There were a few times I got off work and was too tired and just went home and went to bed. Woke up and didn’t eat till dinner the next day. Easy 48 hour fast. My longest was 162 hours (almost 7 days) of just water and electrolytes. People on the fasting subreddit sometimes got for 14 days or more. If you don’t have any health conditions and have your electrolytes taken care of you should be ok. Just have to re-feed properly coming out of it if you do more than like 3 days. It actually does not feel bad at all either. After the 2nd or 3rd day you basically just stop feeling hungry. As long as you get the electrolytes you won’t feel bad either. In fact, I LOVE how I feel when I’m fasting properly. It’s a mental clarity I can’t really describe. The body feels light and mobile and fairly motivated to do shit. Kind of hard to describe.
As far as going to events and eating multiple times a day or whatever… I mean, you can just eat like normal some days. I do OMAD and the 20:4 fast during the week. On the weekends I usually still won’t have breakfast but will snack and do whatever for the rest of the day after noon or so. It won’t like, ruin you. Once your body gets used to doing fasting it’s not like one or two days of not fasting will set you back to square one. Your body will just get to a point where it is like “I can eat now or I can just wait, whatever.” Eating more often and stuff only really can be dangerous if you do multi day fasting of longer than 3 day then come back and eat a ton. That can really fuck you up. If you ever do do an extended fasts like that though just make sure you’ve done your research.
The key thing to take away from getting into OMAD for me was “I will eat when I want to eat and not let my hunger control me. I know that I don’t have to eat ever 4 hours. I will be fine and my body is not going to starve.” For me it’s empowering. I see so many people freaking out about having to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. Like their whole day is consumed with… Consumption. I would go to work and all I would hear is people crying about their next meal and I realized how much people just obsessed over it. It made me realize how much more time I had for myself and the things I wanted to do. The thing with fasting is it’s not about what you HAVE to do, it’s about what you DON’T have to do. I DON’T have to cook so many meals. I DON’T have to eat if I don’t want to. I DON’T have to worry if I miss a meal. Your body is not some fragile little thing that’s going to break down the second you go without a meal.
Another thing it helps me with is, ironic enough, I have self control issues. I cannot portion control. I never could. I struggled with weight all my life. When I eat I want to eat till I’m full. So fasting helped me control that. I am either a ravenous beast, or I “monk out” and just don’t eat at all and that’s just how I have to live. It’s easier that anything else I have tried.
This helped a lot, thanks!
On top of my other comment once you get into it heavily you realize how much you were just eating out of habit. Like when I do my 5-7 day fasts the hard part isn’t feeling bad or hunger. I don’t feel bad and the hunger goes away after a while. The hard part is the habit of eating when I do certain things or at that specific time of day. I literally only ended my (almost) 7 day fast was because I was just bored of not eating. I wanted to taste something other than water. lol