What do you eat on one meal a day (OMAD)? How do you make it safe and comfortable and
still get all the benefits? Coming right up. So what is OMAD or one meal a day?
Well it's exactly what it sounds like you just eat one meal a day you shrink
your feeding window down to about one hour you eat all the food within that
window and you don't eat the rest of the day so along with a ketogenic diet which
is incredibly popular there's also talk about intermittent fasting and OMAD
one meal a day and they're all just variations of the same thing it's all
about cutting back the carbs reducing insulin resistance so what drives
insulin resistance is the amount of carbs that you eat and how often you eat
every time you eat a carb you drive insulin and the more often you eat the
more often you stimulate insulin so the reverse of that is to cut back the carbs
and eat more seldom eat fewer times a day and the extreme version of that if
you want to call it that is you just eat once a day so why would you do that well
it is a very powerful way of reversing insulin resistance but another benefit
is it saves time you don't have to spend so much time eating and preparing meals
and another benefit is that you give your body a break every time that you
eat you have to kind of jumpstart you have to start up your your digestive
machinery you have to make enzymes you have to move things around you have to
make churn the food and and it has a certain wear and tear on your intestinal
lining so if you keep eating every few hours then the stomach and the lining
never really gets a break whereas if you eat one time a day then it gives the
body a lot of time to get some rest and repair and that goes for all your
internal organs your liver your gallbladder your pancreas your digestive
tract etc and the next question then is how do you do
this and how do you do it comfortably and how do you do it safely so first of
all I would recommend that you get fat adapted first that means you get into a
keto lifestyle you start reducing your carbohydrate so that your body knows how
to use the fat that would be step one because now you're more prepared for the
one meal a day then you start shrinking the window as you get more fat adapted
and you don't get so hungry and you notice you could skip breakfast you
could skip a meal here and there without going crazy now you shrink your feeding
window first you eat it at 8:00 in the morning you have your last meal at 8:00
p.m. then you have a 12 hour feeding window then you shrink that you skip
breakfast you eat at noon and then maybe at 8 p.m. you have an 8 hour feeding
window and then you gradually shrink that down to maybe six hours and four
until you're comfortable eating within a four hour window meaning you eat maybe
at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and 7 o'clock and nothing outside of that
window and now your body is pretty much ready to go
to one meal a day where you eat all of the food within a one-hour window so
when you do it this way it's not a shock to the body you get fat adapted you get
your body used to the concept of eating in a shorter period of time
then we want to think about a few additional things to make it healthy as
well so you don't want to crash your metabolism you don't want to get into
starvation and that the risk of this is much much less if your fat adapted first
if you if you're not and you start starving your body goes into a crisis
mode and it starts preserving energy that's not the idea you want to keep
your body burning the fat off your body but part of that is also don't cut your
calories too much try to keep it maybe at 70-80 percent so if you're eating
2,000 calories on a normal basis that's your basic energy
requirements you probably don't want to cut it below 1,500-1,600 calories a day
the object is not to go hungry the object is just to give your body a rest
and reduce insulin resistance and to burn fat so it makes it a whole lot
harder to get all that quality food in to get all those nutrients into a single
meal because that could be a really large meal and you may not even be able
to eat that much so you want to look at quality foods you want to eat things
like maybe an omelet with lots of vegetables in it and then the eggs are
nutrient dense you add some good olive oil and you add some cheese and raw
organic cheese if you can tolerate that and now you could probably eat 12 14
1500 calories in a single meal and be okay with that
another trick would be to make you some bulletproof coffee because even though
that wouldn't strictly stick within the one hour feeding window you could do
that in the morning maybe and you just sip it throughout the day and if you do
a bulletproof coffee with some butter and some MCT oil in it it's not gonna
have a significant influence on insulin it's not gonna trigger any insulin
response to speak of and therefore you're still technically fasting so
there you could get if you use a tablespoon of butter and a couple of
tablespoons of MCT oil now you got 400 calories they're sort of for free that
you if you get the 400 in the coffee now you just have to eat maybe 1200 in your
in your big meal it's not strictly a one meal a day but it's a way that you
essentially stick to the principles of doing that and again you want to think
quality food don't use anything artificial synthetic process nothing
like that but the best quality food you can think of organic grass-fed raw whole
vegetables all that good stuff as far as a percentage this isn't exact
for everybody but a typical percentage of calories would be from 75% from fats
20% from protein and probably no more than 5% from carbohydrates again you can
maybe get away with a little bit more protein and maybe even carbs because
you're spreading out the feeding window you're increasing your fasting period
you're going to still keep the insulin really really low even if you increase
the protein but if you can still keep this really low then you're
better off so is it safe and is it necessary so I think that it depends on
what your goal is and I don't think that you necessarily want to do it forever
because it does limit your food choices a little bit when you have to eat it all
in one meal it is difficult for a lot of people to eat that large a meal so if
your goal is weight loss then I would say go ahead and do it
for a few months and just see how it works engage your results and then you
cycle in some regular keto and intermittent fasting and I would say try
to stick for the most part with 80% from fat 15% from protein and no more than 5%
from carbohydrates pending on the person some people can get away with a little
bit more carbs but again this is individual I think the top level for
most people would be maybe 10 percent from carbohydrate which on a 2,000
calorie diet would be about 50 grams if you're still in ketosis at that level
then I think that'd be the top level if you're not then figure out where that
limit is for you. Now if you've lost the weight if you're feeling good if you are
stable in your health situation and you're just maintaining now is where you
try to tweak it just to figure out where you feel the best so now I could still
suggest a one meal a day once in a while because there's some great benefits to
given your intestinal tract a rest once in a while but it also kicks in
something called autophagy and that's where your body increases its recycling
properties it cleans up junk proteins and old debris from from cells that
break and you essentially recycle better during it autophagy and you kick in autophagy
at a much higher level if you have a 23-24 hour fast but if you don't need
to lose the weight then I would suggest you mostly stick with a low carb diet of
with intermittent fasting of a feeding window of 6 to 12 hours for the most
part that's basically what I do I usually eat within a 6 to 8 hour window
occasionally I'll have some breakfast and then I might have a 12 hour feeding
window but that's not for the most part again I don't have insulin resistance so
weight loss is not a goal I'm just trying to find out where do I function
the best so for some people at this point you might want to experiment and
see where do you feel the best I still don't think that you should go into
grains or any inflammatory starches but if you want to you could try getting up
maybe as high as 15% on the carbs that's still a relatively low carb diet and if
you're physically active I think that you could get away with that
some people might function a little better at that but figure out where that
number is for you so 15% of carbs for me would be about 75 grams I probably a
good bit lower that would be my highest number on any given day for the most
part you want to stay probably somewhere in the range of between 5 and 15 percent
of carbohydrates calories so keep in mind that you want to learn
some principles there's not a one-size-fits-all for everybody but once
you understand the underlying principles now you can start playing around with it
and see what does it take for you to lose the weight you need to get off and
what does it take for you to maintain and to feel the best that you can please
share this video with as many people as you can because we want to help lots of
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rather than just little things to do that's how you make it sustainable and
that's how you get the most out of it please share your comments if you want
to give this a try let me know how it goes and as always thanks for watching