Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Pros and Cons of the "One Meal a Day" (OMAD) Diet

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

The “One Meal a Day” (OMAD) diet has been around for a while, but it’s more popular now than ever before. That’s likely because fasting, intermittent fasting, and diets that revolve around not eating for long periods of time are more popular in general. OMAD is the most extreme variation of intermittent fasting, and much tougher to follow than the Leangains protocol, for example. Why would you want to eat just one meal a day, though? If you’re not doing it currently, should you consider it? Many people say OMAD improves your metabolic health, reduces your risk of disease, helps you live longer, and is generally superior to traditional eating. Other people are less convinced and question the efficacy, safety, practicality, and necessity of OMAD. So that’s what this podcast is all about. What is the OMAD diet, what are its benefits,  what are the downsides, who should consider it (and who should not), and more. Timestamps: 4:54 - What is the OMAD diet? 10:19 - What are the benefits of the OMAD diet? 15:05 - What effects does the OMAD diet have on weight loss? 24:14 - What are the downside of the OMAD diet? Mentioned on the Show: Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://buylegion.com/vip Want free workout and meal plans? Download my science-based diet and training templates for men and women: https://legionathletics.com/text-sign-up/

Hey there, I'm Mike Matthews and this is Muscle for Life. Welcome to another episode and thank you for joining me today. The one meal a day diet, OMAD, something that has been around for a while. I mean, I have heard about OMAD since I got into the fitness racket back in 2012, but it's more popular now than it was then or maybe has been at any point in the past, because fasting is more popular now than ever before. And that includes intermittent fasting diets and other diets that revolve around not eating food for long periods of time. And the one meal a day diet is the most extreme, quote unquote, version of intermittent fasting,

right? You could say that water fasting is more extreme than OMAD, of course, because then you might go several days without eating or even doing a 24 hour fast once per week. Some people might find that more difficult than eating just one meal per day. But as far as just your daily intermittent fasting protocols go, one meal a day is a bit tougher for most people than let's say the lean gains protocol, which is usually three meals a day. You have eight hours to eat all of your calories. Most people split that up into two or three meals. And so why would you want to eat just one meal a day if you're not already doing

it? Because if you're already doing it, you probably just like it. If that doesn't sound like something you would like to do though, should you consider it? Well, some people, many people say, yeah, because it's going to improve your metabolic health. It's going to help you reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction. It may even help you live longer. It may have certain effects in the body that increase longevity. And depending on who you listen to, you also might hear a lot of science-y sounding explanations as to why OMAD is superior to traditional eating by a country mile and even superior to other intermittent fasting regimens. Other people

though, like me, as you will find out, are a bit less convinced and they question the efficacy, safety, and the practicality and the necessity of OMAD. And so that is what I will be talking about in this podcast. What is OMAD? What are some of its benefits, some of its purported benefits? What are the downsides? Who should consider following OMAD and who should not and more. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my VIP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and all circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life

faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger paint by numbers simple by carefully managing every aspect of your training and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork. So all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week and month after month. What's more, we've found that people are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the puzzle. And I'd bet a shiny shekel it's the same with you. You're probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there's something you're not doing correctly or at all that's giving you the most grief. Maybe it's your calories or your macros. Maybe it's your exercise selection. Maybe it's your

food choices. Maybe you're not progressively overloading your muscles or maybe it's something else. And whatever it is, here's what's important. Once you identify those one or two things you're missing, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress. And that's exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to www.buylegion.com. That's B-U-Y legion.com slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It's really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you're a good fit for the service. And if you're not for any

reason, we will be able to share resources that'll point you in the right direction. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next few months than you did in the last few years, check out my VIP coaching service

at www.buylegion.com slash VIP. All right, let's start this discussion where we always start discussions like these, and that is a simple definition of OMAD. What is the OMAD diet? And that is an initialism for one meal a day. And that basically tells you what the diet entails, right? One meal a day. In most cases, it's actually one hour. You could say it's the one hour a day diet where you eat all of your daily calories in a one hour period. And it's normally just one large meal. And then you don't eat anything for the other 23 hours of the day. And some people would say that those are 23 hours of fasting. Although

technically you're not in a fasted state until your insulin levels have come back down to a baseline low level. And that means that your body has finished processing all of the food that you ate in that one meal. Then you are technically in a fasted state. Up until then you're in a fed state. And because you are going to be eating a couple thousand calories, probably maybe a bit less if you're a small woman, especially if you are restricting your calories for weight loss. This is a large meal that's going to take several hours to process. It could be four, five, six, even seven to eight hours, depending on how big you are and how much food you eat in your one meal a day and the makeup of

that meal. For example, if it is a high protein, high carb and moderate fat meal, or maybe even a moderate carb, high fat meal, the more fat that you inject in that meal, the slower it will be processed. Whereas if you're following a lower fat diet, and so that means it's going to be a high protein, very high carbohydrate, lower fat meal that will probably get processed a bit faster. And so that's what the diet entails. There are no calorie targets or macronutrient guidelines usually that comes with OMAD. You're basically eating as much as you want, but you're supposed to just eat to satisfaction. You're not supposed to force feed yourself. And usually you are not restricted as to any foods you can eat. You're supposed to eat the stuff that you like, but you are supposed to eat your meal at roughly the same time every

day. And that's because your body gets used to getting fed at certain times and will naturally get hungry leading up to those feeding times. So if you were to, let's say for a week, eat your one meal a day at 1 PM, and then maybe a week is not enough actually to cause that entrainment, but probably seven to 10 days or so. And then you decide, actually, you want to switch it up and start eating at three or four, or maybe eat earlier in the day. It's okay. You can make that change, but let's say you're going to go from the 1 p.m. to the 3 or 4 p.m. Don't be surprised if you start getting hungry around 1 p.m. and you find it hard now to stick to the plan. That's a good nutrition tip regardless of

the type of diet that you are following. It is smart for helping control appetite to generally eat at the same times every day, regardless of how many meals you're eating or what is in those meals. And so then a lot of people who follow the OMAD diet, they eat their one meal in the evening. It's usually a very big dinner sometime between maybe 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. And then they don't eat anything else. And then they get in, you know, p.m. and 10 p.m. and then they don't eat anything else and then they get in, you know, let's say seven or eight hours of sleep and so that makes it easier to go the 23 hours without food and if they have eaten a lot the night before, they often are not hungry at all in the morning anyway, so that helps them get a little bit further and if people are going to struggle with this, and women in particular tend

to struggle with fasting diets more than men, and there are biological reasons for that. It's not just because women are psychologically weaker. No, there are biological reasons why women tend to have more issues with hunger in particular on fasting diets, so much so that the intermittent fasting diet or approach that is most popular in the body composition space, which is the 16-8 diet, 16 hours of no food, 8-hour eating window. It's generally recommended for women to go maybe 12 to 14 hours without food and have the 12 or 10-hour eating window just to cut down on the hunger because many women experience it to the degree where it's distracting and it is just counterproductive and it can lead to overeating and feelings of guilt and so forth.

And some people though with OMAD, they prefer to eat a large breakfast and that just works best for them. So, you know, sometime in the morning they eat a very large meal and that's it for the entire day. And some versions of OMAD will say you can eat a small snack or two throughout the rest of what is supposed to be your quote-unquote fasting period. Like you can eat some low calorie fruit, for example, or a little bit of protein. And that of course means you spend even less time in a fasted state, which kind of further defeats the purpose of a diet like this, which is to maximize fasting, to maximize the amount of time that your insulin levels are very low. That's really what it comes down to. So many OMAD purists say that you can't eat snacks, you can't drink calories,

you eat your one meal, and then for the rest of the day, you can drink water, you can drink zero calorie drinks. So diet soda is okay. Diet anything is okay. So long as it's zero calories per serving. Black coffee is often used to help blunt appetite or other caffeinated beverages for people who are very sensitive to caffeine. Sometimes it's black tea, or maybe it is half of a can of an energy drink or something like that. Now, as far as benefits go, there are a lot of claims out there. If you poke around on the internet, you're going to hear a lot of things. You're going to hear that OMAD can reduce your bad cholesterol, your LDL cholesterol levels. It can reduce inflammation. It can reduce the risk of different types of disease, neurological disease, metabolic disease, Alzheimer's. It's going to make

your heart healthier and it's going to improve your cognitive function and your brain health. It's going to increase autophagy levels, the natural cell death that occurs in cellular turnover, and that is claimed to increase longevity. There are claims that OMAD can improve your hormone profile. It can boost your growth hormone levels. It can boost your testosterone levels. And as I mentioned in the intro, many people have very scientific sounding explanations for how all of that works. But when you take a closer look at a lot of the studies that are used to support claims like those, you quickly realize that the evidence is tenuous at best. So for example, there's no research out there that looks at the OMAD diet

specifically. The studies that OMAD adherents are using to support their claims all involve different kinds of fasting protocols. So there's really no way to know if the benefits associated with one of those types of diets, like the 5-2 diet, for example, can be applied to another one like OMAD. What's more, much of the research on fasting and intermittent fasting is done on animals. And of course, we can't assume that benefits that are seen in animals are going to also be seen in humans. We can't extrapolate it directly from rats to humans. And a lot of the research has been done in unhealthy people, people who are overweight, people who are sedentary, people who eat very poorly,

the standard American diet, which has an apropos acronym, SAD, the sad diet. So when you take somebody who doesn't eat well, who doesn't exercise, who drinks too much alcohol, well, who doesn't exercise, who drinks too much alcohol, maybe has other unhealthy habits like smoking, probably isn't sleeping well. And if you start restricting their calories, you start bringing their body weight down, improving their body composition, maybe including some exercise of any kind, just movement is beneficial at this point. You're going to see a lot of the benefits that I just ran through, not because of the diet per se, simply because they're losing weight and they're moving. Their body is just getting healthier. And now what happens if you take somebody like me, probably like you, who

has a healthy body composition, who is active, who's doing at least a few hours of exercise per week, who eats a lot of nutritious foods, who has pretty good sleep hygiene. What happens when you take somebody who's doing the most important things mostly right most of the time, and then you put them on a fasting diet, you put them on the OMAD diet, are there any additional benefits for people like us? That is one big question mark. And based on my understanding of the current weight of the evidence, if I had to make a bet and a fairly big bet, it would be on no. And that's not because I have an ax to grind with fasting or intermittent fasting or people who really advocate for those types of diets. I personally have no emotional attachment one way or another to

how I eat or even how I currently recommend most people eat, which as you know is, hey, if you're like most people, you're probably going to do best with a traditional type of diet, eating three to five or even six meals per day, and probably going to do best with a high protein diet and at least a moderate carb and moderate fat, maybe even higher carb and lower, not low, but lower fat diet. And you're going to do well if you eat a large variety of foods and a lot of nutritious stuff and include some treats in there as well to satisfy your sweet tooth. And that's probably what's going to work best for you. Now, if that does not quite work for you, if you like to eat just two or three meals per day, for example, and let's

say you are not naturally hungry in the morning, you don't even like breakfast as a meal or breakfast foods, well then actually maybe intermittent fasting might work well for you, but only because it's just going to fit your preferences. It's going to fit your lifestyle. Maybe it fits your schedule. It is a diet that you're going to be able to stick to, in which case I would recommend trying it. Try the skip breakfast intermittent fasting, which usually comes out to be that 16, 8 approach or 12 to 14 fasting. And then the remaining hours eating window, which many women do a little bit better with. It looks kind of like that actually. Maybe you start eating 12, 1 PM and you finish 6 or 7 PM and then you just do that day after day, right? But anyway,

let's get back to OMAD and let's talk about OMAD and weight loss because that is the primary benefit claimed that sells people, that persuades people to do it. And as you know, the only way to lose weight, to lose fat is to eat fewer calories than you burn. Over time, of course, you can do it every day. You could have a moderate calorie deficit every day, or you could do it three or four or five days out of the week and then eat maintenance calories on the other days. But the important thing is if you look at total calories consumed over a meaningful period of time, let's say three months, and then you look at total calories burned, that total calories burned has to be significantly lower over the course of that three months for there to be meaningful fat loss.

And several studies show that diets that involve fasting can be effective at helping people lose weight because many people find that it's easier for them to restrict their calories, to maintain a calorie deficit when they eat fewer meals, fewer larger meals every day. And mostly because of appetite of effects, people find that they're just generally less hungry if they do that. But studies show that some people respond better to a traditional type of meal layout. And again, in my personal experience, having worked with many people over the years, I would say many of the people I've interacted with prefer a more

traditional diet. They prefer to eat something in the morning, eat something around lunch, usually some kind of snack in the middle of the afternoon, a little pick-me-up, eat dinner, maybe an after-dinner snack. Many, many people enjoy eating that way. And even when they're cutting, they don't have problems with hunger. But again, there are certainly many people who can do fine with that, but they do better with fewer meals. They do better on an intermittent fasting diet. And so one meal a day fits into that paradigm. For example, in one study conducted by scientists at the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, participants who could only eat one meal per day couldn't

consume enough calories in a single sitting to meet their daily calorie needs. So as you'd expect, these people lost on average about four pounds of fat over the course of the eight-week study, which is not impressive per se, but nothing to scoff at. That's decent depending on where they were starting. Hey, it's results, right? And it's pretty good considering that they were told to just eat normally. They were not told to restrict their calories. They just simply couldn't eat more than maybe 1,500 or so, max 2,000 in a single meal. And they were burning more than that over the course of the study. Now, a counterpoint that I should mention is the workability of that approach

depends on what you're eating. Of course, if you're heading to the local greasy spoon and getting a pile of oily meat and French fries and washing it down with a big milkshake, you can put down a couple thousand, you know, three, 4 thousand calories in one sitting without feeling over full, without feeling like you would feel if you took those calories and put together a big meal of mostly nutritious foods. And if you don't believe me, go do that right now. Head over to whichever calorie counting website you like to use and give yourself 2,000 or 2,500 calories for this one meal with the stipulation that most of those calories have to come from relatively unprocessed foods, nutritious stuff that you are going to prepare

yourself, whole grains, seeds, vegetables, legumes, fruits, lean protein, and then you can take 20% of those calories and do whatever you want with them and then if you want to take this experiment further try it try try to eat that much nutritious food in one meal it is not pleasant now i should also mention that there is scientific evidence for some of my comments that I made earlier about intermittent fasting diets not necessarily working any better for people for weight loss than traditional diets. There was a large review that was done by researchers at the University of Sydney that involved analyzing 40 studies on intermittent fasting, with 12 of them comparing intermittent

fasting directly to traditional dieting methods. And what the researchers found is that there were no significant benefits related to body composition, fat loss, insulin sensitivity, or hormones. And those are some of the biggest types of benefits that intermittent fasting zealots will bandy around. So the primary benefit of OMAD is it may help you control your calories and control your appetite better than more traditional eating or other intermittent fasting protocols. And I suppose there are some non-physiological benefits that are worth considering, like not spending as much time making food, eating, cleaning up. And those things resonate with me. I would love to spend less time. I don't

spend much time making food, eating, or cleaning up, but I would love to spend less time doing that because I have so many other things that I'm doing these days, but not enough to want to follow the OMAD diet. And I'll explain why in a minute. It has some pretty significant downsides that need to be considered as well. Now, another non-physical benefit of OMAD and other fasting diets that's worth mentioning is it can help you become comfortable with being a little bit hungry, with going longer periods without food. And if you're somebody who, when you get a little bit hungry, you immediately rush to eat or you feel the urge to rush to eat. You do not want to experience any hunger whatsoever. Or if you go for three, four or five hours without food and you get

a little bit anxious and you may not even feel particularly hungry yet, you just are now thinking about eating and you have a compulsion to go eat, then it can be productive to unlearn those habits. And you can unlearn them. They are just psychological habits and intermittent fasting and other fasting diets can help you rewire your relationship with food in a constructive way. They can help you get comfortable with being a little bit hungry, for example. That does not mean physically, physiologically, that you need to eat food right away. Nothing bad is happening in your body when you're a little bit hungry. I remember many years ago when I did not know much about anything really. Maybe I thought I knew a little bit, but my nutrition and my training knowledge was sorely lacking.

I remember I read in a bodybuilding magazine back then that if you don't eat protein every couple of hours and you start to get hungry, your body starts eating muscle right away. That's where it goes for the energy that it needs. And I never looked into it. I just thought that quote unquote experts knew what they were talking about. And so I used to get hangry, you know, the hungry, angry kind of feeling if I hadn't eaten protein in like the last three hours and I was starting to feel hungry because I thought that my biceps were withering away. With every second, I was losing a fraction of a gram of muscle directly from my biceps, of course. No, I didn't think that, but I thought that I was slowly losing ground. I was taking little baby steps backward and I was spending all of this time in the gym, probably close to two hours a day, five days a week at that time. And I was stuffing myself with three or 400 grams of protein every day, which was not appreciated by my gastro intestinal tract. And I was also at the time I was eating a lot of egg protein. And if anybody

listening has eaten a lot of egg protein, you know what I'm going to say next. What was coming out of my butthole was impressively noxious. It smelled necrotic. And so anyway, I was doing all of these things and then I was sacrificing gains by not eating protein every couple of hours. And I am certain that the psychological component, the distress that I added to the situation ramped up my hunger because later when I learned how things really work, that was overnight no longer a problem. Previously, if I didn't eat food every three or four hours, I would get very hungry and I would get upset. And then I learned how the metabolism works and I learned about energy

balance and macronutrient balance. And the fact that, for instance, research shows that your body really doesn't start breaking down muscle until probably 16, 17, 18 hours without food. And then just like that, no more appetite issues. I could go four, five, six, seven, eight hours without food and not get that hungry. Maybe a little bit after six or seven hours, but nothing like before. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my VIP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. Coming back on track here to OMAD,

let's talk about some of the downsides. So the first disadvantage is OMAD is probably not optimal for building muscle. And there are a few reasons. First, let's talk about lean bulking or lean gaining when you maintain a calorie surplus to gain muscle and strength consistently. And that is what you have to do if you are no longer a newbie. If your newbie gains have been exhausted, if you have at least a year of proper training under your belt, you can no longer recomp, gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. Effectively, you have to choose one or the other. You have to lean bulk or lean gain, maintain a calorie surplus, maybe a 10% or so over what you burn, and you gain muscle, you gain strength, you gain fat, and then you cut, and then you restrict your calories, you retain your muscle, and you retain most of your strength, you gain fat, and then you cut, and then you restrict your calories. You retain your muscle and you retain most of your strength and you lose the fat. And now you look a little bit bigger and you then go to a maintenance phase or maybe back to a lean bulking

phase. You quickly regain any strength that you lost and you just keep on going from there. And the reason you have to do this is research shows that that energy surplus, that consistent energy surplus, you could think of it as boosting the effectiveness of your body's muscle building machinery, so to speak. It helps your body better recover from training and to better adapt to training and to better add muscle tissue. And that of course then allows you to gain strength. Now, if you are eating just one meal a day, it's going to be hard to do this unless you have a very large appetite. But if you have a very large appetite, you're probably going to struggle with one meal a day because you're going to get hungry and you're going to want to eat more than one

meal per day. So let's say you just have a normal appetite and I can speak to that. I have a normal appetite. I don't have a small appetite. I don't have a large appetite. I would say it's just right in the middle of the bell curve. And I tap out personally around probably 1500 calories in a meal. Sure. I can eat more than that, but at that point I am just eating more for the sake of eating more, maybe because it tastes good. I am certainly not hungry anymore. And for me to lean bulk, for example, I would need to start that diet probably around 3000 calories per day. I'd have to do a little bit less cardio, although I probably wouldn't. And that's another discussion that I've actually had here on the podcast. If you go to the feed and search for cardio,

you'll find an episode that I posted a few months ago about why I think everyone should consider including some cardio in their regimen, even if they're trying to just gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible. So I would keep my cardio routine, which is about two to three hours of moderate intensity per week. I would keep that in. And so to do that and lift, I'd have to eat a bit more action. I have to eat about 32 to 3,300 calories per day. That would be my starting point on my lean bulk. And that would go up throughout the course of the lean bulk. It probably would go up to close to 4,000 calories per day. And I, I, I sure, maybe I could eat that much in one meal every day with most of those calories being nutritious, but that's going to be tough.

That is not going to be enjoyable at all. And of course, but that's going to be tough. That is not going to be enjoyable at all. And of course, anything that gets in the way of dietary compliance can be a major obstacle to accomplishing your fitness goals. So that's the first problem is it's going to be hard to eat enough calories every day to maximize muscle growth if you're eating one meal a day. Now we have the protein intake issue. So if you want to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, you want to eat somewhere around one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Now we have the protein intake issue. So if you want to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, you want to eat somewhere around one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. You could go as low as 0.8 grams. That's fine. But that's a lot of protein to eat in a single meal. And even if you can do it, that is almost certainly not best for gaining muscle. There

isn't that much research on protein timing and distribution, but the studies that we do have show that splitting it up, splitting up your daily protein intake into three to six meals is likely superior to eating the same amount of protein in fewer sittings. And the research is most clear here actually with one serving of protein per day, even if it's a very large serving, one large amount of protein per day versus 3, 4, 5, 6. The 3, 4, 5, 6 is going to win over time in terms of muscle and strength gain. And by doing the OMAD diet, of course, what that means is you are missing out on these other opportunities to give your body some protein and boost muscle growth. And you will almost certainly gain less muscle over time as a result of that. Another downside

of OMAD is kind of obvious. It can lead to extreme hunger, minimally just increased hunger. For example, studies have shown that many people who limit themselves to just a couple of meals per day, one to three meals per day, they can experience very high levels of hunger and other side effects that just make dieting miserable. Dizziness, nausea, anger, lethargy, constipation. And that is probably one of the reasons why many intermittent fasting studies have higher dropout rates. So people who just quit than other human feeding studies, which is something that many people, of course, those who are most into intermittent fasting and promoting it, don't talk about.

You can look at the results that an intermittent fasting diet had with people who finished the study, but you have to also look at how many people finished the study. If 100 people started and only 15 finished, you need to take that into consideration when you are judging the overall effectiveness of the diet, because of course, adherence and compliance are the most important factors. So long as a diet is set up properly, so long as it takes into account energy balance, it creates a calorie deficit, it provides enough protein, it provides enough nutritious calories, and there are many ways to do that. But so long as a diet does that, then really all we need is compliance. We don't need perfection.

We just need the person to be pretty good at following the diet over the long term. Another downside of OMAD is it's probably not best for overall health for a number of reasons. One, it's hard to get enough key nutrients. It's hard to get enough vitamins and minerals and other things that our body needs to stay healthy when we are eating just one meal a day. And especially if we're struggling to eat enough calories and especially if we are struggling to eat enough fruits and vegetables, which is common with people who follow OMAD, probably because fruits and vegetables can be very filling for not many calories. And so if you need to eat 2000, 2500, maybe 3000 calories in one meal, if you are going to be eating, let's say two to three servings of fruit, and I think three would be the minimum number of servings of vegetables per day, I would like to see probably five or six servings. But let's just say it's the minimum of two servings of fruit per day and like three of vegetables per day. And you're going to want some leafy greens in there. That alone is pretty filling, not many calories, but it's pretty

filling. So you're only now a few hundred max, maybe 500 calories into this 2,500 calorie meal. And then you have all of the lean protein that you're eating and that's very filling. And then you're supposed to eat a bunch of carbs and you're supposed to get in fats. It's just not feasible for most people. And so what they do instead then is they start making food choices based on how much they can eat in that one meal. And that usually means more calorie dense foods that are less nutritious. Now, there are other health factors to consider, other health downsides to consider with OMAD. For example, research shows that eating just once a day is linked to increased blood pressure, cholesterol levels, including bad, quote unquote, bad, the LDL cholesterol, which you do not want to get too

high because that increases the risk of heart disease. If OMAD does lead to high levels of hunger, and it does in many people. You can only withstand that so much before it starts to lead to binging. And that is probably going to be on higher calorie, lower nutritional value, quote unquote, unhealthy foods. And studies show that if that happens too often, if you alternate between long periods of fasting and binge eating that can promote disordered eating in people who are susceptible to that problem. And that can cause a more serious and chronic problem. Eating disorders are no joke. When they take hold, they can be very insidious and they can undermine health and wellness in many different ways. Something else that often happens with OMAD is insufficient

protein intake. And that not only hurts body composition, that can lead to muscle loss. If you are also restricting calories for weight loss and doing a bunch of cardio on top of that, which again, many people are at least restricting calories with OMAD because many people turn to it to lose weight. And so if you are trying to lose weight, you're restricting your calories, not eating enough protein, that is going to hurt your body composition. And if you chronically under eat protein, maybe you're not chronically restricting your calories, but you're chronically under eating protein, then the risk of various types of disease goes up, various dysfunctions goes up, your ability to improve your body composition to gain muscle and strength goes

down. That is one of the biggest dietary mistakes that you can make, under eating protein. The other ones, the other biggest ones would be not managing your energy balance properly. So chronically overeating, for example, to the point where you are very overweight and where you stay very overweight, and then chronically under eating nutritious foods, eating too much junk and not enough of the good stuff. So then who should consider following the OMAD diet and why? Should anybody? Well, I think I have made my case, at least for why I think there is no clear cut benefit of OMAD over more traditional approaches to eating or more traditional

approaches to intermittent fasting, like for example, the 16-8 method or the 12-14 version for women. But if you are currently following a fasting diet and you want to see how you do eating fewer meals per day, you could give OMAD a try. You're probably not going to stick with it for the long term because it's just not a very sustainable diet. Or if you just like tinkering with different dietary strategies and just doing your own N1 experiments so you can say, hey, I tried that and here is how it went for me, then I could see giving it a go for a week or two. If you're very busy and if you are very busy on certain days and you struggle to find time to eat enough food to stop and get in your nutrition, then OMAD can be a useful tool on those days.

You may want to just load up, for example, in the morning and then go, go, go all day, or maybe the other way around. Maybe you are go, go, go all day and then you just load up in the evening. That would be my personal preference. I don't like eating a lot of food early on in the day. I like to eat more of my calories later in the day. But one little tip if you're going to do that is try not to eat your one meal within an hour or maybe two hours of your bedtime because research shows that if you eat too much food close to when you go to bed, it can interrupt your sleep. So try to give yourself at least, I would say, four to five hours to digest as much of the food as you can to work through as much of that meal as you can before you go

to sleep. And one more use case for OMAD that's worth mentioning, another instance of where it can be helpful is let's say you eat way too much one day for whatever reason. Who cares? is let's say you eat way too much one day for whatever reason, who cares? You just ate a thousand, maybe 2000 more calories than you burned. And you would like to quote unquote, undo a little bit of the damage. Well, what you can do is eat a lot less the following day. And OMAD can be useful for that, where you are going to eat, let's say 2000 calories the following day. And normally you would be eating 2,500 calories or 2,800 calories.

So you're going to try to give yourself a decent deficit the next day to hopefully lose any fat that you gained from your overeating. And you may find that easier to do in one meal, especially if, let's say, you ate a large dinner. That's where you ate thousands of calories, a couple thousand calories at dinner and you wake up, you're not hungry. It's 12 p.m. You're not hungry. It's 3 p.m. You now feel like you at least have an empty stomach and you could go another couple of hours. Well, yeah, you could do that then. You could just go, you know, I'm just going to eat a dinner.

I'm going to make sure I get in my protein. And maybe it's even fewer calories than that. Maybe it's 1500 calories. I wouldn't recommend going too low, but that can be an easy way to just cancel out an accidental overeat or even a planned overeat. Let's say it's going to be a big holiday dinner. You really want to enjoy yourself. You're going to eat a lot of food. And so you plan then on not eating much the following day and maybe just eating one meal later in the day when you start to get a little bit hungry again. Caveat, though, is don't make that the rule. That should be the exception. That should be something that you do every once in a while, because if you get into the habit of doing that too often, that can also lead to disordered eating if you are susceptible to that type of issue.

lead to disordered eating if you are susceptible to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility, and thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn't like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscle F-O-R life.com and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism. I'm open to it. And of course, you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that

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