More and more people are singing the praises of eating one meal a day. But is OMAD, an extreme form of intermittent fasting, a healthy and effective way to lose weight?
This article was originally published on March 3, 2020.
But most importantly, many people on OMAD like it because, for some reason, it’s the one diet approach that has actually worked for them. With this in mind, here’s a breakdown of how OMAD diet works — and what science says about its weight loss potential., which involves limiting food consumption to a certain time window. The more common variations allow for a six- or eight-hour eating window, followed by a 16- or 18-hour fast.
“I just think it’s a way to fool the body into eating less, I don’t think there’s anything magical about it,” Varady says.Another common misconception around intermittent fasting is that it promotes autophagy, or “self-eating,” on a cellular level. The idea behind autophagy is that, when you fast, your body can spend time cleaning up damaged cells because it isn’t busy dealing with a constant influx of food.
Eating one meal per day promoted modest fat loss that didn’t occur with eating the standard three square meals per day, but not for the reason you might think. Many men simply found it difficult to consume such a large meal during their eating window — which unintentionally created a calorie deficit. Eating this way also elevated blood pressure and cholesterol among some participants.
“Time-restricted eating is amazing in that you just have to watch the clock. You just stop eating when you’re supposed to stop eating, and people just naturally calorie-restrict,” Varady says.