Eating one major supper a day spares time, is advantageous and can feel like a devour. It’s not the most advantageous approach to separate up your calories, be that as it may. When you quick for the majority of the day and eat at only one time, you’re putting yourself in danger for conditions that range from hoisted glucose levels to long-haul heftiness.
Benefits of eating a meal per day:
- Eating once a day saves time.
While I love to eat, doing so multiple times a day is a chore. The cleaning up and cooking even more so. Plus there’s no proven benefit to eating this way so why do it at all?
Now that I eat once a day I only need to buy groceries one time a week. This, along with cooking and cleaning up less often saves me about 15 hours a week. Now I have lots of extra time to work, study, train, and best of all surf more often.
- You’ll burn fat for fuel
Since I go at least 16 and up to 40 hours between meals my body is using its own stored fat for energy much of the time. This is a metabolic state known as nutritional ketosis. It’s perfectly safe and is in my experience to get rid of body fat and keep it off.
If you follow a low carb diet you can get your body into the same fat burning state but it can take weeks and definitely requires you to count carbs, fat, and protein much more closely.
When you eat one meal a day, your body will kick into fat burning mode between meals and stay there if you keep carbohydrates around 75 grams or so per meal.
- I have better focus and more mental energy.
After a few days, an awesome benefit of eating one meal a day kicks in. You will suddenly be able to focus better on tasks like writing and reading and be able to work longer before you feel mentally tired.
I don’t want to hype this benefit too much but it can be really profound. When I was eating several times a day my focus and mental and energy were limited to an hour or so at a time at best. Now I go from 4 AM to dinner time without feeling burned out or tired. I rarely drink coffee or use caffeine either.
This enables me to write a blog post every day, study, do my research, and lots of other mentally taxing work for 8, and sometimes more hours a day. If this was the only benefit I got from intermittent fasting this way, I would do it without hesitation.
- My physical energy is great too.
Just like your brain, your muscles will be able to go harder, longer. These results really kick in after a couple of weeks and have continued so long as I’m eating one high protein, low carbohydrate, a meal with lots of healthy fats.
Before I ate this way I trained every day. Some days it was really tough to find the energy I needed to get through my workout.
Now, I’m able to train twice a day if I like. I’m also able to push myself a lot harder. This has helped me make great progress and do things like walk a mile carrying 150-pound sandbags and double the weight of my best 5 rep front squat max.
This extra physical energy and endurance also make it easier to get what I need to done and have the extra energy to play hard too. Unlike in the past, I’m never too tired to go out at night or go for a long hike with my wife after a long day at work.
- I’m much less sore post-workout.
Thing is they’re a lot less sore than before I started eating once a day. Not just a little but a lot. I talking about being able to walk downstairs and sit comfortably after doing lots of intense sets of squats, swings, presses, etc.
The soreness and pain are diminished to the point now that I can do some type of squat every day. I recently went over 30 days of squatting daily. That’s right, every day for a month. Each workout I did included at least 5 sets of squats whether they were front squats, goblet squats, split squats, etc.
I’ve tried this before but being excessively sore and tired always got the best of me. Not this time. One meal a day makes enhances my recovery better than anything else I’ve ever done.
- Benefits of caloric restriction without drawbacks.
The one way scientists have been able to extend an animal’s lifespan is by severely restricting the calories eaten every day. In us humans, this means eating less than a thousand calories a day if you want to potentially see similar results. Every day for the rest of your life.
The problem with eating so little is that you will feel pretty horrible much if not all of the time. We’re talking being cold, hungry, depressed, and downright miserable all of the time.
- It eliminates cravings for carb & sugar-rich foods.
After a week or two, perhaps sooner, of eating one meal a day you’ll notice that your cravings for soda, chips, pasta, bread, etc. are really diminished.
This because this way of eating not only helps you burn off extra body fat and use it for energy but also keeps the hormones that regulate our appetite under control.
Instead of having these hormones go way up and then come crashing down every couple of hours they stay nice and steady throughout the day. Then, when you do eat a low carb, high fat and protein meal they don’t go crazy either.
This means that your cravings for pastries, cookies, pasta, chops, etc. go way down. The longer you eat this way the less you’ll have them.