Eating fewer meals per day and/or only eating between specific times aka intermittent fasting can be a great tool to lose fat…
And I’m going cover exactly how and why this works as well as how to remedy common problems that can pop up…
Chances are that you’re eating 2 or maybe 3 meals per day right now and you’re thinking about experimenting with OMAD or 1 meal per day…
What are the advantages of this approach for fat loss specifically…
We can only eat so much food at any given time and so for the vast majority of people, the more times per day that they eat, the more total calories they consume…
Because there’s only so much physical space in your stomach and it takes time for food to work through your digestive tract…
And so by reducing the number of meals that we eat daily, we tend to eat fewer total calories, not always but most often…
And fewer total calories consumed results in fat loss, meaning…
There’s actually nothing inherently special about eating 1 meal per day or intermittent fasting in regards to fat loss because…
If you’re eating 2 meals daily right now and not losing fat and you decided to start eating 1 meal per day…
But, you ate exact same amount of total food, you would not lose fat and you can think about it like this…
If you spend $100 on one shirt or you spend $50 on 2 shirts, ya still spent $100…
The exact same concept applies to your nutrition, if you eat 3000 calories in one meal or 1500 calories twice per day, the bottom line is the same…
And so OMAD is simply a tool or strategy that you can use to control your total energy intake and therefore your body composition if you so choose to.
There is no way to quote unquote ‘game the system’…calories still count whether you eat them over the course of 1 meal, 2 or 10.
Now the cool thing is that if you’re eating say twice per day and you decide to reduce it to once per day…
You can eat more at that 1 meal, for example…
If you’re eating 2 1500 calorie meals right now and maintaining your weight, you could eat 1 2500 calorie meal and still lose fat…
Or if you’re eating 3 1000 calorie meals right now and maintaining your weight, you could eat 2 1250 calorie meals and also still fat…
Because both of these scenarios result in a reduction of 500 daily calories…
It’s really important that if you do decide to reduce your meal frequency that you don’t let food quality take a hit…
Meaning you still want to prioritize the same nutrient dense whole foods.
Because sure you can lose fat simply by eating less crap, but the healthier way to go is to favour food quality as well…
Prioritizing food quality is also going to keep you much more full and therefore it’s much more sustainable.
It’s worth mentioning that it may take your gut some time to adapt to eating a larger portion of food all at once, so stay super mindful of your digestion!
You can also implement OMAD periodically meaning, you don’t have to do it every single day, it’s not an all or nothing dealio…
Maybe ya decide to do it once or twice per week or you just do it on days where you’re on the go and super busy…
Or perhaps for whatever reason you don’t have access to great food options like on a travel day let’s say…
This doesn’t have to be something that you do or don’t do 7 days a week, you can use it on a go by feel basis…
Personally that’s what I do, most days I eat 2 meals per day however, occasionally I’ll just have 1.
So the key takeaway in regards to OMAD, intermittent fasting or just eating fewer meals per day for fat loss…
Is that it can be a super useful tool to reduce your total energy intake…
Not because reducing meal frequency or eating between specific times magically makes you lose fat…
But because more often than not when you eat fewer times or in a smaller time window, you eat less food as a whole.
