“One Meal a Day” or OMAD, is a diet plan that claims to help you lose weight. OMAD is a kind of intermittent fasting in which you set periods in a day where you eat, and periods where you don’t. On paper, the OMAD weight loss plan is supposed to help you lose weight as you’ll be eating only once a day. This means that you’ll have 23 hours to burn the calories you consumed in one meal.
While OMAD offers many benefits, it comes with certain downsides as well. In this article, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of OMAD, how it works, and help you decide whether you should opt for it or not.
How OMAD Works
OMAD is a special type of intermittent fasting that helps you modify how your body utilizes the calories that you gain. We usually take three or more meals a day and end up consuming more calories than our body needs. OMAD helps reduce calorie intake to an extreme level.
When we intake carbohydrates, our body breaks them through complex metabolism processes. While our body cells absorb some of the sugar and turn them into energy, the excess sugar is carried to our fat cells by ‘insulin’.
Once we restrict the amount of sugar we take, the insulin production of our body decreases as well. Also, having only one meal a day doesn’t leave us with excess sugar molecules, but rather causes a deficit.
This prompts our fat cells to supply additional energy required by our body, and finally helps us reduce overall body fat. This is how OMAD helps us lose weight.
Benefits of OMAD
OMAD doesn’t only help you lose weight, but it leads to other health benefits as well. One of the obvious ones is that OMAD helps you decrease your body’s sugar level. This in turn reduces the chances of suffering from heart disease.
This practice also helps you reduce the level of LDL or bad cholesterol in your body, as it burns excess fat. All kinds of intermittent fasting help you reduce body fat, but OMAD can help you take things a step further.
OMAD also helps boost your metabolism. As you won’t be taking regular meals, it’ll push your body to use up any excess energy, thus tapping into your fat cells.
Another amazing benefit of OMAD, or any intermittent fasting, is that it can help you be more alert to your surroundings. However, this is only true if you fast in daylight. When you do so, your body releases orexin-A. It’s a special kind of chemical that makes you more alert.
Also, you can improve the efficiency of your diet by fasting overnight and eating during the day. It’s been found that eating more at dinnertime makes you gain weight, as your body tends to burn fewer calories during the night. The reasoning behind this is, while sleeping burns calories too, the rate is considerably lower.
How Much Weight Can I Lose from OMAD?
Honestly, it’s not possible to say how much weight you can lose from OMAD as there are a lot of factors that control your metabolism. Starting from what you’re eating, when you’re taking the meal, to how much physical activity you partake in, everything controls OMAD weight loss results. Over 2 years, people who followed OMAD reported losing anywhere from 100 to 160 pounds.
How To Get The Best Out Of OMAD
To get the best out of OMAD weight loss, you can follow the tips and tricks we’ll be sharing here.
1. Consistency Is The Key
The most ideal time to have your meal while following OMAD would be between 12 noon and 5 pm. While most people prefer taking their meal later in the evening, this will only slow the process down for you.
However, what’s more, important is consistency. Try to make the habit of eating at a certain time of the day. This will help you regulate your body better.
2. Make Sure Your Meal Offers Sufficient Nutrients
As you’ll be having only one meal a day, you’ll need to take whole foods that offer sufficient nutrients so your body may function properly. We highly recommend avoiding food with high levels of sugar and the ones that are processed.
3. Plan Your Meals Ahead
Make a weekly chart of the meals. Make sure the meals are arranged in such a manner that you get every possible type of nutrition throughout the week.
Downsides of OMAD
While OMAD is associated with some health benefits, it’s known to lead to some health concerns as well.
Firstly, while OMAD reduces LDL and blood sugar on paper, some individuals taking the diet reported the exact opposite. This extreme fasting method increased their blood sugar level and LDL instead.
OMAD also leads to an extreme feeling of hunger. So, a lot of people undertaking the diet lose motivation over time. Some are even known to give in to gluttony, which increases their weight instead.
In some cases, restricting the amount of sugar intake completely leads to hypoglycemia, a condition that defines low sugar levels.
Other than these, OMAD is known to cause the following health conditions in an individual:
- Dizziness
- Nausea
- Constipation
- Irritability
- Lack of energy
Note that there’s no way to tell if you’ll experience these or not. While some individuals experience these conditions, many don’t. So, you can’t tell until you try it out for yourself.
Conclusion
While OMAD is an amazing fasting method for losing a lot of weight in a relatively shorter period, it’s not the most perfect weight-loss diet on earth.
That being said, you can only say if the OMAD weight loss plan is for you once you try it out. So, if you’re planning on losing weight fast, you should try it out. Don’t forget to maintain the practices we mentioned, they will make the diet much more efficient for you.
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