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Weird tips like that? No, no definitely not. Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off

Weird tips like that? No, no definitely not. Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off. It's what I did for a bit and lost the weight quickly. You'll lose 5lbs/month easily even for people who have a relatively lean body mass already. (Easier to lose a lot of weight when you're heavier because your BMR is high to begin with) I've done it as someone who is 5'10" and 150lb to get down to 140 or 130lb. (Basically cutting fat - yes, I have significant fat even at 150lb and 5'10") I've done it a few times. I would recommend it. Changing your diet permanently is a much more permanent solution but also requires a lifestyle/mental change. I've had too many other lifestyle changes going on that made it hard for me to commit to such a thing. Nice part about it is that it really frees up a lot of your day too. You don't have to worry about eating another meal or two. You just have the one per day and it's a done deal. Kinda freeing in that sense. Just make sure your meal isn't 2000+ calories - otherwise, it'll defeat some of the point. Which I know for some people can be easy to push down because their stomach has grown in size and is able to hold that much weight. It'll take willpower at first but then once your stomach starts to decrease in size - you'll automatically be limited on your caloric intake from that one meal.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago
any unhealthy side effects of only eating one meal a day? what if that meal is 1800+ calories?
- maury91 5y ago
  Intermitted fasting works on the principle that if you eat 1800kcal in one sitting you are going to puke. I can easily eat even 3000-4000kcal in 1 day, but in one meal going over 1500kcal is very hard. Edit: Yes I'm wrong I should have said "if you eat 1800kcal of clean food", I forgot the existence of fast food because it is not something common in my country
  - torbTurret 5y ago
    Basically every fast food combo is over 1500k. Meaning it’s very easy to eat that depending on what it consists of.
    - maury91 5y ago
      I kind of forgot that, it is a decade that I don't enter a McDonalds, this could be one of the hacks: don't go to any fast food place
      - torbTurret 5y ago
        Yeah I suspect much of HN is the same. Kind of crazy how dense those meals are. Ice cream too is crazy - one Ben & Jerry’s is like 1600k
  - demopathos 5y ago
    A personal anecdote but I eat ~1600-1700 kcal each meal. I've been eating one meal a day for years. This is simply because I don't get hungry until around dinner time.
  - helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    A McDonalds Deluxe Cheeseburger, Large Coke and Fries is 1400Kcal - switch to a milkshake or add a McFlurry and your meal is approaching 2000. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-calculator.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-...
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    I believe your whole premise is wrong. I only ever eat "clean food" (haven't really tried fast food for 10-15 years) and can easily go over 4 kkcal in one sitting. Feel just fine afterwards, the stomach can stretch very far if you work at it hard enough. Nuts, cheese, and vegetable oils are really energy dense. I also don't consider myself to be a glutton a have a BMI of 21.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    What country is that? I've never been anywhere that doesn't have junk food available.
    - maury91 5y ago
      It is available, it is just not common, I'm from Sardinia, in my province ( Oristano: an area of 3000 square km) there's only 1 McDonald's, and only teens go there. If you don't live in the main city, a trip to McDonald's can take easily 1 hour or more. We dove a lot of pizza places, but it is Italian pizza and it is not as caloric as the American version, ours is made with 200grams of dough and has less stuffing as possible, one pizza should be around 800kcal and majority of people I know usually eats 3/4 of it and leaves the remaining 1/4 for the day after
  - bryans 5y ago
    > Intermitted fasting works on the principle that if you eat 1800kcal in one sitting you are going to puke. Fasting (intermittent and otherwise) causes several physiological responses that have a wide range of health benefits, including reducing risks for cancer and heart disease, and even completely reversing diabetic symptoms for some people. It is absolutely NOT some cheesy self-help way of tricking yourself into eating less because you "just can't fit any more in there" -- you completely made this up. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fasting https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fasting
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Mandatum 5y ago
  Apart from taking forever for your body to get used to it.. Not really. Also once you're an appropriate weight and decide to start changing your diet back to "normal".. You're very likely to fuck it up and end up fat again. To be honest dieting is only good if you're trying to get to a "goal weight" and you're capable of maintaining a weight. If you're not and that's what got you fat to begin with.. You need a holistic lifestyle change.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Yes this. It's cliche and corny to say "it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change", but it's the truth. Dieting fails because diet typically implies a goal. Meaning an end. Said another way, you should adjust intake until weight starts coming off slowly. You'll reach a point where you either lost too much, or stopped losing, and adjust slightly accordingly. Then stay at that intake forever(assuming it's healthy).
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Anecdotally, I've been doing it for years (10 IIRC) without any noticeable side-effects. Lost about 30 kg. I feel fine.
- dataflow 5y ago
  Instead of reducing the number of meals, you can just cut your portions in half.
- pizza234 5y ago
  Eating only once a day is very bad advice. If you make a regular meal, one meal a day nets a negative of 1300/1500 calories per day, which will cause considerable muscle tissue loss (note how the parent writes "losing weight", not "losing fat", but also "yes, I have significant fat even at 150lb and 5'10"), besides having no energy. If you make instead a massive mels, you're going to give a massive glucose shot to your body. I haven't gone to such extreme, but the times when I happened to do something similar (one huge meal, even with an overall negative daily intake), I ended up accumulating fat rather than losing it. I suppose that in a calorie deficit context (=dieting), the body takes advantage of a huge meal to build some deposits up (and unfortunately, deposits are everything except muscles...). Dieting's hard, there are no cheap tricks, unfortunately.
  - jnwatson 5y ago
    Eating once a day is a type of intermittent fasting, which has been well studied and shown to have some of the health benefits of fasting.
  - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I don't think this is accurate, or at least not universally so. The pandemic has given me the opportunity to experiment a bit with losing weight. These days I mostly do eat one meal a day (sometime between noon and 6pm). I'll occasionally have a light snack aside from that one meal. I lost a good 15 lbs in just a few months this way. It was mostly fat. I kept up a running regimen (8-12 mi per week). I felt amazing. Much more energy, flatter stomach, better-defined chest, arms, thighs, and calves. Unfortunately I've gone back to some of my old ways over the past 9 months or so with restaurants and bars reopening, and I've gained back some of the weight. This tells me that it's not really how many meals I have, but what's in them, and how many calories. So I'd probably be fine with two or three meals a day, just healthier choices and fewer overall calories. But I don't believe one meal a day is a problem; just it isn't necessary, and you can still lose weight with a more normal meal pattern.
  - 5y ago
- yukinon 5y ago
  Anecdotal, but just make sure you don't lose weight TOO fast. This is one of the ways in which gallstones are formed.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  It's called OMAD (one meal a day), you can google it. In my experience, it's something you quickly get used to and has no negative effects (for me). You adjust and don't get hungry until the time comes (e.g. dinner). It's a form of intermittent fasting.
  - smiths1999 5y ago
    This has been my experience as well. The first time I tried it I thought I was going to be miserable all day and have no energy. It ended being totally fine. I have this dull emptiness in my stomach but nothing that affects me in any way. And you are right, as soon as dinner rolls around my hunger increases dramatically.
  - dylanz 5y ago
    I've done periods of time on OMAD throughout my life and one thing that would always get me is sleep. I'd wake up (not necessarily hungry) much too early, regardless of the time of my one meal. One trick that helped me was to break OMAD, and have a little bit of a slow releasing protein in the evenings before bed. My go to was low fat cottage cheese. Once I added that I was able to sleep through the night again.
- watwut 5y ago
  For me, loss of productivity and concentration. Also, hard to make that one meal make contain everything you need.
Ralo 5y ago
I've done this before switching from bulking season, to leaning season. I found the hardest part being stomach growling. I'd be talking to people and my stomach would start complaining to everyone. I've been told to drink a glass of water when the happens but I didn't find it helped a bunch. I usually went for a light plain peanut butter sandwich once a day at very "tactical" times to cut the growling. Yes peanut butter is calorie heavy but just keep it light. The fat/protein/carbs in peanut butter is pretty hard to beat, in moderation it's really good for you. This does go away after a while, but this was an issue for the first while.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Soups have worked better for me than water. The right soups can be very low calorie for volume and filling.
- imiric 5y ago
  I've found that laying off carbs (Atkins, keto, etc.) gets rid of the growling and hunger pains entirely. On a carb-restricted diet you eat because you want to, not because your stomach is craving for food.
  - toyg 5y ago
    yeah, carb-restricting is what did it for me, when i managed to shed significant weight. But I couldn't sustain it for more than a couple of years. Also, protein-based diets are heavy on one's liver.
    - wtetzner 5y ago
      If you’re doing a low carb diet, you probably want high fat and moderate protein.
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  Fiber and roughage can help that. The peak of my own weighloss happened when I regularly ate the most basic oat porridge for breakfast. Oats so big my body barely had a chance to get all the nutrients out.
lkois 5y ago
The real takeaway about mass loss via carbon dioxide is that you're changing how the engine works, and you're unlikely to notice it. Get a digital scale, weigh every morning after toilet. I find there is a very quick and variable response to the previous days food, which can be quite motivating. Seeing it up or down half a kilo each day is very noticeable, and informative about what works and what doesn't. Eat less dense calories, try to move around a little bit, all there is to it. My general rule is: -2 small meals = weight loss -1 regular/big + 1 small = maintain -2 big = weight gain Once you stop trying to bloat yourself all the time, it starts to feel nuts how frequently you did
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  I've had the exact opposite experience. Days I felt like I did well on and had, if counted, a lot less calories were upticks, and days where I indulged were downticks. Sometimes very large ones too. Particularly very fatty meals would see me drop weight. Ultimately the treatment for what probably got me to gain so much weight helped me twice over: ADHD medication. Not only does not lessen your constant need for dopamine (and lots of bad foods are good dopamine bumps), but it also supresses your appetite. I of course wouldn't recommend it if you do not have ADHD, but the additional side effect is appreciated none the less.
  - lkois 5y ago
    I had some of that too though, that's kinda the idea. I found carby foods were most consistently weight adding, while meaty and fatty not so much. I recall all you can eat bbqs actually resulting in weight loss the following day. But if I had a bowl of rice with them, I'd have the weight gain I feared. Moderate portions of Indian takeaway curries with Naan could keep my weight up for a few days. That's not something I'd expect from pure calorie counting, nor do I understand what's actually going on or if it's good or bad etc. But it seemed useful to be aware of
    - p-squared 5y ago
      On a day-to-day basis, weight measurement changes are dominated by changes in retained water. This will certainly correlate with daily food choices, but does not really reflect meaningful changes in body composition. Average your measurements over something like a week in order to gauge actual progress.
animal531 5y ago
If people struggle with this, then eat the same amount of meals, but make them smaller. After that add basic exercise, walk a few steps and do a few pushups.
lqet 5y ago
This. I lost 12 kg in a few months when I was 20 by basically just stopping to drink sweet stuff and only eating one meal a day. I simply was too lazy as a student to buy and carry soda bottles and cook more than once a day. I have kept that weight for over a decade now by strictly adhering to the one meal per day rule, and only drinking tap water and coffee. Exercise was never for me (again, too lazy).
ckastner 5y ago
> Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off. You're suggesting a diet that requires a discipline that, empirically, is obviously beyond the reach of most people. Here's much, much simpler advice, that is also more enjoyable to do: Just eat better. Or just somewhat better, and do some exercise. You'd be surprised how easy it is to purchase or cook a meal that is delicious and filling, but not all too heavy on calories. Vegetables are boring when you boil them. Properly seasoned and roasted, grilled, braised, or sauteed, they can be an absolutely amazing side dish. Hell, throw a bit of cheese on them, that little bit of Parmesan or Gruyère won't make a difference calorie-wise but will add a divine dimension of flavor. It's easy to make a delicious desert that doesn't contain >50g of fat. Get some exercise. I enjoy lifting weights but you don't lose weight with that, you do it with endurance sport which I absolutely hate. Luckily, there's a solution for that: any halfway decent gym opened in the past decade has bikes, treadmills, cross-trainers etc. with built-in viewing screens and Netflix, Youtube, etc. An hour flies by when you're enjoying yourself, and with a heart rate of 130bpm or so, you're basically not even sweating, yet burning tons of calories. Imagine enjoying a full hour episode of House of Cards, Narcos, or whatever your thing is and getting healthy in the process. You're losing weight by watching TV. I think most advice that requires a dramatic change in lifestyle (like limiting yourself to one meal a day) is extremely poor because it requires effort that most of us aren't willing to expend. I enjoy food. A lot. I like to go out and try it, I like to cook it, I like to share it with others. For me, "eating one meal a day" is absolute punishment, I'm missing out on least two occasions to taste something enjoyable, maybe even remarkable. And it's easy to do that 3x a day when you just watch what you eat. Eat proper food for a while and you'll never crave a Big Mac again, because you can actually taste what crap it is.
- znpy 5y ago
  > do some exercise Don't underestimate walking! And stairs!
  - Hir0ki 5y ago
    This I've noticed that since I have a car and don't walk as much anymore I have put on a lot of weight. Because I just didn't get my 10.000 Steps a day in anymore, because I didn't have to walk to the train station and to the grocery store any more.
heliodor 5y ago
Four main angles of attack: - eat less - change what you eat - work out more - change your workout Numbers 2 and 4 are by far the easiest.
bin_bash 5y ago
IF works really well for me. I've struggled for years with losing weight. I'm an extremely very picky eater with a sugar addiction and doesn't like to cook. I've had weeks where I would almost entirely survive on sweets: several king size candy bars, ice cream, soda. Hardly much else. I run a lot, even ran a marathon. No amount of exercise did anything. Dieting is impossible for me. I'd rather run an ultra. IF changes my eating habits. I don't know why or how but when I only have a short eating period I only want to eat mostly healthy foods. I'm inclined to drink water instead of soda which never, ever happens if I'm not doing IF. If it's 8pm and I think I want ice cream I say "it's too late, but you can have it during your eating period tomorrow." And I mean that, I allow myself to eat whatever I want during my eating period. I just don't want to eat junk food somehow so as a result—I just don't have ice cream anymore and it's not a big deal. That said, OMAD (for me it was 22:2) backfired a couple of times for me. It was too strict and I ended up giving up on fasting after trying it for just a day or two.
- tamasnet 5y ago
  IF = intermittent fasting <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting>
toshk 5y ago
Works for some, but body will try to go back to it's habits, can be very hard to change food habits. Easy hack that gives more energy & has health benefits is: Strength training for muscle growth. Muscles burn tons of energy, having more muscle mass will boost your daily resting kcal. When starting out it's easy to gain quite a bit of muscle first months. Ofc cut out the shit, mainly sweets & fried stuff.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> I've done it as someone who is 5'10" and 150lb to get down to 140 or 130lb. I agree with you but wait what, that'd be 178 cm / 58 kilos? That's bordering on underweight: it doesn't feel right (or I'm converting it wrong?) My first advice to people would be this: check your BMI first, and if you're perfectly in the middle then certainly do not get close to underweight. Besides that: I don't drink much alcohol and do intermittent fasting (skipping meals like you do) and I've never been neither overweight nor underweight. To me it's all about discipline.
- hurflmurfl 5y ago
  As a single additional anecdotal data point, my body is the same way. With similar height, if I am at 150lb (around 68kg) then I have visible fat. 140 is much better.
refurb 5y ago
Agreed. I’ve actually found one meal a day means I eat less over 24 hr. You can only eat so much in one sitting, and for whatever reason a big heavy meal usually turns me off food for 12 hrs or more.
discordianfish 5y ago
> Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward ... > You don't have to worry about eating another meal or two. You do realize for many overweight people eating isn't something to worry about but to look forward to? It's not that we don't understand thermodynamics. It's just a big part of enjoying being alive.
- gadders 5y ago
  You can just average your calories over the day and have three smaller meals.
  - miroz 5y ago
    You''ll be more hungry eating 3 small meals than eating one bigger meal.
    - gadders 5y ago
      Quite possibly. The fundamental thing is calories in/calories out. Then you just need to find a strategy that helps you implement that that you can adhere to - keto, intermittent fasting, low fat, whatever. Track your calories under a few regimes and see which is easiest to stick to. People might argue one is better than the other, and that could well be true, but I think only at the individual level. What works for me might not work for you. What worked for me (losing 14kg in 6 months) was only having two meals a day (lunch and dinner, breakfast was a coffee), and having the same (low calorie) meal for lunch every day. Eating the same thing every day is not a bad idea: https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/the-groundhog-day-diet-why-i-eat-the-same-thing-every-day/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/the-gro...
- gtirloni 5y ago
  And? If a big part of enjoying being alive is eating freely without worry then do that and be happy with whatever body shape you end up with. That doesn't seem where OP is coming from though.
- subpixel 5y ago
dspillett 5y ago
> Weird tips like that? No, no definitely not. Yep. The best “weird tip” is to avoid weird tips. I'm sure they've all worked for someone, though I suspect in many cases by some variant of a placebo effect or an indirect effect, and some work for a noticeable subset of people, but very few work generally and trying all the tricks and having them not work is a recipe for “I'm just not destined to manage this” style demotivation. Always start with the practically undeniable basics: eat less if you can, try eat better whether you are eating less or not, do more physical activity where you can, try not to undo the effect of the activity by using it as an excuse to eat significantly more, monitor what effect your changes have, and try not to have too high expectations or push too fast (weight lost slowly is more likely to stay off, because you fall into better habits/routine over the longer period and are less likely to flip straight back into all your old habits once you get close to your goal). Once you have those habits down, then maybe think about tweaks & tricks to optimise the process. Getting yourself into the habits might require some self-management tricks, but don't think of them as weight-loss or getting-into-shape tricks as they are really general self-management behaviours. One note on monitoring: be careful not to obsess over single readings. The human body can be more random than you expect and your daily/weekly life is not as predictable as you think. I stand on my scales almost daily, but don't care about individual readings: things could be high because I've been at parties recently, low because I've had two long-ish runs this weekend, weight can vary a fair amount either way just be hydration levels. I tend to watch a fortnightly average: two weeks of my normal routine seems to be enough to aggregate out most of the blips most of the time. On being more active: the challenge there is to find something that is either easy to fit into your routine, or that you enjoy enough to want to make the effort, or both. I accidentally discovered I enjoy running, though I've since gone off pounding the streets for speed and now take more steady paces, often but not always for longer distances, through countryside trails. Some prefer cycling. Martial arts are good too (wrestling can be a great full-body workout, and if you actually enjoy it you don't realise how much work you are actually doing). Just walking more can make a noticeable difference, and is usually easy to fit into daily/weekly life. [for reference: about six years ago I dropped from ~110KG to <64KG over the course of about two years (most of this in the middle year of that period), mostly through diet but partly through activity, <64 I feel is too little for me though over the last couple of years I've put on more than I want to (hit ~75 at one point in 2021) and not in useful mass (its around the gut, I can feel it jiggle when I run!) and I'm slowly (more slowly than I'd like, but at least steadily) getting back down to hovering around the 68KG point which seems to feel optimal]

MuffinFlavored 5y ago

any unhealthy side effects of only eating one meal a day? what if that meal is 1800+ calories?

maury91 5y ago
Intermitted fasting works on the principle that if you eat 1800kcal in one sitting you are going to puke. I can easily eat even 3000-4000kcal in 1 day, but in one meal going over 1500kcal is very hard. Edit: Yes I'm wrong I should have said "if you eat 1800kcal of clean food", I forgot the existence of fast food because it is not something common in my country
- torbTurret 5y ago
  Basically every fast food combo is over 1500k. Meaning it’s very easy to eat that depending on what it consists of.
  - maury91 5y ago
    I kind of forgot that, it is a decade that I don't enter a McDonalds, this could be one of the hacks: don't go to any fast food place
    - torbTurret 5y ago
      Yeah I suspect much of HN is the same. Kind of crazy how dense those meals are. Ice cream too is crazy - one Ben & Jerry’s is like 1600k
- demopathos 5y ago
  A personal anecdote but I eat ~1600-1700 kcal each meal. I've been eating one meal a day for years. This is simply because I don't get hungry until around dinner time.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  A McDonalds Deluxe Cheeseburger, Large Coke and Fries is 1400Kcal - switch to a milkshake or add a McFlurry and your meal is approaching 2000. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-calculator.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-...
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  I believe your whole premise is wrong. I only ever eat "clean food" (haven't really tried fast food for 10-15 years) and can easily go over 4 kkcal in one sitting. Feel just fine afterwards, the stomach can stretch very far if you work at it hard enough. Nuts, cheese, and vegetable oils are really energy dense. I also don't consider myself to be a glutton a have a BMI of 21.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  What country is that? I've never been anywhere that doesn't have junk food available.
  - maury91 5y ago
    It is available, it is just not common, I'm from Sardinia, in my province ( Oristano: an area of 3000 square km) there's only 1 McDonald's, and only teens go there. If you don't live in the main city, a trip to McDonald's can take easily 1 hour or more. We dove a lot of pizza places, but it is Italian pizza and it is not as caloric as the American version, ours is made with 200grams of dough and has less stuffing as possible, one pizza should be around 800kcal and majority of people I know usually eats 3/4 of it and leaves the remaining 1/4 for the day after
- bryans 5y ago
  > Intermitted fasting works on the principle that if you eat 1800kcal in one sitting you are going to puke. Fasting (intermittent and otherwise) causes several physiological responses that have a wide range of health benefits, including reducing risks for cancer and heart disease, and even completely reversing diabetic symptoms for some people. It is absolutely NOT some cheesy self-help way of tricking yourself into eating less because you "just can't fit any more in there" -- you completely made this up. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fasting https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fasting
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Mandatum 5y ago
Apart from taking forever for your body to get used to it.. Not really. Also once you're an appropriate weight and decide to start changing your diet back to "normal".. You're very likely to fuck it up and end up fat again. To be honest dieting is only good if you're trying to get to a "goal weight" and you're capable of maintaining a weight. If you're not and that's what got you fat to begin with.. You need a holistic lifestyle change.
- silisili 5y ago
  Yes this. It's cliche and corny to say "it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change", but it's the truth. Dieting fails because diet typically implies a goal. Meaning an end. Said another way, you should adjust intake until weight starts coming off slowly. You'll reach a point where you either lost too much, or stopped losing, and adjust slightly accordingly. Then stay at that intake forever(assuming it's healthy).
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Anecdotally, I've been doing it for years (10 IIRC) without any noticeable side-effects. Lost about 30 kg. I feel fine.
dataflow 5y ago
Instead of reducing the number of meals, you can just cut your portions in half.
pizza234 5y ago
Eating only once a day is very bad advice. If you make a regular meal, one meal a day nets a negative of 1300/1500 calories per day, which will cause considerable muscle tissue loss (note how the parent writes "losing weight", not "losing fat", but also "yes, I have significant fat even at 150lb and 5'10"), besides having no energy. If you make instead a massive mels, you're going to give a massive glucose shot to your body. I haven't gone to such extreme, but the times when I happened to do something similar (one huge meal, even with an overall negative daily intake), I ended up accumulating fat rather than losing it. I suppose that in a calorie deficit context (=dieting), the body takes advantage of a huge meal to build some deposits up (and unfortunately, deposits are everything except muscles...). Dieting's hard, there are no cheap tricks, unfortunately.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  Eating once a day is a type of intermittent fasting, which has been well studied and shown to have some of the health benefits of fasting.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- kelnos 5y ago
  I don't think this is accurate, or at least not universally so. The pandemic has given me the opportunity to experiment a bit with losing weight. These days I mostly do eat one meal a day (sometime between noon and 6pm). I'll occasionally have a light snack aside from that one meal. I lost a good 15 lbs in just a few months this way. It was mostly fat. I kept up a running regimen (8-12 mi per week). I felt amazing. Much more energy, flatter stomach, better-defined chest, arms, thighs, and calves. Unfortunately I've gone back to some of my old ways over the past 9 months or so with restaurants and bars reopening, and I've gained back some of the weight. This tells me that it's not really how many meals I have, but what's in them, and how many calories. So I'd probably be fine with two or three meals a day, just healthier choices and fewer overall calories. But I don't believe one meal a day is a problem; just it isn't necessary, and you can still lose weight with a more normal meal pattern.
- 5y ago
yukinon 5y ago
Anecdotal, but just make sure you don't lose weight TOO fast. This is one of the ways in which gallstones are formed.
bonoboTP 5y ago
It's called OMAD (one meal a day), you can google it. In my experience, it's something you quickly get used to and has no negative effects (for me). You adjust and don't get hungry until the time comes (e.g. dinner). It's a form of intermittent fasting.
- smiths1999 5y ago
  This has been my experience as well. The first time I tried it I thought I was going to be miserable all day and have no energy. It ended being totally fine. I have this dull emptiness in my stomach but nothing that affects me in any way. And you are right, as soon as dinner rolls around my hunger increases dramatically.
- dylanz 5y ago
  I've done periods of time on OMAD throughout my life and one thing that would always get me is sleep. I'd wake up (not necessarily hungry) much too early, regardless of the time of my one meal. One trick that helped me was to break OMAD, and have a little bit of a slow releasing protein in the evenings before bed. My go to was low fat cottage cheese. Once I added that I was able to sleep through the night again.
watwut 5y ago
For me, loss of productivity and concentration. Also, hard to make that one meal make contain everything you need.

Ralo 5y ago

I've done this before switching from bulking season, to leaning season. I found the hardest part being stomach growling. I'd be talking to people and my stomach would start complaining to everyone. I've been told to drink a glass of water when the happens but I didn't find it helped a bunch. I usually went for a light plain peanut butter sandwich once a day at very "tactical" times to cut the growling. Yes peanut butter is calorie heavy but just keep it light. The fat/protein/carbs in peanut butter is pretty hard to beat, in moderation it's really good for you. This does go away after a while, but this was an issue for the first while.

vidarh 5y ago
Soups have worked better for me than water. The right soups can be very low calorie for volume and filling.
imiric 5y ago
I've found that laying off carbs (Atkins, keto, etc.) gets rid of the growling and hunger pains entirely. On a carb-restricted diet you eat because you want to, not because your stomach is craving for food.
- toyg 5y ago
  yeah, carb-restricting is what did it for me, when i managed to shed significant weight. But I couldn't sustain it for more than a couple of years. Also, protein-based diets are heavy on one's liver.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    If you’re doing a low carb diet, you probably want high fat and moderate protein.
anothernewdude 5y ago
Fiber and roughage can help that. The peak of my own weighloss happened when I regularly ate the most basic oat porridge for breakfast. Oats so big my body barely had a chance to get all the nutrients out.

lkois 5y ago

The real takeaway about mass loss via carbon dioxide is that you're changing how the engine works, and you're unlikely to notice it. Get a digital scale, weigh every morning after toilet. I find there is a very quick and variable response to the previous days food, which can be quite motivating. Seeing it up or down half a kilo each day is very noticeable, and informative about what works and what doesn't. Eat less dense calories, try to move around a little bit, all there is to it. My general rule is: -2 small meals = weight loss -1 regular/big + 1 small = maintain -2 big = weight gain Once you stop trying to bloat yourself all the time, it starts to feel nuts how frequently you did

sascha_sl 5y ago
I've had the exact opposite experience. Days I felt like I did well on and had, if counted, a lot less calories were upticks, and days where I indulged were downticks. Sometimes very large ones too. Particularly very fatty meals would see me drop weight. Ultimately the treatment for what probably got me to gain so much weight helped me twice over: ADHD medication. Not only does not lessen your constant need for dopamine (and lots of bad foods are good dopamine bumps), but it also supresses your appetite. I of course wouldn't recommend it if you do not have ADHD, but the additional side effect is appreciated none the less.
- lkois 5y ago
  I had some of that too though, that's kinda the idea. I found carby foods were most consistently weight adding, while meaty and fatty not so much. I recall all you can eat bbqs actually resulting in weight loss the following day. But if I had a bowl of rice with them, I'd have the weight gain I feared. Moderate portions of Indian takeaway curries with Naan could keep my weight up for a few days. That's not something I'd expect from pure calorie counting, nor do I understand what's actually going on or if it's good or bad etc. But it seemed useful to be aware of
  - p-squared 5y ago
    On a day-to-day basis, weight measurement changes are dominated by changes in retained water. This will certainly correlate with daily food choices, but does not really reflect meaningful changes in body composition. Average your measurements over something like a week in order to gauge actual progress.

animal531 5y ago

If people struggle with this, then eat the same amount of meals, but make them smaller. After that add basic exercise, walk a few steps and do a few pushups.

lqet 5y ago

This. I lost 12 kg in a few months when I was 20 by basically just stopping to drink sweet stuff and only eating one meal a day. I simply was too lazy as a student to buy and carry soda bottles and cook more than once a day. I have kept that weight for over a decade now by strictly adhering to the one meal per day rule, and only drinking tap water and coffee. Exercise was never for me (again, too lazy).

ckastner 5y ago

> Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off. You're suggesting a diet that requires a discipline that, empirically, is obviously beyond the reach of most people. Here's much, much simpler advice, that is also more enjoyable to do: Just eat better. Or just somewhat better, and do some exercise. You'd be surprised how easy it is to purchase or cook a meal that is delicious and filling, but not all too heavy on calories. Vegetables are boring when you boil them. Properly seasoned and roasted, grilled, braised, or sauteed, they can be an absolutely amazing side dish. Hell, throw a bit of cheese on them, that little bit of Parmesan or Gruyère won't make a difference calorie-wise but will add a divine dimension of flavor. It's easy to make a delicious desert that doesn't contain >50g of fat. Get some exercise. I enjoy lifting weights but you don't lose weight with that, you do it with endurance sport which I absolutely hate. Luckily, there's a solution for that: any halfway decent gym opened in the past decade has bikes, treadmills, cross-trainers etc. with built-in viewing screens and Netflix, Youtube, etc. An hour flies by when you're enjoying yourself, and with a heart rate of 130bpm or so, you're basically not even sweating, yet burning tons of calories. Imagine enjoying a full hour episode of House of Cards, Narcos, or whatever your thing is and getting healthy in the process. You're losing weight by watching TV. I think most advice that requires a dramatic change in lifestyle (like limiting yourself to one meal a day) is extremely poor because it requires effort that most of us aren't willing to expend. I enjoy food. A lot. I like to go out and try it, I like to cook it, I like to share it with others. For me, "eating one meal a day" is absolute punishment, I'm missing out on least two occasions to taste something enjoyable, maybe even remarkable. And it's easy to do that 3x a day when you just watch what you eat. Eat proper food for a while and you'll never crave a Big Mac again, because you can actually taste what crap it is.

znpy 5y ago
> do some exercise Don't underestimate walking! And stairs!
- Hir0ki 5y ago
  This I've noticed that since I have a car and don't walk as much anymore I have put on a lot of weight. Because I just didn't get my 10.000 Steps a day in anymore, because I didn't have to walk to the train station and to the grocery store any more.

heliodor 5y ago

Four main angles of attack: - eat less - change what you eat - work out more - change your workout Numbers 2 and 4 are by far the easiest.

bin_bash 5y ago

IF works really well for me. I've struggled for years with losing weight. I'm an extremely very picky eater with a sugar addiction and doesn't like to cook. I've had weeks where I would almost entirely survive on sweets: several king size candy bars, ice cream, soda. Hardly much else. I run a lot, even ran a marathon. No amount of exercise did anything. Dieting is impossible for me. I'd rather run an ultra. IF changes my eating habits. I don't know why or how but when I only have a short eating period I only want to eat mostly healthy foods. I'm inclined to drink water instead of soda which never, ever happens if I'm not doing IF. If it's 8pm and I think I want ice cream I say "it's too late, but you can have it during your eating period tomorrow." And I mean that, I allow myself to eat whatever I want during my eating period. I just don't want to eat junk food somehow so as a result—I just don't have ice cream anymore and it's not a big deal. That said, OMAD (for me it was 22:2) backfired a couple of times for me. It was too strict and I ended up giving up on fasting after trying it for just a day or two.

tamasnet 5y ago
IF = intermittent fasting <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting>

toshk 5y ago

Works for some, but body will try to go back to it's habits, can be very hard to change food habits. Easy hack that gives more energy & has health benefits is: Strength training for muscle growth. Muscles burn tons of energy, having more muscle mass will boost your daily resting kcal. When starting out it's easy to gain quite a bit of muscle first months. Ofc cut out the shit, mainly sweets & fried stuff.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> I've done it as someone who is 5'10" and 150lb to get down to 140 or 130lb. I agree with you but wait what, that'd be 178 cm / 58 kilos? That's bordering on underweight: it doesn't feel right (or I'm converting it wrong?) My first advice to people would be this: check your BMI first, and if you're perfectly in the middle then certainly do not get close to underweight. Besides that: I don't drink much alcohol and do intermittent fasting (skipping meals like you do) and I've never been neither overweight nor underweight. To me it's all about discipline.

hurflmurfl 5y ago
As a single additional anecdotal data point, my body is the same way. With similar height, if I am at 150lb (around 68kg) then I have visible fat. 140 is much better.

refurb 5y ago

Agreed. I’ve actually found one meal a day means I eat less over 24 hr. You can only eat so much in one sitting, and for whatever reason a big heavy meal usually turns me off food for 12 hrs or more.

discordianfish 5y ago

> Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward ... > You don't have to worry about eating another meal or two. You do realize for many overweight people eating isn't something to worry about but to look forward to? It's not that we don't understand thermodynamics. It's just a big part of enjoying being alive.

gadders 5y ago
You can just average your calories over the day and have three smaller meals.
- miroz 5y ago
  You''ll be more hungry eating 3 small meals than eating one bigger meal.
  - gadders 5y ago
    Quite possibly. The fundamental thing is calories in/calories out. Then you just need to find a strategy that helps you implement that that you can adhere to - keto, intermittent fasting, low fat, whatever. Track your calories under a few regimes and see which is easiest to stick to. People might argue one is better than the other, and that could well be true, but I think only at the individual level. What works for me might not work for you. What worked for me (losing 14kg in 6 months) was only having two meals a day (lunch and dinner, breakfast was a coffee), and having the same (low calorie) meal for lunch every day. Eating the same thing every day is not a bad idea: https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/the-groundhog-day-diet-why-i-eat-the-same-thing-every-day/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/the-gro...
gtirloni 5y ago
And? If a big part of enjoying being alive is eating freely without worry then do that and be happy with whatever body shape you end up with. That doesn't seem where OP is coming from though.
subpixel 5y ago

dspillett 5y ago

> Weird tips like that? No, no definitely not. Yep. The best “weird tip” is to avoid weird tips. I'm sure they've all worked for someone, though I suspect in many cases by some variant of a placebo effect or an indirect effect, and some work for a noticeable subset of people, but very few work generally and trying all the tricks and having them not work is a recipe for “I'm just not destined to manage this” style demotivation. Always start with the practically undeniable basics: eat less if you can, try eat better whether you are eating less or not, do more physical activity where you can, try not to undo the effect of the activity by using it as an excuse to eat significantly more, monitor what effect your changes have, and try not to have too high expectations or push too fast (weight lost slowly is more likely to stay off, because you fall into better habits/routine over the longer period and are less likely to flip straight back into all your old habits once you get close to your goal). Once you have those habits down, then maybe think about tweaks & tricks to optimise the process. Getting yourself into the habits might require some self-management tricks, but don't think of them as weight-loss or getting-into-shape tricks as they are really general self-management behaviours. One note on monitoring: be careful not to obsess over single readings. The human body can be more random than you expect and your daily/weekly life is not as predictable as you think. I stand on my scales almost daily, but don't care about individual readings: things could be high because I've been at parties recently, low because I've had two long-ish runs this weekend, weight can vary a fair amount either way just be hydration levels. I tend to watch a fortnightly average: two weeks of my normal routine seems to be enough to aggregate out most of the blips most of the time. On being more active: the challenge there is to find something that is either easy to fit into your routine, or that you enjoy enough to want to make the effort, or both. I accidentally discovered I enjoy running, though I've since gone off pounding the streets for speed and now take more steady paces, often but not always for longer distances, through countryside trails. Some prefer cycling. Martial arts are good too (wrestling can be a great full-body workout, and if you actually enjoy it you don't realise how much work you are actually doing). Just walking more can make a noticeable difference, and is usually easy to fit into daily/weekly life. [for reference: about six years ago I dropped from ~110KG to <64KG over the course of about two years (most of this in the middle year of that period), mostly through diet but partly through activity, <64 I feel is too little for me though over the last couple of years I've put on more than I want to (hit ~75 at one point in 2021) and not in useful mass (its around the gut, I can feel it jiggle when I run!) and I'm slowly (more slowly than I'd like, but at least steadily) getting back down to hovering around the 68KG point which seems to feel optimal]