5 ms·

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.

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.