As I've been really intersted in nutrition and fitness over the last years I've stumbled upon every topic of the "industry". I 've documented a lot about cardio, workouts, recovery, nutrition, fasting, carbohydrate cycle, protein synthesis, fasting etc. You name a fitness topic and I assure you I've been studying it.
I've always struggled to lose fat as all my life I used to be about 25-30% bodyfat and I finally found motivation last year when I've lost about 20kgs of fat and put on some considerable ammount of muscle.
HOW DOES ONE MEAL A DAY WORK?
Well, although it is kind of self explanatory by its naming it can be really tough to do it without any knowledge. You might end up starving, having stomach problems or binge eating. This method should actually help your organism and fatloss process rather than doing the opposite.
First of all you have to get accomodated with intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting means that you eat in an interval of 6-8 hours. Example, if you wake up at 8 am, you will have your first meal at 2 pm and have 2-3 meals in total untill 10 pm. You can adapt this however you want.
I will recommend starting it gradually. At first you have to discover what is your "natural" habbit of eating. Let's say first meal of yours is at 9 am and the last at 9 pm. This means you are eating in 12 hours window, this shouldn't be hard to change in time. You can start adding 30 mins from your first meal daily like this.
- Monday : Start eating at 9:30 am and finish your last meal at 9 pm
- Tuesday : Start eating at 10:00 am and finish your last meal at 9 pm
- ...
- Next Monday : Start eating at 1 pm and finish your last meal at 9 pm
As everything in fitness should be done gradually - adding weights to the bar, changing eating habbits or quantities - this should apply to fasting as well. If you will be doing this gradually and you will be able to eat in a 6-8 hours window, then one meal a day will become easy for you to implement for 1 day in the week.
My recommendation is to do it only once a week for the health and fatloss benefits. I m currently doing a different kind of fast as I plan not to eat anything for more than 1 day. I literally wake up and I won't be adding untill next day when I wake up at least, but this is very hard to do!
Before I will enumerate the benefits of fasting I just want you to know that fasting is literally cleansing our body. Imagine how you feel when you wake up, your body cleanses it self on the exterior while eliminating different kind of oils - body oil, hairy oils etc. I just want you to imagine this stuff happens when in the interior of the body when you fast, it is going through a cleansing stage as well. Prolonged fasting is used for cancer pacients in order to fight the tumour, there are a lot of stories of how fasting helped people combat their diseases.
I encourage you to do your own research on this topic in order to find out if it's the right thing to do for you and what should be the approach.
Benefits:
- weight loss
- boost in human growth hormone
- lowers the insulin levels
- stabilising the hunger hormone
- slows down the trygliceride levels
- anti-aging
- detoxification
- mental clarity - eliminates the brain fog
- focus
- boosts metabolism
- lowers blood presure
- decreases blood sugar
Either if you fast or not I recommend drinking a lot of water. For an average man it's indicated to drink at least 2.5 litres of water per day, you can adapt this if you are below or over the average. I weight 100 KG and I aim to drink ~ 4 litres of water daily!