OMAD vs 2MAD - Which Is Better (One Meal A Day or Two)

Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to talk about OMAD (one meal a day) versus 2MAD (two meals a day) eating

one meal a day or two meals a day is one better or does it just depend on the

person and the circumstances so today we're going to cover all the different factors

that you need to understand so that you can decide when and if one is better for you.

Coming right up.

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

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OMAD and 2MAD are both forms of intermittent fasting

and just real quick if you eat two meals a day and let's say

that you eat lunch at noon and you eat dinner at 8:00 then you have an eight

hour feeding window there's eight hours during the day that you're eating and

there's sixteen hours a day that you're not eating

if you squeeze that together a little bit so you're eating lunch at noon and

dinner at 6:00 now you have an 18-6 intermittent fasting pattern if you

squeeze it a little bit further so you have lunch at 2:00 and dinner at 6:00

now you have a 20 hour fasting window and a 20:4 intermittent fasting pattern

and now if you squeeze that just a little bit further then you have one

meal a day where you're eating only one meal you're eating all the food of that

day in about an hour window or so so they're really kind of similar but

they're different degrees of intermittent fasting so you're

stretching your fasting window from 16 to almost 24 hours now why would someone

want to do this and what are the advantages and issues well most people

who get into intermittent fasting or ketogenic diet and so forth then it's

because they want to lose weight okay it's the by far the greatest and biggest

reason for most people and even though I totally understand that I'm not a big

fan of putting that as the priority because we have to understand that the

weight is not the root cause there is a reason for the weight gain there's a

reason the weight won't come off and we have to find and solve that reason and

that's the priority and when we do that then the weight comes off easy or at

least consistently and we're addressing the root cause so we're getting some

health benefit we're fixing the body at the root and we're getting healthier the

biggest reason for weight gain is insulin resistance and the far-gone

state of insulin resistance is called type-2 diabetes so that's the second

biggest reason that people want to do intermittent fasting or low carb is to

reduce insulin resistance if they are maybe pre-diabetic

they have what's called insulin resistance or if they're full-blown type

2 diabetics but we want to realize that the weight loss the vast majority of

people who have excess weight the reason is that they are insulin resistant and

that is the thing that you're actually trying to resolve for some people it

might be that they want to do OMAD or 2MAD to maintain the gains that

they've made they they were overweight and they've lost the weight and now they

want to maintain it or it might be someone who was never overweight but

wants to maintain their health and not become insulin resistant or diabetic and

that's the best place to be to fix things before they become a problem

there's the popular saying don't fix it if it ain't broke and I totally disagree

with that because what that says in a health sense is that wait for a disease

before you do something and that's not prevention okay we want to prevent

things we want to maintain the highest possible level of health now for some

people they don't really a weight issue or a insulin resistance

issue but they're still interested in intermittent fasting because they're

interested in longevity and improved immunity and both of those are results

of something called autophagy. Autophagy is when the body up regulates its

recycling when resources become more scarce in the body such as when you're

not eating the body gets better at using them efficiently so it starts recycling

and reusing and it gets more efficient at using and repairing what's there so

as a result your immune system starts working better because some of those

foreign things some of those proteins that it's recycling are pathogens like

virus and bacteria and yeast and parasites and it's well documented that

fasting and calorie restriction increases longevity so we'll talk more

about that and some people do it just to save time

they have solved their health issues they they maintain what they're doing

they're getting some Autophagy they know that but one of the greatest benefits is

that they wake up in the morning and it's liberating that the first thing

they do is not to have to go and eat they can start their day just shower get

dressed and get right to it and then they'll eat later in the day sometime

but it's not urgent okay they could eat at noon they could eat at 2:00 o'clock

they could eat at 6:00 o'clock it's not a big deal and that's a great thing to

get to that point and then there's the issue of calorie restriction so it is a

physical fact it's a law of physics that you have to burn more calories than you

put in but in terms of physiology it's not

quite that simple because hormones determine how hungry we are which

determines how much we eat and so forth and when we talk about calorie

restriction typically people talk about eating many small

meals but smaller meals with fewer calories in each meal and they try to

have frequent snacks but they want to keep them under a hundred calories and

that's a really bad idea because what people find and is that it is much much

harder to eat a little bit frequently than to eat a lot on a few occasions

because once you eat a little bit all the time you trigger the body's desire

for food and that's why the typical idea of calorie restriction is so hard to

maintain whereas calorie restriction that results

naturally from eating fewer meals is very very easy if you just skip a meal

the body says oh I'm hungry and then you have a cup of tea and the body says okay

well I'm good for now this may be hard to believe if you haven't tried it but

talked to some people who have tried it or give it a try yourself and you will

find that once you get into it you get a little bit fat adapted then it is very

very easy that you don't get hungry personally it is when I'm recording this

it's about two o'clock in the afternoon and all I've had today is a cup of

coffee and a cup of tea and I could eat but I'm not particularly hungry and I

don't have any weight to lose I don't have insulin resistance but I like the

time savings and I like the fact that I'm getting some autophagy so when

people get into OMAD or 2MAD okay it works great for most people at least

for a time but then there may be some issues down the road and some of these

issues might be a plateau a lot of people might find great benefits they

lose some weight but then they hit a plateau and nothing happens other people

might do this and they noticed hey you know I feel a little better I'm not as

hungry but I haven't lost a single pound or some people lost their weight they

reach their goal they want to maintain the autophagy and the

fasting they want to maintain the time savings but they lose too much weight

they get thinner than they want to be than they feel good with or some people

might get digestive upsets when they try to eat all that food in one sitting if

they don't have a strong digestive system then it can be difficult to

digest that much food in one sitting because if you eat thousand calories per

meal in two meals then the body has to make a certain amount of hydrochloric

acid and a certain amount of digestive enzymes to process that food if you eat

2,000 calories in one sitting the body has to make twice as much all at once so

you have to have a stronger digestion to get away with eating one meal a day

and some of that of course is just getting the body habituated getting the

body used to it so if you do this on a gradual pattern then you can probably

work up to it another issue that is not so common if you do it right is that you

get too hungry for the most part that's because you try to do things too quick

if you ease into it then there typically will not be a problem if you go slow

enough to get your body fat adapted to teach your body how to use fat as the

primary fuel instead of carbohydrates where you have to top it off all the

time you typically won't get hungry but for some people it's still an issue or

for some people they're losing weight or they're reversing insulin their blood

sugar going down their insulin is going down but for some reason they feel it's

not happening fast enough that they feel that there's a time line and they wanted

to go faster so know that we understand some of the variables and some of the

issues that were working with let's try to understand the physiology a little

bit closer like what's the main difference between one meal a day or two

meals a day from an internal perspective what's actually happening

in the body so if you eat one meal a day and this is the 24 hours of the day then

this would be midnight and this is noon and this is midnight again and we're

just going to assume if you eat OMAD you could eat your meal at any time

during the day but we're just gonna assume that you work you come home and

you have your one meal at six o'clock at six o'clock you go from a fasting state

you go from a place where your body has made a lot of ketones it's in a good

state of autophagy at least if your fat adapted and then as you eat you

start packing in a lot of food all at once you're gonna go from that fasted

state from a state that promote insulin sensitivity to an insulin resistant

state all at once okay you eat a bunch of food your body increases the insulin

production in response to all that food because your body has two process it and

the insulin has to take the nutrients out of the blood and into the cell so

even if you're not technically long term insulin resistance you are promoting

insulin resistance in that state you're in the fed state you're in the storing

state all right and there's nothing wrong with that we obviously have to eat

sometime so that lasts for a few hours while the body is processing that food

and then the insulin drops and after a few hours you return into a state where

you're becoming more insulin sensitive you're you're moving the momentum goes

from insulin resistance to insulin sensitivity and here's the key with OMAD

with one meal a day that once you get into that insulin sensitive place and

you don't put any more food in the longer you go without putting any new

food in the more you're promoting insulin sensitivity the more ketones you

make the more autophagy you get and so this is the continuation of that

graph by midnight were a little bit into in into insulin sensitivity again and

then as long as we don't eat again we wake up in the morning we go to work but

because we don't eat we're keep we keep increasing the autophagy and the insulin

sensitivity if we eat two meals a day let's say that we're doing an 18-6

pattern so we're eating at noon and we're eating at 6:00 then the thing

would be exactly the same except for the jump at noon so we have two times where

we get into insulin resistance there's twice a day where we're breaking the

momentum of moving toward insulin sensitivity instead of just one and what

that does other than giving us two times where we become a little insulin

resistant is it shortens the time that we are without food and therefore we

don't get the same depth we don't get the same momentum toward insulin

sensitivity we don't give the body the same opportunity to burn off stored

resources because we eat sooner and therefore we don't get the depth of

insulin sensitivity that we would with a longer fast so insulin sensitivity is is

a big thing that the longer you go the more insulin sensitive you become the

other thing is autophagy that if you're looking for autophagy there is no

exact consensus of when that kicks in we do know that if you on a low-carb

high-fat diet if you're already making ketones when you start the fast here

just before midnight then you'll probably have a significant amount of

autophagy in about 14 to 16 hours it's definitely by 18 hours you'll have some

good autophagy but it's a matter of degrees all right the longer you go the

more you get it's not like you never have any but those extra

six hours will dramatically increase the amount of autophagy that you enjoy so

with that in mind let's just look at who might benefit from what and when

so OMAD would be the best way to go if you want faster results right if you're

trying to lose weight faster if you want to reverse type 2 diabetes faster then

go OMAD if you want more autophagy if your main concern is longevity immune

benefits then you would want to go OMAD because it would OMAD is

dramatically better for autophagy than 2MAD would be. OMAD however is

harder to sustain some people do get hungry some people lose too much weight

some people have digestive upsets some people find it difficult to eat that

much food in such a short period of time so therefore it's harder to sustain some

people get excess weight loss and just in terms of long-term health that once

you have lost the weight that you want to lose you want to maintain now what

you're looking for is health and your body is going to require a certain

amount of nutrients you need vitamins and minerals and essential amino acids

and essential fatty acids so the amount of food that you have to eat to provide

those nutrients it's much more difficult to eat that in a single meal than it is

in two meals and then two meals a day is easier to sustain for all of the same

reasons you don't get quite as hungry it's easier to maintain the weight it's

easier to get the nutrients but of course your the drawback is that you

don't get as fast a result and you don't get the same depth of autophagy that you would

with OMAD and for some people who want an even stronger degree of fast

results or more autophagy maybe they have cancer maybe they have an

autoimmune disease may they have a really stubborn weight or

type-2 diabetes then they might want to go longer than 24 hours in a fast they

might want to go 36 hours or 48 hours or they might want to do three day fast or

four day fast and not all the time not like every week but you want to change

things up a lot and throw those in once in a while again that's why we want to

understand these principles because there is not one set perfect way to do

it for every person is going to depend on a lot of different factors so that's

you want to understand this stuff so that you can start playing around with

it and understand why things are happening and then find a way that works

for you so now what do you do with this well it depends on where you are so

let's just figure out where you are on this scale if you're eating three or

more meals a day then your first step would be to get fat adapted if you're

eating three meals plus snacks you are probably carbohydrate dependent

because carbohydrate dependence is the only reason that you would want to top

off your blood sugar with a snack every couple of hours if your body knows how

to burn fat you're not going to need to eat that often so that would be step one

you go from eating all those meals high carb to eating low carb you get your

body fat adapted you're not going to need the snacks you're down to three

meals a day then once your body gets used to that you try skipping breakfast

or at least you try to push breakfast later in the day and just get your body

used to that idea before you know it you can skip breakfast altogether and you're

eating two meals a day now you from two meals you start

shrinking you start pushing the two meals closer together so if they're

eight hours apart in the beginning you push them seven six five four hours

until you're all the way down OMAD if that suits your goals right if you

don't feel like you need autophagy and you don't have weight to lose

you just want the time-saving then maybe 16-8 is good for you so again you figure

out where this fits for you and then the way I see it is that for most people

you're gonna stay primarily in OMAD until you have reached your goals until

you have lost your weight you've reversed the insulin resistance you

reverse the type-2 diabetes then you stay in OMAD and then for all the

reasons we talked about once you have reached your goal your insulin sensitive

you've reached your goal weight now it's going to depend some people are going to

be perfectly able to stay on one meal a day and they're not going to lose a lot

of weight they're going to be easy for them to maintain it there and they find

it easy to get all their nutrients in one meal great but if you start losing

too much and you don't want to lose too much now I don't think there's anything

unhealthy with being very thin unless you start getting emaciated and

pathologically thin and malnourished but on the contrary being quite thin

probably gives you some longevity benefits even though I think you can get

most of those benefits by following these principles and just being in in

enough autophagy on a regular basis but if you're starting to lose too much weight

or if you just want to enjoy two meals a day then now you're gonna move back so

you went from two meals a day to one meal a day and this one meal a day is

kind of crunch time that's where you get things done but when things are done now

you go back to two meals a day or maybe alternate two meals with one meal to get

the autophagy benefits and that's where I would stay for the rest of my life I

would stay with 2MAD or OMAD I would throw in some longer fasts every

couple of months twice a year whatever fits you because there's tremendous

amount of research that shows that you get enormous health benefits

that it is much much more important when you eat even than what you eat of course

you have to eat real food that goes without saying

but when you eat is incredibly important and there's some tremendous health

benefits to giving yourself a sustained period without food they clean up the

autophagy the insulin resistance your body is designed for this you eat

something you put it in storage during the fasting you pull it out of storage

that's how the body stays in balance and it allows the body to clean itself up so

you can stay healthy for the long term if you enjoyed this video make sure you

check out that one thanks so much for watching I'll see you in the next video