What to Eat For One Meal A Day (BEGINNERS)

Check out my client Sharon’s transformation where she lost a whole bunch of fat

After making a bunch of videos on the one meal a day diet and how effective it can be to help with weight loss and burning body fat in a simple non-restrictive way,

I’ve noticed that most people still have tons of questions about what to eat and in general how to set up the diet properly.

So I wanted to make this video specifically for beginners that are brand new to the diet plan in an effort to explain everything

And if you’ve never tried to eat one meal a day you might think that its impossible, unhealthy, or too difficult for you to do,

but if you give this style of eating a chance I promise you’ll find that all of those thoughts are simply untrue.

To set up an omad or one meal a day diet plan you want to start by picking 1 hour of the day that you would like to eat your meal.

When it comes to losing weight or burning body fat it doesn’t matter whether that meal is consumed in the morning or at night,

but we do want to try to start and finish eating within one hour. The other 23 hours of the day are gonna be for fasting.

Now if you’re a beginner just the thought of that probably got your stomach growling. And there’s no denying that when you first start you’re gonna feel hungry,

but most people think that they’ll feel a lot hungrier, then they do when they gather the courage to actually try the diet.

A lot of the hunger that you currently feel throughout the day is a conditioned hunger response. Nobel prize winner Ivan Pavlov accidentally discovered this

when studying salivation in dogs ultimately leading to something known in psychology as Pavlovian Conditioning.

Meaning if you’re used to eating breakfast everyday at 7 am, lunch at 12 pm, and dinner at 6pm you’ve conditioned yourself to get hungry everyday at those times.

The stimulus that causes you to get hungry isn’t the smell taste or sight of food it’s the time itself. And this applies further…By pairing things like eating snacks while watching tv,

or while studying, or whenever you feel boredom you develop even more conditioned hunger responses.

So the ironic truth is that by practicing fasting you can break a lot of these conditioned hunger responses, and start feeling only the unconditioned hunger response when you’re actually hungry, allowing you to develop a better relationship to food in general.

To help you break your conditioned hunger responses throughout the day you can slowly ease into one meal a day diet, by cutting out snacks and meals slowly one at a time.

You can also incorporate things like black coffee, apple cider vinegar, and sugar-free tea throughout the day to suppress your appetite.

Remember it’ll take some time, but your body will for sure adapt. Let’s move on to what to eat and how much of it to eat.

When you actually get to your one meal for the day you don’t want to restrict calories. A lot of people try this diet plan to lose weight or burn fat,

and they think they can lose weight faster by cutting calories from the only meal they eat for the whole day.

This is a big mistake that leads to binge eating almost every time. Another big mistake is trying to do something like one meal a day ketogenic diet plan as a beginner.

You should allow yourself to eat all three macronutrients protein, carbs, and fats. Again do not restrict calories

or macronutrients during this one meal especially when first starting as it will likely lead you to fail the diet.

Instead you want to eat your fill of single ingredient real foods. I think we all know what single ingredient real foods are,

You can also have foods that are a combination of a bunch of single ingredient foods. So an example of that would be something..

like Ezekiel bread which is made up of a bunch of real natural sprouted grains. Once you decide what to eat grab a large dinner plate as well as a large bowl.

Start by adding your protein source to your plate. Normally when you’re trying to burn fat I recommend you have about 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight to preserve muscle mass.

And I know this is a major area of confusion for people when it comes to the one meal a day diet.

So…you will most likely not be able to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight when eating one meal a day. I mean for me that would be 200 grams of protein in one meal, that’s just not gonna happen.

Luckily fasting itself is great at preventing muscle loss because of the hormonal changes that will occur in your body while fasting.

By combining fasting with heavy weight training you can prevent most muscle loss without having to eat a ton of protein in one sitting.

But as a general rule of thumb, you want to take that dinner plate and fill about 40 percent of it with your protein source.

The rest of the plate can be filled with fats and carbs in whatever ratios that you choose. And when I say fill up your plate I mean fill it up.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll exceed your total daily calories with just one really full plate of wholesome single ingredient foods.

Those single ingredient foods are gonna fill you up without you having to worry about calories. In fact, if anything you should be worried about eating enough rather than too much.

Just to help illustrate what to put in your plate let me give a couple examples. You might fill your plate with a large piece of salmon and the rest of your plate might be baked potatoes that were baked in some cooking oil.

You can also have multiple protein sources. So you might fill 20 percent of your plate with diced steak, another 20 percent with scallops, and then the rest with brown rice pasta cooked in olive oil topped with tomato sauce.

There’s really an infinite amount of ways that you can fill your plate as long as you’re sticking to real food not processed food.

Now for the big bowl, you’re going to use that to fill it up with at least two to three cups of vegetables.

 Again don’t try to restrict calories I don’t want you sitting there chewing on a raw broccoli stalk to try to lose weight faster because it won’t work.

 These vegetables can be cooked in oil, they can be seasoned, and made very tasty. Since you’re only eating one meal a day

you want to make sure that you still take in plenty of nutrients so I usually recommend you start by eating your big bowl of veggies first.

This will also take the edge off of your hunger. Then you can move on to the plate of protein, carbs, and fats making sure to prioritize eating all the protein off your plate.

After eating everything in your bowl and off your plate you’re most likely gonna feel extremely full. However if you’re not full then eat more single ingredient foods.

I know this diet sounds absurd because we’re not tracking calories, we’re not concerned with having one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, we’re not eating all day long, and when we are eating we’re eating until we’re totally full, but I guarantee you it works.

Now there are a few more things that I want to mention for you to be able to eat like this successfully. First, off the one meal a day diet is a flexible dieting approach.

The main goal is to break the conditioned hunger response and teach you to only react to your unconditional hunger response.

If you find yourself really low on energy during your workouts then add a second meal during one of the days to take in extra calories.

Flexibility implies that you don’t have to eat one meal a day every day. As unbelievable as it sounds there are gonna be days where it’s time to eat your one meal and you’re not all that hungry and you wind up leaving food in your plate.

Well, the next day if you feel low on energy and you’re starving then allow yourself an extra meal that day. You can add an extra meal a couple days a week and still end up with a large net caloric deficit.

 This slowly teaches you to respond to natural hunger signals rather than eating based on a clock or a calculator.

Again if you find yourself extremely hungry once you’ve already adapted to the diet then occasionally add in an extra meal.

The amount of weight you lose isn’t based on calories consumed per day but instead, it’s based on calories consumed over time.

So small refeeds will be necessary especially if you’re following the single ingredient food approach because that approach fills your stomach up without costing too many calories.

One last thing that I want to mention and that’s on the topic of junk food. If you’re trying to simply maintain your weight rather than lose weight you can definitely get away with eating more junk food during your one meal,

however, I still recommend eating those junk foods and snacks after already consuming your single ingredient foods.

That’ll prevent you from overeating, and will ensure that you’re still taking in plenty of nutrients.

That’s it guys I know this diet plan may sound super simple in theory, but that’s exactly the way it’s meant to be.

If you want to feel more calculated with your diet plan you can track your calories, in the beginning, to ensure you’re not taking too little or too much.

Also if you’re looking to lose weight or burn body fat fast and you want a streamlined done for you solution without you having to do research and without tons of trial and error try my 6-week challenge. Where my clients are losing an average of 20 pounds or 5 percent body fat in just 42 days.

We customize a ton of different diet plans including fasting, keto, vegetarian, and even more traditional 5 to 6 meal day diet plans because everyone is different and everyone finds more success with different diet plans.

You also get a 42-day workout plan, a recipe book, and an accountability coach to help guide you through the entire process. And the best part is that we offer you the chance to get it for free to incentivize you to follow through without cheating

and without quitting for all 6 weeks so you can experience the results that so many of our clients have already experienced.