Those who have or are doing an OMAD style eating/ fasting schedule, what is your experience with maintenance and returning to more than just one meal? How do you maintain any weight loss?
Answer
Yes, I can more or less maintain on OMAD. After ~15 months of practice it feels so effortless that I quite frankly don’t want to have it any other way.
Caveats:
- I didn’t have a goal weight nor did I formally count calories. I just ate as “cleanly” as I felt comfortable with, otherwise leaving it up to natural hunger and satiety to determine consumption, and waited patiently to see how far the energy imbalance that OMAD had organically induced would take me. The weight that I arrived at is rather low for my height, not clinically underweight but close to the cut-off and definitely lower than what I expect most would feel comfortable with; ergo: if it’s exactly a 22-ish BMI you seek to maintain, maybe you’ll have to calorie-count and/or go with calorie-denser / nutrient-sparser foods than I have.
- I was sedentary all throughout the 10~12-month period of active loss. Nowadays that I am finally increasing my activity, I find that I struggle getting enough nutrition in a single meal while still upholding my quality standards. Energy levels on particularly active days also prove slightly sub-optimal. Thus my mid-/long-term course of action will be to fall back to TMAD, likely over a 6~8-hour eating window, on active days, while still sticking with OMAD on sedentary ones (note: these are minute amounts of extra nutrition / calories that I speak of, maybe a few hundred extra kcal/day; a single restaurant meal should in theory provide me with more than adequate compensation for multiple weeks’ worth of activity demands, given that statistically such meals in my case tend to hover around the 3~5k kcal range).
Answer
I’m currently 5 months in to 20/4 which while is not OMAD strictly, I really only have supper, plus a few snacks at night.
I have lost 34 lbs and feel much better. My blood sugars are better too (I’m diabetic).
My goal is to get to 190 which is 11 lbs away now.My intention once I get to my goal weight is to lengthen the eating window, say to 16/8 and add a light lunch. Monitor that for a month or so see what happens to my body. If I see weight creeping back on I will either go back to 20/4 or increase my physical activity yo accommodate for the extra calories.
That’s my plan currently…sounds doable!
All the best with your journey