For the past month and a half I’ve been doing night OMAD.
I’d known about the new researches on syncing your circadian rhythm with your meal times for a while but it wasn’t until last week where I decided to give it a try.
I started by doing a 48 and ate my first meal on 9am. Did another 48 after that and continued my routine. This day has been particularly hard. I ate yesterday morning and as per my schedule my correct meal time should be tomorrow morning but I’m seriously considering breaking my fast tonight.
I’ve been hungry for the entire day and it seems my body is now producing ghrelin BOTH in the morning and my previous nightly eating window.
Hang in there, it should get easier with time.
Personally though I would focus on the low-hanging 90% of effectiveness and leave the remainder for the researchers and record-breakers. What good would it be if an earlier eating window spared me, I don’t know, 50 calories, if I were tempted to eat back, say, 500 later on. It’s just not cost-effective if it feels much harder than the prospective returns justify. I feel similarly about the various inquiries on whether 5 or 50 calories of something will “break the fast”. At least for weight loss this shouldn’t be the critical concern, but rather what happens next. If a little bit of creamer or stevia or for that matter pure sugar were what for me subjectively constituted the border between “bearableness” and “plain torture”, then I’d by all means adopt such a measure; if it spiked hunger, brought back memories of “better times” or were otherwise significantly detrimental to compliance, as in fact happens to be the case for me, I’d steer clear of it.
I’ve myself settled on late lunch of sorts, somewhere around 13-16:00, as my usual OMAD; the rationale being that a) it used to be the one meal that I would consistently have with my family growing up, so my body has been trained to expect it for a rather long time; b) while I love grand and ridiculously late dinners, my food choices in the evening and at night-time tend to be considerably worse for, again, years of conditioning have rendered me susceptible of associating such sittings with comfort / pleasure rather than nourishment; and c) my sleep quality tends to be negatively impacted by late feasts. Thus for me a relatively early meal has been more of a fair compromise rather than an attempt to “micro-manage” my energy expenditure.