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The OMAD diet is another popular fad diet as of late. This diet gained momentum on the heals of the intermittent fasting craze. It is basically an extreme form of intermittent fasting. People on this diet generally forgo eating all day and save their caloric intake up for one large meal. These meals don’t necessarily even have to be healthy and usually end up in the range of 3,000 to 4,000 or more calories. This diet has pros and cons just like the rest of the fad diets I have covered and I will go over them shortly.
Does it work?
The answer to this simple question is not so simple. Will you lose weight on this diet? Most likely yes. Will you get the POTENTIAL health benefits of intermittent fasting? Another yes here, but keep in mind I say POTENTIAL benefits. These are all covered in my Intermittent Fasting Post. The real question you have to ask yourself is, “Does it work FOR ME?”
Pros
- You will likely have significant weight loss if this is your only goal
- You could have all the potential health benefits of intermittent fasting
- Not a lot of food prep or counting calories for the whole week
- Fits into some people’s lives quite easily
- You get to eat pretty much whatever you want for your one meal
- Has a niche in competitive eating
Cons
- You will most assuredly lose muscle mass
- There hasn’t been a ton of solid science behind the potential health benefits of fasting
- Forces you to go VERY long periods without eating, which generally isn’t fun for most people
- Doesn’t fit into everyone’s life very well
- Has a high propensity for indigestion/GERD due to overfilling the stomach
- Has a high propensity for dramatic weight gain and hunger if you quit the diet due to a “stretching” effect the diet has on the stomach, and a now ravenously high satiety threshold.
- Not a very good diet for people with certain medical conditions (diabetes, pancreatitis, acid reflux/GERD, gastroparesis, etc)
Importance of Muscle
As you can see, this diet doesn’t go with what I preach so much. I preach that EVERYONE should be working to add quality muscle mass to their frames as this will keep you burning more and more calories and have a very large net positive influence on your weight and eating habits over the long run. Many sources claim that fasting has a muscle sparing effect on the body. As stated in my previous IF post, this effect is RELATIVE to an extreme hypocaloric diet. This diet would be BETTER for muscle retention than a 500 calorie diet for instance, but it doesn’t mean your muscles are spared, in fact, you will likely have a very noticeable loss in muscle mass. To optimize muscle growth, you want to try and spike your nitrogen/protein synthesis every 3-4 hours to promote optimal muscle growth. This is obviously impossible when you are fasting for 23 hours a day.
Weight Loss
The weight will definitely come off on this diet. However, as I have asked many times in the past, “is this diet sustainable for you?”. For a small number of people the answer is yes. This is the small group of people that this particular diet just fits right into their life like a missing puzzle piece and they don’t want to focus so much on gaining muscle (I shuddered as I typed that). They don’t have to count calories, go to the gym, or spend hours meal prepping each week/day. I have a good friend who is on this diet because it works with his life. He is also really into competitive eating. This particular diet primes his body for eating large amounts of food in a short period and stretches his stomach. A LOT more goes into competitive eating than this, but it is one of the niches of the diet.
I don’t want to be hungry all day
…I feel ya. However, just as with intermittent fasting, your body will adjust to the fasted state after a few weeks and you will likely not even feel hungry anymore until its time to eat once you have adjusted. Our bodies have remarkable adaptive mechanisms. Those few weeks while your body adjusts to the fasted state and your new eating schedule, however, well it’s not going to be fun at all.
Summary
Overall I would not generally recommend this diet. It has it’s place for those people who have tried everything and just can’t seem to stick with anything else. You can’t argue the simplicity of the diet. I could see myself recommending this diet to the extremely obese person who is having trouble getting started because most people who are extremely obese (not counting those with medical conditions that cause the extreme obesity) tend to need simplicity and simple structure with their diet. This also allows that type of person to maintain a sense of gluttony/cheating when they finally do eat their meal. It could serve as a springboard for the morbidly obese because once they lose a significant amount of weight, they can then focus on gaining muscle, but it will be hard to go back to a normal diet for these people because they haven’t really CHANGED their eating habits, they’ve just limited them to an hour a day. For a vast majority of my readers, however, I would not recommend this diet because I want you to increase your lean muscle mass AND lose fat, not just lose weight.
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