7 Years of OMAD: Mental Health and Life Quality

Introduction

In the previous post, I focused on my health and physique transformation as a person doing OMAD for 7+ years. Building on that, this will address those benefits of the plan I consider the biggest regarding mental health and day-to-day living. Besides energy, time efficiency, and sleep quality, the video also discusses resources like willpower, and decisions.

Energy

Greatly emphasized in my content and book is the energy difference this regimen creates. For decades, we’ve been told that having more “energy,” requires eating more frequently. Based on research and first-hand experiments, I say this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, I firmly believe food digestion is one of the most energy-draining processes. Whenever calories are ingested, the body processes and eventually stores them (in some shape or form). Essentially inevitable, rather than boosting it, that significantly lowers energy.

Here, some keto and carnivore fans might argue this isn’t the case when not eating carbs. Disagreeing with them, I object that while those diets don’t cause the triggered-by-junk-and-poor-quality carbs crash, it remains that food always needs processing. It’s unavoidable.

High, low, or no-carb, a meal always sits in the stomach, giving a heavy feeling. Adding to that, digestion slows down physical and mental activity. Therefore it severely decreases performance.

Countless times, I felt super determined to do something. Yet, only 15 minutes after having a meal, I no longer wanted to do anything, dealing with the inescapable “slowmo” effect.

Apparently, this is why after eating, we get sleepy. No, it isn’t that we’re undisciplined. It’s because the body starts handling the meal. And that steals precious energy that can be invested elsewhere.

Well-known to many, the standard procedure to combat that is drinking copious amounts of coffee. Based on drinking coffee since the third grade, I’d say that besides, incredibly ineffective, that consistently elevated my blood pressure and heart rate. Interestingly, I never got such results after I stopped combining coffee with calories. Though the types of beans definitely matter.

One reason behind this is that by lowering insulin, fasting keeps blood pressure in a healthy range. I’m also saying this regarding the pre-conceived notion that fasting forces people to rely on caffeine. If this is what you believe, then listen to this.

After drinking plenty of it for about 22 years, I quit coffee in the summer of 2020. By plenty, I mean using an actual IKEA jar instead of a cup and having multiple of those a day the years before quitting. While this deserves a separate post, I’ll only note that I have the exact amounts of energy, doing everything I previously did, including 2 fasted workouts a day.

Sleep

Resembling those of downer drugs, the mentioned slow-mo effect isn’t entirely “bad.” (IMHO) Strategically eating OMAD before bed is the mightiest hack for customizing your sleep regimen according to the person you aspire to be. Plus, you burn stored energy when you’re most active. Besides getting you leaner faster, that is incomparably more efficient for mental and physical performance.

Resembling those of downer drugs, the mentioned slow-mo effect isn’t entirely “bad.” (IMHO) Strategically eating OMAD before bed is the mightiest hack for customizing your sleep regimen according to the person you aspire to be. Plus, you burn stored energy when you’re most active. Besides getting you leaner faster, that is incomparably more efficient for mental and physical performance.

About two-thirds of my life, I struggled with a massive inability to sustain a proper sleep schedule. As shared in my book, I also changed all sleep chronotypes while primarily being a “dolphin” or a “night owl.” Undoubtedly, my teenage stimulant abuse did play a role.

Supposedly, doing a so-called healthy fitness diet was going to fix that. Instead of doing so, however, it only worsened the issue, making it impossible to fall asleep. That was due to unbearable hunger and dissatisfaction. Truth be told, back then, I was much hungrier than when smoking a bag of weed a day.

Once I transitioned to doing OMAD before bed, everything changed. By causing me to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, reaching not some calorie number but the absolute fullness and satiety allows me to wake up whenever I desire. Also, to get off the bed, pretty much right after opening my eyes without any of the soreness, doubts, and negative thoughts that annoyed me for years.

In fact, I still tweak that, shifting my sleep schedule precisely as I want while consistently getting around 90% quality. I started by waking up at 6. Then 5. And now, based on preference, it is between 2:30 and 3:30, several hours before my alarm.

Meaning that unlike when going to school, I never wake up at the wrong, but only at the most appropriate sleep phases avoiding the disastrous sleep inertia. And this is the second key to adjusting your sleep habits to your liking.

Time

One of the numerous disadvantages of the standard American and bodybuilding diets is that they are obscenely time-consuming. Going further than it may seem, this has several aspects.

Most obvious, the first is the time spent eating, every 2-3 hours. Somewhat optional, if ordering your meals, the second is the time spent buying, cooking, and measuring food. Mandatory to me, and hopefully you, the third is (the time spent) teeth cleaning with dental floss, toothpaste, and brush.

Fourth is the quality of time when digesting food in the middle of workouts, tasks, and daily life.

Doing some calculations, I concluded that those compounding rob about 5 or more hours of my day. By adopting the OMAD plan, I immediately got that time back, realizing how much more I could achieve and be in a day without sacrificing fun or sleep. And this is extremely important because time is our most valuable asset.

Willpower & Decisions

The conventional wisdom still advocates that staying in shape (or not being fat) depends mainly on willpower and discipline. On the contrary, an increasing number of studies show that willpower is exceedingly limited faculty. And the same applies to our number of daily decisions.

This means that unlike what is taught by gurus and zealous self-help junkies, you can use only so much willpower and make only so many decisions before running out of those. Once that happens, you enter the conditions called willpower depletion and decision fatigue.

Self-explanatory, the first makes simple tasks feel as if they’re beyond reach. The second severely handicaps the ability to make decisions.

Besides making you feel like garbage and draining energy, that translates into a total inability to think and act. Meaning you become kinda useless when life demands doing and opting for the right things.

When eating traditionally, I lacked any understanding of that, living in the permanent negotiation of what, when, and how much I was or wasn’t going to eat. Hence, if not solely, I wasted my daily decisions mainly on nonsense like that.

Waking up hungry and eating 6 or more small meals, I often had symptoms of decision fatigue before lunch. I also constantly fought my body, ineffectually attempting to control hunger through willpower and discipline.

Unaware of what was going on, I was beating myself for not getting stuff done and looking the way I looked. I also felt very ashamed of myself. One because of all that. And two because of some fitness celebrities’ speculation and misinterpretation of willpower.

Another fundamental advantage of the OMAD plan is that it eliminates this self-torturing, essentially healing the mind and body. It is a genuine miracle to live a life free of all of the mentioned, having your willpower and decisions (available) for meaningful things like your work, art, family.

Socrates says: “The unexamined life is not worth living…” I ask: Can you really examine yours when your mind is preoccupied with eating, food measuring, cravings, and fighting them, tracking calories, fitting things in macros, etc.?

Maybe you can. Perhaps all it takes is discipline. Аs repeated by zealots adoring to rub in people’s faces quotes from authors like Jocko Willink (who btw seldom eats more than once per day and advocates fasting to his daughter), “Discipline Equals Freedom…”

Well, if the described sickness and food obsession is the kind of “discipline” that equals freedom… Then I want freedom from discipline — complete liberation from mindless challenges, restrictions, hunger, tracking calories, and futile attempts to fight my body. And that’s is one of the gifts suppressing my appetite and transitioning to OMAD granted me.

Thank You For Your Time!