What Happens to Your Body When You Eat One Meal a Day for 30 Days

What would happen if you ate one meal a day for 30 days? Discover the benefits of intermittent fasting, how autophagy works, and what one meal a day can do to help reset your body.

What would actually happen if you ate one meal a day every single day >> [music] >> for 30 days? Let’s get into it. Now, last night when you were sleeping, your body was repairing. When you do one meal a day, OMAD, you are fasting for literally 23 [music] hours. And so, your body is doing a cleanup on steroids.

The first thing you need to know is [music] this whole three meals a day was completely invented. [music] Three meals a day is actually not very normal for our body. It was first recommended by the British Royal Navy needing to feed hundreds of sailors on a ship. Then the Industrial Revolution kicked in. Factory owners needed workers at their machines at very specific times.

And so, they had a bell system that would tell you when to eat. And then in 1917, we have Lena Cooper. She was the one that coined this phrase, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. ” There was absolutely no research, no science behind it. It was just made out of thin air.

Little background on Lena, she worked for Kellogg. You know the guy that came up with cereal for breakfast, right? Seven years later, 1924, General Mills came on the scene with Wheaties. And then slowly the Americans adopted this tradition that you need breakfast. Now, out of all the bad things that destroy our health, it’s the frequency of meals that is at the top of the list.

Three solid meals plus snacks in between. Now, I know this might be hard to believe, but if you go to the grocery store, you will find entire aisles of snack foods. 40 to 50 years ago, we did not have those aisles, okay? This is a newly invented thing. Now, if we go back in time to the Vikings, they only ate two meals a day, okay?

They didn’t have snacks. And their evening meal was called netmal, which is basically a stew of meat, fish, and vegetables. Now, let’s dive into OMAD. The first eight hours. This is when your body is digesting, processing, storing fat.

And then we go from 8 hours to 12 hours of fasting. Stored sugar called glycogen starts to drop because it’s being used. It’s being used as energy. Your body is starting to make ketones, which are another fuel source that our brains actually love. This is why one of the big benefits of doing OMAD for 30 days is the cognitive benefit.

Now, between 12 hours and 16, your glycogen is really, really low at this point and you are burning fat. And right about 16 hours, you’re going to start this thing called autophagy. This is the cleanup crew. This is where your body is starting to recycle old damaged proteins. It’s pretty bizarre that your body does not clean when you’re eating.

It cleans when you’re not eating, when you’re fasting. Now, when we get to hours 16 through 23, now we’re getting into much deeper autophagy, especially your liver, your muscles, and more importantly, in your brain. And this is important, especially as it relates to preventing Alzheimer’s, dementia. Sometimes you may find your LDL goes up when you do this because you’re burning a lot of fat. Now, there’s a lot of people around the world that do fasting, especially for 30 days.

Let’s talk about Ramadan. In 2023, there were 66 studies involving 7,496 people. They found massive body improvements, not just with weight loss and your waist shrinking, but also triglycerides decreasing, cholesterol profiles improving, and also more insulin sensitivity, which is directly related to many types of metabolic problems. What you have to to is fasting has been done for a very long time in a lot of different cultures and it’s actually very safe if you do it correctly. So, let me just explain what happens when you start one meal a day from day one to day three.

This is the most difficult time to do one meal a day. Why? Because your body is switching over into making ketones and your cellular biochemistry has to change and in that change process sometimes it’s not as smooth as you would like. So, you might get a little hungry. I’m going to suggest just know it’s going to be a little difficult on day two.

Push through it because on day three it’s going to get easier and easier. If you get any type of weakness, headache, or tiredness, usually means like 95% of the time that you need to increase your salts, especially sodium. Now, on day three your hunger is going away. You’re not going to have any appetite. You’re going to be kind of surprised like I’m not even hungry.

I’m not craving anything. It’s going to get much, much easier on day three. So, a lot of people ask me, “What supplements do I recommend? ” Now, of course I’m not biased of my own high quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you’ll find more information.

And then also on day four through day seven, this is when your body’s going to be adapted to ketones and fat burning. So, things are going to run a lot smoother. Probably the biggest thing you’re going to notice is your brain. You’re going to feel sharper, have better concentration, and your overall mood is going to be elevated because you are spiking something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It will help you grow new connections.

BDNF increases significantly when you do intermittent fasting. Now, what’s really fascinating is that this is not related necessarily to calories. They’ve tested this. So, if you’re doing one meal a day, obviously you’re going to be doing less calories than you would for three meals a day. They compared eating one meal a day to taking the same number of calories and spreading them out through the day, and they found something fascinating.

The BDNF did not increase when you just cut calories and spread them out through the day. This is why intermittent fasting is so powerful because you’re mimicking an environment of infrequent eating. You would think that if you didn’t eat very frequently that the cortisol, the stress hormone, would go up. It doesn’t. It actually goes down significantly.

Based on the study that was comparing one meal a day to three meals a day. One meal a day produced much lower cortisol. And this is confusing for certain people because they’ll say, “Oh, if you do one meal a day, you’re going to have a hard time sleeping. ” Actually, what that means is you just need a little bit more sodium or salt because when you’re doing OMAD, you’re getting rid of all this fluid. Because when the fluid goes away, your electrolytes go away, especially sodium.

And low sodium actually increases cortisol. Simply add more salt before you go to bed and watch how much better you sleep. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It’s like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick.

You could feed them the best food, you can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel. But there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest, and until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you.

It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. Day 15 through 30, this is where you get a massive growth hormone spike, sometimes up to 1,225% above baseline. And this is the baseline for females. Males had an increase growth hormone by 500%, but the ranges actually went from 125% to 20,000% in certain individuals.

So, there’s a wide range of spikes in growth hormone. Growth hormone is one of the most important tissue repair hormones that you have. It helps rebuild muscle. It helps repair your discs, your tendons, your ligaments. It als