I Eat Once a Day to Live Longer

Nutrition & Our Hybrid Body
In the 1950s, my friend Bill was a very gifted Engineer who made an extraordinary car. The car’s main fuel source was electricity, and gasoline was to be put in whenever available.

It was fine for the car to use gasoline every other day or so, but the problem was that people ran it on gasoline nearly 90% of the time. This resulted in the car breaking down frequently, all the while Bill was trying to tell people;
“Use it the way it was designed!”
Despite his advice, people continued to theorize about how to properly use the car. Bill went bankrupt and left the automotive industry soon after.
This situation my poor imaginary friend Bill found himself in is quite like our modern health environment.
How Did Eating Get So Complicated?
Most of us just want to feel good, look good, and live a long life.
You would think by now there would be a straightforward consensus on what our eating habits should look like, but we’re faced with countless trains of thought on the topic.
Maybe we’re supposed to be doing the ABC diet or XYZ diet or something in between?
— One of the first “diets” was proposed by a man named George Cheyne in 1724.
On Amazon, you can find over 50,000 different books on the topic.
Like Bill’s car, surely there is a simple way we should be fueling our bodies that is most suitable for its design.
Obviously, we’re not engineered, but Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and the majority of that time, the food environment could not have been anything like today’s food environment.
Agriculture didn’t even exist for a good 190,000 years of that time.
Not even the fruits and vegetables we have today would have been similar as we hadn’t cultivated them to our liking.
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Photo of Wild Banana from ScienceAlert
Just 700 years ago here’s what a banana would have looked like.
What way of eating did we adapt to?
The environment would have chosen our diet rather than us.
Your choices would have been to eat what was available or be dead.
The idea that our body must have adapted to a certain ratio of macronutrients available in the environment is not novel; and recently has become quite well known due to the “Paleo diet”.
However, what I’m getting at is our body would have also had to have adapted to how often the food was available — there should be a natural frequency of eating that promotes health and longevity.
Where Do We Start?
The logic would be that more nourishment, more food would make you healthier and live longer.
But let’s take a look at this from the First Principles method as described by Elon Musk:
“It’s kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles.
First Principles is a kind of a physics way of looking at the world.
And what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘OK what are we sure is true?’ and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy.”
What do we know about longevity?
Other than exercise, the word “superfood” might come to mind. Maybe more omega-3’s or some red wine or making sure to take supplements and drink less alcohol.
There are a lot of things that contribute to longevity, but there is one method accepted by science that you can use to consistently increase longevity.
“If I take any organism on the planet earth from yeast cells to spiders, insects, rabbits, dogs… and I reduce their caloric intake by 30%, they live 30% longer.
The only organism which has not yet been deliberately tested by scientists is Homo sapiens!”
Conventional Wisdom
For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that you need to get 3 balanced meals a day to stay healthy.
Ever since I was a kid, “breakfast, lunch and dinner” seemed as natural as sleeping or going to the bathroom.
Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, I needed a healthy lunch to focus the rest of the school day, and being sent to bed without dinner was child abuse.
The situation is basically the same in Japan where I now live, as with the rest of the world.
If we want to reduce caloric intake to increase lifespan, the only choice then is to eat less at each meal, because we need 3 meals, right?
But where did these 3 meals a day idea come from?
As Abigail Carroll suggests in her book Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal:
Eating three meals a day was basically invented due to culture. When European settlers got to America, they found Native Americans were basically just eating whenever they felt the urge to, rather than at specified times.
The Europeans took their lack of defined eating times as evidence that they were uncivilized and had them change.
In short:
The 3 meals a day paradigm is not based on our biological needs.
How Our Environment Designed Us
In a hunter-gatherer culture it wasn’t surprising at all to feast on a big catch, then survive on very little or no food for an extended period of time until they needed another big source of fat and protein.
In fact, the environment up until now would suggest that if we could not do that, we probably wouldn’t be alive to be reading about dieting.
The Pirahã people, an indigenous hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest was extensively studied by an anthropological linguist named Daniel Everett.
He found they do not eat every day or even attempt to do so. They were even aware of food storage techniques yet never used them except to barter with Brazilian traders.
When questioned about why they do not store food for themselves they explained:
“I store meat in the belly of my brother.”
Until the advent of agriculture, eating 3 meals a day and in some cases even eating every day was a near impossibility.
Some of you may be pointing to the fact that life expectancy in the Paleolithic era was much lower than now at around 33 years, as a sign that our modern eating habits are healthier.
However, the infant mortality rate was a big factor in bringing that number down.
You have to understand that one of the effects of modern civilization and technology is that you can be unresourceful or made up of weak genetic material and not die.
As Doug McGuff explains about the life expectancy back then:
“It didn’t really have anything to do with anabolic catabolic balance or long term health benefits.
Because there were older survivors and the fossil evidence of those older survivors based on ligamentous attachments and bony assessment and bone mineral density was, they were extraordinarily robust.”
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Photo by Lucas Guizo from Pexels
Glucose Metabolism & How “Conventional Wisdom” Failed
The common misconception is that stable blood glucose is necessary for survival, which would biologically justify 3 meals a day.
Bear with me through a bit of biochemistry to understand why constantly consuming carbohydrates to maintain blood glucose is not only unnecessary but can be a detrimental and vicious cycle.
After you eat some carbohydrates — bread, pasta, whatever:
Glucose enters the bloodstream.
Insulin is secreted to distribute the glucose properly.
Via an insulin receptor, glucose enters the cells to produce energy.
This can only happen at a certain rate, so to overload the cell with glucose or have glucose sit in the bloodstream…
70 grams can be stored in the liver and 200 grams in the muscle.
You have your morning bagel and some Frappa—
“Whatever you want, some vanilla bullshit latte cappa thing, you know whatever you got, I don’t care”
and you’ve stored all the glucose you can store.
It has to go into your body fat.
As well as storing it as energy, your body puts it in your body fat because the fat cells have less complex machinery than the other cells.
Too much glucose can bind to the proteins and muck up the machinery of the cells in a harmful inflammatory process called Glycation.
It’s kind of like pouring pancake syrup into a car engine.
The problem here is that if your energy levels start to wane, you can’t tap the energy out of your stored body fat because the hormone that does that- hormone-sensitive lipase is sensitive to insulin.
Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat for energy.
If you have a bunch of insulin sitting in your blood from processing a bunch of glucose before and you need energy, you’re going to get ravenously hungry and will need to jack your blood sugar up the short term with a snack or something to raise your energy levels again.
This is why if you’re following the recommended American diet, you’re usually going to be stuck in this loop of wanting to eat every time your blood glucose drops and 3 meals a day will feel very necessary.
Even Peter Attia, M.D. fell victim to this:
“Despite exercising 3-4 hours every single day and following the food pyramid to the letter, I gained a lot of weight and developed something called ‘Metabolic Syndrome’. “
Time to Ketosis
Ketosis to the rescue. If you stop eating glucose for about 10–12 hours, your glucose stores will deplete and your body will start breaking down fat so that the liver can produce something called Ketone bodies.
Ketone bodies produce energy for your cells through similar pathways as glucose but are much more stable, efficient and don’t cause complications like we just talked about.
You may have heard of this Ketosis state referred to as “starvation mode” in school, but this by no means suggests you are about to starve.
I particularly dislike this term because it suggests that glucose/carbohydrates are our body’s primary fuel source, when in fact it is possible to live entirely without carbohydrates.
“Humans have absolutely no requirement for carbohydrates. Not 1 gram do we require. We have this fabulous liver that produces as much glucose as you require.”
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Angus Barbieri — Before & After his 382 days fast.
Example Case:
A 456-pound (206 kg) 27-year-old man ‘Angus Barbieri’ in Scotland fasted an incredible 382 days consuming only water and vitamin supplements.
He lost 276 pounds (125 kg) and completed the fast with no ill effects. He was technically in “starvation mode” this entire time and his body was using his stored body fat for energy.
You can read more about his fast in ScienceAlert.
Quick note: Ketosis and Diabetic KetoAcidosis are NOT the same thing!
Several years back, when I first heard about low carb diets, I was skeptical, and frankly, when I heard my close friend’s mother was trying the Atkins diet, I was worried for her.
However, after understanding the biochemistry behind it, I started doing the ‘Paleo diet’. I felt great in general, had a better physique with less effort and much more stable energy levels.
The downside was it got kind of annoying to have to plan my meals so much, so I would cheat a lot here and there.
The Benefits of Fasting
Even after people were in environments where they could eat much more frequently, the concept of fasting for health benefits has been around for some time.
An Egyptian pyramid inscription from around 3800 B.C. reads:
“Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor.”
Plato apparently fasted for greater mental efficiency.
The “Luther of Medicine” Philippus Paracelsus called fasting “The Greatest Remedy”.
Mark Twain suggested fasting to be more effective than any medicine.
The Romans even found that they cure people who were possessed with demons by shutting them in a room without food.
To simplify an incredibly complex process, aging in essence is the result of cumulative damage to your DNA.
Professor of Genetics, David Sinclair, and his team found that not eating stimulates the Sirtuin proteins which are directly responsible for DNA repair.
Professor of Neuroscience Mark Mattson, at John Hopkins University Neuroscience showed how fasting promotes the growth of new neurons in the brain.
This explains why fasting has been linked to the prevention of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Intermittent Fasting
This information got me excited about Intermittent fasting.
With intermittent fasting, you’re not eating for 16 hours of the day which gives your body time to deplete the glucose stores and start burning fat as well as reap the benefits discussed above.
Many sources are pointing to the key here is that whether you are doing extended fasting, intermittent fasting or simply eating less, you are giving your body a chance to deplete its glucose stores and dip into ketosis, leading to the health benefits discussed.
I was keen on the fact that I could get similar effects to Paleo with more leeway in my diet.
The problem with intermittent fasting was I found with myself craving food outside of the 8 hour eating period, and I still had to be somewhat strict with what I ate (although not as strict as my 3 meals a day regimen).
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Photo of ‘The Fasting Cure’ from WikiCommons
Upton Sinclair who was born in the late 1800s and lived to the swell age of 90, published a book in 1911 called The Fasting Cure.
The book was inspired by the personal accounts of 250 people who cured some ailment with extended fasting. The ailments ranged from colds, headaches, constipation to arthritis, valvular heart disease, and cancer.
Dr. Alan Goldhamer spoke about how in 2012, a 42-year-old patient cured her cancer (stage 3 follicular lymphoma) with a 21-day fast.
All this opened me up to try my first week-long fast…
But I ended up around the 4th day even though I didn’t feel particularly bad.
While I missed my goal and I didn’t really feel all that different afterward, over the following days I started to notice something.
I used to enjoy eating some refined sugar crap here and there, but after the fast, I wasn’t so interested. It was like it reset my eating preferences.
Around this time I came across a book called Kuufuku ga hito o kenkou ni suru by Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo.
The title means “Hunger makes people healthy.” And it provides an incredibly compelling argument for limiting yourself to one meal per day.
It touched upon many of the things I’ve talked about here, some things I didn’t and it dispelled some worries I had like malnutrition and whatnot.
(Also, It was easy to trust him since he’s 30 years older than me and looks younger than I do.)
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Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels
O.M.A.D. — One Meal a Day
I decided to try eating once per day for 2 weeks.
For 3 weeks before starting, I had been showing my little sister around Tokyo while eating basically anything and everything that looked good. I started the Nagumo plan the day after she left and the first three days were definitely the hardest.
When the clock hit around 11 AM, I realized I wasn’t getting the joy from eating that I was used to around this time of day and started really wanting to eat. My stomach didn’t particularly hurt, it was the equivalent of not being able to play video games when getting home from middle school.
Around 4 PM was when I was convinced that I was really hungry and needed to eat. Waiting another 30 minutes until 4.30 PM to eat was like pushing through a last set of squats.
The next two days were slightly easier, and come the 4th day I realized I wasn’t looking at the clock thinking
“Ah…only 4 more hours to go!”
A week later I decided to put the diet to the test by doing a 50-kilometer bike ride to Atsugi from Tokyo. I hadn’t been working out all that much and a usual bike ride for me was about 3 kilometers.
It was unsurprisingly difficult, but I never felt really physically weak.
I had hunger pangs earlier than normal, but I didn’t feel like I had less strength from a lack of food. This made me decide to stick with eating once per day.
Conclusion
It’s been a month since I started and I feel great in general, my energy levels are very stable, I feel more focused and surprisingly I have fewer problems with hunger compared to intermittent fasting.
Even if I don’t eat the healthiest meal I can now feel confident that my body will have more than enough time to empty whatever excess glucose or toxins I ingested.
(The only time I do crave unhealthy food is when I’ve had some alcohol.)
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine having to pile so much food into my stomach throughout the day. Other than the health benefits, one other reason I do this is the same reason Steve Jobs wore basically the same thing every day:
“It makes choosing easier and it frees my brain up to focus on other things.”
At least for myself, the amount of new information I get only changes my behavior by a small factor.
For example:
If I increase my knowledge about the detriments of alcohol by say… 60% maybe I’ll cut my intake by 30%.
I’m not expecting you to suddenly start eating once per day.
But hopefully, you can start giving your body a break.
Eat when you need to, not when the clock says you should.

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