The picture above is from a few years ago, I was running a couple miles each day and boxing as well. I got down to 170 pounds and I felt great, except for the daily pain in my ankles and knees from all that running, even at the lower weight.

Running is not sustainable, it tears up your body. When I see people in their 50’s and 60’s running the Boston marathon I don’t know how they do it.

The scale is just one metric for measuring your health, you also want to consider how you feel and how your clothing fits. If I slim down running and then need knee surgery I’ll put the weight back on.

In doing a bit of casual research I’ve come across the “one meal per day” method of caloric control. I’m also walking and swimming in cold water. I’m looking for a sustainable plan that I can incorporate into my life for the long term.

Our ancestors, who were hunting and gathering nomads during millions of years of biological evolution, did not have the luxury of eating 2 or three meals per day. There were days when the hunt was unsuccessful and they didn’t eat at all. Eating one meal today is not that hard to do, and it allows your insulin levels to drop to lower levels.

I know, there are a ton of experts who will tell me that my metabolism will slow down to zero, and I have to eat 16 small meals per day, etc. Truth is I will never have the time nor the inclination to eat multiple small meals. Most of the people who advocate multiple meals tend to be body builders who want to put on muscle.

One meal per day (normally around 4PM) is very simple. I eat a normal meal in the middle of the day, that’s it. If there are days when I eat a little more, like when I’m invited to an event or dinner, I don’t sweat it. If I’m going somewhere for dinner I don’t eat anything else that day.

The body does not start to burn body fat for energy until you’ve been fasting at least 16 hours. There are also some interesting connections between your blood sugar and the production on insulin in your system, the guy in this video lost over 145 pounds:

Eating once per day allows your body to tap into your stored body fat.

Here is another video from Joe:

I’m going to try one meal per day for a few weeks and track my results.

-Benjamin T. Alexander

January 2017