Let's start with some definitions as they relate to our conversation today:
This is the OMAD simplification of "intermittent fasting": fast for 23 hours; eat a meal of super-delicious food; and stop eating when the abdomen is comfortable. During those fasting hours, a person will have the opportunity of addressing concerns and needs covered over with food, but never solved. Eventually, he/she will even make friends with the hunger instinct, instead of eating to prevent it.
What we're talking about here is getting lean and clean. Not eating allows the body to reduce or eliminate the following garbage yin:
Since the 1920s, owners of medical research laboratories have noticed that lean rats lived far longer and healthier lives than their plump cousins, thus saving big bucks on rat food and rat replacements. However, advising people to eat less food makes money for no one. The fact is, huge losses would be incurred by the food, nutrition, supplement, and medical industries if the message were, "Eat less food," instead of the universally applauded, diet-conscious. "Eat this / don't eat that."
Weight-Loss Diets Are Scams
With the meteoric rise of American obesity beginning in the 1970s, weight-loss diets have become the fad. The trick is to put together a combination of foods that are advertised to melt away fat on account of some mysterious ingredients, and then back up these claims with pseudoscientific explanations. This is all magical thinking, by the way.
The corollary is the gospel belief that "bad" foods enlarge fat cells by some odd mechanism not fully understood by science.
These weight-loss programs all have one thing in common: They trick people into undereating. The trouble with tricks is that nothing is learned. Thus, when dieters tire of eating kale salads and lean chicken breast (or whatever), the excess yin / weight returns, often with a vengeance. These days, many are fed up with diets; and with being told what to eat and what not to eat.
Understanding Undereating
Two more definitions will be helpful:
An average active adult might burn through 2,000 calories in a 24-hour period. If that person consumes a total of only 1,000 daily calories, his/her body will go after whatever extra yin it can find and use those stored calories to keep essentials running. The scientific term is autophagy. That is undereating, the opposite of overeating.
One pound of fat contains 3,500 calories. Seven times 1,000 would mean a weight loss of 2 pounds weekly, regardless of what or when you eat. Which weighs more? A pound of lead or a pound of feathers? Which is least fattening? A thousand calories of ice cream or a thousand calories of organic sweet potatoes?
OMAD Means Freedom to Eat Anything You Want
That is the key to OMAD's success. If you limit your eating to once per day, it's pretty difficult, day after day, to consume more than a thousand calories of anything at one sitting. Only by regularly leaving the table in a great deal of pain (food stagnation) could you do it; not to mention the uncomfortable after-effects that night or the next day.
A modicum of "body trust" will tell you when to stop eating. A comfortable feeling in the belly and a diminution of deliciousness, even within one bite of food, are two clear messages from the body saying, "Thank you. You are excused from the table."
Most adult Americans live entirely in their heads and have little or no experience with body trust. Until that life-saving habit develops, it can be useful to count – approximately – the calories in the single meal. Caution: Excessive math, however, serves no useful purpose, and often shouts down self-trust.
Most Americans Never Feel Hunger
Most Americans are unable to feel hunger even if they want to, owing to their high levels of excess yin / body fat.
Without the hunger instinct, all animals would simply starve to death. Sick, fat or tired animals will remain under that comfortable shade tree, until the hunger feeling eventually prompts them to get a move-on. All American adults have appetites, but very few feel hunger.
So why don't we just fast until we reach our optimal weight? Because we eat for our mental health, not our physical health. Without hunger, there is no "healthy food." Eating stimulates dopamine in the brain, temporarily banishing unhappiness and boredom. That's why, with OMAD, we make sure to eat only delicious food.
People also eat to suppress two common physical symptoms that can masquerade as hunger:
Bear in mind that neither situation above would motivate or empower a resting lion to kill a zebra; or a monkey to climb out on a limb for a piece of fruit.
The Daily 23-Hour Fast
There are three reasons to fast for 23 hours:
It would seem that our Chinese spleen needs a reset – a break – in order to regenerate itself to full strength. Eating interrupts that process of self-cleansing. And it's the spleen that produces the majority of our qi and xue, i.e., postnatal jing; the stuff we use to help conserve prenatal jing.
What About Nutrition?
It is an acknowledged fact that the body recycles vitamins, minerals, proteins, and other nutrients when fasting.2 Otherwise, we would detect epidemics of deficiency diseases such as beriberi, scurvy, pellagra, kwashiorkor, and night blindness among those who fast or "skip meals."
What About Muscle & Bone Loss?
"Muscle memory" means that when normal eating is resumed, as it will when targets are reached, healthy yin bounces right back. In addition, strenuous exercise will preserve most lean tissue during the OMAD process. The human body knows the difference between what it needs and does not need to preserve for work performance.
Author's Note: OMAD is an "undereating" program. The program should be discontinued when the person reaches his/her desired state of leanness.
References
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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