Well the title says it all really. Assuming that the single meal contains sufficient vitamins and callories for a person.
Check out the Warrior Diet. Some people love it, most hate it, although strictly speaking, one does consume very small amounts of food to stave off muscle catabolization (if I’ve got the term right) and keep energy levels up.
Kinda depends on your definition of unhealthy is, dosen’t it? Seems I recall from the History Channel, the guys on the Lewis and Clark Expedition would eat 4 or 5 pounds of freshly killed meat in a setting and then go off and haul thier gear thru a couple of miles of uncharted wilderness without breaking down. Can you do it without dying? Yes. Would you live a long life doing this everyday? Possibly.
But I think that you are probaly asking, "Could a “normal” person in a “normal” modern somewhat low exertion life do this? Probably not, sugar levels alone would drive most people mad with hunger. And that’s not heatlhy.
With occasional exceptions for special days I’ve been doing that for more than a year now. You do get lows during the day, but once you’re used to them overall it’s not so hard. One effect that you can get is constipation. Serious, serious constipation. Like “once every 10 days” constipation, if the calorie intake is low enough. It’s something you have to eat wisely, in terms of types of foods, to avoid.
(As an aside, IME every single time a non-diabetic has insisted they are suffering from low blood sugar and they have allowed me to test them with my meter, they have always been between 100-140 mg/dl (which is not low, it’s dead average). That’s not to say that a person isn’t hungry or needing food, just that outside of having an actual medical condition people don’t seem to be able to correlate feeling hungry with low blood sugar. Not surprising really, it’s hard for me to do so and I’m used to it.)
Aside from my previous post, a friend of mine does this quite consistantly. Some days she even forgets to eat! :eek: But I would consider her healthy, perhaps a little eccentric, but not suffering in anyway. She drinks liquids thru out the day and gets irrate when I ask her go out to lunch, but she seems to be quite content with her one meal a day routine. Different strokes for different folks I guess. 
If it was bad for you, I’d be dead now! I’ve been doing it for about 26 years. It stems from a long period when I was so poor, I couldn’t afford to eat more than once a day. It wasn’t long before I was used to it. I was always pretty skinny, and wore pants with a 32 waist, and weighed 150. In a picture taken 9 years ago, my cheeks were sunken and my wife says I looked gaunt. I’ve been married for 6 1/2 years and have eaten a good evening meal every day. Now I wear pants with a 34 waist and weigh between 170 and 175, but I don’t seem to be getting any larger- I just seem to have filled out. I look healthy, and feel healthy. I can’t remember when I last ate twice in the same day.
I do sometimes wonder, have I screwed up my metabolism?
That’s what my girl does, and still does on some days if I don’t remind her…and when I get depressed I have a reverse to the “common” reaction in that instead of eating more, I lose all appetite and can go 2 days without eating.
Monday thru Friday I eat once per day (dinner). Total cals is about 1200-1400.
Saturday and Sunday I eat lunch and dinner. Lunch about 200-300 cals and dinner about 1200.
I eat alot fish, veggies and fruits. Whole grains, lean proteins, etc.
Every stat that can be checked on me is dead on for healthy ranges. From body fat, cholesterol, BP, pulse rate.
I rarely get sick and run people over all day because they move to slow.
From my research – **personal anecdotal evidence aside ** – the only ‘risk’ is having uncontrollable eating impulses. However, when I dug deeper, it became obvious that once the body adjusts, everything stabilizes (sugar). I heard about Dr Ray Walford (search on him) and decided to try some of what he talks about, except that I eat it all at one instead of 3 servings of 500 cal meals.
For me, eating breakfast would make me slow, and would drive my cravings thru the roof. Additionally, I’d rather look forward to a big filling meal at day’s end than eat tiny little 300-500 cal meals.
(37 y/o male, 5’10", 180 lbs, body fat low teens, married, two kids)
I’ve been eating one meal per day since 1996, and it hasn’t harmed me one bit. I don’t like to eat as soon as I get up, and I don’t like to take lunches to work, so I don’t have much of a choice. (Occasionally, when I get hungry, I’ll have a few crackers or chips out of our communal office “munchie cabinet,” but other than that, I wait 'till supper.) I have no problems with constipation, but I have had a couple occasions when my weight went too low and my doctor nagged me incessantly to “drink milkshakes.”
My mother and grandmother are the same way-- one-meal-a-day girls. Hasn’t harmed them, either.
I’d say that this habit isn’t the best thing in the world for you, but I haven’t seen it cause any real harm to any of us.
If so many people can get by eating only once every 24 hours (I’d be ravenous after 12-18) - and assuming their daily meal is lunch or dinner - why are we always told it’s such a bad thing to skip breakfast?
I don’t eat breakfast or lunch most days (I might have something if I felt like it, wouldn’t if I didn’t), and I’m perfectly healthy, with a BMI of 20. I eat a good, well balanced dinner, and don’t have any food groups I cut out completely. If I like it, I’ll eat some of it.
Addmitedly, I suffered from bulimia for a few years, and this way of eating is about the only way I could get myself out of the binge/purge cycle. I eat when Im hungry, and stop when I’m full (which, for me was incredibly difficult to do).
Since I’m not hungry first thing in the morning, I don’t eat, and might not eat at lunch. On the rare days when I have breakfast, I feel hungrier and more tired than usual. I’ll usually have coffee or tea at some point, but that’s it.
Una Persson, an Endocrinologist who gave my class a lecture on Diabetes said that he finds that his patients prefer to be a little “sweet”, and that they have become so used to living with high blood sugar that normal blood sugar levels feel “low” to them. Does that make sense to you, WRT your experiences?
I did this a few years ago for a while. Resulted in weight loss (which was the aim). But also resulted in dizzy spells and tiredness.
I can believe that, and have experienced it myself. If you are high or higher than normal for some time, “normal” levels of 80-120 feel uncomfortably low. However, for the last year or two my blood sugar has been under the best control it has been in my life (which is still not fantastic, although my A1cs have been below 7, and my last two 6.5 and 6.3) and I still have poor sensitivity - 60 to 240 feels about the same to me. And sometimes, depending on factors I cannot determine, I can test and find out I’m down at “40”, which is starting to get dangerous. And yet I feel OK.
I do prefer to be on the high end of normal at bedtime (130-140). Waking up dying with a blood sugar of “10” and having your girlfriend stick you with a glucagon shot like an animal on Wild Kingdom only has to happen once or twice before you become too scared to go to sleep with a blood sugar under 100.
[paranoid]It’s a conspiracy by Kellogg and Post to sell more breakfast foods. Their Washington lobbyists are exerting undue influence over the FDA, forcing them to release statements favorable to their Big Business interests. They’re scaring us into eating in the morning by threatening dire consequences if we don’t. [/paranoid]
Well, the studies don’t really say eating breakfast makes you healthier, they say that people who eat breakfast tend to be healthier. See the difference? Breakfast is an indicator, not a cause.
My theory is that people who eat breakfast tend to be more fastidious about their health in general. Not that you can’t be perfectly healthy eating one meal a day, but maybe more people who don’t eat breakfast neglect their health in other ways.
Hemlock hit my nail on the head. I almost never have breakfast. I eat a cooked meal out at lunchtime because I enjoy the break from work. Often I don’t feel like I need anything to eat in the evening. I will drink sugar containing drinks through the day, so keep blood sugar levels fairly steady. I wonder if I am doing myself harm on the days I eat only one meal a day. It is the common advice that skipping breakfast is bad that worries me that skipping breakfast and dinner may be worse.
It’s really tough to make general statements about nutrition, because there are huge individual differences in metabolism and other stuff. That said, eating one meal a day is very likely not a good idea if your goal is to lower your bodyfat percentage.
Most studies are pretty good about correcting for that sort of thing.
The only time in my life my weight has been “normal” was when I was young, single, poor, student and ate only lunch each day between college in the morning and work in the afternoon into late evening.
“Breakfast” shouldn’t be a meal per se, unless you are up at 4am and need to work the fields until 7pm.
Breakfast isn’t needed to fend off starvation anymore, because we all have food at our fingertips, and we all burn fewer and fewer cals with each passing generation.
For most of us, breakfast can easily become a 600 calorie disaster.
When I actually incorporate ‘breakfast’…like when I am tackling some major home improvement project, I will have a banana and some nuts or something. Maybe a slice of whole weat with p-butter.
My creedo is, “Breakfast is the biggest scam perpetrated on the American Public since one-hour Martinizing.”
Where’s your evidence to back this up?