It is well known that in developed countries, we overeat.

Obesity has become a severe problem with its parade of debilitating diseases such as diabetes, arteriosclerosis, heart attacks, etc. In the USA alone, 39% of people over 20 years of age are obese. The food industry and pharmaceutical companies are delighted because it boosts their revenues. Still, for most of us, we are unhappy with our increasing size.

Karen and I have tried a multitude of diets over the years. We regularly fast for two weeks at a time, twice a year. Fasting has benefits and helps us lose weight, but the weight returns after a while. Eating paleo didn't work for us, cutting out wheat didn't work, eating whatever we wanted REALLY didn't work.

We found hope with a Japanese doctor called Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo. He has developed a diet which he calls One day, One meal. He has written a fascinating book with the same title (unfortunately available only in Japanese and Spanish). After I read it, Karen and I began the diet.

As the title of the book reveals, you only eat once a day. It does sound pretty shocking and can seem like a kind of blasphemy to our minds. Most of us grew up conditioned to eating three times a day, and that breakfast was the most important meal of the day.

Let's begin with why one meal a day works so well with Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo' story.

Dr. Nagumo, the author of the book, One Day, One Meal, admits in his book that he started this diet because he was afraid of dying. When he was 35 years old, his father died of a heart attack, forcing him to leave his quiet life as a researcher to take over his father's clinic. His father's sudden death left the clinic with many loans to repay.

Due to increased stress, he started eating junk food and binge drinking. He put on a lot of weight and began to suffer from constipation and arrhythmia. Things were so bad that he began to lose consciousness when he had a bowel movement and was afraid he might die from a stroke. 

So, he decided to go on a diet, but counting calories was boring. He began physical exercise, and then he stopped eating meat. He found becoming a vegetarian relieved his constipation, but as soon as he started eating meat again, constipation returned, so he decided to stop eating meat permanently. 

After much trial and error, he began to think that maybe eating one meal a day would be enough. He noticed that when he ate at noon, he became tired and needed a nap, which was inconvenient for his surgery schedule. So, he experimented with eating only one meal at the end of the day.

After 15 years of eating one meal a day, his health has improved immensely. He has attained and maintained his ideal weight. His body has rejuvenated, and his skin is now smoother. After a full medical check-up in his 60's, the age of his arteries is like that of a 26-year-old.

He decided to write his book because of the recent discovery of the gene responsible for rejuvenation, sirtuin. He found that reducing your diet by 40% can extend your life expectancy by 1.5 times, and you will become healthier and look more youthful.

 The one day, one meal diet, the paradox

Hunger has been the companion of the human race for thousands of years. Throughout the hunter-gatherer period, hunger was present because sometimes the hunt was successful and other times not. So, it was either feast or famine. 

Our bodies are structured for this. According to Dr. Nagumo, the body has developed several specific genes, such as survival genes. When we overeat, the extra food transforms into fat. Fasting was well known in the past. Many religious groups such as Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims, practiced fasting for spiritual purposes and the improvement of health. Sadly, the knowledge of fasting for health improvement has been lost and fasting is more dogmatic with holidays such as Easter or Ramadan.

To better understand the processes of fasting, the scientific community experimented with animals. They found that by reducing the food of rhesus monkeys by 40%, prolonged their life expectancy 1.4 to 1.6 longer. They also noticed that those who ate until they were full had dull and sparse hair, and their skin became saggy as they got older. Those who ate less had a soft and shiny coat, and their skin was smooth even with age.

These studies led scientists to think that when animals were hungry, a gene was activated, which helped keep them alive. This newly discovered gene was called 'sirtuin".

Upon further research, they realized that this gene began scanning the body's sixty billion cells when activated by hunger. It repaired defective cells, increasing our lifespan and slows down aging.

The Diet

Dr. Nagumo advises eating soup and one other dish each day. For example, he eats an excellent dinner at the end of the day when he is most hungry. He says it is best to avoid carbohydrates, refined sugar, salt, industrial seasonings, and bad fats such as trans fats. Choose complete foods, brown rice, whole grains, or fruit with the skin on them, if possible, and eat organic (see note below). He also recommends fermented foods, greens, vegetables, olive oil, and linseed oil.

Let's address being hungry and having an empty stomach. Some people say on an empty stomach, you don't have strength, but all animals fight when they are hungry. If hunger did not generate more vitality, we could not survive.

As you know, if we don't eat in the morning or at noon, our stomachs growl. The first time they rumble, we secrete the longevity hormone, which rejuvenates the skin and mucosa. The second time, sirtuin, the rejuvenating gene, is activated, which reactivates cells and genes. With the third growl, adipose tissue (fat) synthesizes adiponectin, a protein which metabolizes glucose and tones the arteries.

What do Karen and I do to follow the one day, one meal diet?

Every day we drink a smoothie, then 1 hour afterwards we eat either spring rolls or soup, and a stir fry dish with lots of vegetables. We have stopped eating wheat, sugar, drinking tea, coffee, and alcohol, except for an occasional glass of wine. 

We began our diet three months ago, and I weighed 95 Kg. The only exercise I had was walking on the beach each day, but if I had to walk uphill, I was out of breath. Now I weigh 77kg, I walk 5 km up and down hills with no problem, and it is easy to fall asleep. I stopped snoring, we sleep from 10 pm to 5 am every day and wake up feeling great. Another benefit is that we don't smell anymore, Karen even stopped using deodorant. We no longer take any remedies to fall asleep. Karen used to have restless legs, which has disappeared; she rarely gets a headache and hasn't had to use any asthma medicine since we began our new diet.

When you begin this diet, you will probably feel hungry, Dr. Nagumo advises to eat dried fruits, seeds, etc., in small quantities at this time. The strategy is not to eat for at least 16 hours, because the longer you wait to eat, the more time the sirtuin has to work.

One thing is sure; if you follow this diet, many diseases from modern civilization, such as diabetes, osteoarthritis, and atherosclerosis, will disappear from your life. You will eat around two times less food so you can eat quality organic food. You save time during the day with less cooking, food prep, and shopping. Cooking becomes a joy again instead of work. You also improve your sex life because you have more energy. Within a year, you will look and feel ten years younger and will have a new lease on life. For us, there are only benefits to this diet. The only problem you may have is how you are able to handle being hungry. It's difficult sometimes, but it's not impossible. If we can do it, so can you!

Note: Common plants, fruits and vegetables, and processed foods are grown with chemical fertilizers and filled with pesticides. Increased use of chemical fertilizers produce fruits and vegetables whose nutritional qualities are degraded. Studies have shown that you would need to eat 5 oranges to receive the same amount of vitamin C that one orange from the 1950s used to have. You can apply this to all the fruits and vegetables we now buy at the supermarket. It would follow then, that you receive five times fewer nutrients buying non-organic fruits and veggies.  

Also, it has been estimated people eating non-organic food ingest 1 - 2 ½ pounds of pesticides per year. In my opinion, if you don't get cancer from pesticides, you're fortunate. Finally, if we compare the prices of organic food to non-organic food, 1 pound of organic potatoes are twice the price of non-organic. But, again these vegetables contain five times fewer nutrients than organic ones. Buying non-organic produce is 2.5 times more expensive than organic! Not a very good deal in my book.

By Dominique Susani