Bruce Springsteen, 75, follows the Omad diet, but could you live on one meal a day?
Eating one meal a day is an extreme version of intermittent fasting, and has potential benefits but also downsides, doctors say
At 75, Bruce Springsteen is still going strong. The Boss played more than 100 shows over the past two years, and he isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
When speaking to British newspaper The Times, Springsteen offered insight into what keeps him going: he is on a one-meal-per-day diet.
What is the Omad diet?
Some dieters restrict their calorie intake to eight-hour windows, while others focus on eating all their meals while the sun is still up.
“I’ll have a bit of fruit in the morning and then I’ll have dinner,” Springsteen told The Times. “That has kept me lean and mean.”
Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland, studied intermittent fasting for 25 years and said it is similar to how prehistoric humans naturally ate, because they lacked consistent access to food.
“Intermittent fasting contrasts with the normal eating pattern for most Americans, who eat throughout their waking hours,” Mattson says. “If someone is eating three meals a day, plus snacks, and they’re not exercising, then every time they eat, they’re running on those calories and not burning their fat stores.”
Time-restricted dieting, such as Omad and intermittent fasting in general, works by allowing the body to burn through its sugar stores and forcing it to burn fat between meals.
