One Meal A Day - What I've Learned

i've been eating one meal a day

for 15 months
i started at a weight of 145 lbs, added 15 lbs of leg muscle to reach 160 lbs over six months on a bicycle trip, and now i am using basketball, pull ups, dips, and pushups to add muscle to my shoulders arms and chest.

observations:

1. my body gets used to consuming a large meal for an hour, then digesting it slowly in my stomach over the next 4 hours. Body doesn't care that it's 'breakfast time' or 'dinner time'. It goes by whenever my body's food stores are low, and that I have full control over. 
2. Be careful about eating raw fish, medium-rare meat, and other difficult to digest foods! Eat very little if any. Never eat them towards the end of a huge meal, because they will sit at the top of your stomach undigested for several hours in which they can spread bacteria and can make you sick.
3. it's easy to quantify how many calories, nutrients, fats, proteins, vitamins are in my diet when I eat a single meal. It's simple. You don't have to vaguely remember whether you ate a lot of a little at breakfast, or plan how much you need at dinner. The body doesn't care how I divvy up that supply, whether in three easy payments or one. However much you just ate of salad, is the total amount you get that day! So it's easy to adjust accordingly based on my needs, which do vary from day to day based on whether I am training my muscles hard or giving them rest.
4. i can eat anytime from 11 to 3 pm, to get lunch price. some days i don't get hungry so i wait to the last minute to eat, it depends on how many calories i burned with activity and exercise, not the time of day.
5. I usually eat about an hour after waking up. I wake up, stretch the legs, do some light reading or writing, and once i'm fully awake, i usually feel physically active and that's when I feel is the best time to eat. Right after the body becomes active, when hunger starts. If I wait too long my hunger subsides, the body's metabolism slows down, I lack energy, and I lose that appetite to maximize my meal. During my meal, I am usually very active mentally as well, reading and studying. I feel like eating time is the most productive.
6. it's better to eat the big meal towards the start of the day, and gradually increase activity as the food leaves the stomach and is absorbed in the intestines. That way I start the day with maximum food and use it up as I go. In the late afternoon after food has emptied out of my stomach is my energy peak, and I can work out as hard as I want. If I wait till the end of the day to eat, I can't put in a hard workout because I have low energy before eating. Then my body goes into deficit mode, converting glucose from it's reserves, instead of absorbing it from food and I lose my appetite to eat a sufficiently large meal. Then when I have a full stomach, I go to sleep so my metabolism is slow, so a lot of food is left undigested when I wake up. This way I absorb and output the least amount of energy, there's no way to build stronger muscles or do productive work.
7. i get a little bit hungry for sugar and carbs after my belly returns to normal size, when i assume my stomach has just about finished its job in the digestion process. about six hours after the end of a meal. i think it's because my body has used up all the sugars and carbs available from the stomach, and there's a drop in blood sugar levels and i need more to be active before I'm ready to sleep, or to finish digesting the non-fast sugars left in my stomach. i dunno.
8. some days if my calorie expenditure is low, i won't feel hungry at all and i'll just show up to eat because i'm supposed to, but i don't need to. my stomach doesn't fully digest all the food i've eaten the day before. i can tell because, if i go running before mealtime to create a need for calories to get my appetite up, my stomach starts digesting faster and i get burps and can taste the meal from the previous day.
   this seems to agree with the evidence that not eating slows down metabolism. if you eat regularly throughout the day, your body has to expend energy to digest constantly, but if you eat all the food in one go, the rest of the time, your digestion will be inactive, and burning fewer calories. I think it's more efficient to release digestion enzymes and do that digestion process once instead of three times. produces less toxins for your body to dispose of.
   on days i am not hungry, the routine is sub-optimal. i should either fast that day except for a salad, some yogurt - to maintain daily vitamins. or increase my calorie needs through aerobic exercise. either way, if i continue to binge eat just for the sake of routine, my needs are lower than my intake, so that puts strain on my body - i get fat.
9. eating a large amount of food and storing it in an overly full stomach does put strain on the heart. studies say single meal diets increases blood pressure. mine has always been low and healthy 120/70. Been a distance runner since 10 years old. So for me, this extra strain hasn't hurt. But I do feel my heart beat faster around mealtime, and also sometimes when I get hungry at night if I didn't eat a lot that day. I think it's mostly due to under-eating that puts strain on the heart. Not the matter of eating a single meal vs eating three. When you eat less than you need, later in the day you get hunger pangs and sweats, etc because blood sugar is low the heart has to pump more blood to supply the body with its energy needs. For the studies they done, I believe the high blood pressure is due to under-eating by novices who aren't accustomed to expanding their stomachs with a high volume meal. It can be hard to balance a single meal diet with your body's needs, when you first switch from three meals, because you lose two chances to adjust to your calorie needs. I think the strain from over-eating has a minor impact on the heart.  When you eat too much, it puts a lot of stress on the heart to supply a high volume of blood to help the stomach that is too full to digest efficiently. But that can easily be mitigated by choosing easy to digest foods over meats, greasy foods, etc. and the body over time the body adapts to digesting a larger amount of food and taking a long time. When I eat enough and exercise enough in the right balance,  I think my heart should be fine. I do think there is a biological time limit to consume the food, however. I try to get all my eating done in about an hour. Because I'm guessing the stomach can only store so much digestive enzymes before a meal, and those enzymes have a limited duration to work. 
10. I need a solid hour to eat, and about an hour afterwards to recover from the overly full stomach. So for a working person at a job, this is very unpractical to accommodate. But my good-for-nothing bum lifestyle allows me to take however long I need. I have either bicycled for several hours right after eating (on my cross country trip), studied at the library, or shot basketball free-throws. Bicycling feels the best. It speeds up the digestion, clears out my stomach, and I hope it sends calories to the muscles that need them. The overly full stomach isn't disturbed by the motion of the legs - even a pregnant woman on a bicycle isn't bothered by pedaling. Sitting still after eating makes digestion slow, my muscles don't get the full benefit of the fuel, and body prefers to store the food as fat. Basketball is a little too volatile an activity, even simply throwing the ball and fetching it creates vertical movement that puts uncomfortable strain on the stomach when it is overly full.
    

To summarize, my contentions are:

1. It doesn't matter at what time you eat, or how often, what matters is do you supply your body with enough nutrients on a regular basis.
2. It's better to eat the bulk of your food after waking up rather than before going to sleep, whatever time that may be.
3. To maximize growth efficiency/work output, at every meal, eat as much as you can in an hour and afterwards balance your calorie expenditure to match it. Gradually increase activity (one to four hours after a meal) while the food is digested out of the stomach .
4. Under-eating is the primary risk for detrimental health effects. Eat high nutrient, easy to digest, healthy foods. Train your stomach to accommodate a large meal. Then you should be fine. Probably. Maybe. I think. Seems okay to me. Definitely, for sure.
   
   meh, sumo wrestlers eat two huge meals a day and consume 200,000 calories. they are otherwise healthy, except for long term problems that come from obesity. no need or likelihood for me to weigh 400 lbs, so I see no harm in eating single huge meals.

Food choice considerations:

I really don't need to eat that much protein (i.e. meat). You don't need a lot to build muscle. Most of the time when I choose my meal, I'm looking for quality fats (the unsaturated good kind like from avocados and nuts), complex carbs that won't expand too much in my stomach (whole grains, beans, quinoa - dream on, i wish i could get this at a buffet....), and a shitload of vitamins in dark leafy greens (spinach, kale) and in every color of vegetable and fruit (carrot, cucumber, tomato, cantelope, etc).

I want to minimize the amount of high-fiber foods I eat, in favor of high-nutrient low fiber foods, cause fiber isn't digested and doesn't provide calories - it just takes up space in my stomach (beans, broccoli, whole-wheat bread) and makes me feel full before I've finished eating. I'm already getting enough fiber simply by eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, so I don't need more of it.

Balancing pH in the stomach is also an important consideration. Acidity in the bloodstream leaches nutrients away from the body. Most processed foods will be highly acidic and harmful. Sodas and alcoholic drinks will wreck your stomach (pH of 2.5. compare to battery acid pH of 1). So balancing pH usually means neutralizing acidity by eating alkaline foods to raise pH. Rather than to drink soda, I choose to drink water and either milk (basically neutral) or grapefruit juice (the juice is acidic in your mouth, but results in an alkaline byproduct left in stomach when digested. in other words, it has the same effect as eating an alkaline food. same goes for lemon juice.)

Most of the vegetables and leaf greens I'm eating anyways for nutrients that I listed above are alkaline. Mushrooms are also alkaline. Acidic foods to be aware of are any type of meat, corn, olives, bread, rice, noodles, peas, beans, peanuts, butter, cheese, processed sugar. Corn, processed sugar, and artificial drinks are the most important to avoid because they offer no nutrition. Eat but limit meat and breadstuffs, because they are good for protein and carbs respectively. Then, you know have your cheese and olives just don't go overboard.