Also maybe I'm weird, but eating one meal a day makes me feel really great. I feel like being slightly hungry (or at least not full) throughout the day makes me more productive and mentally sharper. Only after I've finished my work for the day at around 7-9pm do I then eat a big meal.

It feels like I just lost 15 IQ points right after a meal. I also get kind of sleepy and unmotivated after.

The meal is also a great way of demarcating work. Before I eat, I'm working. After, I'm chilling. Simple as that.

I grew up in a family where life was basically based around meals. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were all sitting down together for an hour. Since I’ve basically ditched routine eating a few years ago I feel much better. I don’t have any specific approach other than eating whatever I feel like eating, when I actually feel hungry. It’s a huge mental shift to make initially to really listening to your body about what hungry really is. There are lots of cues around food which have no basis in hunger at all. Sometimes my body screams for quick carbs, other times protein or just a good all round meal. But I’ve just learnt to listen to it. I’ve gone from 100kg+ to a steady 78kg for 2 years.

I quite often do a 1hr power ride on Zwift at around midday on an empty stomach and feel less hungry than when I started now. Before I would have felt that I deserved a high calorie meal and eaten more than I should of. Now I listen to if my body is actually, really hungry. Quite often I feel less hungry after a workout, so I might go through till dinner without any food if that’s what I feel like. Sometimes I might have deep hunger pangs, so I’ll eat straight away after in that case.

Something that shifted my approach to food dramatically was a 7 day fast two years ago. My approach to food has never been the same since.

> It feels like I just lost 15 IQ points right after a meal. I also get kind of sleepy and unmotivated after.

That’s the large meal effect.

Small meals work better for me and I get sluggish and mentally slow when I’m hungry. As soon as I eat, I perk up and have lots of energy.

But I’m also at 11% or so of bodyfat so maybe my body is just less willing to dip into reserve energy stores.

> Would not have thought such a metabolic schedule would be realistic

I mean it might not be. There might be long term consequences.

I often wonder metabolic switching between e.g. fat vs carbs as energy sources would be a good way to force cells to perform some acrobatics and die if they have a distribution of mutations that make them metabolically inflexible. Might be easy to test in a lab with radiation and different feeding cycles for cells/mice, look for rates of cancer development. May be negligible, hard to say.

There are many claims regarding "autophagy" out there, some say it helps the body to remove cancerous cells. But there are cancer types that can circumvent or even take advantage of this. As with everything it depends and is no silver bullet.