It’s 5:40 on a Friday evening and I’m standing at the cutting board, watching the fat render off a lamb chop that’s been resting maybe four minutes longer than I’d like. I haven’t eaten since Thursday night. The kitchen is quiet, my phone is in another room, and for the first time all day I’m not thinking about anything except the next ten minutes. That stillness is the whole point, though it took me a couple of years to understand that.
I train every morning, and I eat keto with intermittent fasting most days of the week. None of that is unusual anymore. But Friday is different. Friday is one meal. One.
People assume OMAD is about the food, or about being lean, or about willpower. For me it’s none of those. It’s about what the rest of the day feels like when you’ve decided, ahead of time, that you’re not going to feed the small wanting voice every time it speaks up.
Here’s what the day actually looks like. I wake up, I train, usually lower body or a longer Zone 2 effort, nothing heroic. Black coffee. Water with electrylytes. Then I work. And the hunger shows up around eleven, the way it always does, on schedule, polite at first.
The old me would have negotiated with it. A handful of something. A “small” thing to take the edge off. Now I just notice it and keep going. By one o’clock it’s loud. By three it has mostly given up and gone quiet, and that quiet is where the strange part lives.
Because somewhere in the early afternoon, on an empty stomach, my head gets clearer than at any other point in the week. Not jittery-clear. Not caffeine-clear. Just a flat, calm focus where the noise drops and I can actually hold a hard problem in my hands and turn it over. I’ve made some of my better calls on Friday afternoons, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I used to credit ketones for that, and maybe some of it is metabolic. But I’ve come to think most of it is simpler. When you remove a decision you make a dozen times a day, what to eat, when, how much, you free up something. The question “should I eat now?” just isn’t on the table. There’s nothing to decide. And it turns out that running with one fewer open loop all day is its own kind of performance enhancer.
That was the unexpected lesson. I started OMAD Friday for vain, physical reasons. I kept it for the mind.
When you remove a decision you make a dozen times a day, what to eat, when, how much, you free up something. The question "should I eat now?" just isn't on the table.
The meal itself is good, and I look forward to it the way you look forward to seeing an old friend. But the honest truth is the meal is the smaller half of it. The waiting is the larger half. You can’t have the clarity without the hours that produce it. You don’t get the second half of the day without sitting through the middle.
That sounds obvious written down. It did not feel obvious for the first year, when every Friday afternoon was a low-grade argument with myself.
What changed is that I stopped treating the hunger as a problem to solve and started treating it as information. It’s just a signal. It tells you your body would prefer to eat. It is not an emergency, and it is not a command. You can hear it clearly and choose not to act, and nothing bad happens. Most of the things that feel urgent in a day are exactly like this, if you’re honest.
Which is where the work connection lives for me, and I want to be careful here because this is the part where most people start reaching for a tidy metaphor.
I’ll keep it plain. The discipline I practice on Friday is the same muscle I use when an incident is loud and everyone wants a decision right now and the actual right move is to wait twenty more minutes for one more data point. It’s the same muscle that lets me sit in a planning meeting and not commit to a date just because the silence is uncomfortable. It’s the ability to feel the pull toward the immediate thing and decline it, calmly, because you’ve already decided what matters more.
Leadership, the version of it I respect, is mostly that. It’s not having the loudest opinion. It’s being the person in the room who isn’t governed by the urge of the moment.
Leadership, the version of it I respect, is mostly that. It’s not having the loudest opinion. It’s being the person in the room who isn’t governed by the urge of the moment. Who can hold a little discomfort without flinching and acting just to make the feeling go away.
OMAD doesn’t make me a better leader. I want to be clear about that. I’m not selling a productivity hack. But it is a small, repeatable rehearsal of a thing I want to be good at the rest of the week. Once a week I practice wanting something and waiting for it on purpose. Some weeks the rehearsal goes great and some weeks I’m cranky and counting the hours like a kid in a car. Both count.
There’s a version of this article that ends with me telling you to try it. I’m not going to do that. It works for me at fifty-four, with my training load and my labs and my life, and that says nothing about whether it would work for you. Plenty of people I respect would call it unnecessary, and they might be right.
What I’ll say instead is this. There’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from doing one hard, unglamorous thing on a schedule, with no one watching and nothing to prove. It doesn’t show up in any metric. It just quietly changes how you carry the rest of the week.
So I cut the lamb chop, and I eat slowly, and I’m grateful in a way that has very little to do with the food. Then on Saturday I eat like a normal person again, and I don’t think about any of this until the following Friday, when the kitchen goes quiet and I get to find out, one more time, whether I meant it.
ETL Takeaway
For me, Friday OMAD is not about eating less. It is about practicing the pause, with food, with discomfort, with pressure, and with the small impulses that try to lead the day before I do.
This piece isn't a case for OMAD. It's one person's account of what a weekly fasting practice revealed over time — about hunger, about mental clarity, about the relationship between physical discipline and the kind of steadiness that leadership actually requires. The metabolic benefits of extended fasting are real and studied. Whether they apply to you depends on your health, training load, and life context in ways this article can't know. What I'm confident about is the less dramatic claim: doing one uncomfortable thing consistently, on purpose, changes how you handle everything else.
Disclaimer
This article reflects my personal experience with intermittent fasting and one-meal-a-day practice. It is not medical advice. Fasting is not appropriate for everyone, especially those with medical conditions, diabetes, a history of disordered eating, or those taking certain medications. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting or changing any fasting or nutrition routine.
What I'd Actually Do
- If OMAD interests you, don't start there. Start with a 16-hour fast one day per week and see how you feel. Get the rhythm before you extend the window.
- On a fast day, treat the hunger like information rather than an emergency. Notice it. Note the time. Most hunger waves pass in 20–30 minutes if you don't act on them.
- Keep electrolytes and black coffee available. The hunger you feel early in a fast is often thirst or low sodium, not actual fuel depletion.
- Track your mental state, not just your body. The clarity some people experience mid-fast is worth paying attention to — it's one of the more reliable signals that the practice is working for you personally.
- When you break the fast, eat slowly and don't overload. A large protein-and-fat-centered meal works well after an extended fast for most people on a keto or low-carb pattern.
- Talk to a clinician before trying extended fasting if you have diabetes, a history of disordered eating, are taking medications, or have any hormonal or metabolic condition — this is a practice that requires real context, not just inspiration.