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Longevity & Why I now eat One Meal a Day

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One YouTuber’s case for eating just once a day is forcing viewers to rethink breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Joseph Everett, who runs the YouTube channel What I’ve Learned, spent years building videos around science-based health experiments. In late July 2016 he released “Longevity & Why I now eat One Meal a Day,” a video essay explaining why he abandoned the standard three-meals-a-day pattern in favor of OMAD — eating everything he needs inside a single daily window. The video paired his usual data-driven style with before-and-after footage of his own meal prep, and it quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views along with thousands of comments from viewers arguing about whether the approach could actually work.

• Everett argues that confining food intake to one meal a day triggers a prolonged fasted state that improves insulin sensitivity and increases human growth hormone (HGH) secretion.
• He cites Japanese physician Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo, who has long promoted eating once daily for youthfulness, and the Okinawan concept of “hara hachi bu” — stopping at 80 percent full.
• To counter skepticism about portion size, Everett uses before-and-after visuals showing that his meal looks like a mountain of food only because raw vegetables are later blended into a drinkable puree.

The Case Against Three Meals a Day

Everett’s central argument is that the three-meals-a-day structure is a modern convention rather than a biological requirement. He contends that constant grazing keeps insulin elevated throughout the day, which interferes with the metabolic processes tied to fat-burning and cellular repair. Instead of treating food timing as an afterthought, he frames OMAD as a way to work with — rather than against — human metabolic biology, pointing to prolonged fasting windows as the mechanism that unlocks most of the benefits he describes.

This isn’t a new idea on his channel. Everett had already explored the topic in Why One Meal A Day Is Good For You | The Unknown Secret, and this newer video builds on that groundwork with a more personal, first-person framing of why he made the switch permanent.

Insulin Sensitivity, Autophagy and HGH

Everett breaks down three physiological mechanisms he says drive OMAD’s benefits. First, extended fasting periods lower insulin resistance, which he links to reduced risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Second, the prolonged fast promotes autophagy — the body’s cellular clean-up process that clears damaged cells before they can contribute to age-related disease. Third, he points to elevated HGH secretion during fasting, tying it to tissue repair and slowed muscle and bone decline as people age.

What looks like an unmanageable mountain of food is really just vegetables blended into a drinkable puree — the gif makes it look like way more than it is.

Explaining the Meal Itself

A recurring objection in the comments section, according to Everett, was disbelief that anyone could physically eat the volume of food shown in his demonstration footage. He addresses this directly by clarifying that his gif shows food in two states — “before preparation” and “after preparation” — and that the purple-tinted drink viewers keep asking about is simply his vegetables blended down into liquid form. That single clarification, he says, resolved most of the confusion driving skeptical comments.

Viewers looking for more structured approaches to timed eating can find additional context in Different Ways Of Fasting, which lays out how OMAD compares with other fasting windows people commonly try.

Cultural Precedents: Nagumo and Hara Hachi Bu

Everett grounds OMAD in existing longevity traditions rather than presenting it as a novel biohack. He references Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo, a Japanese physician who has publicly credited eating once a day with keeping him youthful, and the Okinawan principle of hara hachi bu — the practice of eating only until 80 percent full, long associated with the region’s above-average life expectancy. For Everett, these examples support the idea that restricting food volume and frequency isn’t extreme so much as it is a return to older, simpler eating patterns.

Simplicity as the Real Selling Point

Beyond the metabolic case, Everett spends real time on a more practical argument: cutting three meals down to one removes the daily mental overhead of planning, shopping for, and preparing multiple meals. He frames that freed-up bandwidth as a benefit in its own right, separate from any longevity claim — one less decision to make, one less thing to plan around a workday or a workout.

Everett has acknowledged in the video that OMAD isn’t a fit for everyone, particularly viewers asking in the comments whether one meal can sustain heavy training loads or muscle mass without nutrient gaps — a question he leaves open rather than resolved. What’s clear is that the video struck a nerve: within days of release it was pulling hundreds of thousands of views, and the debate over whether one giant meal can really replace three was still running through the comment section long after the upload.