I´ve been dieting my whole life and got more obese every time. It has taken me ages to start using my own knowledge and experience to decide what might work. During 1990-ies (I´m swedish, excuse any language weirdiness) the norm was to eat five or six times a day - three meals and two or three snacks. It was presented as a necessity to stay healthy or succeed with a diet. I thought that my forefathers never had any snacks and it seemed to work... and for me with dignosed BED the risk of overeating came six times a day instead of three... so I ate three times a day. And then came Michal Mosley with 5:2 and the taboo of fasting as a diet was suddenly gone. It did not work for me, fasting often throw me into starve-binge mode. 16:8 semmed better but I can eat a lot in eight hours so the compulsive eating was still very much present.
In august 2017 I asked for help with my sleep apnea and got a c-pap. It gave me back some of the energy I had gradually lost during late spring and summer, I had stopped exercising and was feeling worse and worse due to weight gain. In december I climbed the scale for the first time since april and found I hade gained 25 kilos in eight months, and I was severely obese before that too... Big shock and I finally managed to eat better, 1 of january I hade lost five kilos (during christmas!) and since then I´ve lost another ten. I eat healthy, don´t see myself as senisitive to sugar, fat and saltare what I prefer to binge on, not sweets.
It has been a rollercoaster, not a straight road, I have been bingeing and given in to cravings at night, but the difference between this and how it always has been is that it has been possible to return to OMAD the next day. I am trying to ignore that my OMAD servings are huge, it is hard because the feeling of doing "wrong" triggers me to go on eating. When I read your questions about what is "allowed" I feel provoked, to me this is a reccmendation on how to eat and I am constructing it along my own experiences. That means that I do take milk in my morning coffee as well as in the ginger tea I drink at nights. I recently read Gillian Rileys "Eating less - say goodbye to overeating" and the one thing I picked up from her was that in every moment it is my dicision. If one day I eat more than one meal – it is a decision that might be healthy or not but it does not mean that I have "fallen off the wagon" or that I have failed, it means that I chose to do something different that day. I have developed a very strong aversion to diet gurus during my years, I´ve done a lot of research and today I am a little bitter that my self esteem in these matters has stopped me from doing my own choices, I have followed too many authorities in my days.
Learning that OMAD exists as a theory and something other peole also is going for hopefully will give me some shorcuts, it is still very chaotic because it is really "loose" in rules, the thing is to eat one time a day and that´s it. If I track what I eat that hour the caolire amount is not always great, but compared to trying to stay on track for three meals ad day in the long run, it is great.
So - my reasons for doing this is that I think it will make my life so much easier. I fought a beginning alcoholism for some years, fearing that it would become a real problem, affecting work and relations. I finally gave in trying to handle it, took the help of AA and became sober. That was twelve years ago, I don´t think staying sober is a problem att all today but I had to change lifestyle to make it. Tried OA for the food, did not work and today I think that I simply can´t handle handeling... I need simplicity, I need to abstain, to eat only one time a day is a really simple rule. In my own rulebook that does not take out milk in tea or coffee, or even a teaspoon of honey in the thermos of ginger tea I prepare for evenings. It does not seem to trigger me but putting in a snack or an extra meal does.