A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!

Presenting two of my two unobtainable goals

By Ed Goldman

THE HUNGER GAPES—”OMAD” stands for One Meal A Day, a dietary practice whose devotees include the impressively lean and muscled singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen. I was about to mention that one of his biggest hits was “Born to Run” but that may send the wrong message on the possible side effects of his regimen. 

At the same time, OMAD is viewed by doctors and nutritionists as a movement—which I know sends the wrong message.

In a November story in the New York Times, various experts weighed in, so to speak, on whether going on the OMAD diet is a good way to combat obesity. One doctor worried that if always-hungry people knew that the meal they were about to consume would be their only one for the next 24 hours, they might go calorie-crazy. 

I can see that. You decide, “If all I’m going to eat today is this hamburger, I’m larding and loading it up with condiments!” This is an act I call Desperately Seeking Lazy Susan.

Others interviewed by the Times thought some people who claim to be devout OMADs are possibly cheating a little. Springsteen told the Times of London, for example, that he has “a bit of fruit in the morning and then I’ll have dinner.” This phrasing makes it sound as though having “a bit of fruit” may be followed immediately by having dinner. That would mean Bruce’s one meal a day includes fruit as an appetizer. 

If, on the other hand, he means he has fruit in the morning and dinner later in the day, well, that sure sounds like TWO meals a day, no? But why quibble about it? I mean, if it works for you, Bruce, you’re The Boss.

I’ve tried being an OMAD adherent on and off over the years but with little success. To work my way up to it, I started by limiting myself to a late breakfast, then nothing until dinner, which I rarely have before 8 p.m., categorizing me as, I suppose, 2MAD to have only one meal. 

But sometimes I’ll go to business lunches. Does that make me skip that late breakfast? Nooo. It merely makes me rise earlier so I can have my usual breakfast, then business lunch, then my usual dinner. How does my lack of self-discipline make me feel and what do I therefore promise myself? To paraphrase Peter Finch from the movie “Network,” OMAD as hell—and I’m not going to intake anymore.

ECONOMIC VINDICATORS—“All the Presidents’ Money” is a new book by Megan Gorman that talks about which Leaders of the Free World could handle his finances and those with whom I can more readily identify.

Turns out that Herbert Hoover, the guy who brought us the Great Depression, was smart and thrifty, if a tad tone-deaf when it came to the American economy. And Gerald Ford—whom President Lyndon Baines Johnson accused as having played too much college football without wearing a helmet—was actually plenty savvy about handling money. He was just what we might call Geopolitical Lite when he declared in a debate with then-Governor Jimmy Carter, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” insisting that Poland, Yugoslavia and Romania had nothing to fear from Russia. This, along with his pardon of President Richard Nixon for Watergate crimes, is what likely deprived him of being elected to the job he’d inherited from his pardonee.