Renunciation is Joe's name for a change deeper than repeatedly refusing an extra meal. It is the gradual discovery that the imagined excess was not truly wanted. The daily boundary begins as restraint, but its intended end is a life in which food no longer requires constant restraint because attachment to it has weakened.
This is one of the places where Joe's Buddhist frame is explicit. He is not merely borrowing austere imagery for a diet. He connects the one meal to a larger inquiry: what happens when wanting is followed far enough to reveal its cost?
How Joe distinguishes suppression from renunciation
In his account of his own OMAD history, Joe compares suppressed craving to grass under a board. The growth is hidden, not gone; when the board moves, it rises again. A rule that holds desire down without changing the relationship leaves the original attachment ready to return.
Renunciation, by contrast, changes the valuation of the object. The extra food is no longer a reward being heroically denied. Its anticipated pleasure is considered alongside the effort, guilt, repetition, and renewed wanting that follow it. Joe's phrase about destroying psychological attachment is severe, but the mechanism he describes is understanding rather than permanent brute force.
This also explains why mere food avoidance can fail his test. A forbidden food may become more important in absence. The visible behavior looks austere while the mind remains organized around the thing it lacks.
How Joe treats one meal as renunciation in miniature
Joe's fullest late statement is OMAD Is the Path of Renunciation. After more than eleven years, he says the decisive motivation is no longer weight loss or even the pleasure of control. It is recognizing that self-destructive excess is not a hidden true desire.
His thought experiment plays a want forward without limit. Infinite food, money, vacation, or longevity eventually becomes obligation and exhaustion. Desire usually points to a symbol—the imagined security, relief, or completion—not to an endless supply of the object itself. The fantasy works only because its maintenance costs and eventual boredom stay outside the frame.
The one meal becomes a small daily version of the answer: enough here, nothing else. Scarcity can make the meal vivid, but the larger benefit in Joe's account is a default state of non-seeking. The day no longer depends on repeatedly finding the next source of gratification.
The doctrine did not begin in the Buddhist era. Its origin is a 2017 parable, OMAD: The Prison of Reformation, in which Joe imagines waking in a locked cell where, once a day, a small plate of food arrives through a slot in a steel door. The imagined prisoner panics, grieves, adapts—and is transformed, because “you have to be broken so that you can be remade.” The alternative, Joe says, is “the prison of self-indulgence,” a palace of pillows with the temperature set just right, and the prison that kills. Everything the late teaching elaborates is already present in outline: the constraint is remaking rather than punishment, and the cell to fear is the comfortable one.
How Joe uses the monastic model to change food's meaning
In Why OMAD Makes You a Monk, Joe calls OMAD a reverse gateway: control of appetite can make other forms of simplification attractive. He lists monastic constraints around food, stimulation, possessions, and entertainment, while saying that a layperson need not reproduce the whole list.
The relevant movement is from delay to devaluation. One practiced limit exposes another domain in which anticipation creates more work than satisfaction. Joe does not claim that ordinary pleasures must vanish. His car-seat image is more moderate: a pleasure can be appreciated and used without becoming the destination.
His plate-and-bowl discussion makes the food practice concrete. In the monastic model he admires, a person receives what is placed in one bowl, waits, eats attentively, and cleans the bowl. Mixing the foods together can deliberately interrupt an established taste palette. Preference loses some authority because the meal is nourishment before it is a curated experience.
Why Joe uses chosen scarcity as an exercise
Joe later turns this principle into a specific assignment in Eat a Bowl of Rice. The proposed meal is one plain bowl of rice, perhaps once in a month—not as a permanent nutritional doctrine, but as deliberately chosen scarcity.
He contrasts this with “perfect foodie” thinking, in which the right meal is expected to make the practice effortless. The rice meal cannot fulfill that fantasy. Its point is appreciation, simplicity, and evidence that an ordinary staple can be enough for one occasion.
This exercise also reveals an important limit. Renunciation in Joe's mature teaching is gradual. The 2026 renunciation talk explicitly rejects declaring every desire gone at once. Unknown attachments emerge over time, and attempting instant purity creates another ideal to cling to. A periodic exercise is therefore a probe, not a new identity.
How Joe locates a middle space between wanting and aversion
Renunciation can easily be confused with disgust or self-denial. Joe complicates that reading in The Safe Space of Freedom From Craving. He locates contentment between wanting and not-wanting: “I neither have nor want.”
This middle space is not a bed of nails, starvation, or hatred of food. The meal is eaten and can be enjoyed. What drops away is the belief that another portion, a better item, or a future feast will complete the present moment. Aversion remains a relationship with the object; non-clinging allows it to lose relevance.
Joe suggests examining the total cost of a desire and holding both sides at once. The wanted object is also owned, maintained, regretted, and eventually lost. Applied to food, the extra plate includes not only its first bite but the renewed appetite and mental bandwidth that accompany the chase.
Why Joe treats renunciation as the long-term aim
Early OMAD can look like a clock restraining appetite. Joe's renunciation principle describes the hoped-for reversal: appetite stops organizing the clock. The external form remains, but its psychological weight diminishes.
That is why he calls weight “training wheels” in the later talk. A scale goal can begin the practice, but maintenance depends on no longer seeking the former excess. Renunciation is not the permanent feeling of being deprived. In Joe's account, it is the recognition that the supposed deprivation removed something costly, and that “enough” can end the transaction.
The finality he intends is marked by a line he now borrows from a legend of the Buddha, who declines an offered indulgence with the words “what I have cast off, I cannot take up” (The Wisdom from Dog's Vomit). Joe treats the sentence as the standard for his own practice: a renounced habit is not scheduled less often; it is not reinstalled. The idiom is late, but the posture is the 2017 parable's—the reformed prisoner does not miss the cell of self-indulgence.
This page is an independent editorial synthesis of the views Joe expresses in the linked videos. The videos remain the primary sources for his full remarks and context.