Protein: How much you should be eating and the easiest way to add more.
July 30, 2024
Why is protein so important?
Protein is one of the key macronutrients in food, along with carbohydrates and fats. It is found in food that come from both plants and animals. Protein is made up of amino acids, which our bodies use in many ways from repairing muscle & bone to helping make hormones and enzymes. It is utilized in every organ in our body.
A higher protein intake increases levels of the satiety, aka: your appetite suppression hormones GLP-1, peptide YY and cholecystokinin, while reducing your levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin. Which is why it is recommended as a key ingredient in successful weight loss.
How much protein should I eat?
For optimal protein levels you should eat 0.7-1g of protein per pound of realistic goal body weight.
- If you want to weigh 150 pounds, then you should aim for 105g-150g of protein per day.
- Protein is best absorbed when intake is spread throughout your day.
Practical ways to increase.
- Start where you are and make slow incremental increases to your protein intake.
- Preplan your day to make sure you can meet your daily goal.
- Whenever you normally eat protein, double your portion.
- Egg whites are an easy low calorie, high-protein addition to any egg breakfast. You can even sneak it into oatmeal and other dishes.
- Protein powder is extremely versatile. You can make shakes, you can mix it into coffee, oatmeal, yogurt, cereal… You can find many ways to add it to many different foods.
- I start my day with Fairlife Nutrition Plan Milk. It comes in small, individual white bottles. 30g of protein! Caramel is my favorite to mix with 6oz of dark roast cold brew.
- Greek yogurt, I have pretty much every day as an afternoon snack. I mix Dannon Light and Fit Vanilla Greek yogurt with fresh fruit and Fiber One cereal to get my daily allotment of fiber + 12g of protein.
- Lean meats like chicken breast are an easy addition. I buy the Foster Farms Grilled Chicken Breast, or buy extra chicken if I am cooking some anyways. Have it in the fridge ready to go to add to most meals.
- Add fish to your dinner rotation. Most fish is high in protein, salmon is my favorite not only because it’s delicious but also for the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids. Tuna is another versatile option.
- Protein bars. Most evenings I have a Pure Protein bars 20g protein, my favorite is Deluxe Chocolate or Mint Chocolate Chip. I also really like Robert Irvine FitCrunch bars 16g protein, Chocolate Peanut Butter and Mint Chocolate Chip.
Bottom line.
Calories first, then optimize your protein intake. It’s best to take it slow, find different ways that you can incorporate into your day. Most people start around 70g and incrementally increase over time. Keep protein as a priority at every meal and eventually it will become easier. I easily hit 110’s of protein a day, and can increase up to 150g as needed.
Once you can consistently hit your protein within your target range going higher is not necessarily better. Your rate of return on protein starts to fade out after that number unless you are an elite athlete which anyone reading this isn’t LOL (hate to burst your bubble). Plus you start investing so many calories into protein that you either are going over your daily calories and gaining weight or you don’t have the room for the fat and carbs needed for performance or enjoyment of life. 0.7g-1g per pound of body weight is the Goldilocks spot, just the right amount to optimize your nutrition but not so high that you can’t enjoy life and feel great doing it.
If you have great ways that you add protein into your diet please add them below for others to try.
To put it simply, I’ve struggled with my weight my whole life. I grew up in a household that commercialized weight loss programs were part of the norm. I was a teenager in the 90’s when “Fat-free” everything started to become the diet trend, then quick-fix rapid fat loss programs were all the rage, diet pills like Hydroxycut, and shakes like Slim Fast would fix our weight issues. I toggled between a pattern of strict control over my eating to zero control. I’d follow all the rules and if some restriction was best then more must be better right? That pattern continued up until I was 40! Decades of yo-yo dieting cycled me up to my highest weight (pregnancies included) of 217 pounds. This last time I remember vividly, I got to the point that I knew I needed to go on another diet and I truly didn’t even know which one, I felt like I had tried them all and it felt like nothing worked for me. It’s like there was something I wasn’t getting, was I just destined to be overweight? Truly it didn’t make sense to me, all the things I had tried and the many times I had tried them it never seemed to stick. I understood the concept of making it a lifestyle change and a mindset but in practical terms I really didn’t know what that meant because I clearly wasn’t able to make that happen. I wanted it desperately but it just wasn’t sticking for me. It’s like this giant puzzle of life, I had a lot of the other parts figured out or were only missing a few small pieces but the health and nutrition part that I felt so many other people had figured out but mine was missing this big section, I felt like I had a big question mark on it. Regardless I needed to do something, the trajectory I was on left me terrified and even though I didn’t know how I was going to do, I truly didn’t know what else to do. I jumped back to my old toxic friend “calorie counting”, and met up with her just as terrible friend, “hours at the gym”. I would spend at least 2 hours, 4x/week doing moderate-high intensity cardio and eating 1200 calories/day. I obviously saw weight loss, but I also found it challenging to sustain, this was honestly the only thing I knew to do. I just went right back to my old toxic relationships because I didn’t know better. I didn’t even realize the disordered eating patterns I was in. Restrict and binge cycling, emotional eating, I looked at the scale to judge my efforts, not realizing eating out didn’t have to equal and indulgent experience every time, no carbs, no sugar, no….. so many things that I didn’t even think to question. It was about this time, shortly after I started that I was introduced to coaching and slowly the pieces of the puzzle started to appear, at times I still didn’t know how to put them into place but I at least had something to work with. One of the biggest pieces I learned in the process is that there is so much more to weight management than on or off a diet. Weight management is on a spectrum and my old version of dieting was to go from one extreme end of the spectrum to the other. Not realizing all the levels of managing weight that reside in the middle of the spectrum. Had I recognized these different levels and started to learn the skills of each level, it would have saved me from years of yo-yo dieting and disordered eating behaviors.
It’s that time of year! It’s a great time to reflect on the past year, assess where we are and where we want to go and then come up with goals to help get us there. Many people like to use the S.M.A.R.T. acronym for creating their health and nutrition goals, I personally didn’t find success using this process. But let’s break it down, S=Specific, M=Measurable, A=Achievable, R=Relevant, T=Time-bound. If this works for you…. great! For me it feels very rigid, with qualifiers and rules to follow. Honestly, I already felt not good enough in this area of my life, and truly in a few others as well, whether by others or myself I felt “not enough”, which cuts deep into one of our core needs in life. To my mental and emotional health, this approach to goal setting felt like a “set-up” to cut that wound a little deeper. I needed a different approach, one that honored a healthier version of the whole me, because I’m much more than just a number on a scale. Another example, I had a client tell me that she was proud of her 40# weight loss this year BUT it wasn’t the 60# she had hoped to lose. I asked her if the previous version of herself, who made that original goal, would have been happy weighing 40# less when she said that? Of course she would! If I looked at the trajectory I was on prior to this last attempt at weight loss even if I maintained my weight it would have been an improvement. I really needed to let go of the “Specific” part of the goal. I had time-bound, just by nature of it being a New Years, but I needed my goals to be measurable, achievable and relevant. With that I offered her my New Year’s Resolutions/Goals, to end the year healthier than I started it, creating a Healthier Version of You. You have the freedom to choose how you want to measure it and honestly I’d cast a wide net, compare it to recent bloodwork you had done maybe lower your cholesterol, take pictures of yourself, take measurements, and obviously the scale. Get creative about different ways to measure health because it is far more than the number on the scale. Maybe you do a mental health journal? Whatever it looks like for you. Noting your water intake, how many fruits and veggies you eat in a day. Anything goes because ALL of it goes towards your health. I honestly think that especially in the beginning of your health journey it is best to have a wide definition, encompassing many different data points and values. You need to create a different cycle for yourself, you need some wins. You need a year that you can look back and see objective proof that you achieved that goal for yourself because there are so many markers of health. We have the rest of our lives to continue to improve and continue to get better it all doesn’t have to happen in one year. NEXT… Take that larger goal and break it down. I like to break my goals down into seasons. January- June, I am dialed in to a specific health goal with 1-2 maintenance breaks. In the summer, with kids home from school and summer vacations I find it’s best to stick to a gentler version of my habits that keep me in maintenance. It’s a great break for my mind and my body. Then come Fall, I’m back to being dialed in on a specific health goal and then during the Holidays I go back to maintenance. I’m never on or off, I make slight adjustments in my nutrition and workouts to support my current health goal. You should not push hard on any one goal for an entire year, but you also want to spend enough time pursing it to see progress. I find seasonal adjustments are great for my life and schedule. And once you decide on seasonal goals then you break them down further into the actions that will help you achieve those goals. What are the daily and weekly actions that realistically fit into your already busy life that will support your goal. Visual from Precision Nutrition (below graphic)
This feels slightly gimmicky, which I slightly cringe at but the reality is when life happens we start to make this process far more complicated. In no way am I trying to downplay the real issues of why weight loss isn’t sustainable. The mindset, negative thoughts, all or nothing thinking, sabotaging behaviors, and honestly things you don’t even realize you do or believe, that make this process far more challenging. I titled it this way to remind you that it really is this simple, NOT EASY, but simple. Don’t complicate it, when “it’s not working” it’s likely because of one of the deeper issues mentioned above. This is typically how this goes down, we start off strong but then something derails us. It’s like going on a road trip from your starting weight to your goal weight and you get a flat tire along the way. What we need to do is pull over, pause there, fix the tire, then keep going. Instead, most of us either slash all the other tires (ie: well I already ate over my calories today I might as well eat everything else in sight) OR we go ahead and tow our car all the way back to the start of the trip (ie: all or nothing, anyone?). I want to reminder you to not make this complicated, pull this list back up (save it to your notes section on your phone) as many times as you need to remind yourself to just pull over, eat maintenance calories, fix what needs fixing, keep your progress, then when you are ready just pick up where you left off to preserve all the hard work you’ve put in to get to that point. Make progress from there, not starting all over or worse off then when you were derailed.
Short answer is no, but let’s look at why we track our food, the benefits and limitations, different ways to track and what your ultimate goal for living your life.
Let’s start with some great resources and I’ll end with what has worked for me to increase my water intake.
Low-fat, Carnivore, Vegetarian, Keto, Paleo, shakes, supplements, Intermittent Fasting….. the list goes on. What is the best diet for weight loss? Answer: The one that you can be consistent with. Definition of success is not just losing the weight but keeping it off. THAT’s the bar we need to reach for. You need to define an eating plan that works for you, taking into consideration your likes and dislikes to find a way of eating that is sustainable for you. Here’s where we are going to start:
Having a clearly defined reason for why you want to lose weight can be a powerful driving force. As humans, we are far more motivated if we intrinsically have a desire for something versus someone else telling us to do something. It’s one thing to have a healthcare provider tell you to lose weight but you are far more likely to be successful if your desire comes from a place deep within you that truly wants something different. If you possess that deep desire for change it can be even more powerful to define that for yourself. Here’s a great exercise to get you started. #1 Start with measurable goal. (Example: Lose weight.) #2 Why do you want that? (Ex: to be healthier and feel better) #3 What does that mean to you? (Ex: be in a healthy weight range, not feel tired all the time, to be able to move without pain, not have stomach issues, feel more confident,….) #4 Why is that important to you? (I saw a family member when I was growing up who was morbidly obese, struggled to get around was on a ton of medications, their quality of life was not one what I would want) #5 Reword it for yourself. “I want to do what I can to preserve my health, mobility and quality of life as I age.” These are the things that increase the likelihood of you being successful. By themselves they don’t make it happen, it’s maybe 2% of the reason people are successful. Think about it this way though, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be good enough to make it work. C- students still graduate, you don’t need A’s. We want A’s, but you don’t need them. The most successful people value the small wins, they take the 2% improvement here, the 5% improvement there and keep layering them on, building upon them. Remember this isn’t an area in life that we excel in, we have to purposefully keep doing all the reasonable things to keep building and growing until eventually we get a good enough grade to pass the class. Find your why, write it down, memorize it. When you hit a roadblock on your journey and you are frustrated and for that split second wonder if it’s all worth it. Say your why to yourself, then tell yourself you have a 2 options, you can quit, no one is forcing you to do anything. If you quit, you know what will happen. OR, you give yourself some grace and be kind to yourself for all the work you are putting in, and you keep going. I said this to myself countless times, but my why and deep intrinsic desire kept me always choosing to keep going. I’m never going to tell you this is easy, LIFE isn’t easy, but you get to choose your version of hard. Keep improving, keep working but most of all be kind to yourself.