What Is Protein?

Protein is one of the three macronutrients that comprises food and is integral to building up and repairing tissues in our body. It is also arguably the most important macronutrient when it comes to weight loss. Below, I will describe three ways protein can help aid with fat loss. I will also describe strategies on how to shop for protein dense foods!

How can protein help with fat loss?

There are three main ways protein can help aid with fat loss. First, protein helps us feel more satiated than carbohydrates and fats. It does this in part by reducing the levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin in the body!

 Second, a high protein diet combined with resistance training will help us retain our muscle mass while we are losing weight. To understand why this is so important let's use an analogy. Let’s assume you had 10,000 dollars in cash and were deciding between two banks to put your money in. Bank A has a 4 percent annual interest rate, and bank B has a 0.5 percent annual interest rate. That means you would earn 400$ in interest if you chose bank A or 50$ interest if you chose bank b. It would seem like a no brainer to put your money in bank A right? In this scenario muscle mass is the equivalent of the interest rate of bank A, and fat mass is the equivalent of the interest rate of bank B. Muscle mass burns more calories at rest than fat mass does. This boosts our metabolism and helps us burn more calories throughout the day. Muscle mass is the investment we want to choose if we are trying to sustain long term weight loss. A high protein diet helps build and retain muscle mass and therefore is crucial to this process.

Lastly, protein has what's called a high thermic effect of food!(TEF). This is a fancy way of saying we burn a lot of calories when digesting protein! When eating 100 calories worth of protein, our body will use 20 to 30 calories in order to break down and digest that protein! So it's really like we only consumed 70 to 80 calories! So while protein has a TEF of 20 to 30 percent, carbohydrates have a TEF of 5 to 10 percent, and fat 0 to 3 percent! Protein is a clear winner in this category!

How Much Protein Should You Eat?

The research shows that eating 0.8 to 1 grams of protein per lb of your goal body weight per day is ideal when trying to retain or build muscle mass. In other words, someone that has a goal of wanting to weigh 180 lbs should be shooting for anywhere from 144 to 180 grams of protein per day. 

If our goal is weight loss, it is also important to eat foods that have a high ratio of protein to overall calories. Along with our protein goal of 0.8 to 1 grams of protein per lb of body weight, we also want to aim for about 25 percent of our overall calories being from protein. Let’s use peanut butter as an example. Peanut Butter has 8 grams of protein and is 190 calories per serving. At first glance 8 grams of protein might seem pretty high. But remember, we also want to look at the ratio of protein to overall calories. There are 4 calories in a gram of protein. If we take 4 calories and multiply that by 8 grams of protein, we can determine 32 calories are from protein in one serving of peanut butter. 32/190= 16.8 percent calories from protein. That is a pretty low ratio! Let's use eggs as another example. Three eggs have a combined 18 grams of protein and 210 calories. Using the same equation from the previous example we can determine that 34.2 percent of the calories in an egg are from protein! This is double the ratio of peanut butter and nearly the same amount of calories! This equation takes merely seconds to use in a grocery store and will help you shop for lower calorie, protein dense foods!

Summary

A high protein diet will play a critical role in a fat loss journey. This will be done by helping with satiation, boosting metabolism by building and retaining muscle mass, and burning more calories through digestion. Make sure to choose foods that are protein dense by using the simple equation described above when grocery shopping!