Center Your Diet Around Protein
Written By Kyle Ligon - MovementLink Head Coach
Eating adequate amounts of protein helps drive the perfect balance between all The MOMENTUM Program’s top targets:
Our Non-Negotiable Fitness Goals:
Functional Performance - Adequate protein intake ensures your body is repaired and strengthened after exercise along with ensuring it is maintained during less active times.
Body Composition - Protein is essential for muscle protein synthesis (MPS). A higher intake helps you maintain or build lean muscle mass, which is key to a favorable body composition (better muscle-to-fat ratio).
Tissue and Joint Health - Collagen, the structural protein in your joints, tendons, and ligaments, is synthesized from amino acids derived from your dietary protein. This intake directly supports the durability and resilience of your entire musculoskeletal system.
Overall Health and Wellness - muscle mass, bone density, strength, all the leading indicators of lifespan, healthspan, and quality of life, are highly impacted by dietary protein.
Managing our Body Fat Set Point - Protein has a uniquely powerful effect on satiety (feeling full) and metabolism compared to fats or carbohydrates.
Protein consumption lowers our body fat set point making it a very satiating macronutrient. This reduction in hunger is vital when trying to find strategies that reduce body fat that we can actually adhere to in the long-run.
Protein also has the highest Thermic Effect of Food (TEF), meaning your body burns more calories digesting and processing protein than it does for the other macronutrients, slightly boosting daily energy expenditure.
More muscle mass leads to higher metabolism, adding another element that makes it easier and easier to lose fat and maintain lower levels of body fat.
Managing Fatigue and Recovering from Workouts (Workouts Don’t Produce Results, They Produce a Stimulus)
Exercise is a deliberate act of tissue breakdown (a stimulus). Protein provides the materials needed to execute the necessary recovery and adaptation. After a tough workout, protein supplies the amino acids needed to quickly repair the micro-damage in muscle fibers, reducing soreness (fatigue) and accelerating the return to full function. Consuming protein post-workout initiates the process of supercompensation (adapting to be stronger than before), ensuring the training stimulus actually leads to the desired results and performance improvements.
Protein is not just for muscle; it is the architect and construction crew for your entire body, driving adaptation, structure, metabolism, and satiety.
Satiating Effect of Protein
In the "Protein Overfeeding Study", researchers fed participants 1,000 calories excess for weeks, but split up into two groups, one on a higher carbohydrate diet and one on a higher protein diet. The carbohydrate group had no problem consuming the excess calories, while the high protein group struggled to meet the requirements due to an overwhelming feeling of fullness.
Protein is the key for setting our lipostat to lean and letting our body send us signals that control our consumption. Yes, we could count calories, but if the makeup of our meals is lacking protein or includes triggering foods like added sugars, it’s likely to take a lot of grit and willpower to adhere to certain calorie numbers. Instead, centering our diet around protein, we let our lipostat control our hunger for us and therefore the calories we consume.
I honestly have no idea how many calories I eat a day, yet I have had the same level of body fat for the last 15+ years. Protein is just one key concept of The MOMENTUM Program’s nutrition blueprint, but is a major key.
How to Center Your Diet Around Protein
We are looking to consume about 1g of protein per 1lb of ideal body weight every day. So if you goal weight is 150lbs, you’ll consume 150g or protein every day. That’s a lot and typically does not just happen without planning and strategizing.
Protein is not stored in our body like carbohydrates and fats are. Additionally, there’s only so much protein can be absorbed from one sitting, so we need to spread out our protein consumption throughout the day, but there’s a balance to be struck by eating too often. We need periods of time when we are not fed, but we’ll dive into the benefits of an Eating Window in a future article.
Our recommendation is to spread your protein consumption across 3 meals. To hit our daily target, you’ll need to get about 0.33g of protein per 1lb of ideal body weight each meal. If your ideal weight is 150lbs, that would be 50g of protein every meal.
The 1g per day does give us a buffer zone, but because protein cannot be stored, getting near this number each day is crucial for our goals.
To ensure we’re hitting our targets each day, we should be relying on real foods that are high in protein, meats like steak, as much as possible, but most people are going to need additional supplementation, like whey or casein protein powder, but there are still some additional considerations.
When using protein powders, they get digested and run through our system much faster than real foods, so we cannot absorb as much. We can likely only absorb 30-45g of protein powder (depending on how large and muscular you are) in one sitting. With real foods, that number increases significantly because of digestion time, so to get up into the numbers we need, eating mostly real food is key.
I want to emphasize that getting in adequate protein through mostly real food is way harder than most people anticipate. The food tastes great, but the satiety factor of protein and meat is very large…which is a huge benefit. Although getting up into these numbers is difficult, these numbers greatly reduce hunger, making eating amounts of food that will maintain low levels of body fat, feel natural and be much easier to adhere to…a huge win for fat loss.
Now, although it is not only helpful but necessary when we are learning to estimate to weigh and measure food, we don’t want to live our lives that way. Like I mentioned, the 1g rule does provide us a good buffer zone of staying above our minimum recommendation of 0.7g, so tracking for a day and estimating from there on typically gets the job done.
How to estimate serving sizes:
Meat/Fish: a piece that is about an inch thick and slightly larger than the palm of your hand.
Note: steak is not unhealthy! In fact, it is one of the most nutrient dense foods that exists. Avoid highly processed, low quality, fast food red meat, but high quality red meat is very healthy for us (we evolved eating it for our entire existence), and it being unhealthy is a myth that has been debunked.
Eggs: A large egg contains about 7g of protein. (Read that as needing to eat a bunch of eggs!)
Note: Eggs and their yolks are not bad! That is another myth that has been busted, so there’s no need to avoid egg yolks.
Protein is far from our only consideration, but is the center of our nutrition plan. It’s a necessary macronutrient that also brings in tons of necessary micronutrients, while being an incredibly satiating food.