Don’t cut back on protein when you are dieting! Why? Due to the fact that studies have shown diets high in protein to be effective for weight loss.
Having more knowledge about protein, how much you need, and the best and highest quality sources will help your weight loss efforts work faster. Professional athletes use high protein diets to their advantage every day for added strength and less weight, and so can you.
Check out the health advantages of a protein-rich diet and how it can help you shed extra pounds. The following are the top three benefits of increasing your protein intake while losing weight.
1. Protein For Feeling Full Longer
The primary reason we eat so much that we find ourselves overweight is that we never feel satisfied. When your stomach and brain get in sync with satisfaction, they can overrule the tongue and tastebuds.
That’s the point at which you feel satisfied and have no further need to eat.
The thing is, proteins are known to help your body reach the point of satiety faster. And when you feel satisfied, your body feels full, and it takes longer for you to experience feelings of hunger.
Staying full and content longer means you will have more control over reaching for higher-calorie foods.
Unlike carbohydrates, which only provide short energy rushes, proteins break down much slower. Because of the steady release of energy, blood sugar fluctuates much less, leading to fewer sweet and flour cravings.
2. Protein Builds Muscle For Enhanced Metabolism.
I get it! You don’t care about trying to achieve a bodybuilder’s physique. That’s not the point at all, so don’t worry. However, building and maintaining muscle mass is something you should do throughout your life, especially when you are losing weight.
Consuming more calories than your body can burn for energy results in fat storage. In essence, fat cells are lazy and burn hardly any calories to stay alive in your body.
On the other hand, the cells that make up muscle tissue burn more calories when activated as well as at rest. It only makes sense that to shed excess pounds, the more muscle mass you have, the easier and faster it will happen, right?
Metabolism is basically the process by which your body turns food into energy. Because fat cells like to lay around and do nothing, they don’t add much to this process.
Conversely, there are certain foods that help your body process food into energy better, and the main ones are protein-rich.
More protein provides more energy and speeds up your diet
Eating protein enhances the process of converting food into energy instead of fat cells, and provides amino acids for the production of muscle tissue that increases fat burn.
I don’t know about you, but that seems like a win-win dieting situation to me.
How can I boost my metabolism?
Eat plenty of protein and exercise regularly with any strength training or aerobic type activities along with a healthy diet to burn body fat as you build more muscle.
3. Burn More Calories With Protein Digestion
Processing proteins is more difficult for your body than processing fats or carbs. Your body actually works harder to digest proteins, which burns more calories.
The whole process is known as thermogenesis and is important to losing weight. Not only does the process take more energy to digest complex proteins than carbohydrates, but it also keeps your insulin on an even keel.
But that’s not all. Adding more protein to your diet leads to a healthier heart (it’s a muscle, after all), a stronger brain, and stronger bones. You simply can’t underestimate this important macronutrient, and it’s a necessity for all your metabolic functions. It’s just essential to your good health.
How Much Protein Should I Eat?
All of these factors, plus your age, size, level of activity, and objectives, must be taken into account. A good place to start is with the USDA recommendation of a minimum of 46g a day for women and 56g grams a day for men.
It’s important to keep in mind that these are just the basics for avoiding problems. The figures are an indication of how much a person eats with a moderate activity level and at their ideal weight.
Losing weight, especially if you are having difficulty reaching your goals, necessitates more than the minimum recommendations. A good way to know how much protein to eat is to simply divide your current weight by two.
If you weigh 200 pounds, you should shoot for 100 grams each day. To make sure you’re getting enough, you might want to take a supplement.
I can hear you saying, “Ugh, I don’t count grams and calories!” Well, that’s fine. Just do this instead:
Every time you eat a meal or snack, just mentally try to make about 30% of it protein. Do that while considering that about 25% of your calories should come from healthy fats, and the remainder from complex carbs like peas, beans, vegetables, and whole grains.
Summary
From the information above, it’s easy to see that increasing protein means feeling full longer, having an increased metabolism for more energy, and burning more fat. So as it turns out, for the fastest weight loss possible, your daily meals should be designed around a high protein diet.
A key component of this approach is concentrating on complete proteins for the 8 essential amino acids the body doesn’t produce. Without consuming enough, your body starts to break down existing muscle tissue to meet its own needs.
Good sources of these amino acids are skinless chicken, turkey, fish, eggs, and lean red meat.
Burn Calories and Lose Weight Without Hunger
With a high protein intake, you can diet without being hungry and increase your thermogenesis. Because you are not hungry all the time, it will be easy to limit calories while keeping up the energy to exercise and burn fat stores.
A whole foods diet focused on higher levels of protein for the purpose of weight loss speeds up the process and improves your health all around. Vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, and healthy fats are the foundation of a healthy diet, whether you want to lose weight or just stay healthy.