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Get Plenty of Protein Proteins are the building blocks for your body. You need to eat lots of protein for your body to build, repair, and maintain your muscle and other lean tissues. If you don't eat enough protein, your body will break down muscle tissue, which is bad, to maintain itself. As a result, your metabolism will slow, and you won't burn body fat. Unlike fat or glucose, there's nowhere in our bodies to store protein (aside from building muscle tissue) so you have to get a lot from your diet. Eat a plentiful supply of protein, however don't go overboard. Some of the popular fad diets make you eat tons and tons of protein. Too much protein doesn't help you. Once your body uses all of the protein it can for the day, it will burn the excess as fuel, but protein has lots of nitrogen in it, which can toxify your blood, kidneys, and tissues. Your body then has to expend lots of water to flush the nitrogen out, which makes you lose water weight - not an accurate form of weight loss. How Much Protein to Eat How much protein should you eat? Most people should eat about 0.4 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Therefore, if you weigh 200 pounds, you should be eating between 80 and 160 grams of protein per day. This isn't hard to do. Eat two eggs for breakfast, at an 8-ounce serving of chicken for dinner, and you're at 60 grams of protein right there. Now, if you exercise a lot, or lift weights, and you're interested in building extra muscle mass, you should eat more protein... anywhere from 0.75 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight. A weight lifter or other athelete on a high-protein, high-calorie diet can easily eat 200 grams of protein in a day. Don't go too far though... if you start eating 2.0 or more grams of protein per pound of body weight, you might be getting too much protein. Be sure to drink lots of extra water to flush out those toxins. The official recommendation from many nutrition experts is to eat 0.8 to to 1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. To figure out your weight in kilograms, divide your body weight in pounds by 2.2. So if you weigh 200 pounds, thats about 91 kilograms. So you should be eating between 73 and 163 grams of protein per day... which is about what I said above. If you aren't active at all, you're at the lower end of this scale. If you exercise a lot and lift weights, you're towards the higher end.
Types of Protein to Eat What kinds of protein should you eat? I like fish, chicken (white meat), turkey (white meat), soy products, beans, legumes, and eggs (whites only - yokes have a lot of fat). Soy products are a great source of protein... once you get used to the taste. I have totally switched from regular milk to soy milk. It has all the calcium, much less of the saturated fat, and none of the cholesterol of normal milk (even skim milk!) Eat fish twice a week, chicken twice a week, turkey once a week, a vegetarian meal once a week, and then on that seventh day, go ahead and splurge with the pork or beef... just take it easy. Just make sure you choose lean sirloin cuts. Trim off any fat. Beef has a lot of saturated fat in it (it's marbled throughout the meat so you can't just cut it off). Beef is the worst meat for you - as compared to the other popular meats. Actually, if you can get yourself free range beef, it's not that bad for you. The problem is, most of the beef you're going to find is not free range beef (it's very expensive). Cattle that have been eating grass make very lean beef. The problem is that most cattle are fed a crap diet of corn-based products. What they cow eats, you eat... so their beef is loaded with saturated fat. Good v. Bad Protein Also, just about any fish is good for you - I've just listed my personal favorites here. Oh, and make sure you broil, bake, or grill your fish. Avoid frying (if you must fry, use canola oil and lemon juice). There really isn't any bad protein for you, but some protein sources are higher in fat so we'll list them here as bad proteins. I know, I love a good steak myself - but if you're trying to lose weight, try to limit yourself to once-a-week for these meats:
The bad proteins are high in saturated fat. Eat in moderation (like once a week). Rick's Protein Tips Eat protein with every meal. Unlike carbs and fats, your body cannot store protein. You need protein to build muscle (which is very important for weight loss). The moral of the story: eat lean protein with every meal. Breakfast is tough... usually people don't like eating lean meats for breakfast (no... you can't have sausage and bacon!) I personally like to supplement with protein powder in my breakfast cereal milk. A few scrambled egg whites are good too (go for 1 whole egg and 3 whites with a little skim milk to thicken). Supplements are not meals! The term "supplement" means "in addition to" not "in place of." Protein supplements (bars and shakes) are fine... I love my protein shakes after my workouts. However, they are not a replacement for a good meal with lean protein. Try to make sure you eat real lean protein in the form of lean meats (or other whole sources for you vegetarians) at least three times a day. Drink lots of water. I know I've said this before in many places, but if you're eating a lot of protein, you need to keep your water levels up... especially if you have a history of kidney or urinary tract problems. Protein metabolism is tough on your kidneys and liver - it's not a problem for healthy people as long as you drink plenty of water. Aim for a bare minimum of eight, 8oz glasses of water a day... and an extra 10oz for each half-hour you exercise. Protein is highly thermic. There is another benefit of eating protein called the thermic effect of food. You see, certain types of food are more difficult for your body to digest than others. Fats are chemically very easy for your body to digest. Carbs are a little more difficult than fats. Proteins, on the other hand, require many complex chemical reactions for your body to utilize them... hence almost a quarter of the calories in the protein you're eating are burned off just to digest the food! This is a science called thermogenics. For example, if you eat 120 calories (4 oz) of lean chicken, your body will actually expend about 30 calories of that energy just metabolizing the chicken. Now, the moral of the story is that in addition to using the protein to build muscle which helps with weight loss, eating lean protein itself helps to reduce the net calories in the food you eat.
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