Reference To
The effects of consuming a high protein diet (4.4 g/kg/d) on body composition in resistance-trained individuals https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-19
I tend to keep my nutrition and training advice fairly simple.
Q1: How do I gain more muscle?
A1: Eat a calorie surplus and progressively overload.
Q2: How do I lose more body fat? I’ve lost 10lbs over the last 8 weeks on 2540 calories, but now my bodyweight won’t budge!?
A2: Eat less calories.
Generally, that’s all that needs to be said, if the person asking the question is following a good diet already, which if they are a client of mine, I would certainly hope is the case.
Lets create a hypothetical scenario though, from Q2 above.
Client: GettingShreddedBrah
Goals: Get shredded (fat loss)
Starting body weight: 192lbs
Current body weight: 182lbs
Macros: P200 C300 F60
Calories: 2540
This client is eating 2540 calories and has plateaued with his fat loss.
So what do we do?
Drop calories of course!
As I stated earlier, generally that’s what i would do. Simple. But this post isn’t about what I would generally do, it’s about when a calorie is not just a calorie and that all calories are not actually created equal.
Instead of dropping calories, we could increase protein and drop carbs, keeping calories the same.
Don’t be silly, 2540cal is 2540cal. It will make no difference. Or will it?
I had a weightloss client recently ask if we could substitute some protein for carbohydrates, as his protein was rather high and carbohydrate intake was getting fairly low. Off the top of my head, protein was abit over 300g/day and carbohydrate abit over 200g/day. I said sure, happy experiment if you wish. So, that week we swapped 100g of protein with 100g of carbohydrate. One week later, this client checked in 3lbs heavier. We then decided to swap the extra 100g of carbohydrates back to protein. =P
Throughout my own weightloss phase, over the last 40 or so weeks and having played around with amounts of protein during past contest preps, as well as many clients, over the years, I can guarantee that consuming excess protein from things like chicken breast, Turkey breast, kangaroo (lean unprocessed animals, etc), has no negative effect on body composition and is a great was to increase satiety (feeling full/satisfied), as long as you equate for the extra fats you will then be consuming also. For example, even though chicken breast is very lean, if you ate an extra 1000g of it per day, that’s an extra 20g of fats also, so you need to adjust the rest of your diet to decrease 20g fat somewhere else, to make up for that.
So, when I say weight gain/weight loss is purely about calories in Vs calories out, that is generally true, but there are always exceptions to the rule.
For those of us that lift and enjoy carrying around excess muscle tissue and lower levels of body fat, high protein diets are great when it comes to a combination of fat loss/muscle gain/muscle retention and feeling satiated.
If you are currently maintaining your bodyweight on fairly low calories, whilst trying to stay lean, but struggling because you feel hungry and weak, I say try increasing your protein intake from any lean, unprocessed animal source and see what happens.
For example, lets use GettingShreddedBrah again. We could take his current maintenance calories of 2540, which consist of the macros: P200 C300 F60, chuck in a heap more chicken breast and kangaroo steak, adding extra 100g of protein per day, increasing is calories to 2940, macros: P300 C300 F60 and he will feel more full/satisfied after his meals, probably feel stronger in the gym and not gain any body fat. Winning all round if you ask me.
High protein FTW. ^_^
https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-19
