Protein is Vital for Controlling Hunger While Losing Weight.

Many dieters do not eat enough protein while dieting -- and this triggers hunger. Some dieters eat much more protein than they need -- and this stops weight loss.

If your body begins to run low on protein, it triggers hunger, cravings, aches, pains, and low energy because it needs protein to keep you healthy -- and it wants you to eat so it can get what it needs to do its job.

However, managing protein on a diet is not quite as straightforward as some "high-protein" diet techniques may lead you to believe. This is because protein is a "dual-use" nutrient. Your body can either use it for tissue maintenance and repair, or burn it for energy.

Under normal circumstances, your body would "prefer" to use protein for tissue maintenance. But it will burn protein for energy instead (1) if you are starving, or (2) if you have just eaten so much protein that it needs to get rid of an excess.

Dieters aren't starving, (it just feels that way ), but with some techniques they are getting "too much" protein. "Too much" simply means that if your body is busy burning off the excess protein you just ate, then it is not burning off the excess fat in your fat cells. And that's not a good way to lose weight.

On the other hand, dieters do need more protein than non-dieters. This is because of the "protein-energy" relationship that has been well-known to physiologists for decades and is explained in the next pages of this section.

All of this just means that dieters need to eat enough protein to prevent hunger but not too much to stop weight loss ("Enough, but not too much", is a familiar theme).

With modern methods, it is easy to strike this protein balance, but you need to understand the issue in order to use the methods effectively.

Additionally, many protein foods contain other nutrients besides protein and some of these other nutrients also affect both hunger & weight loss in their own ways.

For example:

• High protein foods usually contain various fats. Fat is another "dual-use" nutrient. Some fats stop hunger, but most fats just stop you from losing weight. (See the Essential Fatty Acid Section of the site.)
• High protein foods usually contain large amounts of some of the macrominerals. Proper amounts of the macrominerals are essential for preventing hunger and too much of them can cause problems. (See the Vitamins & Minerals Section of the site.)

These issues are also easy to handle using the proper technique.

Background on Protein

Many people kid themselves about the importance of protein when they’re dieting. The short blunt fact is: You need more than you think you need. And if you don’t get enough, you can badly damage yourself on a long diet.

Before I started working out, I used to think things like: “Gee, a whole can (6 oz) of tuna fish, that’s got to be almost enough protein for the whole day”. This kind of thinking was (and is) foolish. It’s not “almost enough”. Sometimes it’s not even “half enough”. You can get yourself into embarrassing and expensive situations by making assumptions like this—which turn out to be wrong or even dangerous. When I dug into the scientific literature on the subject, the answers were all right there—they just weren’t very widely publicized.

Of all the Vital Factors, Protein is arguably the most important. The VLCD researchers certainly thought so, and this is among the reasons they focused so much research effort on it for so many decades. The central focus of their efforts was to find an answer to the critical question “How much protein is needed while dieting in order to ensure safe weight loss?”

This is also a main concern of dieters. However, we add to this a concern with making sure the phenomenon doesn’t make us abort our dieting efforts prematurely. We gratefully use the results of the VLCD research (as well as other research) to help manage this.

As you have certainly realized by now, the major premise of the concept is that you must eat enough of the nutritional things you need or hunger will force you (or trick you) into eating the fattening things you don’t need. You already know that hunger is very good at this. So this way you give your body the nutritional things it needs (without the Calories) before it gets hungery. Protein is one of your main “hunger-taming” tools. The important thing is learning how to eat enough useable protein without getting lots of other Calories in the process.

There are three important issues you must learn to deal with to make sure you get enough useable protein daily.

1. Protein Quality—How to avoid “protein” that doesn’t actually have much protein in it.
2. Protein Quantity—How much protein is right for you.
3. Protein Density—How to avoid the additional Calories that come “mixed in” with many protein sources.

Science gives us good information on all these issues. We’ll discuss them in order.

Protein Quality:
Some Protein ain’t Protein!

Most people know that any given “protein” is really composed of twenty or so different amino acids—nine of which are essential for humans to get from food because our bodies cannot make them from other things. The other amino acids are still required in order to form various other compounds, but they are termed “non-essential” because the body can make them from the essential nine—IF those essential nine are present in sufficient quantities (note the big “IF”). Getting each of the twenty or so individual amino acids in the right quantities is what the body wants, needs, and will-get-hungery-to-make-sure-it-gets.

But each type of “protein” (e.g. in beans, corn, milk, beef, etc.) has completely different quantities of each amino acid. This means that using the word “protein” is a very imprecise way to describe what your body is really trying to get—enough of each needed amino acid.

Unfortunately, when scientists measure the amount of “protein” in foods, the method typically used is to break the food down and measure how many grams of nitrogen it contains. Then they multiply the grams of nitrogen by 6.25 to get the grams of “protein” in the food. That’s the number you usually see in the food charts which food processors are required to put on the food labels under Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (U.S.), Section 101.9(c)(7).

This method does measure the amount of crude protein in the food. But, by itself, it gives no clue as to which amino acids are present in what quantities.

This means that  (for example)  some “protein” could (in theory) be composed of nothing but the thirteen non-essential amino acids. In other words, it could have no essential amino acids in it at all and still (theoretically) be counted as “protein”. In this case, it would be such low quality protein that to your body it would not be real protein at all—just another source of Calories. And as always, your body would use the Calories and then make you hungry again for the real protein you didn’t get but still need. In reality, low quantities of even one essential amino acid (EAA) will make dietary “protein” nearly useless for tissue maintenance and repair—which means it can only be used as energy.

When protein that is not used for tissue maintenance is used as energy, it provides about four (4) Calories per gram—the same amount as carbohydrate. Obviously, the ideal we shoot for is to provide exactly the amount of protein that the body needs for tissue maintenance and have nothing left over for energy. This ideal, of course, can rarely be achieved, so most authorities will point out that too little protein is (eventually) dangerous to health while too much merely slows weight loss. Therefore, as in most areas of life, we need to choose an appropriate balance in order to get the results we want.

Nutrition science has long recognized that protein that is deficient in one or more of the essential amino acids is greatly reduced in its usefulness as an essential nutrient. Logically enough, nutritionists have coined another couple of terms to refer to this fact. These terms are: “high-quality proteins” and “low-quality proteins”. High-quality proteins have all essential amino acids present in at least sufficient, if not perfect, quantities. Low-quality proteins do not. Most high-quality proteins are from animal sources. Most low-quality proteins are from plant sources.

So if someone tells you that (e.g.) beans are a good source of protein, you can tell them that crude bean protein has some, but not enough, of the essential amino acids methionine and cystine. This means it’s a low-quality source of what your body thinks is protein. The reference 70-kg (154 lb) male would have to eat about 4 cups (728 grams, with about 1000 Calories) of navy beans each day just to get his official RDI (56g) of protein (using methionine as the “limiting” amino acid). For sedentary people, this would be using up too many Calories to satisfy Protein Factor requirements before even beginning to satisfy the other Vital Factors. And—as we will see below—the official RDI for protein is not enough protein when you are dieting.

Our way we simply avoid this issue entirely by using only “high-quality” protein foods that have enough of all the amino acids.)

Since most vegetable proteins (like beans) are deficient in one or more of the essential amino acids, they are—by themselves—not very useful for diet purposes. Therefore, for the rest of this discussion, whenever I mention protein or amounts of protein, I am talking about high-quality proteins such as those listed in Table 15: Protein & Calories in Foods.

Protein Quantity:
What’s Minimum? What’s Enough?

In dieting, the most important thing about protein is getting enough of the right kind of it. The second most important thing is avoiding all the fat and other Calories that tend to come mixed in with it. Further, if your body doesn’t actually need all the real protein you eat at the time you eat it, it just treats the excess as Calories (energy) instead of burning fat for energy. This is not exactly what we’re trying to accomplish when dieting.

You need enough protein or your body will create hunger to make you eat. If you get too much, that means you are getting extra Calories that make losing weight harder. So exactly how much is “enough-but-not-too-much?” On your own, that can be a little tricky to decide. Fortunately, science and the food labeling system give us some pretty good answers (though not perfect ones, as we shall see).

The U.S. Food and Nutrition Board says that 97.5% of Americans will get enough dietary protein if they eat 0.8-grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. (That’s about 0.4-grams per pound of body weight). Most other countries’ official RDIs are close to this. But for dieters there are some problems with using this RDI.

Problem One: Body Structure

The Food and Nutrition Board’s protein RDA definitions are probably adequate for people who are not trying to lose weight. But various weight-loss researchers have realized that this definition is too simple for people who are trying to lose weight. Here, is a somewhat exaggerated example, one of the issues they confronted: Consider the situation of a person who weighs (e.g.) 300 pounds (136 kg). If this guy is a competitive weight lifter, he’s got a completely different body structure than someone who just eats a lot of food. The lifter’s body is mostly muscle. The eater’s body is mostly fat. Are they both going to need the same amount of protein? Hardly! Why? Because the lifter’s body weight is mostly composed of muscle cells, which are mostly protein, and need a constant supply of dietary protein for maintenance and repair. The eater’s body weight is mostly composed of fat cells, which are mostly fat (duhh!), and need very little protein for maintenance and repair. Therefore, these two 300 pound people do not have the same protein requirement—even though they weigh the same amount.

There is also a second (and more important) reason to expect that the normal protein RDI is not adequate for dieters.

Problem Two: The Protein-Energy Relationship

It has been well-established by nutrition research that when Calorie (energy) intake is inadequate (as we want it to be when we’re trying to lose weight) then some protein is diverted from tissue-building and repair into meeting the energy needs of the body. This means that the need for protein in the diet is increased when the amount of energy (Calories) in the diet is decreased. In at least some cases, this can be a very significant effect. Kishi and associates, reported experiments with young men in 1978 showing that decreasing energy from approximately 4000 Calories/day to approximately 3000 Calories/day would nearly double the protein requirement (from 35 g/day to 72 g/day in a 70-kg (154 lb) person). The RDA for protein at this weight is only 56 grams. Obviously, sedentary individuals and others—particularly the elderly—require less energy than the above 3000 Calories just to maintain weight—much less lose any. This inverse protein-energy relationship has significant meaning for dieters. It lends further support to the observation made during VLCD investigations that larger amounts of protein—in the range of 1.2 to 1.5 grams per kilogram of ideal body weight—are required to prevent loss of muscle mass during serious weight loss. There is also further confirming evidence of these amounts from the field of sports medicine where experiments have shown that at least 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of IBW (Ideal Body Weight) per day is required while dieting to maintain physical exercise efficiency as measured by VO2 max. See ideal body weight and more on… exercise.)

For reference, 1.2–1.5 grams per kg IBW would be 84-g to 105-g of protein per day for the person with an IBW of 70-kg (154-lb). That 6-ounce can of tuna fish I mentioned earlier has only 35–40 grams of protein. Of course, VLCDs tend to be truly severe Calorie restriction diets and this diet is not a VLCD. On this diet, you don’t restrict Calories to below 1200 Calories/day. Therefore, it is possible that you may not strictly need quite this much protein. But dietary protein is one area where getting too much is unequivocally better than getting too little—until it pushes you over your daily Calorie limit.

So What’s The Ideal Amount, and How Do You Know?

VLCD and other researchers realized the importance of the above two issues and decided that the best way to determine an individual’s protein needs was to begin with the concept of Ideal Body Weight (IBW) rather than simple body weight. Ideal Body Weight basically means the amount you would weigh if you had ideal (“normal”) proportions of muscle and fat. How is this defined?

Most researchers have agreed that the best definition of Ideal Body Weight (ideal proportions of muscle and fat) is the body weight that correlates with the lowest death rates. This is an intuitively satisfying definition. After all, if you live the longest possible time, that probably means you’re healthier than you would have been otherwise, which means your body is as satisfied with your situation as is possible. It also means you can do more of what you want for longer, and so are probably happier with your life (other things being equal).

As we discussed in more on… body weight & calories, the best measure of weight related to life span remains the 1959 Desirable Body Weight Table produced by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and based on the Build and Blood Pressure Study of 1959. There have been various attempts over the years to create alternative measures to this table. Some of the results of these attempts have been based on science, others have merely been “well-intentioned” in one way or another. But the Desirable Weight Table remains a standard (if not the standard) for those who attempt to relate weight to life span and health. (For a more comprehensive view of the issue of alternative measures, see Simopoulos 1995) This table was also the basis of the measure used in the classic Framingham Heart Study. For convenience, the data is restated below. (The values in Table 13 are identical to those in Table 3 and are restated here for your convenience.)

To use the table below,

1. Find your height in the first or last column as appropriate.
2. Find your weight in the middle columns as appropriate.
3. This is your “Ideal” Body Weight (IBW).

Ideal Body Weights - English Measurements

BODYWEIGHTS ASSOCIATED WITH LONGEST LIFE SPAN

Now we will use the IBW you found above to figure out how many grams of protein you need daily to keep your body happy and not hungry. Later we will determine how much of each type of protein food you would need to eat in order to get this number of grams of protein.

Ideal Body Weights - Metric Measurements

BODYWEIGHTS ASSOCIATED WITH LONGEST LIFE SPAN

Table 14: Your Protein Requirement

YOUR DAILY PROTEIN REQUIREMENT

To use the above table, 

write in your Ideal Body Weight (IBW) in pounds (col. 1)

divide to get kilograms (col 2&3)

multiply again to get the grams of protein you need daily (col 4&5)

If you already know your kilogram weight, enter it directly in column 3. The amount in column (5) is the number of grams of high-quality protein you need each day when you are dieting.

You have most likely noticed that in the table above I have used 1.5 grams/day as the protein Daily Value factor (the upper end of the 1.2–1.5 grams/kg/day range discussed earlier). If for some reason this amount is just unacceptable to you, you can recalculate using the lower end of the range (1.2 grams/day). However, I strongly recommend against going any lower than this, because the available evidence—much of it cited in the references—simply does not support less protein in dieting situations. (See also the section: Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Protein?.)

OK, now you know approximately how many grams of protein you need each day to keep hunger at bay. You should remember this number. It’s uniquely “yours” and it is a critical number for keeping your hunger under control.

Our next step is to move on to giving you some idea of how much of each protein food you need to eat in order to get this daily amount of protein—without getting a ton of Calories besides.

Protein Density:
What about Super Premium Ice Cream?

Super premium ice cream…(yum)… Yes, it does have some protein. It also has “a few” other Calories, so if you ever eat any, the Liar’s Diet is about the only weight-loss diet you can possibly be doing at the time. (So relax and enjoy it—just don’t lie about it.) There are also “one or two” other foods in this category.

To resume our discussion of protein foods that don’t have excess Calories, Table 15: Protein & Calories in Foods shows some commonly available low-Calorie high-protein foods. These are generally the ones you should be trying to eat while on this diet. Use this table and the daily protein requirement calculation you just made above to determine how much of them you need daily. (To help you do this, I’ve provided a simple method in Table 16: Your Protein Food Requirement\.) You will see that, in general, seafood is lower in total Calories per gram of protein than other high-quality protein foods and is therefore more suitable for dieters.

You should try to select foods from closer to the top of the table in order to get the most protein with the fewest Calories. Note that the last column of the table shows you the number of Calories you get per gram of protein for each of these foods. Obviously the lower this number the better. (Gourmet seafood cooks will love this.)