Why Protein Is Crucial For Your Fat Loss Goals
The key macronutrient to optimizing fat loss.
I’m sure you’ve heard this countless times when trying to lose weight.
“Make sure you eat enough protein!”
This is one of the few things that pretty much everyone agrees with when it comes to optimizing weight loss. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say “you should lower your protein intake while on a diet.”
So why is protein intake so important during weight loss? To answer this question, we need to expand on what weight loss actually means.
Simply put, weight loss factors in any sort of body mass lost. I think we forget that most of your body probably isn’t fat mass. If your body fat percentage is less than 50% (which it will be for most), then most of your actual bodyweight is not fat mass. I am currently about 18% body fat. Making around 82% of my weight not fat mass.
Why Is This Relevant?
This is relevant because losing weight doesn’t always mean losing fat. It most likely will be fat mass if you’re actually losing weight over time, but there are other forms of weight you can lose. Water weight, glycogen retention and muscle mass to name a few. In fact, you can actually lose some weight from your organs during weight loss.
Any organ loss would be very small and nothing to worry about in most cases. The example above showed an average 0.013 kg drop in kidney mass over 2 years when an average of 5.2 kg of weight was lost. This was just to demonstrate that you don’t only lose weight from your fat cells.
The relevance here comes with optimizing your ratio of fat mass lost. So if you lose 10 pounds, you’ll want most, if not all of it to be from fat mass. In reality, it most likely won’t all be fat, but you can optimize that ratio.
This is where protein comes into play. Aside from fat mass, muscle mass is another tissue your body can break down for energy. It usually won’t be your body’s first option, but it is a viable one. You see, when you diet and put yourself into an energy deficit, (meaning you’re consuming less energy than you’re using) your body has to tap into it’s energy reserves to carry out your daily living and keep the lights on. Similar to when you’re spending more money than you’re making. You have to start spending from your saved money instead of with your incoming cash flow.
I like to think of fat mass as your everyday savings account and your muscle mass as your investments. Sure you can pull from your investments if you need to, but you’d prefer to live off your cash flow. Also, given the energy costs of protein metabolism, it’s not the most efficient tissue to use for energy. Not to mention the fact that if you’re aiming for a certain look with your fat loss goals, then maintaining muscle is an important thing to focus on.
There are several ways to help preserve muscle mass while in an energy deficit. A high protein intake is one way. In fact, the evidence suportting this is large and diverse. Which is rare when it comes to science. High protein intakes during energy restriction increase lean mass preservation in elderly populations. Also in resistance trained lean athletes, even higher protein intakes have been shown to help preserve lean muscle mass while under caloric restriction
Which, I think makes complete sense. The leaner you are, the less fat mass you have (cash flow) and the more muscle you’ll have (investments) if you’re considered “trained”. So it makes sense that if high protein helps preserve muscle mass while in a deficit, then even higher protein intakes could help populations with less fat and more muscle to actually use.
This is why you never stop hearing coaches and nutritionists talk about the importance of consuming high protein while dieting. Your body is breaking down tissue for energy. So we want to avoid the use of muscle mass being used in that process. Leaving most of that breakdown being from fat mass.
Common Obstacles
There are two common obstacles I want to address with increasing your protein while on a diet.
1. The constraints of an energy restriction along with increasing protein.
2. The effort and planning needed to increase protein intake.
There is an energy constraint to this. You’ll need to reduce overall energy intake while increasing overall protein intake. Similar to putting yourself on a budget while increasing spending somewhere else. You can do this, but it takes more effort and planning.
This makes meal prepping and meal planning more important while on a diet. Most convenient options will not be high protein, too. Making this planning even more important. It will be rare that you just stumble upon a high protein intake while in a deficit. This will take more planning.
Here are some basic tips for achieving this:
-Swap high fat dairy for low fat dairy
-Swap fatty cuts of meat for lean cuts of meat
-More egg whites, less egg yolks (not because yolks are bad)
-Drink a protein shake. Have 2 scoops a day if need be
-Swap snacks for high protein sources. (protein bars, jerky, cottage cheese, greek yogurt etc.)
-Swap some carbs sources like rice and potatoes for legumes. Which will have carbs but also moderate protein content
This touches on the second obstacle, effort and planning.
Achieving high protein while in a deficit will take more effort and planning than you’re used to. Foods that I listed above will need to be bought ahead of time and made easily accessible for you. As if they’re not around, other convenient foods won’t often have high protein doses.
Also if you end up eating out more, you’re less likely to get high protein/ low fat options. Takeout food will usually have more oil/butter, as that will make them more delicious. These aren’t bad foods either. They are just more energy dense and within the constraints of a calorie deficit, that isn’t ideal.
The importance of high protein/low fat while dieting is because of the calorie restriction. High Protein/high fat also means high calorie. So if you’re aiming to increase protein with minimal calorie increases, lean sources are your best bet.
Preparing meals ahead of time and making these high protein sources widely accessible is something I strongly recommend.
How Much Protein Do You Need?
Using the studies above, the recommendations vary. In the older adults meta-analysis the benefits were seen at 1 gram or more of protein per KG of bodyweight per day. While in the lean athletes review, the recommendation was in the range of 2.3–3.1 grams per KG of fat free mass per day (meaning your total weight minus the amount of fat you have).
These ranges vary a lot, but here is my basic recommendation. Follow a sliding scale of 0.7 grams to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. I highlighted pound because studies usually use kilos but in North America, we use pounds.
This scale is simplified but it will do the trick. Essentially, the leaner you are the higher you would go on that scale. The higher your body fat and the higher your weight, I would recommend hanging near the lower end.
There are other ways you can get more specific targets, but this will cover most bases.
If you prefer, you can hang around the higher end even if you don’t need to. This is personal preference. You just have to remember that you are still within the confines of a calorie defcit. So the higher your protein is, the lower your fat/carbs have to be to still fit within your daily calorie totals.
Finally, if you track your food and realize that you’re lower than ideal, don’t panic. Optimization is not an absolute term here. Sure you may not be at the optimal range based on the evidence, but any increase will make a relative improvement for you. If you get caught up in absolute optimization, it might all seem like too much and be more discouraging than it needs to be.
Final Thoughts
Protein intake is a crucial component of fat loss optimization. If you’re in a calorie deficit, you will lose weight regardless. Protein just seems to help more of that weight be fat and less be from muscle breakdown.
If you have been eating lower protein, then this will take some adjusting to. One way to to make that adjustment easier is to plan ahead and make higher protein foods easily accessible to you. Grocery shopping and meal prepping to some degree plays a big role in this.
Also, there are two other things you’ll want to focus on in the attempt of optimizing fat loss and preserving muscle mass.
Strength training. Lifting weights and increasing protein intake is probably the best combination you can have in your arsenal in the attempt to preserve muscle mass while losing fat.
Getting enough sleep. One study that controlled for calories (meaning both groups consumed similar calories based on their lab tested resting metabolic rates) both yielded a similar amount of weight loss — 2.9kg and 3.0kg in two weeks. Except the 8.5 hours of sleep per night group lost 1.6kg of fat mass and the 5.5 hours of sleep per night group lost only 0.6 kg from fat mass.
In summary, increasing protein is something you really should be doing to optimize your fat loss results while on a diet. The sliding scale of 0.7–1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day will be a simplified tool to help you set appropriate targets.
Your fat loss strategies do not need to be complicated. They just need to be sustainable while yielding results. Increasing protein may have one of the highest return on investments when compared anything else you may do to lose weight. Making it a priority on the fat loss checklist, in my opinion.
-Coach Dylan
References:
1. Changes in skeletal muscle and organ size after a weight-loss intervention in overweight and obese type 2 diabetic patients
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/105/1/78/4637484
2. The Energy Costs of Protein Metabolism: Lean and Mean on Uncle Sam’s Team
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK224633/
3. Effects of dietary protein intake on body composition changes after weight loss in older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26883880/
4. A systematic review of dietary protein during caloric restriction in resistance trained lean athletes: a case for higher intakes
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24092765/
5. Preserving Healthy Muscle during Weight Loss
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421125/
6. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421125/