A High Protein Diet and Weight Loss

Americans are fat. This is true even if you set aside the flawed model of using body mass index to determine whether somebody is underweight, at a healthy weight, or overweight. Everywhere you go there are large guts foretelling the coming of an American through a door, into an aisle, or around a building. Unfortunately, despite what liars claim, it's not possible to be healthy at any weight. Being fat (or severely underweight, but that's far less prevalent) negatively impacts your health. Perhaps you're a far American. Perhaps you want to change that. I've written about how exercise can help with weight loss but a far more important factor is diet. In this post I will describe how a high protein diet can help you lose weight.

As I'm wont to do, I'm going to start this post by blaming the government. The USDA publishes a food pyramid. Supposedly it's a guide to eating healthy. Like most things the government produces, it's garbage. I'll go so far as to say it's dangerous because it encourages overeating and therefore promotes obesity.

The foundation of the pyramid is carbohydrates and the very top of the pyramid is... more carbohydrates. The problem with the base of the pyramid being carbohydrates is that carbohydrates are easy for your body to digest. Your body needs to expend far fewer calories digesting carbohydrates than it does protein:

On average, a person uses about 10% of their daily energy expenditure digesting and absorbing food, but this percentage changes depending on the type of food you eat.

Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%).

Thus, if you eat 100 calories from protein, your body uses 20-30 of those calories to digest and absorb the protein. You’d be left with a net 70-80 calories. Pure carbohydrate would leave you with a net 90-95 calories, and fat would give you a net 97-100 calories.

Calories are the key to weight management. If you want to gain weight, you need to consume more calories than you use. If you want to stay at your current weight, you need to consume the same number of calories as you use. If you want to lose weight, you need to consume fewer calories than you use. The key is that consumed calories in this case specifically refers to digested calories.

Not all calories are equal. Some require more energy to digest. Fats require the least amount of energy to digest. Carbohydrates require just a bit more energy to digest, but the difference is marginal. Then there are proteins. Proteins require the most energy to digest and the difference is significant. Between one fifth and almost one third of the calories in protein are burned up by your body just digesting them. Somebody who eats more calories in the form of protein will absorb fewer calories than somebody who eats the same number of calories in the form of carbohydrates.

There's another advantage to protein that I alluded to in the beginning of this post. When I wrote that the base of the food pyramid being carbohydrates encourages overeating, I was referring to the protein leverage hypothesis:

The protein leverage hypothesis states that human beings will prioritize the consumption of protein in food over other dietary components, and will eat until protein needs have been met, regardless of energy content, thus leading to over-consumption of foodstuffs when their protein content is low.

You've likely heard that protein satiates more than carbohydrates. The protein leverage hypothesis explains why. Proteins are the building blocks of your body. According to the protein leverage hypothesis, you will continue to experience hunger until your body has the building blocks it needs. If you consume a high amount of protein, your body will have the building blocks it needs and cease sending hunger signals. Thus a high protein diet will make you want to eat less.

Another advantage comes from combining a high protein diet with hypertrophy training (body building or focusing on increasing muscle mass). Muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat:

The takeaway from this article should be pretty straightforward: The next time someone asks how many calories a pound of muscle burns, the bros and the nerds are both wrong. The bros pulled a random figure out of their ass (or they’re just passing along a figure that someone else pulled out of some other ass), and the nerds are only correct if you never leave your bed. When you account for the impact on both active and non-active energy expenditure, we can estimate that each pound of muscle you gain will increase your total energy expenditure by about 9-10 calories per day in total.

It's not a huge difference but gaining 10 pounds of muscle (a very achievable goal) increases your daily energy expenditure by 90 to 100 calories.

In the description of this article I wrote, "The foundation of the [USDA] pyramid is carbohydrates. It should be protein." I was being a bit hyperbolic. A pyramid is actually a stupid way to model nutrition. My rule is to make a majority of my diet fruits, vegetables, and protein. I have a protein goal and try to make it every day (I admit that I don't always succeed). I consume some carbohydrates too, but they make up the smallest percentage of my calorie intake. This has proven to be a winning strategy for me especially when combined with weight training. I've slowly lost fat and gained muscle. I've never been much overweight but I definitely look better in the mirror with this diet than before. If you're overweight, try adjusting your diet so you're consuming a lot more protein and see how it goes for you.