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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, good morning everyone. So today's topic is protein because we say track your protein, protein is important, but some of you might be thinking, why is it important? Am I struggling to increase my protein? A lot of people do, some people find it easy. In your app, you'll be given the optimal amount of protein.
Speaker 1:There's a range, right? But we're on the lower range of optimal because once you go higher than what you're given, there's kind of diminishing returns in a sense. But going over on your protein, so say now you've hit your calorie target and then you decide I'm still hungry and you go over your calorie target with more protein, that's absolutely fine. Protein typically doesn't really convert to stored fat. The process can happen.
Speaker 1:It does happen sometimes, but it's quite limited. So if you are to go over your calories by any macronutrient, it is protein. So let's have a look at the first topic. The first question is, does more protein speed up weight loss or make weight loss more efficient? So it's more c 88 in the carbs and fat, so protein helps you feel fuller, faster, delays hunger between meals, that's obviously going to help.
Speaker 1:It also has a higher thermic effect and other macronutrients, so this means we burn off more calories digesting protein than other macronutrients like carbs and fat. So if you're eating more protein, one part of your metabolism is thermic effect of food. So your metabolism is made up of four parts. You've got your BMR, your base, your existence calories, what you need to function, what you need for your organs and all this stuff. You've got your exercise calories, you've got your non exercise calories, so anything you do with no exercise such as housework, walking, fidgeting, and then you've got the thermic effect of food, which is like usually 10 to 15% of your metabolic rate.
Speaker 1:So you can increase SAB by a few percentage points by going on a higher protein diet, so you'll be burning more calories digesting the food you've eaten. Now I'm not saying this is gonna be a massive difference for loads of people, but when you combine that with a bit more steps and stuff, you start seeing how this comes together. So if you eat lean protein with most of your meals or like how your protein diet most of your meals, does that mean you're going to lose more weight as well? And there's a study done by the University of Copenhagen in Denmark wanted to answer this question. So the researchers basically searched for weight loss studies, compared diets high in protein to standard protein.
Speaker 1:They excluded studies on athletes and people underweight on pharmaceutical treatments. So most of the studies they used were in their analysis compared protein to carbs, 35 experiments, average age is 46 years old, BMI 35, even two thirds of women. So great. We're not talking about athletes here, not talking about elite athletes, because a lot of talk is about that. We're talking about potentially the kind of average person right now.
Speaker 1:Okay? So here's what the study found. Participants in the higher protein group lost on average 1.6 kilograms, so 3.5 pounds more than the standard protein groups. Right? Higher versus standard.
Speaker 1:Okay? So you're looking here at kind of like 20 to 30% of your calories coming from protein versus about 10 to 15%. Some of the studies are higher protein 20, some of them are 25%. There could be improvements done to this study, but when you're looking at this in general and other studies as well, it's the same type of thing. It's like when you go higher protein, which is what the app will give you, you don't have to go, oh my god, am I on the right protein, what should I do?
Speaker 1:It's the target in front of you daily. If you eat that amount of protein and hit your calorie target, not only are you going to lose more fat, not lose more weight, more of that weight loss comes from fat. You can increase your thermic effect of food, you're gonna make hunger signals a bit less powerful in a sense. You're going to feel fuller from your meals. All of this aids you in your weight loss journey so it makes complete sense that protein becomes a really important part with calories.
Speaker 1:That's why the two of those together are very important combination. That's kind of from the weight loss perspective. When it comes to muscle loss, you wanna keep the muscle. Okay? You want to keep your muscle.
Speaker 1:As age, typically what happens is activity goes down, muscle mass goes, and muscle is expensive to build. Right? So when you lose muscle, you're losing function. Some of you listening might be in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 30s, Now is the time to start thinking about at least maintaining the muscle mass you've got. You don't want go downwards.
Speaker 1:And you know what happens in YoYo dieting that really isn't spoke about much is that YoYo diets that put people on severe deficits, and we'll never do a severe deficit, we will never say to you, alright, you want to lose weight, do you? And you go, yes. And we go, okay, what weight do want to be? Well I want to be 30 pounds lighter. And we say, okay, by when?
Speaker 1:And you go, well, I want to be 30 pounds lighter in six weeks. Okay, then the app will calculate the deficit you need for six weeks and will give you ridiculously low calories. That's only every calorie tracking app works, because they want you to visualize your fat loss in a nice way. But the hidden dark secret or the dark kind of what's the word? Like the dark energy, the Scott of that, is you're gonna basically lose a hell of a lot of muscle mass as well as losing your fat mass.
Speaker 1:So yes, you lose weight, but you lose muscle as well and you feel worse. And what happens when you've lost muscle? You're not going to build when you put the weight back on, which happens. So say now you've lost 10 pounds of fat and five pounds of muscle, just as an example, and then you go, I can't sustain this. You put on 10 to 15 pounds, right, and most of that will be fat, or you put most of that fat on water weight.
Speaker 1:You haven't reclaimed that muscle loss, so maybe put one pound of muscle back on. So you've lost four pounds of muscle. Now imagine doing this over and over and over. Your muscle mass goes down and down and down and down. Your fat mass goes up and up and up, which means your body fat percentage shoots up as well.
Speaker 1:This is not what we want. This is one of the worst outcomes you can have and it's not spoke about enough. Maintaining muscle mass is a priority when it comes to weight loss. That's why it's better to go slower, that's why we'll never deviate from this. I don't care how fast you're to lose weight, it's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:Guys losing muscle at the same time as losing weight is a disaster, especially for your long term health. So they looked at people 65, observational studies have shown higher protein intakes, basically maintaining muscle with age, But observational, that's not a causation right now. The short term study, six months or less, have showed mixed results with this. And there's a new study, Denmark again, go on Denmark, Yulong study, experimental study to see how consuming a twice daily protein supplement with or without resistance training would affect muscle mass in older adults. Okay?
Speaker 1:I wanna go through this quite quick. They thought higher protein would benefit muscle size and strength. And the other one was maybe you need some light exercise to stimulate muscle growth or maintenance as well. One hundred and eighty four healthy adults over the age of 65, randomly assigned into five interventions, carb supplement alone which had no protein, collagen protein, low quality protein basically, whey protein supplementation, higher quality protein, whey protein and some light intensity resistance training three times a and then whey protein supplementation with heavy resistance training three times a week. Supplements were taken twice daily.
Speaker 1:All supplement and by the way, they're using supplements here because it's just easier. You can eat food instead. Okay? This is not to say supplements better than food. It's just for research purposes, it's bit easier.
Speaker 1:So supplements have 20 grams of protein and 10 grams of carbs per serving serving, typically quite a normal protein drink. Right? What do you think is gonna happen here? So if you didn't if you didn't add any exercise, there was no change in muscle size or strength, regardless of which one you took, including calves only. People who took whey protein and lifted heavy weights three times a week saw significant increases in muscle size and strength compared to lower intensity ones.
Speaker 1:So, obviously, that makes sense. We know that. You do add weights two, three times a week. You can even use body weight. You can start at home.
Speaker 1:It's brilliant for you if you wanna if you wanna add it in. Adherence to exercise was higher for those who did the home based low intensity program. Okay? So, again, another another important point here. Like I just mentioned, doing them from home can help.
Speaker 1:Now here's the important thing. Even if you don't do exercise, higher protein, so having the high quality protein supplement, didn't reduce muscle size. This is important because you may not be interested in saying I wanna add muscle right now and that's fine. You might say that's that's that's no problem. The limitation of this study is they didn't put people on the higher protein amount that you should have.
Speaker 1:So you know the last study I spoke about, the optimal protein range to be in, one point six grams per kg body weight, the app will give you, they didn't really quite reach that. So whilst they did intake some protein throughout the day, if they did take the minimum they probably would have seen, well most of them would have seen at least maintenance which will happen anyway, but maybe even a bit of size increase potentially, maybe a bit of strength increase. This is an interesting study and I think the research is going in the right direction with this now, they're doing more and more on this. The main takeaway from this study is that protein combined with some weights or some resistance training is brilliant for you, long term health. So if you're thinking of doing exercise, thinking of a plan, you don't know what to do, you say right, I'm going to do a home workout and I'm going to do some weights twice or three times a week and that's enough for me for the rest of my life, happy days.
Speaker 1:If you don't want to go to the gym, don't want go to classes, you can do that. If you don't want to do that right now, you can't be bothered to do it or doesn't fit into your routine, higher protein is still very important because you're maintaining what you've got muscle wise. And it makes fat loss easier, it makes fat loss more efficient. So again, protein is turbocharged by a stimulus, which is weights, but maybe something to think about in the future. One more study I wanted to cover which I think is important for you guys to know.
Speaker 1:So there's a new hypothesis about obesity and it's called protein dilution. This is still in the early stages, I'm not saying this is bang on true, they're still looking into it, but here's the hypothesis and the thinking behind it. After millions of years of human evolution, we're now kind of eating ourselves to death. It's kind of very well, Most of our existence we haven't had enough food to do that, so we've really just been boom in the last hundred years or so absolutely annihilating food. And it's easier to eat more food, we've fast food, we've got foods, liquids, everything is easier to consume food.
Speaker 1:This study and this author has got something called protein leverage hypothesis. Here's how it goes. Humans, like other species, have a specific appetite for protein. Our appetite for protein drives our overall food consumption. We keep eating until we're satisfied our protein needs, even if that means consuming far more calories than we need to maintain our weight.
Speaker 1:But it's not as simple as seeking a specific quantity of protein. If that were the case, we'd lose our appetite after we consume however much we needed. What we seek is a ratio of protein to other macronutrients. Now here's where it gets tricky. Protein consumption according to a 2020 study is consistently around 16% of total calories in The US.
Speaker 1:The same is true for other countries even though the percentages of carbs and fat can be very different. If the percentage of calories from protein hasn't changed at the population level, how can protein leverage explain obesity epidemic? Brings us to protein dilution. Even a small dilution of protein in someone's diet, that is a decrease in the percentage calories from protein and a corresponding increase in calories from carbs and fat can lead to a disproportionately large increase in how much they eat. That's how protein exerts leverage over our appetite and drives us to eat more than we need.
Speaker 1:It also works in reverse as you probably know. The higher the percentage of calories from protein, the less we eat. This is actually documented. You won't be shocked to learn that highly processed foods are most likely to dilute pro protein with carbs and fat. That's especially true for high fat, low protein meals.
Speaker 1:Fat has the highest energy density, the number of calories per gram of food, which makes it way too easy to eat way too much. And as we gain weight, protein leverage creates a feedback loop. We seek more protein because we have a larger body to feed. We eat more food in pursuit of that protein and then we gain even more weight. But here's the exceptions.
Speaker 1:Protein leverage is not linear. It appears to be strongest when calories from protein are in the 10 to 15% range. For example, let's say you're wired to seek 15% protein but your meal pattern gives you just 12 or 13%. The small amount of protein dilution can have a powerful effect on your appetite. But when protein is extremely diluted and calories from protein are around 5%, hunger stops increasing.
Speaker 1:It's like your body and brain click the protein leverage off switch. No protein requirements are the same throughout life, they change over the years. Most of you probably in the 13 to 17% range of eating calories and protein, so you're 17% of your calories and protein. If you're following the protein we give you, you're at least in the 20% range, so you're doing exactly what's needed here to kind of lower your hunger levels. We still don't know a lot about this, it's very new, it's quite intriguing.
Speaker 1:We do know though that a higher protein diet so there's a research study where they put people on a higher protein diet versus lower protein and then they told them to eat whatever they wanted afterwards. So you can say, hey, you're eating this high protein diet, but then after 1PM you can eat whatever you want. And the group that had high protein, so 20% plus of the calories, they just ate less. It's not that they were told to eat less, they were told to eat whatever they wanted. They just ate much less, they just weren't as hungry, their hunger signals were down and their fullness from the meat was up.
Speaker 1:So we know that's true about protein, is it documented? But is it true because of this? It's a question for us to maybe think about and hopefully there's more research coming out. But again it's another important part, it's like get your protein up, put these things into place. Why make life harder for yourself when if at the end of the day all you've got to do is bump your protein up a bit.
Speaker 1:And it's not even to extreme levels. You think of your meals and you have two meals a day or three meals a day, just have 30 grams of protein per meal, you are pretty much there. If you need another bumper, you got your protein yogurts full of amazing stuff. You You got your protein yogurts. If you want, you can go your protein bars.
Speaker 1:You can do those things. But it's it's better to ideally get it from food or if you need clear whey protein as a drink or your whey protein drinks or you can create a whey protein shake that's like a milkshake. You can add whey protein to your oats. Like, can do a lot of things to boost things up. And then you're putting yourself in a really strong position.
Speaker 1:You've got your deficit number, which is a moderate deficit, which means it's not gonna be extreme and you're not gonna have that extreme backlash from it. You're eating enough protein, you can maintain muscle mass, make your hunger signals lower, satiety signals are improved. This hypothesis, if it's true, then your body's like, oh, we got our protein needs to satisfy. Brilliant. Don't push us to eat more calories subconsciously.
Speaker 1:This is it. Makes makes the game a lot easier. So that's the protein in a nutshell for you guys. If there's any more questions, let me know. But, really, all of that's the reason why we focus on protein.
Speaker 1:And I don't want you all to think, oh, well, I need to do workouts now. You don't have to do workouts, by the way. You don't have to do workouts. If you're thinking of doing workouts, think about something that's resistance based. What that means is am I using my body resistance bands, kettlebells, dumbbells, barbells?
Speaker 1:Am I using something as a resistance? You know? Some of you start off body weight and you will absolutely get killed in a work body weight work because it's hard. You know? We did a jujitsu self defense workshop, women's self defense workshop on the weekend, and it wasn't an intense workout.
Speaker 1:It was like on the floor, standing back up, trying to escape, moving our hips back to escape from the floor, maybe some pushing, maybe some leverage there. And next day people might ask me I'm so sore. Oh my god. And it's as simple as that, like just sitting up, getting up, body weight squats, doing those basic movements that we don't do day to day. Are really effective as a resistance training workout and they're really really good for you.
Speaker 1:So if you want to start doing that, brilliant. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions let me know.