Iota Fitness

As the saying goes…you are what you eat. 

There are 3 major categories that all foods can be divided into, proteins, carbohydrates and fats.  Protein provides structure for your cells, carbohydrates provide immediate energy for activities and fat provides long-term energy for physical activities as well as energy to run all of your metabolic processes.  But protein and fats are the only two macronutrients essential for your body’s survival.  This is why when you’re trying to lose weight and cutting calories it’s vital that you take in sufficient amounts of protein and fat.  

In particular, it’s vital that you consume enough protein on a daily basis in order for you to sustain (or build) a lean body while trying to lose weight. As your activity level increases so should your protein intake.  The reason being that the more active you are the more muscles you breakdown and repairing it requires you to have more protein.  

Benefits of protein 

Outside of providing muscular development and supporting other structural integrity in your body, protein plays a major role in losing weight as well.  Consuming enough protein suppresses your hunger.  That’s one major reason why high protein, high fat and low carb diets work so well when it comes to losing weight (at least initially).  It’s much harder to over eat protein rich meals, since it makes you full faster and keeps you full longer, there by reducing your total caloric intake. 

Consuming sufficient protein combined with ample healthy fats allows you to curb your (refined) carbohydrate intake as well.  Consuming refined carbs is the biggest reason for gaining weight along with a slew of other health problems.  Basically boils down to insulin.  The more refined carbs you eat, the more your insulin rises and the fatter you get…it’s as simple as that.  You can cut out refined carbs and replace it with unrefined carbs like vegetables and fruits.  These foods have much less impact on your insulin, so it won’t increase your fat accumulation. 

The flip side of replacing refined carbs with unrefined carbs is that they are very low in calories, which is a good thing from the stand point of losing weight, but calorie deficit also makes your hungrier.  Uncontrollable hunger is the number one reason why diets fail.  So satiety is a must if your want to stick to eating healthy unrefined carbs, and this is where protein can really help.  You can shift some of the caloric deficit by consuming more protein, which should also increase your satiety, since protein suppresses hunger and keeps you full longer.  In addition, digesting protein takes more energy (process known as thermogenesis) than digesting (refined) carbs.  Therefore, you burn more calories, curb your appetite and control insulin levels all by eating protein. 

As mentioned earlier, your body technically does not (technically) need carbohydrates to survive.  Remember, carbohydrate provides energy, but our body has an amazing ability to turn fat and even some protein into the same basic components, that carbs breakdown into, to provide energy.  The process is called gluconeogenesis, and it converts other non-carbohydrate food sources into energy in the absence of sugar, and the best part about this process is that it forces your body to burn fat as the primarily energy source instead of sugar, so you can burn more calories from your stored fat.  Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that unrefined carbohydrate is vital to a well-balanced and healthy diet, but the benefits from the foods like fruits and vegetables don’t necessary come from their sugar content, but rather from other micronutrients, like vitamins, and anti-oxidative qualities that they provide instead.  

Needless to say it’s important to consume enough protein (and fat, but I’ll get into that in a separate article) if you want to lose weight, stay lean and have a healthy diet.  

So here’s the quick summary: 

• Protein is made of a chain of amino acids which are essentially building blocks for your body
• Protein is necessary to build lean muscle
• Protein and fat are both essential for survival
• The best source of protein comes from animal protein, since it provides all 10 essential amino acids
• Diet rich in protein and fat allows you to reduce or eliminate refined carbohydrate consumption, helping you control insulin levels and lose weight
• Protein helps suppress hunger
• Protein burns more calories through digestion