Proteins & Weight loss

Proteins are the single most important nutrient to lose weight. The more you eat protein, the more you lose and this has been proven scientifically. Studies show that if you eat more protein, you lose weight automatically even if you don’t make any other changes to your regular diet.

How it works?

For understanding the reason of protein being such a powerful weight loss tool, we need to review some basics.

Weight loss is largely about calories, if more calories leave your fat cells than enter them, then you lose fat.Conversely, if more calories enter your fat cells than leave them, you gain fat.Although this is a drastic oversimplification and it’s not the only thing that matters, calories are still an important part of weight loss.

It’s also one of the most powerful ways to reduce cravings, which are the dieter’s worst enemy.

The most important reason why protein is so great for weight loss, is that it reduces your hunger. As studies have shown that when people go on a high-protein diet, they eat fewer calories automatically and for this reason, calories from protein are a lot more slimming than calories from carbs and fat.

In fact, various studies have also proven that adding protein causes automatic weight loss, without intentionally restricting anything.The mechanism behind this is that protein increases levels of satiety hormones like GLP-1, peptide YY and cholecystokinin and tt also lowers levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin.

In other words, by replacing carbs and fat with protein, you reduce your hunger hormones and boost your satiety hormones.

Other important benefit of proteins is that it also boosts your metabolism significantly, even during sleep.This means that if you increase your protein intake, you will burn more calories every day. One of the main reasons for this is the “thermic effect of food” (TEF).

Proteins have a thermic effect of about 20-30%, compared to 5-10% for carbs and 0-3% for fat.A high protein intake has been shown to boost metabolism and increase the amount of calories you burn by 80 to 100 calories per day.

One of the biggest reasons why people fail on their diets is carvings,In fact cravings are the dieter’s worst enemy and protein also helps in slashing the carvings to a very large extent.