Protein: The MVP

IN SPORTS, FEW THINGS are as valued as versatility—a center who
can rebound and shoot, a quarterback who runs as well as he
passes, a shortstop who can belt homers and flash leather. In your
body, protein is the most versatile player on your nutrient team.
It comes in many forms and does so many things well—all
without a $254 million contract.
Protein builds the framework of your body, including
muscles, organs, bones, and connective tissues.
In the form of enzymes, it helps your body digest food.
As a hormone, it tells your body when to use food
as energy and when to store it as fat.
It transports oxygen through your blood
to your muscles and organs.
As an antibody, it protects you from illness when
viruses and bacteria attack.
So protein is critical for helping your body function at optimum
levels. But we’ve made protein the foundation of the Abs Diet for
four other crucial reasons.
1. It tastes good. Juicy steaks. Sliced smoked turkey.
Roasted pork loin. Steamed lobster. Peanut butter. The
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Abs Diet is built around the foods you crave, so it’s a program
you’re not going to have to stick to; it’s a program
you’re going to want to stick to.
2. It burns calories even as you’re indulging in it.
Food contains energy in the form of chemical bonds, but
your body can’t use them in that form. Your body has to
break down the food and extract energy from that chemical
bond; that process of extracting energy itself requires
energy, so your body’s burning more calories to do it.
That’s the thermic effect of eating, as I explained in
chapter 3, and protein pushes the thermic effect into high
gear. It takes almost two times more energy to break
down protein than it does to break down carbohydrates.
So when you feed your body a greater amount of protein,
your body automatically burns more calories throughout
the day. When Arizona State University researchers compared
the benefits of a high-protein diet with those of a
high-carbohydrate diet, they found that people who ate a
high-protein diet burned more than twice as many calories
in the hours after their meals as those eating predominantly
carbs.
3. It keeps you feeling satisfied. Research has shown
that if you base your meals around protein, you’ll feel
fuller faster. Consider one study in the European Journal
of Clinical Nutrition. Subjects downed one type of four
different kinds of shakes—60 percent protein, 60 percent
carbohydrate, 60 percent fat, or a mixture with equal
amounts of all three. Then they were offered lunch. The
subjects who had either the high-protein or mixednutrient
shakes ate the least for lunch. The shakes they
had downed contained the same number of calories, but the
protein made them feel fuller and eat less at lunchtime.
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4. It builds muscle and keeps your body burning fat
all day. Remember, more muscle burns more fat. When
you lift and lower weights, you create microscopic tears in
your muscles. To repair the tears, protein acts like the
Red Cross in a federal disaster area. Your body parachutes
in new protein to assess the damage and repair the
muscle. Proteins fortify the original cell structure by
building new muscle fibers.
This whole process through which proteins make new
muscle fibers after a workout can last anywhere from 24
to 48 hours. So if you lift weights 3 days a week—triggering
proteins to rush in and repair your muscles—your
body essentially stays in muscle-building, and thus fatburning,
mode every day.
As you know, protein comes in many forms—such as
turkey, beef, fish, nuts, and tofu. You want to concentrate
on the proteins that best help build your muscles. Research
has shows that animal protein builds muscle
better than soy or vegetable protein does. So poultry, fish,
and lean cuts of beef or pork are a better choice than tofu
or other soy-based products. If you’re the kind of guy who
likes to count, you’ll want to shoot for about 1 gram of
protein per pound of body weight per day—that’s roughly
the amount of protein your body can use every day. For a
160-pound man, that’s 160 grams (g) of protein a day,
which would break down into something like this:
3 eggs (18 g)
2 cups of 1% milk (16 g)
1 cup of cottage cheese (28 g)
1 roast beef sandwich (28 g)
21⁄2 ounces of peanuts (16 g)
8 ounces of chicken breast (54 g)
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Combine those four reasons—an easy and delicious eating
plan, more calorie burn, less calorie intake, and more fat-burning
muscle—and you can easily see how a high-protein diet translates
into weight loss. In a Danish study, researchers put 65 subjects on
a 12 percent protein diet, a 25 percent protein diet, or no diet (the
control group). In the first two groups, the same percentage of
calories—about 30 percent—came from fat.While the low-protein
dieters lost an average of more than 11 pounds, the high-protein
subjects lost an average of 20 pounds and ate fewer calories than
the low-protein group.
The more amazing statistic wasn’t how much they lost but
where they lost it: The high-protein dieters also lost twice as
much abdominal fat. One reason may be that a high-protein diet
helps your body control its levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that
causes fat to converge in the abdominal region.