If you download a diet app, it will likely ask you to track your "macros"—your daily intake of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Trying to perfectly balance all three every single day is exhausting, complicated, and mostly unnecessary.
Your total daily calories dictate if you lose weight. But protein dictates what kind of weight you lose and how hungry you feel while losing it. If you are hitting your calorie deficit, protein is the only macro you actually need to worry about. Here is why.
When you eat in a calorie deficit, your body looks for stored energy to burn. It prefers to burn fat, but it will also break down your muscle tissue if you let it. Losing muscle slows down your metabolism and leaves you looking "skinny fat."
Eating a high-protein diet signals to your body that it needs to preserve your muscle mass and exclusively target your fat stores for energy instead.
Protein is the most highly satiating macronutrient on the planet. When you eat protein, it actively lowers levels of ghrelin (the hunger hormone) while boosting peptide YY (a hormone that makes you feel full). If your diet leaves you feeling starving by 3:00 PM, you likely are not eating enough protein at breakfast and lunch.
This is called the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). Your body has to work much harder to digest protein than it does to digest carbs or fats. In fact, your body uses up to 30% of the calories in the protein just to digest it. If you eat 100 calories of pure protein, your body only actually absorbs about 70 of them. It is essentially a metabolic cheat code.
You do not need to overcomplicate the math. A universally accepted rule for weight loss and muscle preservation is to eat 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of your goal body weight.
If your goal is to weigh 150 pounds, aim for 105 to 150 grams of protein per day. Fill the rest of your daily calorie allowance with whatever mix of fats and carbohydrates you naturally enjoy. Stop stressing about hitting a perfect macro pie chart, and let your calorie limit and protein target do all the heavy lifting.
Disclaimer: The information on this website is for educational purposes only. It is not meant to replace advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a medical doctor.