Does a high proteine intake support the reduction of body fat?

Question

The following scenario:

Male, 180cm tall, 80kg wants to lower body fat. Sits most of the time in front of a pc Wants to lose fat before building muscles

Started to workouts: 3 days a week weight lifting for 45min, then 45min cardio every other day 45 min cardio

Now I've read having a high protein intake of 2-2,5g per kg weight would protect the muscles from being used as protein source and the high intake of protein would increase metabloism to support reducing body fat.

Of course the protein being just an addition to a healthy diet.

Are those two statements true and does the high protein intake help to protect the muscles/help reducing fat?

Then supplementing protein shakes are a quick source of energy, approx. 100 kcal per 30g saving.

Does it matter when you take it? Would it be bad to take it right before/after a regular meal and could it happen that the body has so much energy that he converts the meal into fat because of the protein shake?

How much time should be between meals and a protein shake?

Answer 1

Let's start with some foundation in the order of importance:

• Energy Balance (Calories in vs. Calories out)
• Macros (amount of protein, carbohydrates, fat)
• Micros/Supplements (vitamins / minerals and sports supplements)
• Meal timing (how often you eat and how close to training)

Energy Balance

This is the simplest thing:

You eat less than you burn in a day to loose weight.

What makes this slightly more difficult is that there is a certain amount of uncertainty in measurement processes--both for the food and for the amount of calories you burn.

If your goal is to loose weight, but you are either maintaining or even gaining weight, you probably need to lower the amount of food you eat. While calories in vs. calories out is not a perfect model for everyone, it is good enough for most people.

Macros

You'll find some conflicting recommendations here, but the following general guidelines are good enough for most folks:

• Protein: 1.8 g / kg (0.8 g / lb) total body weight (4 Calories per g protien)
• Fat: 20-30% calories from fat (9 Calories per g fat)
• Carbs: all the rest of the calories to carbs if sports performance is important to you (4 Calories per g carbs)

Studies do show that there really isn't any advantage to more protein than this guideline.

Micros / Supplements

These do help maintain general health and in some cases they have at best a minor improvement in performance. Check Examine.com if you have any questions about specifics.

In general, if you take a multivitamin and some omega 3s you'll have pretty much all you need.

Meal Timing

This is probably the least influential of all the nutrition factors. Typically, if you consume your macros evenly throughout the day you will do better. Studies have shown advantage to eating at least 3-4x a day. More often than that has diminishing returns to the point that it doesn't make sense for most people.

Recommendation for you

You identified the following:

• You are a beginner
• Loosing weight is your primary goal

I recommend focusing primarily on calories in vs. calories out, and just make sure you have the recommended amount of protein and staying out of ketosis. The rest will take care of itself.

The amount of extra fat you are carrying does impact how much lean mass you might loose:

• Obese people will primarily lose fat
• Overweight people will lose more of a mix but still skewed toward muscle

The closer you are to a "normal body weight" the more lean mass you will lose as you lose weight. Going from normal fat levels to bodybuilding competition fat levels is a specialty topic and one I'm not qualified to speak toward.

Just as a personal anecdote, I was able to increase strength while losing weight in 2014 culminating in new personal bests in a powerlifting competition that year while weighing over 20 lbs lighter than the previous one. Slow weight loss, normal training, and staying out of ketosis were key elements of that process.

I used to recommend ketogenic diets but don't anymore. I was able to get fairly quick dramatic results on one back in 2010, but lost a lot of muscle mass in the process. Much of that was due to bad diet advice and my own ignorance at the time. I didn't have enough protein to protect the muscle mass I had (I was consuming less than 0.5g per lb body mass) and I wasn't doing anything that required the muscle to remain. Had I had the correct amount of protein and did strength training the results would have been better. Performance will suffer in a ketogenic diet because there are so few resources to do work. It's also the only time that increasing protein above the recommended amount might be worthwhile.

Answer 2

This is gonna be a "yes-and-no" answer.

In general

First off, if you've done little to no weight training before, you're in a spot where you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time. This isn't necessarily impossible later, but it gets progressively harder the more you train. In this sense, doing both weight training and a decent bit of cardio, is going to help you achieve these goals.

The amount of protein intake you need varies from person to person, but the 2-2.5g per kg of bodyweight is a decent rule of thumb. But try to experiment with it. You might be wasting money chugging shakes to get protein that isn't being used.

Protein intake and fat reduction

You gain fat by consuming calories that is neither being used, nor being excreted. This also goes for protein! People think that consuming protein builds muscle. Well guess what, if you consume too much protein, the amino acids into which protein is metabolised, is stored as fat too.

Hence my earlier tip; don't get too caught up in getting that exact amount of protein intake per day. It may very well be too much, and therefore counter-productive.

When to consume protein

Just do it. Whether you chug a shake right after the workout, or wait an hour for dinner, it makes little difference. But my best tip here is to spread the protein out over the course of a day. If you down 240g of protein in one sitting, I guarantee you, your body is going to store most of it as fat.

Bottom line

You become fat by eating too much food. It's not just fat that makes you fat. Too much of anything is going to make you fat. Carbohydrates, proteins and fats alike.

If you want to control your weight and bodyfat percentage, start counting calories, and keep track of how much of it is carbs/protein/fat. Experiment with these parameters to find which ratio gives you the best result.