08/27/2024
Here is WHY!!!!! I champion protein over the other macronutrients. Not that they don't all have value.
How To Store Less Body Fat
We all know that overeating leads to weight gain, but could the amount of protein in your diet affect how much fat you gain?
Research suggests that your body is less likely to store protein as body fat — even when you overeat.
The strongest evidence comes from a study in which participants spent 8 weeks in a metabolic ward and were purposely overfed about 1,000 extra calories above their maintenance levels.
The participants were split into three groups: low protein, moderate protein, and high protein. As you would expect from overeating, all three groups gained weight, but here’s where it got interesting.
The low-protein diet gained the least amount of weight (3.16 kg), while the normal and high-protein groups gained about twice as much weight (6.05 and 6.51 kg, respectively).
The catch: The additional weight was all an increase in muscle — not fat! In other words, the more protein they consumed, the more the body stored it as lean mass, not body fat. The group eating the lower amount of protein lost lean body mass.
The researchers went so far as to state that an increase in calories alone drives body fat, but increasing protein causes a boost in lean body mass but not body fat.
That does not mean you can’t gain fat from a high-protein diet. It just means when you overeat calories, you’re less likely to store the protein as fat.
So when you over-consume calories, your body is more likely to store fat from the other macronutrients (fat and carbs).
Can some of the protein be stored as fat? Yes, however, your body is more likely to preferentially store protein as muscle, especially if you perform resistance training.
