How do I add more protein to my diet

audreyd1962

Hi I am doing the intermittent fasting and am finding it hard to reduce carbs and up my protein intake I have an under active thyroid and can gain 2kilos in one day The next day I could be down 1-1.5 kilos I exercise 5 days a week ( approx 1 hr per day ) help!!

Lietchi

I think the first thing to realise is that you do not gain or lose 1 or 2 kilos of bodyfat per day.
Daily weight fluctuations are quite normal, although the range can differ from one person to the other. A range of 2kg up or down is quite a lot, but the important thing to realise is that it is not fat: these fluctuations are caused by fluctuations in water weight and/or food waste in your digestive tract.

So if you want to know whether or not you are losing fat, the important thing is to monitor your long-term weight trend and to learn to ignore the day to day fluctuations. With long-term I mean 1 or 2 months (or menstrual cycles if applicable). A weight trend zo can help in that regard: for example Libra or Happyscale. It will show you your weight trend based on an average of your daily weigh-ins.

As for reducing carbs and upping protein: without knowing what your goals are (calorie, poorten and carb goal) and what you are currently eating, it's a bit hard to give you precise. I managed to increase my protein intake by eating less cereal and more skyr yogurt for breakfast - I actually stopped doing intermittent fasting because it caused my protein intake to be too low.

springlering62

Hi @audreyd1962 from another 1962’er. Welcome to MFP!

I started here in late 2018 and have lost (and maintained) ten dress sizes. MFP works, if you dig in and stick with it.

Why are you focusing on intermittent fasting? If you have a specific reason, naturally eat that way, or were medically advised to do it for whatever reason, great. But if you’re doing it because you “heard” it’s a faster way to lose, it’s not.

It all boils down to dull-as-dishwater (but effective!) Calories In/Calories Out, no matter how and when you dole them out.

Since you’re focusing on protein, my understanding (and you should do your own research) is that it’s better to space protein out during the day to get the most from it. That’s been my own personal experience.

I eat very high protein, but not anything trendy. I simply shoot for X grams of protein for breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon snacks, and a smaller amount in dessert.

Protein is everywhere- and can be super enjoyable and very satiating to many if spread out during the day.

I cannot for the life of me imagine trying to force a ton of protein down at a single sitting, whereas (like today) having protein pancakes, tomato soup with chicken sausage, cottage cheese with fruit, and Greek chicken, as well as other high protein choices, throughout my day keeps my energy steady all day long.

Just think why you’re doing it and how it applies to what you’re doing. For me, I typically do a long walk in the morning, followed by two intense workouts. If I had all my food in the afternoon or evening, I’d have nothing in the tank by the next morning. If I elected to eat it all at once in the morning, I’d probably feel great- until I did a headstand or began swimming laps. It’d make me unbelievably nauseous.

How does this plan work for you? Is it going to aid you, or hold you back from doing things you might want to do? Would two larger meals work better, or are you like me and happy as a bug in a rug with a slow steady drip of meals and snacks all day long?

This is a long term plan. I will never not count calories or not watch what I eat. No way am I ever going to be obese again. Look at the introductions page for all the “I gained it all back” comments. Avoid fads. Think about what you’re doing. Review your diary every night before bed? “How could I have done his day better? With more nutrition?” Ignore the days you screw up. They happen. Just dust yourself off and carry on.

If anyone tells you can’t do this at our age, they’re a liar. Don’t listen to those folks. They want you to fail so they validate their own excuse that they can’t, either. .

AnnPT77

I agree with every word of the posts above.

I'll answer your direct question down-post, but will underscore a couple previous points first as context:

Many people find protein filling; if you're one of them, that may be in tension with using IF as an eating strategy. For sure, spread protein through your eating window; and consider what Spring said about whether IF is a good strategy for you. IF isn't essential for weight loss.

I also have severely underactive thyroid, but am properly medicated for that. I hope you are, too. Anyone - hypothyroid or not - will see big fluctuations in scale weight from day to day. If medicated, note that IF can affect absorption of hypothyroidism medication, so potentially affect dosage requirements.

It takes about 7700 calories to gain or lose a kilo of body fat. If you didn't eat something in excess of 15000 calories over and above your current maintenance calories, 2 kilos gain isn't body fat. That's just physics, pretty much.

Pretty fast fat loss, like a kilo per week - 1100 calories daily calorie deficit - is expected to create around 143 grams of fat loss per day, on average. Water retention of multiple kilos coming on or dropping off daily is common. (The biggest change I can remember when I was calorie stable in fat weight was about 2.7 kilos, though 1 kilo is more usual. I'm non-big now, about 60 kilos. A bigger person would expect bigger fluctuations.) Exercise can increase the magnitude of water fluctuations. So can carb intake variations, since our bodies need extra water to digest/metabolize carbs, after which the water will flush out.

Food waste in the digestive tract, on its way to the toilet, can vary by multiple pounds, too, day to day. Both those things will mask fat loss on the bodyweight scale, and fat loss will only begin to show up in multi-week averages over at least 4-6 weeks. Normal.

As far as how to reduce carbs and increase protein, there's a thread here that may help:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10247171/carbs-and-fats-are-cheap-heres-a-guide-to-getting-your-proteins-worth-fiber-also

That thread links a spreadsheet that lists many, many foods in order by most protein for fewest calories, which inherently up-ranks foods with lower carbs or lower fat or both.

Log your food. Look at your diary every couple of days. Notice foods that have relatively many calories, but not much protein, and that aren't important enough to eat at current frequency or current portion sizes for other nutrition, feeling full, or just being happy with your eating. Reduce those foods (frequency or portion sizes) or eliminate them to free up calories. Choose something high on the spreadsheet above that you like eating, and work it into your regular eating routine eating habits using those freed up calories. That's the process.

I'd encourage you not to stress about the hypothyroidism, or the fluctuations. There's no point.

With the hypothyroidism, proper medication is about all we can do to minimize its effect, and research suggests proper medication puts our calorie needs back into the normal range in most cases. Other than medication, there's nothing we can do about a condition like that, so there's no point in focusing on it IMO. The only point of focusing on obstacles is to figure out how to get over, around, through or otherwise past them. Any other attention is a waste of time and energy.

I'd also encourage you not to stress about day to day scale fluctuations. The bodyweight scale isn't a measure of self-worth, and one or two readings on consecutive days tell us exactly zero about fat loss. Look at the many-weeks trend. Successful weight loss looks like small ups and downs day to day, general trend downward over many weeks, like little bumps we may walk over as we walk down the gradual slope of a hillside. Don't trip over those bumps. Focus on the hillside.

Best wishes!

neanderthin

Well audrey, let me just say your on the right track. I suspect your trying to reduce the amount of processed foods that are so prevalent in the diet (73%) with around 10,000 food additive allowed which both contribute to the chronic inflammation and disease that effect the permeability of our gut lining, not to mention the assault this presents to our microbiome resulting in harmful substances such as bacteria, toxins, undigested food particles, and other pathogens that can pass through the gut lining and enter the bloodstream and reek havoc and causing inflammation, and it's this inflammation that are ground zero for most of the non communicable diseases, and I won't bore you with the statistics but they are significant.

The main driver of this environment is elevated blood glucose levels, and I'm referring to the diet only in reference to inflammation because there are other factors that influence inflammation, sedentary being one. Anyway, when we consume this highly processed food lottery it creates a big and sometimes huge spike in blood glucose, depending on the individual which compounded with the ideology that we need to eat some food every few hours representing eating 6 or more times a day, peoples blood glucose is always high, not what we want to be happening day after day, year after year which has basically resulted in the dysfunctional health situations that represent around 90% of the population.

Obviously you've done a little research and yes consuming a lower carb diet does displace the amount of processed and UPF's in the diet which results in lowering inflammation which can be measured in a reduction of our C-reactive protein and a lowering of triglycerides and increasing the prevalence of our HDL which downstream also increases the prevalence of large buoyant LDL particles that subsequently are less atherogenic, all leading to better health outcomes, and as it relates to hypothyroidism, the reduction in chronic inflammation is helpful considering women especially that find themselves overweight or obese with insulin problems like insulin resistance, pre diabetes and diabetes are 50% higher in risk for that complication, so reducing chronic inflammation will help.

So a diet where we can control and keep blood sugar as close to base line as possible after consuming a meal will experience the least amount of inflammation that takes place and the health issues associated with that situation. that diet is one that is higher in protein and fat than carbohydrates and it'll be up to you how far you want to take it but the lower it is the closer to that base line you'll be and continuing with this intervention will over time drop your base line as well, which is preferable.

Personally I'm on a ketogenic diet most of the time with situation where I'll add carbs for mostly the sports and weight training which is called a "targeted ketogenic diet", some carbs are good for these situation, but they are used immediately for those situation and pretty much all used up by by the end. Anyway my insulin resistance totally reversed in short order, less than a month as did many of my other health related problems which I won't go into unless you want me to, they were a lot, oh, and I lost 65lbs.

Intermittent fasting isn't something I do because I'm already only consuming twice a day and effectively getting those advantages but for some people it can help with reducing the time they're consuming meals which also generally reduces the amount of times they eat over the course of the day, which helps that high glucose situation I spoke of which shows up in the literature as "improving insulin sensitivity" which lowers insulin levels and which by default results in reduced blood sugar fluctuations.

A diet high in whole foods and protein mostly from animal sources with lots of vegetables and I would preference root vegetables instead of grains and consume fruit in the form of berries, most other fruit is just sugar bombs in this context, and just letting you know that blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries hardly registered on my continuous glucose monitor. Fruit oils should also be preference here considering the inflammation associated with seed oils, like soy, corn and canola.

A low carb diet is associated with weight loss which mostly is hormonal and the satiety level is what helps this situation. Basically I eat until I'm full and eat twice a day and don't think about food or how many calories I'm eating because most people on low carb don't count calories, which I don't know about you but if my days were worrying about what I ate 6 times a day and how that effected the data input into some spreadsheet and then analyzing why somedays this happens or other days that happens, yeah, it was never an all my life option, which by the way I did count calories for a few years, so yeah finding what helps our health is a journey. Good luck and stick with it but realize substituting all that great tasting food isn't what most people are willing to do, it is after all a paradigm shift in how to think about food as it relates to health.

springlering62

Total aside, @neanderthin

Never heard of a fruit oil. Taking the opposite tack as you, since it sounds like what I might need to replace sugar free pudding in my homemade ice creams to give it some viscosity or creaminess.

Of what do you speak? Is it oily? Fruity? Both? Tasty? Rancid’ish?

neanderthin

springlering62 wrote: »

Total aside, @neanderthin

Never heard of a fruit oil. Taking the opposite tack as you, since it sounds like what I might need to replace sugar free pudding in my homemade ice creams to give it some viscosity or creaminess.

Of what do you speak? Is it oily? Fruity? Both? Tasty? Rancid’ish?

Hey springer, good question. The original refined oil was cottonseed so basically oil from my shirts and pants Basically any seed and some fruit have natural oils in them and they get extracted. Olive oil is a fruit oil, simply because olives are classified as a fruit. Olive oil has been used for thousands of years as well as the usual suspects back then which would have been the fat of different animals, like lard, tallow, duck fat, ghee as examples.

Anyway all these oils have different compositions of fatty acids commonly known as saturated fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat. Without going on about it too scientifically, unless you want me to, the basic difference between seed oil and fruit oil is the distribution or the ratio's of these 3 fatty acids and every ingredient on earth that contains any oil will have a combination of all three, just in different ratio's.

Seed oils like from canola oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil for example have higher amounts of polyunsaturated fats particularly omega-6 fatty acids, which can be inflammatory if consumed in excess.

Fruit oils like olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil for example are extracted from the flesh or pulp of fruits have different amounts of polyunsaturated fat. Olive oil for example has 9%. Avocado oil has 13.5% and coconut oil has 1.8% I also want to mention that in the keto space these oils are generally purchased unrefined. Seed oil like canola contain 28%. Sunflower oil has 69%. Soybean oil has 58% and purchased refined for the most part.

Here's the problem and it's not that polyunsaturated fats are unhealthy, omega 3's are polyunsaturated fats, and the omega 6's are important and essential for life as well and is involved with cell membrane structure, brain function and they also actually help in the case of acute inflammation and help the immune system fight off such situation but it's because of the amount of omega 6's that have been consumed where the problem lies.

The taste of fruit oils is quite refreshing and lots of nuance in each one where the seed oils are basically a nothing burger.

The balance or ratio is of vital importance and was and is influenced by evolutionary and genetic factors. Historically humans have maintained that ratio in a 1:1-2:1 ratio and it's been acceptable to expand that to 4:1 but I haven't researched why but suspect because it doesn't elicit an inflammatory response that scientist seem concerned with, maybe I'll look into it. Anyway the ratio today is in the 15:1-25:1 area with some people much higher and the consumption of omega-6-rich vegetable oils and the increase in processed foods, leading to an imbalance with omega-3 intake, which is pro-inflammatory. That's the basic explanation, hope that helps you understand a little about it.

springlering62

@meanderthin whoops I had this mental image of highly compressed fruits that would make great flavorings.

I had that ALL wrong.

And I was so excited. 🥹

neanderthin

springlering62 wrote: »

@meanderthin whoops I had this mental image of highly compressed fruits that would make great flavorings.

I had that ALL wrong.

And I was so excited. 🥹

Well springer, you've left no doubt of your love for the sweeter things in life.