Pescatarian Needs Help Boosting Protein

Take your goal protein intake and divide them to the meals you’re planning to eat throughout the day and make sure to hit them with every meal


That tip helped me alot and good luck !

What is your serving sizes of fish, and how many times a day or week do you eat it?

I have @ 80 g chicken twice a day, 100 g Greek yogurt twice per day, up to 164 g fat free cottage cheese per day, plus eggs, cheese, and legumes often but not daily.

What's your protein goal, in grams? And what's your goal bodyweight, and current calorie goal/target loss rate? I'm asking so we can get some context and perspective.

I endorse the thread Lietchi linked, too. Even as a vegetarian, I found it helpful. The top of the protein efficiency spreadsheet it references are mostly meaty/some fishy, but there are other sources further down the list that may still be useful to you beyond that.

Which brings me to another couple of things I often suggest: One is a process, the other is a tactic.

The process, if you aren't already doing it: Review your food log every couple of days for a while. Look for foods that have relatively many calories, but not much of whatever nutrient you're trying to increase (in this case, protein).

Unless those things are really important to you for satiation, happiness, other nutrition or some other major reason, those would be foods you could consider reducing (frequency or portions) or even eliminating, to free up some calories.

Consider replacing those calories with other foods you enjoy eating that have more protein. What you'd be aiming for here is to gradually revise your routine eating habits, the repeated patterns, to gradually move toward habits that get you more protein regularly.

The tactic is to try to get at least a little protein from almost everything you eat. There are breads with more protein than others, grains with more protein, veggies and even fruits with some protein, snack foods with protein, etc.

If some of those alternatives work for you, those small added bits of protein through the day will begin to add up. Some of those sources will not be as complete (in essential amino acids) as animal proteins, but varying the sources will tend to compensate for that somewhat (protein complementarity, lazy method ).

Of course, you still want to think in terms of some major protein source in each meal. But getting more protein in other sides and snacks is still useful.

I don't know how much protein you're shooting for. During loss, I used the rule of thumb of getting at 0.6-0.8g per pound of healthy goal weight daily. For many people, that will be close to 0.8-1g per pound of lean body mass.

Nowadays, in maintenance, I'm aiming to get 100g minimum daily (for 5'5", currently 130ish pounds), and usually getting more like 110-120 (as an ovo-lacto vegetarian, no protein powder/drinks/bars, no commercial faux meats). I figure the 100g is just above 1 gram per pound of my estimated lean body mass.

Note: I don't think there's anything wrong with protein supplements or faux meats: I just don't find them tasty or satisfying personally, so I don't use them, other than some rare restaurant fake meat dish.

I asked about your current calorie level and goals because frankly it's going to be very difficult, maybe impossible, to get adequate nutrition (protein or otherwise) when cutting calories too aggressively low. I have no reason to believe you'd be doing that . . . but, with apologies, I felt it necessary to ask because sometimes people here do paint themselves into a corner that way. Ditto for cases where some have set unnecessarily high protein goals based on sites that have unusual assumptions.

I feel like this can be a solvable problem for you, but that it may take some analysis and gradual remodeling of routine eating habits. As long as you're not getting super dramatically low protein intake now, or are willing to use a supplement as a stopgap if you are, you can tweak habits gradually to dial in an improved scenario.

As an aside, this is a good evidence based source IMO for protein recommendations, from a site that doesn't sell supplements:

https://examine.com/protein-intake-calculator/
https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/

Note that the guide says it can be OK to use a reasonable goal weight as input to the calculator, if materially overweight.

Best wishes!