Protein Shakes..

I've just started drinking protein shakes to up my protein intake to 1g of protein per lb I weigh. Which is a general rule a lot of people go by. Protein powder certainly helps with reaching that goal, as well as other added nutrients they have.

IMHO that is too much. As you want to match your lean body mass. No need to take protein for the fat content. I'd probably cut it to 0.5 grams per lean body mass and see what happens.

This is good advice. Most people on this board seem to go for way too much protein, which, while in general isn't harmful, it doesn't really benefit either. Any excess protein that your body doesn't use for muscle repair (which isn't that much, about 1 gram per kilogram of bodyweight is all it needs for regular maintenance of muscle tissue,) just gets converted to glucose and then into glycogen and used just like carbohydrates. The downside to that, is gluconeogenesis is a longer process, so it slows uptake of glycogen to the muscles, and also, since the liver is needed for gluconeogenesis, that means the liver isn't burning fat as efficiently as it could be.

So yeah, 1 gram per kilogram of body weight, or .5 to 1 gram per pound of LBM, is a good number to shoot for. More than that, isn't bad, but doesn't benefit, either. And protein shakes are expensive.