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High Protein Diet

Successful dieting

may seem like an art, but there is definitely some serious science behind it. One pound is equal to about 3500 calories. That means that if you’ve been gaining a pound a week, you need to knock out 3500 calories weekly, or 500 calories a day to stop gaining. If you expand that over the course of a year, and switch to reducing, it means that if you wanted to take off 10 to 15 pounds in a year, it would require 100 – 150 less calories per day.

A recent Australian study showed that after one year, weight loss in groups of people on both high protein diets and high carb diets ended up about the same. Both groups also seemed to benefit equally from improved heart disease risk factors, such as blood sugar, fat, and insulin; homocysteine and C-reactive protein levels. At first glance, it seemed that reducing calories using high protein or high carb diets had equal health and diet benefits after one year.

A more thorough look at the same study showed something different. At the six month mark, the group on a high protein diet had lost considerably more weight than the group on the high carb diet, so higher protein dieters did take the weight off much faster than higher carb dieters. Mysteriously, protein intake was also the single best predictor of weight loss throughout the study, whether at six months or a year.

It turned out that most people in the study did not stick to the strict percentages of protein/ carbs/ and fiber that were assigned. When viewed as individuals, and not as group members, the people who had more protein in their diets lost more weight, and the people with the very highest protein levels, regardless of their assigned group, lost almost double the amount of weight of those who had the least protein. The science behind this diet research proved that protein made weight loss easier and more effective. It was the art of sticking to strict diet regiments that was the hard part!

As we cruise into the dreaded bathing suit season, let the art and science behind our protein shakes help you quickly drop the pounds and stay at it. One splash of these amazing flavors and you’ll want to be sipping them forever!