Strategy 2: High Protein

In P3toLife, we eat more protein daily than most people typically would if they weren't thinking about it, about 30% of the calories to eat daily is from protein.

THIS IS A LEGIT STRATEGY FOR MAKING YOU NATURALLY EAT LESS FOOD OVERALL AND LESS OFTEN - WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT.

Studies show that higher protein intake reduces the hormone that makes you feel hungry, called ghrelin, and increases the hormone which makes you feel full and satiated (called peptide YY).

This study involving human test subjects showed that a meal high in protein released the largest quantities of that satiety hormone compared to any other type of meal (even more than a meal high in fat). In that same study, this time with mice, having high protein in the diet, reduced fat gain in the mice in BOTH lowfat and high fat diets - it was the addition of high protein rather than normal protein that made the difference.

What is satiety anyway?

This is the feeling when you get when you stop thinking about food because you feel “done” and can move on with your day instead of thinking about what else you can snack on.

Additionally, a higher protein meal makes you feel full for a longer period of time so that you don’t feel the need to eat again for several hours. So basically with a high protein meal, when you finish your meal you feel mentally done eating, and you still feel mentally done eating hours later!

This is one of those very key mental aspects of maintenance. No matter what the diet "plan" on paper is, if you feel snacky, if you feel hungry, that "plan" gets discarded in order to meet our very strong psychological urges. High protein meals is one very real, study-backed way to address this side of things - it really does work.

This study done on participants who first did a 500 calorie diet (sound familiar? This is even more useful for us since this is the situation we are in) showed that increasing protein in a post-weight loss diet increased the subjects ability to maintain their weight loss by 50% and stated the subjects had “increased satiety while energy intake did not differ.”

What this means is that even though they did not eat more calories than the other group, they felt more satiated. Satiation is key as it creates a natural control over what you freely choose to eat or not eat. Making weight maintenance come more naturally with less effort.

So that you are no longer restricting yourself while wishing you could have more/something else, you are actually naturally done eating in your head and heart when this happens.

Notice what P3toLife member Nancy says: