Many people’s weight problems today stem from their diets. The average diet is predominately carbs, followed by fats, and then in last, protein. This would be normal for someone who’s working out constantly like an Olympic athlete, but for the average person, this diet leads to a lot of issues – the main one being weight gain.
What a lot of people don’t understand about nutrition is that carbs are our fuel source, but they have to be used when you eat them. The worst thing that you can do is eat a lot of carbs and then sit around doing nothing, because you’ll have all that fuel go to waste.
What your body then does is create fat deposits to store that energy in case you need it later, leaving you with excess fat and more weight. Carbs come in plenty of forms, from sweets to sodas to bread.
Some are better than others, but none of them are great if you’re not using them enough. Instead, you’ll want to replace some of your carbs with proteins. Protein is what your body uses predominantly to build itself up, specifically in terms of muscle.
While this doesn’t mean that you’ll magically gain muscle from eating protein, your muscles will be less prone to injury and will not get as sore as they would on a low-protein diet.
You want to make sure you don’t lose all your carbs, because just by existing your body needs some fuel to keep going. However, just substitute out the unnecessary amounts with protein to get a more balanced diet.
There are plenty of great sources of protein out there for anyone to enjoy. The most common one for a lot of people is meat. This means things like beef and pork, but more importantly things like chicken or turkey.
While red meat does provide a good amount of protein, it’s often accompanied by fats and other macros, or it’s paired with carbs. Take, for example, a burger, which does have red meat, but is also filled with things like bread and cheese and condiments that make it less healthy.
For a healthy meat-based source of protein, you want to look towards poultry and fish. Chicken and turkey provide sources of lean meat, meaning that they’re low in fat but high in protein. These can be paired with things like salads to make for a great, healthy lunch that will improve your protein intake.
