Exploring food and fitness #1
Recently I've felt an urge to pay more attention to my diet and body.
I'm not where I want to be with regards to appearance, ability to do stuff and prospects for future health. So I've started researching how I can go about changing things.
The key levers I've found so far are:
1. Number of calories consumed per day
2. Amount of protein consumed per day
3. Exercise
Let's start at number 2.
Apparently the key to maintaining and gaining muscle is eating enough protein.
To provide enough building materials to maintain and create muscle, I should be aiming for 2g of protein per 1kg of body weight every day. Or 1g per 1lb per day. For me, at 85kg/187lbs, that means 170g protein per day.
When I read that and looked at the food I'm usually eating, I realized I'm nowhere near that amount daily. So how do I change that?
First, I'm curious what does 100 grams of protein even look like?
I'm currently interested in basic food items and seeing how I could achieve my goals with those. Basically, eating normal food. So I'm starting with chicken breast, eggs and beans. Foods that have a reputation as quality protein sources.
Looking up some nutrition information, I found these numbers:
100g of chicken breast supposedly contain 31g of protein. So 330g of meat is approximately 100g of protein. I could hit my target with about 550g of chicken breast daily.
Eggs have about 13g of protein in 100g of eggs. The eggs I usually buy weigh 75g each, so that's 9.75g of protein per egg. 10 eggs would be approximately 100g of protein. I could hit my daily target with 17 eggs daily. That's a lot of eggs.
Beans are a good plant based source of protein. The label on the canned pinto beans in my store says 6.2g protein per 100g of beans. To reach my daily target with only beans, I'd have to eat 2.7kg/5.9lbs of beans. Our solar system would have another gas giant.
So my first observation is this: The easiest and most sustainable way for me would be to get the bulk of my daily protein from chicken breast.
So far this approach is very anecdotal and informal. I haven't been diving into specific research or citing super reputable sources. This is a combination of general knowledge, my personal knowledge and things I've heard from people I trust. As I go further down this road, I'll be more interested in finding credible sources. But for now, as a start, this is good enough for me.