As soon as you start thinking about diets and fat loss, chances are that you will start to think about hunger and loss of energy and enthusiasm. Diets tend to be a struggle, because they mostly focus on eating as little as possible of plain, healthy food. However, you can bypass a lot of these problems with a high-protein diet.
Function
High-protein, low-carbohydrate diets take advantage of a number of nutritional tricks to help you lose weight. They can also help you lose fat while maintaining muscle, which is hard to do on a conventional diet. Typically, your body requires around 0.8 g of protein a day per pound of body weight, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. Protein is typically low in calories compared to carbohydrates, so if you begin to eat more protein, your overall calorie intake tends to drop.
Theory
Most diets are based on calorie restriction. According to the government's Weight-Control Information Network, losing weight is a matter of balancing the amount of calories you consume with the amount of calories you burn. If you eat more than you burn through exercise or daily activity, then you will gain weight: to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you eat or drink.
Considerations
Most diets achieve this calorie deficit by limiting the amount of food you eat, so that your calorie intake is significantly lower than it would normally be. As long as it is below the maintenance level, or the amount of calories equivalent to the amount of calories you burn during the course of a normal day, then you will lose weight. The problem with these diets is that the lack of calories translates to feelings of hunger, which makes it harder for you to stick to your diet as well as potentially slowing your fat loss, as your body begins to conserve fat to protect your energy stores.
Effects
High-protein diets work differently for a number of reasons. Firstly, protein helps to keep you feeling full, as it takes a long time to digest in the body. The low carbohydrate intake is where most of your calories are lost: carbohydrates, especially simple processed carbohydrates such as sugar, white bread, white pasta or white rice, are high in calories. They are also easy to process, which means that they give you dramatic spikes in energy levels and hunger levels. The excess energy will be converted into fat if it is not used right away, making them ill-suited to fat loss.
Benefits
High-protein, low-carbohydrate diets also take advantage of a process called ketosis. This occurs when your body has exhausted its usual supply of carbohydrates, which is its preferred energy source. When this happens, your body turns to using stored fat for energy instead, leading to much faster fat loss than usual. Being in a state of ketosis also blunts feelings of hunger, making it easier to stay on your diet. A ketogenic diet, as it is known, will comprise mainly protein and fat, with barely any carbohydrates whatsoever.
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