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Comment by knodi | Hacker News Reader

Does any one find hard to eat a lot of protein (150g) in a 8 hour feeding window? I hate to live off of protein shacks.

I do 4 meals at 40g each. Only one of those meals has a single scoop of whey protein (I add it to my pre-workout oats). Though all the meals usually revolve around some high protein source like cottage cheese, skyr, eggs and of course chicken breast. YouTube is full of high protein recipes (look for bodybuilding "full day of eating" videos and the like). Some channels just produce a ton of videos with anabolic recipes (jclarkefitness, felu and pretty much every major fitness influencer).

I'm sure this won't be enjoyable to many people, and only works well for certain meals, but my secret weapon is gelatin powder. Mix with water until paste forms in your bowl then put steaming hot food on top and it will turn into a kind of 'creamy' sauce-like consistency. Nice mouth feel without too much flavor.

Oh, and learning to cook meat/protein so it is tender, browned, flavorful, and seasoned properly. It also seems like acid is way under-utilized in a lot of lazy / American style cooking. Helps a lot with palatability and digestion to use lime juice, rice vinegar, and other acidic ingredients during the cooking process.

Eat more veggies, too. They are full of digestive enzymes, but most veggies don't add too many calories.

If you want 150 grams of pure protein that's about 500g of chicken meat. Other things have protein as well so you could probably bump it down to 400 and have some other stuff like rice and veggies on the side.

Thats a pretty big meal but if you split it in two and have 8 hours between them it's really not that much. Doesnt seem like it should be a problem.

I've spent years without eating any meat, and this week I ate 500g of chicken in one shot, that feels good. But I really don't need it every day, it's also not very scalable in terms of environment

I'm 60kg, 1m83, with I guess strong and endurant muscle with all the bike and manual tasks I'm doing

Why 8hr? For the entire day eat 5 times and 200 plus grams is very doable. I only have one scoop of whey, and sometimes a bar, but everything else is lean Protein or carbs and fat that also have protein (oats, pb, yogurt)

Intermittent fasting. I don't know if there are any real documented benefits but anecdotally fasting is pretty nice. I often feel very energized and clear headed while fasting.

Do you really need that much protein though?

That’s quite a contentious question, there aren’t that many good studies, and they are difficult to do well

It’s really not: https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/. There is tons of quality research quoted on examine.com, and the results around protein are very conclusive. The short answer is that the recommendations are for much higher protein intake than most people think, and than most standard food will give you.

That site you linked says people with active lifestyles can need as much as 3g/kg, if you weigh 80kg that's 240g of protein a day.

Their recommendations are always a range, and for athletes the recommended range generally tops out at 2g/kg. But the recommendation can be higher for people with very strict body composition requirements, especially when trying to lose the last bit of fat when you are already very lean (e.g. bodybuilders before a show, action movie actors etc). But the range for most people is pretty wide, and it’s not a requirement, it’s just that you’ll probably get better results when gaining or losing weight if you err higher.

But yeah, even the minimum is a lot, and it’s hard to achieve without building all your meals around protein.

Need for life? Maybe not. But for sports performance, 1.4 to 1.6 grams per kg of bodyweight is about where the ROI tapers off for most people so far as i know. More probably only if one is very lean or anabolically reistant.

Roughly 40g/meal for me, plus one 30g snack (usually a shake).

Whey can easily get you 50g daily with low effort.

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