If you only change one thing about how you eat, make it protein. Not because it is fashionable, but because it is the target that helps whatever else you are trying to do. Losing fat, keeping muscle while you do it, building strength, recovering from training, staying full between meals, holding onto muscle as you get older: every one of those gets easier when protein is high enough, and harder when it is not.
Most people are not close.
The number
Official minimums are set to prevent deficiency, not to support an active life. For adults who train, or who want to lose fat without losing muscle, the research points to somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. In pounds, that is roughly 0.7 to 1 gram per pound.
For a 175-pound person, that is about 125 to 175 grams a day. For most people that sounds like a lot, because it is roughly double what they currently eat.
Wave sets a protein goal from your weight and your focus. Someone whose focus is fat loss or muscle sits near the top of that range; someone after energy and steadier days sits near the bottom. It is a starting point, and you can change it.
Why it works whatever the goal
When you eat less than you burn, your body draws on stored fat, which is the point, and on muscle, which is not. High protein tips that balance toward fat and makes the muscle you have more expensive to lose. It also digests slowly, so a high-protein meal keeps you full longer than the same calories from anything else. People eating enough of it tend to eat less overall without trying.
When you are training to build, protein is the raw material. Without enough, the work in the gym produces the fatigue and not the result.
And as you get older, the body becomes less responsive to the protein you do eat, which is one reason muscle is so easy to lose after fifty. The answer is more, and spread across the day, rather than one big dinner.
Spread it out
Your body can only use so much at a sitting. Aiming for 30 to 40 grams at each of three or four meals works better than 20 at lunch and 90 at dinner. Breakfast is where most people fall down, because the usual choices, toast, cereal, a pastry, carry almost none.
Some anchors, in grams of protein:
- A chicken breast or a palm-sized piece of fish: about 30 to 40.
- Three eggs: about 18. Add a scoop of cottage cheese or Greek yogurt to get a breakfast to 35.
- A cup of Greek yogurt: about 20.
- A cup of cooked lentils: about 18. Beans, tofu and tempeh all land in the same neighborhood.
- A scoop of protein powder: about 25. Useful, not required.
How Wave helps
Log meals the lazy way, a photo or a few words, and Wave estimates the protein along with everything else, then shows the day against your goal. The daily number matters less than the weekly pattern, and the pattern is what the coach reads when it tells you why the week felt heavy or why the last two lifting sessions went well.
Wave is for general wellness and is not a substitute for a registered dietitian or your doctor. Anyone with kidney disease or another condition that affects how much protein they should eat should follow their clinician’s guidance.
