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Eating enough daily protein is one of the most powerful habits for creating a stronger, leaner, healthier body.

Protein is one of the main food groups (the others being fat, carbohydrate and alcohol) and works as the building block for every single cell and structure in your body.

(Next time you smile at yourself in the mirror, know that 1,176,000,000,000,000,000,000 protein molecules are smiling right back)

Eating the right amount of protein can do wonders for your health, fitness and overall performance:

• Gain and retain strength and muscle mass and tone (extremely important to counter the effects of aging)
• Curbs your appetite for a longer period of time (so you’re not always feeling hungry)
• Helps you avoid the “snack attacks” / common cases of “The Munchies” (similar to point above)
• Speeds up your recovery time from exercise or stress (so you can get back to feeling your 10/10 self)

Over the years, I’ve worked at simplifying all the complex advice out there on the interwebs into a very simple game plan that helps me eat enough protein to stay lean, strong, fit and healthy.

You can “copy and paste” this game plan to get the same benefits.

Here’s how:

#1 Calculate How Much Protein You Need

First, determine how much protein to eat for your personal needs and goals.

Here’s how to calculate this: aim to eat between 0.6 and 1.0g of protein per pound of your goal body weight each day.

Example: If I want to weigh 180lbs, I’d aim for eating between a range of 108 and 180 grams of protein each day (see math below)

• 0.6 X 180 = 108 grams
• 1.0 X 180 = 180 grams

If you're highly active, looking to lose fat or maintain weight, or doing a lot of resistance training, aim to hit on the higher end of this protein range (closer to the 1.0g X goal body weight).

Now it’s worth pointing out, eating more or less than this isn’t going to hurt you (although nearly all research agrees that eating “more” rather than “less” daily protein leads to better health and a leaner physique). Find what works best for you, and adjust from there.

#2 How To Eat The Right Amount

Now that you’ve calculated your daily protein target, it’s time to figure out how to take these numbers (your protein range calculation) and use them in real life.

I like to “chunk” my protein foods into serving sizes that approximately equal 20-30 grams per serving. 

Using this approach, I can simply count the number of servings I eat (rather than trying to count individual numbers) to see if I hit my daily target.

Here’s an example of how this works from yesterday’s meals.

• Breakfast included 2 eggs and 4oz ground beef = 2 servings
• Lunch included 5oz of shredded chicken = 1 serving
• Dinner included 7oz of ground beef = 2 servings
• Bedtime snack included a cup of lowfat greek yogurt = 1 serving.

(Note: 3-4 oz of cooked meat is about the same size of a deck of playing cards)

This adds up to 6 servings. 

Since each of these servings contains approximately 20-30 grams of protein, I can estimate that I ate between 120-180 grams of protein that day. 

(6 servings X 20 = 120 grams, and| 6 servings X 30 = 180 grams)

Using these 20-30g “blocks” of protein to build meals and snacks has made it soooooo much faster and easier to plan meals and keep track of how much I’ve eaten during the day.

If you’d find it helpful to sketch out a protein plan for your day, I’ve included a blank, printable version of the above chart that you can get at the link below. 

>>Download a portion planner here<<

Simple Scales. Fancy Fails.

With just a little practice, you can learn how to instantly “eyeball” these serving sizes of protein foods.

Once you master this, it’s incredibly fast and easy to eat the right amount of protein and power a leaner, healthier, stronger version of you.

While this method isn’t super highly precise, I’ve found that it delivers nearly the same level of results as more complicated nutrition tracking tactics… while saving me 10x the time and effort.

Hope this method helps you simplify your nutrition so you can make faster progress toward your health and fitness goals.

See you next week!