How much protein should you eat to lose weight?

When you eat fewer calories than you burn, your body draws on its reserves. Ideally, you want that to be mostly fat, not muscle. Enough protein, combined with resistance training, helps preserve your muscle mass during that period.

Protein is also the most filling macronutrient. A protein-rich meal helps you last until the next one without snacking, which makes a calorie deficit easier to live with day to day.

Health Canada sets the recommended dietary allowance for protein at 0.8 g per kilo of body weight per day for adults. That covers the basic needs of almost everyone — it's not the amount that optimizes weight loss.

During weight loss, a 2015 review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Leidy et al.) suggests around 1.2 to 1.6 g per kilo per day helps control appetite and preserve lean mass. People who train hard or run an aggressive cut sometimes aim higher, within the 1.4 to 2.0 g/kg range proposed by the International Society of Sports Nutrition (2017).

Health Canada also notes that protein can make up 10 to 35% of total energy for adults, which leaves plenty of room for a high-protein diet.

Multiply your weight in kilos by 1.2 and by 1.6: that's your daily range. A few examples:

• 60 kg: about 72 to 96 g of protein per day.
• 70 kg: about 84 to 112 g per day.
• 80 kg: about 96 to 128 g per day.
• 90 kg: about 108 to 144 g per day.

If you have a lot of weight to lose, some professionals use a target or adjusted weight instead of your current weight. If in doubt, or if you have a medical condition (such as kidney disease), talk to a doctor or dietitian before increasing your protein a lot.

The International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand (2017) recommends spreading protein across the day, with about 20 to 40 g per meal, rather than eating it all at dinner. In practice, three meals of 30 to 40 g plus a protein snack cover most needs.

That's where prepared meals make things simple: every meal on the Protéine Express weight loss plan has about 40 g of protein for about 550 kcal. Two meals a day already give you around 80 g; a protein breakfast and a snack do the rest.

Pick sources that give a lot of protein for few calories:

• Chicken breast, turkey, white fish and tuna.
• Plain Greek yogurt and cottage cheese.
• Eggs and egg whites.
• Tofu, tempeh, lentils and chickpeas (more carbs, but fibre too).
• Skim milk or fortified soy beverage.

Canada's Food Guide recommends varying your protein foods and choosing plant-based proteins more often. Both approaches fit into weight loss.

Even with a good target, a few traps come up often:

• Eating almost nothing during the day and everything at night: hard to sustain and poor for fullness.
• Relying on bars and shakes instead of real meals.
• Forgetting that some protein sources also bring a lot of fat (fried foods, deli meats).
• Cutting too many calories at once: the deficit becomes impossible to keep.

If you want to understand why overly strict approaches fail, read why diets fail.

Here's a simple example for an 80 kg person: a breakfast of Greek yogurt and fruit (about 20 g), a weight loss meal at lunch (about 40 g), a snack of cottage cheese or eggs (about 15 g) and a second weight loss meal at dinner (about 40 g). Total: about 115 g, within the target range.

Don't feel like weighing your chicken? Every dish's values — calories, protein, carbs and fat — are listed on this week's menu. Order by Friday noon, from $11.99 per meal, and get delivered on Sunday from 9 a.m. in Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, Brossard and elsewhere on the South Shore and North Shore.