Diet Food

If you are on a mission to lose weight and get into better shape, you know how important your diet is. Exercise, of course, plays a crucial role in staying healthy and taking off excess body fat, but your diet has to be in tip-top shape in order to get the full benefits from working out. When you exercise, you are taxing your body and forcing it to do things that it will need to recover from.

Whether you want to take off fat, put on muscle, or do a little bit of both, you have to feed your body the nutrients it needs in order to reach your goals. High protein diet foods should be a consideration for everyone, from the person trying to lose a few pounds to the top bodybuilders. There's no type of diet that can't be improved by adding the best high protein diet foods.

Protein Is Essential for Life

Not only is protein important if you're trying to lose weight or gain muscle, it's essential to your health and staying alive. As you know, most of the foods you eat are made up of three main types of nutrients: protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Every food is made up of one or more of these three and your body needs the right combination to operate at peak efficiency.

Did you know that the only one of these three nutrients that is essential to survival is protein? In other words, if you were in the worst case scenario and food was scarce, you would always want to choose the high protein foods to survive. The human body should always have all three of these macro-nutrients, but it will cease to function without protein intake of some sort. That fact alone, that protein is an essential building block of life, should tell you that you need to do all you can to add high protein diet foods to your eating plan.

Protein Builds Muscle

One of the main tasks of protein is to supply your body with the amino acids it needs to sustain and increase muscle mass. This is an area where many people get off track. They figure that they do not want to gain a bunch of muscle mass and therefore should not up their protein intake or look for high protein diet foods for their meals. This is a fallacy. Everyone should strive to add muscle. This doesn't mean that everyone has to be a bodybuilder; it simply means that adding muscle mass to your body, even in small amounts, is better for your health.

Protein to Lose Weight

Protein will help you to add muscle, but that's not all. A great by-product of adding muscle is easier weight loss. When your body has more muscle on it, it has to burn more calories to sustain that muscle. When your body senses that it needs to burn more calories, your metabolism will crank into overdrive. Simply adding a few pounds of muscle, by doing some resistance exercise and eating high protein diet foods, can help to turn your body into a fat-burning machine.

Easy-to-Find High Protein Diet Foods

There are standard foods that are easy to find at grocery stores that are fantastic high protein diet foods. Here are some common foods that nearly every store has in abundant supply. They are all excellent sources of high quality protein:

- Tuna and other fish. Fish are loaded with protein. They also contain healthy, essential fats that your body needs to stay healthy. Tuna is the most convenient of the fish products available, but you might also want to add other healthy fish to your diet to crank up your weight loss efforts.

- Boneless, skinless chicken breast. This is the foundational food for people who are serious about putting on muscle and losing fat. Baking skinless chicken breast is a great way to prepare meals for several days at once. Simply cook enough to last you a few days, and freeze individual portions to heat up for lunches, dinners, and snacks throughout the week. When it comes to high protein diet foods, none are as popular as chicken breast.

- Cottage Cheese. This is a high protein diet food that people don't add to their diets often enough. Cottage cheese contains some of the best quality proteins you can get short of a sports supplement. The proteins in cottage cheese are rapidly absorbed and utilized by your body and they are conducive to digestive health, too.

These are simply a few, staple high protein diet foods that you may want to add to your diet. Each of these choices is low in unhealthy fats and contains the high quality proteins that you need to have when you are exercising and dieting. Remember that protein will help your body build muscle, which will in turn help you to burn fat faster. Gaining muscle doesn't mean that you will become "muscle bound." Adding even a little bit of muscle is one of the best things you can do to help your body burn fat like a furnace.

As you are putting your diet together, you will want to include lots of high protein diet foods like those mentioned above. You'll also benefit from adding a few supplements like protein drinks and multivitamins to your diet. A good protein shot, like Profect, can help you get the protein you need immediately after a hard exercise session. This is one time when it's essential to get rapidly absorbed proteins into your body, so don't overlook the importance of supplements as a high protein diet food in your efforts to lose body fat. Visit protica.com for more information.

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