Dinners have always caused me dilemmas. Long before the high protein hype. It’s the time of day when I am most hungry, when I am most tired, and when I’m conscious that having a big dinner will impact my sleep. I’m also on a weight loss journey, and the metabolism slows down at night when you’re less awake and active, burning fewer calories. I’ve tried a few strategies, but so far, undoubtedly, the one that is working best for me is to focus solely on protein for dinner.
The current fixation for protein is real: So real, in fact, that according to nutritionist Melyssa Chang, we’ve gone from not eating enough to, in some cases, overeating protein, estimating at around 35 per cent too much of the stuff. On my dietary journey for this article, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t championing protein to the point of demonizing other nutrients. Whether you’ve consciously upped your protein intake or not, it should not be done to the detriment of other necessary macronutrients, like fats and slow-absorption carbohydrates.
So, I have been having protein-only dinners four times a week, then, paying special attention to my vegetable, fat, and carbohydrate intake in my other meals throughout the day, so as not to unbalance the rest of the diet and lose other vital nutrients. Having said all this, here’s how I do it.
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Protein intake and weight loss
Nutritionist and biochemist Leticia Carrera advised me that if you want to lose weight, focusing on protein in the evening will keep you satisfied and satiated. “At night, the caloric expenditure is minimal, so everything we eat for dinner that the body does not use will be stored as fat,” Carrera says. “I recommend having protein for dinner if you want to lose weight, because protein is necessary to form new tissues. At night, our body goes into repair mode. When we eat protein we burn a lot of energy to metabolize it, so the total calories it provides us with are reduced.”
To caveat all of this, I do not weigh myself at home—the number on the scales is going to fluctuate throughout the day, from water weight to sodium levels, nor is it taking in the different between fat and muscle mass. Besides, as the nutritionist María del Mar Silva previously told Vogue, “the correct weight loss is when we do not lose muscle mass. And that cannot be reliably detected with the scales we have at home.”
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