Search the Community

Hi all! First of all, I am a strict ethical vegan, so please might I ask you to take that into consideration in any dietary advice you might elect to offer me in response to this post. Just to be clear, that means I will not, for ethical reasons, consume any animal products, no products manufactured or harvested with slave labor or other forms of manifest exploitation, and no products that are known to cause widescale ecological devastation (date palm oil, avocados, etc.). It makes things a tad challenging, but I find that part of feeling good means not knowingly doing evil stuff with respect to my caloric intake. I make no judgments about what other folks choose to consume. Thanks awfully for your consideration! <3 First time poster but have been doing CR for about 3 months now and am happy to say I've lost 35 pounds. I have a bunch more to lose to get down to a <21 BMI, but I'm making good progress at around 2 pounds per week (which is, as of this writing, the upward limit of what is a safe, sustainable pace based on my best understanding from reading several CR books both old and new). I'm currently working through Dr. Fontana's book "Path to Longevity" and he brings up the issue of protein consumption. He has several different bits of data about it: first he says that the FDA recommends 0.6g/kg of body weight or more to avoid deficiency. Then he says 0.83g/kg of body weight is what is optimal and sufficient for most people based on a European study and he indicates that this is what centenarian Okinawans typically eat. He then says later on that an optimal ratio of 1:10 for protein to carbs is best for longevity in a variety of mammals and suggested that Okinawans were eating about 9% of their calories from protein. So all of this leads me to do maths to see where I'm at. I'm using the CRONometer app and I"m using the macronutrient ratios of 24.5% protein to 43.5% net carb to 32% fat. I modified that slightly off of a post my partner showed me from CR Society, I think from one of Dean's dissertations/treatise which indicated that the aggregate mean ratios were something around that among CR Society folks polled. I tweaked the numbers slightly to get the total grams of protein required per day to display 1 gram per kilogram of my CURRENT weight. I am currently at 317.6 pounds which, at 38 years old and 6'4", is much too much for longevity and risk of disease and what have you, so I'm continuing to lose steadily. My goal weight is about 156-160 pounds which lands me at around 19-19.5 BMI or so. So what I'm wondering is: should I be looking to eat 0.83grams of protein per kilogram of my GOAL weight of 160pounds which is about 72.5kg and therefore about 60.2g of protein per day (which is handy because it's about 30g per meal since I only eat two meals a day and that's about the upper limit of what the human metabolism can usefully extract from a single meal, at least according to the references that Dr. Fontana cites). OR, should I instead be eating 0.83 grams per kilogram of my current weight of 317.6 pounds which is about 119.5g of protein? I know too much protein leads to oxidative stress, inflammation, and susceptibility to a host of diseases. I know too little leads to muscle wasting and metabolic insufficiencies. At around 120g of protein and only eating 2 meals a day, I would have to get about 60g per meal or have 30g per meal and two snacks where somehow I get an additional 30g per snack and do not get much else in the way of calories (not easy to do), and the difficulty of doing that strikes me as a likely indicator that it's too much protein. However, I do not want to make assumptions about this and go to lower protein and find that I become ill. I should note that in order to lose 2 pounds per week, I am eating at a 998 kcal deficit per day (some days a bit more if I just don't feel hungry and have less than or equal to about 150kcal left for the day). Typically I'll go a few days where I only lose 0.2 pounds or so, then have a day where I suddenly drop 1.5-2 pounds. I have at no point felt ill or weak or faint other than the first 2 or 3 days of CR where I think I was adjusting to the lower calorie intake. I think the removal of nearly 1k kcal from my diet makes the protein percentage be much higher (~25%) of my diet than if I were eating maintenance-levels of protein, in which case it would be closer to the 10%-ish level Fontana describes. Anyway, that's my question and the context in which it's being asked. Thank you for any insight you can share!