​​Does Protein Burn Fat? (5 Benefits You Should Know)

Yes, eating protein can help you burn fat and lose weight. However, consuming protein doesn’t directly burn fat.

Other than helping you gain muscle, protein has certain effects on the body that allow you to lose weight and retain lean body mass.

Compared to fats and carbs, increasing protein intake can help you lose weight in a healthy and effective manner.

Your weight is actively regulated by the hypothalamus in your brain [7].

Your brain receives signals that determine when and how much you eat. This is regulated by certain hormones that change in response to hunger and eating.

As we’ve seen, consuming protein regulates your satiety and makes you feel fuller than other macros.

This is because protein improves the functioning of your weight regulation hormones.

Consuming a high amount of protein decreases levels of hunger hormones like ghrelin and boosts appetite-reducing hormones like peptide YY [8] [9].

When you replace carbs and fats with proteins, you reduce the activity of hunger hormones and boost satiety hormones. This leads you to reduce calorie intake, helping with weight loss in the long run.

Related: What Are Natural Sugar Blockers?

Prevents Muscle Loss and Metabolic Slowdown

Weight loss doesn’t always mean fat loss. If you exercise but don’t consume enough protein, you can lose lean muscle mass — something most people don’t favor [10].

There’s also the possibility of increased fat loss leading to decreased metabolism [11].

The result: you burn fewer calories than you did before losing all that weight. This effect is called “starvation mode,” and it can reduce your daily calorie-burning by several hundred calories.

Eating a sufficient amount of protein to gain muscle may reduce muscle loss, which in turn keeps your metabolic rate high as you burn fat [12].

An excellent way to double down on preventing muscle loss and metabolic slowdown would be to add strength training into your fitness routine [13].

Together, high-protein and strength training won’t just prevent muscle loss but increase your muscle growth. Increased muscle growth will make you more metabolically active, leading to faster weight loss [14].

Over the years, I’ve had clients who’ve only done dieting and those who’ve done weight training along with their dieting.

More often than not, the latter lost weight and gained muscle much faster than the former.

If you’ve lost weight and are trying to maintain your weight loss, a higher protein intake can help prevent weight regain.

One study showed that even a modest protein increase (from 15% to 18% of calories) reduced weight regain after weight loss by 50% [15].

Many of our clients who had achieved their weight loss goals benefitted from their protein diet by maintaining their new weight and building lean muscle mass.

Related Articles:

• Does Muscle Burn Fat?
• Does Your Body Burn Fat or Muscle First?

Increases Thermic Effect of Food

When you eat, your body utilizes some calories to digest and metabolize food. This is called the thermic effect of food (TEF), and it can help you burn more calories.

Protein has a significantly higher TEF (20–30%) compared to carbs (5–10%) and fats (0–3%), giving you a metabolic advantage by burning more calories [16].

For example, if you consume 100 calories of protein, a thermic effect of 20–30% will burn 20–30 calories to digest and metabolize those proteins.

With a well-planned exercise routine, you can use this to your benefit by adding more muscle-building foods to your diet without the fear of any excess getting stored as fat.

Because of its thermic effect, high-protein diets were effective with clients who couldn't exercise but wanted to burn extra calories.

By planning out their caloric deficit and dietary protein intake, clients improved body weight management.