I’m 50 years old, have a sedentary job, and except for walking the dog I don’t do much exercise. I did martial arts in my 20’s but haven’t been to the gym in 25 years.
A colleague works on muscle wasting in the elderly and gave a seminar here at work about a month and a half ago. What he talked about scared me - I had visions of being unable to get out of bed in 15 or 20 years if I didn’t change something. So I signed up at the local gym and got a personal trainer that afternoon.
I’ve been going 3 days per week for the last 5 weeks or so. No huge gains yet but i’m noticing my chronic back and shoulder pain is much better.
Here’s the problem - My trainer (and also stuff i’ve seen online) says that I should be eating about 130 grams of protein per day for my body weight to be gaining muscle. I am having a REALLY difficult time doing this. I simply don’t eat that much - if I really struggle I can get maybe half that.
Also, although i’m not a vegetarian, my household is, which means at least at home i’m functionally vegetarian as well. Even if I wasn’t, like many men my age i’m on statins for cholesterol and scarfing down large amounts of red meat is counter-indicated.
My trainer isn’t much help here - he’s a nice kid but he just keeps telling me to eat a steak.
So what’s the best, easiest way to dramatically increase my protein intake? I’ve tried the various powders and bars; they’re disgusting.
I do eat these things but getting to 130 grams is hard!
I’ve dropped about 25 pounds in the last year by reducing my caloric intake and i just don’t eat the amounts that I used to. Eating enough (even of “high protein” stuff) to get this amount of protein is physically difficult.
Whole protein is best for uptake and general nutrition but whey or other protein powders can help supplement your protein intake, as can yoghurt, cottage cheese, et cetera. It is also a good idea to intake bone broth and/or skin instead of just relying on muscle tissue to get both more of the amino acids needed for collagen production (necessary for ligament, tendon, and fascia maintenance) and an appropriate amount of saturated fats. You may need iron, Vitamin D, and B-complex vitamin supplements if you aren’t getting enough in your diet (i.e. eating a wide variety of fresh vegetables and leafy greens or have difficulty with dairy uptake).
Your trainer is (I assume) not a dietician, and while his advice to increase protein intake to build muscle is correct in a general way you’d be well advised to consult with a specialist in nutrition fitness especially in regard with what diet and protein intake level will work best for your age, dietary preferences and constraints, and exercise level. I’d emphasize again the necessity to get a good balance of complete proteins (which is why your trainer is recommending steak) including those to build college proteins and do some mild impact and articulation exercise (jumprope, box jumps, kettlebell or club swinging, et cetera) because people so often neglect the necessity of building connective tissue when weight training leading to so-called ‘overtraining’ injuries.
If you don’t eat much (in terms of volume), getting high protein density (grams of protein per volume of food) is going to be difficult with a vegetarian diet, unless you consume a lot of processed eggs and dairy products (eggbeaters, whey protein shakes, etc.).
The supplements (powders/shakes/etc.) are mainly handy in terms of being able to squeeze in large servings of protein inside smaller volumes so that you can comfortably eat that much in a single sitting. A shake, even if it’s not the tastiest thing, is probably easier to shove down your throat than trying to force-feed yourself a bowl of edamame after every meal.
If you’re also trying to go “whole foods” vegetarian, it’s even harder, because then you have to rely on minimally processed eggs/dairy (which isn’t that good for you, because of the high fat/cholesterol/etc. content) and/or minimally processed legumes, nuts, etc., which are high in volume and relatively low in protein density and require you to eat often and in large quantities. So you end up having to do this awkward dance of “how can I squeeze in the maximum amount of protein into the volumes of food I typically eat, so that I can get enough without gorging myself and feeling overstuffed?”
You can look at this table, sorted by protein density (in this case it’s grams of protein per calorie, not per volume, but it’s a good enough proxy):
The lower half of the table (vertically speaking) are foods whose calories consist of large amounts of protein. None of them are particularly easy to consume in large quantities.
If you can learn to tolerate protein supplements, they are going to be the most “effective” and least fussy, in terms of making sure you get the protein you want (want, not need… you can bulk up enough without having to overload on proteins if you’re not trying to become a body builder, just have functional fitness and muscles). The supplements, after all, are concentrated protein and not much else.
Otherwise, the next easiest thing to do might be to start drinking a lot of soymilk (or low-fat cow’s milk, if you prefer).
After that, you can also cook concentrated vegan sources of protein and add them to your meals, like tofu, edamame, quinoa, and seitan (though seitan isn’t a complete protein in terms of its amino acid profile, so don’t let that be the only or majority source of protein you get).
Personally, my partner and I are both vegetarian/vegan, and though we’re not lifters and not particularly fit, we do try to stay active & healthy-ish. We eat a lot of extremely, uber-processed veggie food that’s very protein-dense: Hot & Savoury Cups | Ready To Eat Meals | Huel US and it is quite satiating and energizing. It’ll probably end up giving us some horrible cancer or tooth issue later on, but for the time being at least, it’s a lot easier.
The books “Becoming Vegan” and “Becoming Vegetarian” are helpful resources for the detailed scientific questions of protein quantity, quality, etc. There are also a lot of YouTubers that discuss this now, but they’re often biased and/or sponsored and/or flat-out wrong. There are many vegan athletes these days, so it’s entirely possible, but they often rely on absurd amounts of processed protein supplements (like tempeh and tofu and supplements), just like non-vegetarian athletes do.
For solid professional advice, you can also ask your PCP for a nutritionist referral, especially if you can find a Registered Dietician (it’s a trade certification) with experience with vegetarian diets. But any of them should be able to tell you the basic stuff.
Doctors and personal trainers (who are not themselves vegetarian), in my experience, know very, very little about this stuff, so definitely talk to another kind of professional.
I should note that your body’s protein needs seem to increase as you age, so at 50+, you might want more than a younger person’s:
That means what would be extra protein for someone weightlifting in their 20s might be the minimum baseline you’d need in your 50s+, and that would be very, very difficult to achieve on a reasonable amount of cooked vegetarian whole foods unless you really, really, REALLY like soybeans. I eat tofu and other veggie proteins every single meal and get nowhere near the recommended amounts (more than 100 grams per day)… it is really difficult to do that with veggie sources. Supplementation (powders, shakes, those ready to eat cups above, etc.) might be your more realistic option…
I’m no weightlifter, but I had bariatric surgery a few years ago and am required to have at least 60g of supplemental protein every day: you said you don’t like any of the powders or bars, but have you tried shakes? Many of them are too sweet for my taste, but I’ve been drinking an Ensure Max cafe mocha 2x/day for quite a while now. That flavor won’t work if you don’t like the taste of coffee, but there are lots of flavor options (from lots of companies). The grams of protein per shake varies, as well: the most common I see are 15, 30, and 45.
They also make “unflavored” shake powders that you can mix with anything you like, adding your own flavors (or making smoothies).
You can also find something called “soy protein isolate” or “textured vegetable protein” at most co-ops and health-food stores with a bulk section. This is just extremely processed and cheap soy-based protein powder that you can mold into glops and add to foods. It vaguely resembles mutant flavorless chicken mixed with rubber. There are recipes you can look up online but it’s not the easiest thing to cook with, unless you happen to like the taste of rubber.
The “tastier” forms of this are sold in the form of mock meats like Daring chicken, and a bag of it has about 45g of protein. You can get that anywhere (Safeway/Albertsons/Fred Meyer or Whole Foods, etc.). There are many other mock meats, but 1) not all of them has enough protein and 2) most of them are overloaded with other unnecessary things, like excessive amounts of fat or breading or sugar. Beyond and Impossible, in particular, are really overloaded with fats. Daring is one of the healthier options, while still being tasty enough to eat without wanting to kill yourself. When we cook, we often add half a bag of Daring (per person) to bowls/pastas/soups/etc. and it turns out well.
But with these mock meats, you essentially end up paying like 4x-5x the price of a protein shake/powder, for what is essentially the same base ingredient (hyper-processed soy powder) with some molding and savory spices added. If you can learn to tolerate the shakes, or make your own out of the powder (savory or sweet), it will be healthier, more protein-dense, and much much cheaper.
If you want to try to stay away from hyper-processed foods, unfortunately, at the quantities you’re seeking, I think meat is probably still your best option. A cow is basically a machine that turns corn into protein nuggets… though chicken/fish are probably healthier options, if you don’t mind all the hormones and mercury.
There are no easy answers to this stuff It’s often a series of trade-offs and exchanging one set of lifestyle disease risks for another. Talk to a RD if you’re nervous about any of it. The mainstream American food system & industry is not set up for your health, and it is far easier to eat your way to death than to health. You have to go quite far out of your way, and eat very deliberately, to avoid that.
Now that i’ve lost weight my BMI is normal. I see the cardiologist twice a year (due to a nasty bout of pericarditis a couple of years ago) and other than some atrial valve thickening (apparently not uncommon in men of my age) and high cholesterol my heart is fine.
The most important factor by far for you gaining muscle mass and strength is the strength training program; the amount of protein you take in is relatively very little impact and typically overemphasized.
Which is not to say that there is no impact.
The recommendation in @Reply’s posted cite is a more reasonable high recommendation though than that 130g:
For adults aged 50+, we recommend consuming 1.2 – 1.6 grams of protein/kg of body weight per day (0.54 – 0.72 grams/pound body weight per day). For a 165-pound adult, this translates to roughly 90 – 120 grams of protein per day.
Of course the article also notes that is an opinion, and Federal guidelines would come up with more like 60 grams of protein per day for the same individual. And eating higher protein amounts does not trump eating plant forward in importance. If one has to be prioritized I’d go with plant forward. Of course including legumes and nuts.
Personally I’d thank your trainer for their advice but not take it to heart.
Practical response. Start off with breakfast of a cup of Greek yogurt, with a scoop of a protein powder, some hemp seeds (big bags cheap at Costco), some fruit mixed in and topped off with plain kefir. Fat free will be more protein dense. Depending on exact serving size you are up to 40 to 50 grams there alone. Then just join in your household’s regular vegetarian meals and do your workouts. That will end up as plenty enough to make gains.
So you eat 1600 calories a day and you want to eat 520 calories of protein a day? That would make your protein intake 32% of your daily calories, which is extremely high.
The RDA is 0.8g of protein per kg of bodyweight per day. What also complicates it is some recommendations for protein intake are based on kg of total body weight, while others are based on kg of lean body mass (excluding fat mass). Also the numbers are all over the place, even though the RDA is 0.8g, some people recommend 2g per kg of bodyweight for people engaged in weight training. However I don’t know how much of that is overkill. Also I don’t know if the dose of protein to prevent sarcopenia is lower than the dose recommended to build muscle.
I used to spend time with bodybuilders who used anabolic steroids. People would gain 20+ pounds of muscle on an 8 week cycle of steroids, and even they were topping out at about 2 grams of protein per kg of body weight. And that was for people trying to gain 2-3 pounds of new muscle every week. So the amount to prevent sarcopenia is probably much less than that.
Keep in mind a pound of muscle only has about 100 grams of protein in it. It takes energy to build a pound of muscle, but a new pound of muscle only has 100 grams of protein in it.
In my experience, the easiest way to get extra protein is with pre-made protein shakes. They are about 11oz and have about 30 g of protein per serving. Premier protien makes a lot of good shakes you can get at costco or sams club. If you drink a couple of those a day, thats 60 extra grams of protein a day. Each shake only has 160 calories since it is almost pure protein.
This is something I also do, but I do it with collagen peptides. I take 30g of protein in the form of collagen peptides. It dissolves well in coffee and is totally tasteless.
Collagen is not a complete protein and generally speaking not a great choice as a supplement, especially in regards to preserving or increasing muscle mass, ie muscle protein synthesis (MPS). Better to go with a higher quality complete protein like casein, whey, pea, or soy.
Integrated MPS was increased during supplemental with whey (1.59 ± 0.11 %/d; P < 0.001) and pea (1.59 ± 0.14 %/d; P < 0.001) when compared with RDA (1.46 ± 0.09 %/d for the whey group; 1.46 ± 0.10 %/d for the pea group); however, it remained unchanged with collagen
It’s often a series of trade-offs and exchanging one set of lifestyle disease risks for another. Talk to a RD if you’re nervous about any of it. The mainstream American food system & industry is not set up for your health, and it is far easier to eat your way to death than to health. You have to go quite far out of your way, and eat very deliberately, to avoid that.