How do I lose body fat while also taking in protein?

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Like if I eat a crapload of chicken to get buff, I m also getting FAT.

Also, protein bars.

They have 20 grams of protein.

2 cups of skim milk have 20.

But why do protein bars always work better?

aerobics, jogging, jump rope, things like that.

Yes, but I already do that lol.

Maybe you're eating too much?

Gaining some fat isn't necessarily bad, especially if you are trying to get prepared for football. If you have some extra weight than you can take more of a hit

How much should I eat? I need lots of protein to work out.

Cut down a little at a time until you start performing worse.

Okay, but what about protein bars? That was my other question.

Why do they work so much better than other protein-rich foods, no matter how much protein the other food has?

Try lowering your carb intake and eat more protein food. Like fish, turkey, egg and nuts. Protein makes you fuller quicker.

EDIT: Personally, I wouldn't eat protein bars unless I needed the protein. They tend to have a lot of carbs and sugars.

Nonfat cottage cheese has a huge amount of protein(about 15 grams per 1/2 cup). Tuna mixed with nonfat mayo also has very low fat and very high protein.

What do you mean they work better? Are you saying you personally have better results with them? As far as I know they don't work better, as long as you get the full proteins you need, it should be relatively the same. If eating more chicken is making you gain fat as well, then you might be eating too much protein, or something else you are eating is making you fat.

I don't think they work any better. Maybe you just like the taste, fatty!

I say that, but I doubt you're any fatter than I am.

If you're too fat, you're either eating too much, or not working out enough, and that includes cardio.

Sounds like you're consuming too much calories throughout the day or per meal, and not doing enough to burn the extra calories.

Check your diet, do you research about what you're goal is, and change diet/habits accordingly. To burn fat quickly, it might be a good idea to look up HIIT Cardio. I burned around 50 or more lbs in about 5-6 months when I was fat. It's really not hard if you are injury free.

Also, do you check the labels on your chicken, does your chicken have labels, but varied servings? What kind of chicken is it? Some have more calories than others, and of coarse sodium, too much can make you retain quite a bit of water. Do your protein bars have a lot of sugar in them? If so, maybe it's best not to eat so many. Perhaps there is a tasty low sugar protein powder you could buy.

They don't? Whey protein I guess theoretically is more absorbable, but whey protein powder is better than bars. Bars a lot of times just have calories, some people use them basically like meal replacement bars. Shakes can too, unfortunately online is the only place you'll find pure whey protein with no flavorings, no flavorings will have no added calories to it.

Anyway though, the only reason protein is needed is for recovery and adding muscle mass. The reason I seriously started considering protein is to make myself less sore the days after workout, so I could work out harder. If you're not sore/getting random little injuries, then your protein intake probably is OK. And even then, the guideline is 1g per lb of lean body mass, so that'd be your weight X, let's say you're 15% bodyfat, x .85. For me this works out to like 150, as my bodyweight is like 190. Some people say more protein, but that's really only if you wanna get like, "big" and not just maintain. The other thing too for recovery, you gotta eat well, as in healthily, and get a lot of sleep, and take your vitamins and other supps.

As far as protein sources go, you'd be better off with fish for a more lean source of protein. Fish is like the leanest stuff you can eat. And then the little tiny bit of fat it has is beneficial. So it's a win win. However, do be careful eating canned tuna due to the mercury possibilities, instead try for getting frozen pollock or some other cheap white fish. I mean for normal folks, the mercury in canned tuna is pretty much a non-sequitur, but I've had periods where I ate like 2 cans a day for a week, and you feel like crap.

For me, the easiest way to cut weight was basically going low carb, high protein. The only problem with those kinda diets is imo, they're not sustainable. You can do it for a bit to cut weight, but you can't eat like that for the rest of your life. I managed to cut a lot of weight doing that, and with exercise, and honestly with a lot of caffeine too. My meals would look like, let's say a burger with 93/7 beef, mushrooms, onions, peppers (vegetables have about no calories, eat as many as you please) and instead of bread, I'd use half a pita per burger so it'd cut the carb calories to like 35, now take a hamburger roll, you'd add like 300 calories instantly to your burger. So with the chicken, if you're eating it with bread, then there you go.

For exercise, when I first started skating, I was 215, I started March of last year. By that summer, I was down to 180lbs, from skating and doing that dieting thing above. I did about an hour a day of skating, and then gym consisting of about an hour punching bag 3x a week or so. With exercise, though, let's take running, your body has adapted to running, just as mine adapted to skating. I'm a way better/faster skater now, but I use less calories to do skate now, just because I've adapted to it. The only way I could experience similar weight loss gains from skating is to up my ice time or up my intensity, both of which I can't do. You know how P90X has that "muscle confusion" thing? That's somewhat true. What happens is, if you do the same thing, your body adapts, ie, if you had to walk a mile to work everyday, you might be tired the first time, and then eventually after you kept doing it, it'd get easier. So by what P90X calls muscle confusion, by not doing the same activities, your body never adapts, thus you burn a lot of calories because your body's not adapted to it. So, with that in mind, there's only two things you can do, throw more load at your body, or new activities. I'm personally trying to swim more, and find I lose weight easily doing it because I'm terribly unadapted to it.

One thing for you, you might be taking in more food than you have need for. In another thread you said you were basically only benching and curling. Well, your biceps don't have a ton of muscle to feed, and while bench is more of a compound, the muscles used doing it are really relatively small. You probably don't need much more protein than you'd normally eat if you're just benching and curling. But, squats and deadlifts, they work a large amount of muscle at once, and your leg muscles are huge, so once you start getting serious about your lower body strength, that's probably when you'll need a decent amount of protein.

But, the last point is. Bodybuilders usually go in cycles of bulking and cutting. While bulking they're pretty much fat, then before a competition/photoshoot they cut, usually doing lots of cardio, and then for the super veiny look, they'll dehydrate themselves. Gaining fat with muscle is usually just accepted as part of the territory with bodybuilding.

WAY too complicated to make one good answer, but there are 2 main factors: Metabolism; if you tend to store fat, you will convert some of what you eat (no matter how healthful the food is), into fats. The other main factor is that you must burn more calories than you eat, to lose weight, and you must be consistent! What I mean is that a crash diet or skipping meals will cause you to gain fat fast, and that's because your body will be fooled into thinking you are likely to starve some day soon, and it needs to store up as much as it can. To avoid that, it's usually best to eat 5 or 6 SMALL meals a day, so as to fool your body into thinking it has plenty of food available anytime, and needs to store nothing. It takes time to condition your body to work that way, and if you have a hormone problem, you may also need to have that looked into or your body might not cooperate so well.

Just to reaffirm: DEDICATION and PATIENCE!! !

Charles