A lack of sufficient protein triggers hunger. And that destroys diets. Here's how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

Your body wants and needs to get many different nutrients from food in the right amounts in order to keep you healthy.

Since your health is understandably important to your body, it will always trigger hunger and try to force you to keep eating until it's gotten enough of each of those nutrients that it needs - even if this means making you eat far too many Calories that make you fat in the process.

The way to prevent this problem and to lose the weight again is to reverse the above process by deliberately eating foods that will give you lots of the things your body wants, but not many Calories.

When you learn to do this successfully, your body will happily use up its excess stored Calories (fat) for energy, but will still have no reason to trigger the hunger and excess eating that usually makes dieting such a miserable and unpleasant process.

Modern societies now provide inexpensive access to all the information, the concentrated natural foods, and the supplements that make it easy to give your body everything it needs while still maintaining a conscious Calorie deficit.

What has been lacking until recently is the knowledge of how to use all these tools together to solve this problem.

Although your body needs to get about 50 different substances from food, and this sounds like a lot to think about, they all fall into just a half-dozen or so easily managed categories. Protein is one of those categories.

"Protein" is really composed of 20 different amino acids combined in thousands of different ways to form thousands of different proteins. These amino acids are constantly being "used up" at varying rates and need to be replenished from food. Since your body has no ability to store dietary protein until it's needed, this means it wants you to eat the right amount of protein every day to replace the amino acids that are used up.

How do you eat enough protein daily without getting a lot of additional Calories in the process? It's not at all difficult. Very lean seafood, chicken, turkey, and beef are all easily available and can easily provide the right amount of protein without many Calories, if you eat the right amounts.

How much of these foods is enough, but not too much? That's easy too. Divide your weight in pounds by two, and you will have the approximate number of grams of high-quality protein that nutrition science says will maintain nitrogen (protein) balance while dieting. (This is a simplified calculation, and if you are very heavy this number will be too high.)

The number of grams of protein are what you need to watch and most food package labels will tell you how many grams of protein are in the food they contain. For example, a 6-oz can of tuna fish has about 40 grams of protein and only about 220 Calories. Tuna is therefore a very good food for dieters to use to prevent the type of hunger caused by too little protein.

Most other seafoods, including lobster and crab, are in the same desirable category. In general, fish is better than fowl, which is better than beef because each of the latter two has progressively more additional unnecessary Calories from fat.

In addition to package labels, there are many food nutrient tables in easily available books and on the Internet that will tell you how much protein, Calories, and other things are in each type of food you eat. One of the most authoritative references is the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference at < http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/ >.

The premise of this series of articles is that whenever you run low on any vital nutrient, this will trigger hunger that will tend to make you to eat too many Calories and gain weight.

But you can easily learn which foods can prevent or reverse this process and how much of them you should eat.

Of course, there are other vital nutrients besides protein that your body can "run low" on - thus triggering hunger and having this very same "hunger-triggering" effect. Obviously, it does no good to successfully control protein but then suffer hunger effects and overeat due to a lack of one of the other nutrients. So in my next article, we will discuss how to manage another very important one.

-Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.- Copyright © 2000 Hamilton/Wolcott Publishing

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"Dr. A." is a nutrition researcher who has deliberately chosen to publish anonymously.

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