TLDR: I discuss the results of my high protein diet overfeeding and weight gain experiment and contrast it with a previous low protein, high carb overfeeding experiment (both diets were vegan). I gained 13.8 pounds of muscle and 7 lbs of fat over 78 days while eating an average of 3500 calories per day. I gained an unusual amount of muscle, where as my previous 2013 high carb overfeeding experiment added much more fat. I also discuss the science supporting my two contrasting experiences, high protein overfeeding’s effect on my athletic performance, and how it’s changed the way I look at my diet.

Estimated Read Time: 11 Minutes





Why I Overate On A High Protein Diet

I had two primary reasons for shoveling lots of food into my mouth over the course of the last couple of months.

First, I needed to gain muscle mass to improve a specific overhead pressing movement I use in several partner acrobatic lifts. I’d more or less exhausted the neurological gains I could get from my current amount of muscle, and I realized I was going to have to eat more calories to gain mass if I wanted to continue to progress; 170 pounds just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

However, I could have used a far more moderate approach if that was my only goal. My second, and primary reason, was the further exploration of my curiosity about the subject of how higher protein plant-based diets can offer several body composition and health advantages over the standard low protein, high carb vegan and vegetarian diets we so often see recommended.

I’ve previously talked about how a high protein plant based diet can benefit overall health and immune function, bone health and aging, increase your muscle mass and strength, increase fat loss and preserve muscle mass when you’re running a calorie deficit, and discussed some of the myths surrounding vegan protein claims, like breast milk being low protein.

This experiment was an exploration of how eating a higher protein diet would alter the ratio of muscle to fat gain that occurs when you eat more calories than you need to maintain homeostasis. I suspected that more of the mass gained during overfeeding on a high protein diet would be muscle, due to some limited direct experience, and several other reasons I’ll get into later, and I wanted to put it to the test.

I also wanted to contrast this experience with my 2013 high carb, low protein, low fat overfeeding experiment, which left me a fat, jiggly mess.

How The High Protein Diet & Overfeeding Worked

The plan was simple: work up to an average of 3,500 calories a day, with some pulse days going over 4,000 calories, while consuming 180 grams of protein per day. I started off at 170 pounds, and I planned to continue until I hit approximately 190 pounds (to make comparison to my previous overfeeding experiment doable). I ended up reaching 191.

Note that 180 grams of protein is more protein than I’ve ever consumed in my life, and this experiment is the longest stretch of high calorie eating I’ve done since I used to be obese as a teenager. Only a daily basis, I was consuming several hundred more calories than my prior experiment, as I needed to gain four extra pounds in a similar timeframe.

For most of my adult life, I’ve kept increased calorie consumption limited to days of high athletic output (I used to do a lot of long-distance running, so I sometimes ate a ton). But since I needed to gain weight, I stopped, “earning my calories,” during this experiment, and weight gain ensued.

I weighed myself every morning and weighed all my food to get an accurate tally of what I was consuming. In the chart below you’ll notice a gap. This was from a trip to Tulsa I took one weekend to teach a workshop; I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of bringing food and weight scales. I also ate three meals out with friends over the 78 days, and so estimated the calorie and macro ratios of these meals as best I could.

What I Ate On My High Protein Diet

My diet was primarily based around whole plant foods, but in order to easily hit my 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight goal without eating huge quantities of legumes, I added up to two servings of isolated pea protein per day, which added as much as 48 grams of protein to my diet above what I was getting from whole foods. I ate some higher-protein fruit, like watermelon, lots of legumes, such as lentils, higher protein grains, like quinoa, leafy greens and other green vegetables, some tubers, and some nuts and seeds.

My Exercise Regime

I didn’t alter my exercise regime from what I was doing prior to the overfeeding. I continued doing 8-12 hours of partner acrobatics per week of varying intensities, and did 6-12 sets of progressive calisthenics 5-6 days a week. I also swung my kettlebell a few times. I took 3-4 long walks a week, rode my bike for some of my shorter trips around town, and took two short runs of a few miles each.

How The High Protein Diet Experiment Felt

By the end of this high protein weight gain experiment, it felt like I had to struggle to squeeze in the important elements of my life between the four mighty pillars of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack time. As a guy who hadn’t eaten breakfast regularly for years, and who’s gone months eating only one meal a day, I found the food planning, shopping, weighing, and prep work that went into eating so much healthy food to be tiring at times, but the benefits have been awesome and the results fascinating, so I would consider it a worthwhile experience.

One thing that I always find interesting is that eating more doesn’t really stop me from being hungry, at least not for long. When I increased my calories to 3,000 per day at the beginning of this experiment, I was stuffed…for a few days. Then I was hungry again. When I upped my calories a again, I was once again full for a few days and then subsequently found myself hungry again. This didn’t abate until I was regularly eating above 3,500 calories in the last week of the experiment. I’m curious to know if my appetite would continue to scale past that point, but not enough to continue the experiment.

I continued to process my food for optimal digestion, and I didn’t have any problems that resulted. I enjoy eating, and don’t get tired of doing it, so that aspect wasn’t a problem.

The athletic results were pretty incredible. While I expected to have plenty of energy because I never allowed my glycogen stores to get truly depleted, I was shocked at how rapidly my strength improved. Virtually every calisthenics workout I was adding quality reps to each set. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such rapid gains in my life.

I remember thinking a few weeks into the experiment, as I watched my shoulders and triceips growing day by day: “Man, maybe this is how rapidly and dramatically a healthy human body is meant to respond to physical stressors, and I never knew it because I wasn’t providing enough protein and fuel to allow it to do its job.”

My High Protein Diet Body Composition Results

Over the 78 days, I gained 20.9 pounds. According to the bodpod I used to measure my results, that was made up of 7.1 pounds of fat (33.97%) and 13.8 pounds of muscle (66.02%) .

I have no interest in bodybuilding, but if you were to ask bodybuilders – who regularly do similar high protein bulking cycles before cutting for competitions – what they thought of an established (non newbie gains) strength athlete gaining almost 14 pounds of muscle over 78 days, they’d say that was an excellent result, particularly because I only put on 7 pounds of fat to go long with it. It’s actually a bit insane, to be honest. Even if you assume the bodpod was fooled by expanded glycogen reserves and I really only gained eight or 10 pounds, that would still be pretty great.

Before And After Pics:

I’m including before and after pictures below to give you a visual of how the experiment changed my body.

Back Flex

Visually, it seems to me that much of my muscle got added to my back and shoulders. Specifically, the deltoids, back extensors, traps, lats, and triceps appear considerably larger. This makes sense, considering that overhead pressing training were what I was focused on. Yes, I realize my farmer’s tan is atrocious.

The difference is smaller in the other shots, but I’m including them for completeness.

Front Flex

Front Hips

Front Bicep

Side

2013 Vs 2018

Some of you may recall my 2013 overfeeding experiment, conducted and published to make a point. At the time, a weird zeitgeist had taken hold of the internet’s very loud vegan corner. All the gurus seemed to agree that if you stuck to low fat, low protein, high carb vegan foods in an unprocessed form, you couldn’t get fat, no matter how many calories you ate. In fact, eating more food was emphasized as universally being better than less. Hapless 5ft tall sedentary grannies were advised they could shed pounds while eating 3,000 calories a day – so long it was the right vegan food. Not physically active? You’ll be inspired to move more after you adopt this diet, so don’t worry, they were told.

So I ate at least 3,000 calories a day for 75 days and got pretty fat, which is what I expected, since I’d been eating this sort of diet for years and had experienced fat gain with excess calorie consumption multiple times.

I think I succeeded in pointing out the ridiculousness of the claim. That video has now been viewed more than 600,000 times, and I hope a few of my viewers took the warning to heart and sidestepped this idiocy.

While I had plenty of energy to work out during the 2013 experiment, and I worked out a ton by most standards, I gained more fat than muscle, and I didn’t see the large-scale improvements in physical performance ad strength I was hoping might occur. Moreover, I felt pretty horrible. Not only was I super jiggly and my clothes were tight, but I just felt brain fogged and crappy.

Interesting, my shorts and pants became very tight in 2013, but for whatever reason, they did not in 2018, perhaps pointing to a different distribution of muscle and fat, or perhaps that I just had clothing that was sized differently.

How The Two Diets Differed

During my 2013 overfeeding experiment, I was eating a vegan diet of raw fruits and vegetables. I had been eating this diet for years by the time of the experiment, and really only upped my calorie intake. I’d adopted this diet because I have an autoimmune disease called colitis, and I found a raw diet could keep it at bay. Since 2016, though, I’ve increasingly found ways to broaden my diet and reap several health benefits without retriggering disease symptoms, which I’ve already discussed at length.

This raw diet diet is high carb, low fat, and low protein by necessity. I was generally eating 55-75 grams of protein per day during the overfeeding experiment, and always eating at least 3,000 calories. The 5-7% of calories from protein I was eating fits well with the overall target of less than 10% of protein we often hear suggested by those promoting plant-based diets.

Although my athletic pursuits were different in 2013, they were still pretty vigorous. I was doing 4-5 days a week of crossfit and other barbell and weight-based strength training. I was also doing tons of long-distance running. Overall, I was burning far more calories in 2013 because I was doing way more endurance exercise, but that didn’t succeed in keeping my weight down.

Why You Should Distrust My Results

People who are fans of high carb, low protein diets may scoff at my results, and they are right to be suspicious. After all, both of these were N=1 studies conducted outside of a lab setting. My own stated biases could have easily crept in to influence my results, and there was no control group or large sample size.

I also have no bodpod tests for my 2013 overfeeding experiment to contrast the 2018 results to – only my perception, performance results, and visuals. Furthermore, I had more muscle mass at the beginning of my 2018 experiment. This was simply because I had been eating a lot more protein for several years, which had allowed me to build muscle I couldn’t build before. But It’s none the less a difference that could have skewed the results.

This and other issues are real, so feel free to conduct your own experimentation to see if you get different results.

Why I’m Probably Right About High Protein Diet Overfeeding Anyway:

The nice thing about science is that when you get enough repeated confirmations of a result, you can start to think that there’s probably something to it. Don’t ever be certain and close minded, and always question, but when you start to see patterns, you may want to give it some credence.

Well, outside of the vegan echo chamber, scientists have actually been building wide-ranging body of research demonstrating that optimal health and function generally doesn’t occur at the very low protein intakes generally seen on raw vegan, and some cooked vegan diets.

Relevant to the topic of weight gain and overfeeding, there have been numerous studies focusing on how different macronutrient ratios (the ratio of carbs to proteins and fats) affect what happens to you when you take in excess calories.

This recent review 1 of the 25 high-quality studies conducted on the subject is an excellent read, and free, and if you’re interested you should check it out. The authors sum up the repeated findings of all these studies by writing this:

“…It is evident that overfeeding on carbohydrate and/or fat results in body composition alterations that are different than overfeeding on protein. It is commonly believed that 3,500 kcal is equivalent to 0.45 kg (1 pound) of fat and that changing energy balance in accordance with this will produce predictable changes in body weight. However, the overfeeding literature to date does not support this assertion. Dietary protein appears to have a protective effect against fat gain during times of energy surplus, especially when combined with resistance training. Therefore, the evidence suggests that dietary protein may be the key macronutrient in terms of promoting positive changes in body composition.

…Protein overfeeding or the consumption of a high protein diet may not result in a gain in body weight or fat mass despite consuming calories that exceed one’s normal or habitual intake.”

I’ll just highlight the findings of two studies, and then leave you to browse through review, if you’re interested.

When You Overfeed A Sedentary Adult On A Low Protein Diet…

First is an overfeeding study 2 conducted without an exercise component (important, since exercise is one of the two primary levers we have to create strength and muscle mass gains).

The 25 sedentary adults were overfed by 40% of their energy requirements for eight weeks. The ate either a diet containing 5% protein (similar to my 5-7% protein raw vegan diet), 15% protein, or 25% protein. Carbohydrate intake was universally 41-42% of calories, and fat was reduced to accommodate the increased protein intakes.

Now the high carb, low protein diet group gained less total weight (6.82 lbs vs. 13.2 lbs and 14.3 lbs in the normal and high-protein groups, respectively), which sounds fantastic until you figure out why.

All three groups gained fat, but only the 15% and 25% protein groups gained muscle. The 5% protein group actually lost muscle, so that their fat gain represented 119% of the gain in body weight. The 15% and 25% groups had a Fat mass gain of 58% and 52% the gain in body weight, respectively.

Now there was no exercise component to this study, but if we extrapolate out the findings, it suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy that would have seen little muscle mass gain in my 2013 overfeeding experiment consuming limited protein.

When You Overfeed An Athlete On A High Protein Diet…

This study 3 took 48 men and women who’d been doing strength training for years, put them on an even more intense heavy lifting regime, and broke them into two groups. One group didn’t have their diets altered, and consumed 26% of their calories from protein throughout the study. The second group was instructed to eat 39% of their calories from protein, and consumed and extra 490 calories a day.

Both of these groups could be considered to be eating a high protein diet, but we’d expect much more bodyweight gain from the higher calorie, higher protein group, right?

It didn’t happen.

The lower protein group gained 2.86 lbs on average while losing 0.66 lbs of fat and gaining 3.3 lbs of muscle. Their body fat percentage decline 0.7%.

The higher protein group, eating an extra 490 calories a day, actually lost a slight amount of bodyweight on average −0.22 lbs (so they essentially held steady). But they lost more body fat 3.74 lbs, and saw their body fat percentage decline 2.4%.

So even in a group of established athletes eating lots of protein, a higher protein diet seems to bring body composition benefits, even in the face of extra calories.

Following Up:

If you need to get stronger and gain muscle, you’ll probably want to more calories eventually. When you do that, having sufficient protein on hand to maximize the amount of mass created as muscle, and minimize what you’ll create as fat, is probably a good idea.

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