Eating Fish

I've hit a bit of a slump in the work out arena. I'm severely lacking on the strength training, muscle building exercising lately during the week. Mostly I've been doing cardio activities during the weekends - training more for endurance and distance on my bike and hikes. Some weeks went by without a single day at the gym during the week. Unfortunately I think some of my weight loss has been due to losing muscle through the lack of exercise and the intense aerobic workouts and the lack of protein! After a month of skipping boot camp and showing up in time for a fitness test, I felt way weaker than ever.

So the rule of thumb for building muscle and repairing them is 1g / lb of body mass. That's 140g of protein a day! Edamame (soy beans) has 16g/cup which is huge compared to other vegetables. That's 10 cups of edamame a day. Holy crap, I love it, but not that much. That translates to 46% of my daily calorie intake to protein. Hmmm, am I ready to make this switch. Likely not but I realized how little protein I actually take in.

I'm all about building a new body that does all the work for me. Now that I know that my beta cells are not damaged or broken in breaking down glucose. Also, I can judge body effects of High Glycemic index foods vs low. And I am more aware of what 1200-1500 calories a day is and what is not. The next thing to target is to build and maintain muscle so I can burn off unwanted fat even faster.

So I've come to the conclusion that either I start having Protein shakes or start eating...meat. (Some readers will argue that I never really gave up meat. :) Well let's start with fish only. I finally found a useful chart that a lot of people have talked about. It shows which fish to avoid because of Mercury and PCBs. Have a look, its quite useful. Salmon seems to be safe - good thing - I love Salmon!

Any thoughts on protein, getting enough protein in a Vegetarian diet, and muscle building?