Last Wednesday, I had a 7 week check up. At that time, I was down nearly 60 pounds. Since last Wednesday, I have lost another 6 pounds. I am 8 weeks out and have lost about 75% of what I wanted to lose. For those who are wondering, I did not start out an ultra heavyweight. I started out with two goals: a weight goal and a sculpting goal. I am certain that the sculpting goal will take more time.

My restriction hasn't really changed but there are times that I can eat more than I would expect I could. Sometimes, my stomach is fickle.

My new obsession is the chicken tortilla soup I wrote about last time. I must have been in Whole Food's three times this week just to get that soup and those parmesan crisps. I'm addicted. I found the nutrition info online and it's not too bad at all.

In a more technical vein, I have heard people on these various boards talk about how much protein one can absorb in a single setting. It usually comes up when people are drinking a protein shake that has 40+ grams of protein per serving.

I think the magic number at which your body supposedly stops using ingested protein is 30g. This doesn't make any sense to me and here's why:

First, our intestines are nearly 30 feet long. The process of digestion takes hours. While it's feasible to assume that we only digest so much per hour, it makes no sense to think that after our bodies have digested a certain amount of what we've eaten, no matter how much of it we've eaten, it just stops and won't process any more.

Secondly, let's say one eats all of the 0.8g/kg of body weight that the RDA recommends for protein intake in 1 meal and another person ate the same amount of protein as the first person but spread theirs out so that they didn't go over the magical 30g. This means that when it's all said and done, the first person, who is eating the exact same amount of protein every day as the second person, would end up being protein deficient while the second person would be perfectly okay (from a protein perspective). The only difference I can see here is that the first person's body will take longer to digest and process the nutrients and the second person will have shorter digestion sessions.

I'm sure that body weight, genetics and all of that other good stuff has a lot to do with it as well; not to mention goals (ie. muscle building vs. fat loss).

It seems to me that the "limit" that a body can process and use in a single meal would be pretty much equivalent to what it can use in a whole day (more than 30g, I'm sure). There's an empirical study that actually appears to state that the older the individual, the better it is to do a large serving of protein for muscle retention than several small servings. There's also another that says that there was no difference in eating the bulk of the day's protein in one meal or spreading them out.

The studies I'm referring to are both by Arnal et. al. :

Journal of Nutrition- 2000- Vol.130(7) "Protein feeding pattern does not affect protein retention in young women."

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition-1999-Vol 69(6) "Protein pulse feeding improves protein retention in elderly women."

They're good studies and they are short reads.

Do your own research but whatever happens, always stay vigilant.