Proteinmaxxing Is Everywhere. Here’s How Much Protein You Actually Need
At some point, protein stopped being something you thought about at dinner and became something that needed to be added to absolutely everything.
Protein coffee. Protein cereal. Protein pancakes. Protein chips. Protein water. Walk into almost any grocery store right now and there is a decent chance a product has been redesigned, reformulated or repackaged to tell you exactly how many grams it contains.
The internet has given the obsession a name: proteinmaxxing — or protein maxxing — essentially the practice of deliberately pushing protein intake higher in the name of building muscle, losing fat, staying full or generally optimizing your diet. The American Medical Association highlighted the trend earlier this year, and it has become part of a much larger shift in the way protein is being marketed and consumed in 2026.
The funny thing is that protein isn’t overhyped because it doesn’t work. Protein is extremely important. The question is whether we have reached the point where we’re chasing protein simply because a bigger number looks better.
Because 200 grams sounds impressive. That doesn’t mean your body needed 200 grams.
First, what does protein actually do?
Protein is one of the body’s three major macronutrients, alongside carbohydrates and fat. Its amino acids are involved in building and repairing tissues, and protein plays a role in everything from muscle to enzymes and hormones.
For anyone who strength trains, the connection is even more obvious. Resistance exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis, and dietary protein supplies the amino acids needed to support the repair and rebuilding process. Research in active populations has consistently found higher protein requirements than the baseline recommendation for sedentary adults.
Protein can also be useful when you’re trying to lose weight. Higher-protein diets have been studied for their effects on satiety and body composition, and more recent research has found that increasing protein during weight loss can help reduce the amount of muscle lost along with the weight.
So the protein crowd isn’t making this up.
Where things get messy is the assumption that if 100 grams is good, 150 must be better and 200 must turn you into an Avenger.
The research doesn’t work quite like that.
How much protein do you actually need?
This is where a little math is more useful than TikTok.
For healthy adults aged 19 and older, HealthLink BC uses approximately 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day as the general baseline recommendation.
If you know your weight in pounds, the formula is:
Your weight in pounds ÷ 2.2 = your weight in kilograms
Then:
Your weight in kilograms × 0.8 = your approximate baseline protein requirement
Someone who weighs 150 pounds, for example, weighs roughly 68 kilograms.
68 × 0.8 = about 55 grams of protein per day.
Before you close your protein-tracking app in triumph, there is an important catch. That 0.8 figure isn’t necessarily the ideal target for someone who trains regularly, wants to build muscle or is trying to preserve muscle during a calorie deficit.
For exercising adults, the International Society of Sports Nutrition places a useful range at approximately 1.4 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of body weight per day.
Using our same 150-pound person:
68 × 1.4 = 95 grams
68 × 2.0 = 136 grams
Suddenly, the internet’s obsession with 100-plus grams of protein makes a lot more sense.
But there’s another number worth knowing: 1.6 grams per kilogram.
One large meta-analysis looking at protein supplementation and resistance training found that increasing total protein beyond roughly 1.6 g/kg per day did not produce additional gains in fat-free mass for most of the people studied.
For our 150-pound example:
68 × 1.6 = about 109 grams of protein per day.
That doesn’t mean 109 grams is a magical cutoff, or that eating 110 grams suddenly becomes pointless. Human bodies are not calculators, and age, training volume, energy intake, goals and individual health all matter.
It does show why “more” shouldn’t automatically be the goal.
If you’re strength training and eating 110 grams at 150 pounds, jumping to 180 grams because somebody online showed you a cottage-cheese concoction with suspiciously good macros probably isn’t going to double your results.
Does it matter when you eat it?
Not nearly as much as hitting an appropriate total intake, but there is some science behind spreading protein throughout the day rather than saving virtually all of it for dinner.
For exercising individuals, sports nutrition research has commonly landed around 20 to 40 grams of high-quality protein at a time, or approximately 0.25 grams per kilogram of body weight per serving, as a useful range for stimulating muscle protein synthesis.
Again, this isn’t a rule that requires you to pull out a food scale at brunch.
It is simply a good argument for having some protein at breakfast and lunch instead of realizing at 8 p.m. that you’ve eaten six grams all day and now need to consume an entire rotisserie chicken.
There’s also a persistent myth that your body can only “absorb” 20 or 30 grams of protein in one meal and anything above that is somehow wasted. That’s not really what the research says. Your body can digest and use more protein than that; the narrower 20-to-40-gram discussion is largely about maximizing the muscle protein synthesis response from an individual feeding, not about your digestive system throwing the rest away.
Where proteinmaxxing gets ridiculous
The most useful version of proteinmaxxing is honestly pretty boring.
You notice you’ve been eating very little protein. You start including a meaningful source at most meals. Maybe you eat eggs in the morning, add chicken or lentils at lunch, have fish or tofu at dinner and use a shake when it’s convenient.
Great.
The less useful version is when every food decision gets reduced to a protein score.
A 20-gram protein cookie is still a cookie. A bag of protein chips isn’t nutritionally identical to salmon because they happen to share a number on the label. And adding protein to something doesn’t automatically make the rest of its nutritional profile irrelevant.
Health Canada’s current guidance still emphasizes eating a variety of protein foods, including beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish, lean meats and other options, with an emphasis on choosing plant-based protein foods more often.
That variety matters because your diet has other jobs.
You still need fibre. You still need carbohydrates. You still need fats, fruits and vegetables. Incidentally, while protein has taken over social media, HealthLink BC recommends 25 grams of fibre per day for women aged 19 to 50 and 38 grams for men in the same age range — a target considerably less glamorous than a 50-gram protein shake, but one worth paying attention to.
There are also people who shouldn’t casually adopt an extremely high-protein diet without medical guidance. Protein requirements can change with certain health conditions, including kidney disease, and individualized advice matters far more in those cases than a generalized formula.
For everyone else, there is no need to be afraid of protein. There is also no prize for eating the most of it.
That’s probably where proteinmaxxing gets something right and something very wrong at the same time. Paying attention to protein can be useful, particularly if you train or you’re trying to maintain muscle while losing weight. Maximizing it for the sake of maximizing it is a different idea entirely.
Figure out what range actually makes sense for your body and your goals. Eat enough. Spread it across foods you actually enjoy.
Then you can stop putting protein powder in absolutely everything.
