Getting right amount of protein in your diet makes a huge difference in physical and mental performance. If you have enough of it, you feel better, you think better and you perform physically better.The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for an active adult is 0.36 gram of protein per 1 pound of body weight. For 140-pound woman, that equals 50.4 grams of protein.  This is a bare minimum. If you want to know exactly how much protein you should eat daily and what to do to gain some lean muscle mass, keep reading.

First figure out your daily protein requirements.

For that you need to find out what is your lean body mass.

Your lean body mass = your body weight – fat weight

Your body requires adequate levels of protein to maintain this amount of lean body mass. Your fat mass does not require any incoming dietary protein to maintain it.

To find out, what is your fat weight, you need to know your body fat %. Get it checked at your doctor’s office or hire a personal trainer to do it for you or buy a simple fat % monitor and measure it yourself. Or just use this simple rule:

Stand naked in the front of a mirror and look at your body:

• If you have “love handles” than you are about 25% body fat for men and 33% body fat for women.
• If you don’t have any “love handles” than you are about 15% body fat for men and 22% body fat for women.
• When you raise your hands and see your ribs, than you have about 13% body fat If you are men and 20% body fat if you are women.
• If you can clearly see your abdominal muscles you are about 10% body fat if you are men and 17% if you are women.

Let’s say, you are 160 pounds and have 25% body fat. Than your total fat weight will be:

160 X 0.25 = 40 pounds

This means that 40 pounds of pure fat is sitting on your body. Since fat contains 3500 calories per pound, this means you have approximately 140 000 calories of stored usable fat energy, and this stored energy is the equivalent of the calories in more than 2000 pancakes.

Let’s get back to out example:

If you have 40 pounds of total fat weight, than you need to subtract it from your total body weight to get your lean body mass.

160 lb – 40 lb = 120 lb of your lean body mass

Now when you have your lean body mass number in pounds, you need to apply activity factor to get your daily protein requirement. The amount of protein that you will require to maintain your lean body mass: multiply your lean body mass by your physical activity factor. (See below)

Daily protein requirement = lean body mass X activity factor

If you have 120 pounds of lean body mass and were lightly active, you would require 72 grams of protein per day:

120 pounds X 0.6 (activity factor) = 72 grams of protein.

If you want to gain lean muscle mass.

The only way to build muscle mass is by hard physical work or exercise, primarily weight training. If you can build 1 pound of muscle mass per month, that’s a very ambitious goal to achieve. It takes time to build muscle. To do so, however, you will need only about 7 extra grams of protein per day in addition to the number of grams of protein required to maintain your existing lean body mass.

1 pound of new muscle equals 454 grams. Bud muscle is 70% water, which means that 1 pound of new muscle contains about 136 grams of protein. Divide 136 grams by 30 days, and you get 4.5 grams of extra protein per day required to build new muscle.

Taking  in extra 7 grams of protein with your required amount per day will be more than enough to build extra pound of muscle per month.

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