Whole Foods? Protein Powders? Both?
It’s important to know the benefits of opting for whole foods vs shakes/protein powders.
Shakes or powdered proteins are great when you’re on the go and or extremely tight for time. But because these options are powdered, they are pre-digested. What this means is that it is easily absorbed. Any food that is easily absorbed by the body can tend to cause your insulin to spike more so than whole undigested food sources. So if insulin is a big issue with you, eventually moving away from the shake variations would be useful to your goals.
Whole foods take a lot more digestive energy to break down and absorb, and thus cause you to actually get more of a metabolic spike from digesting these foods. So if your goal is to increase your bodies total daily energy use, whole foods are of importance to your diet as they will allow the body to get more bang for your buck day by day.
They key here is variation, try not to stick to the same thing every day. It is important to balance your intake and follow your macros with different sources of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc…