Bernard O'Shea: Help! I have developed a protein anxiety

I can’t eat a chicken breast without wondering if I’m hitting my macros

'In the supermarket, I’d reach for an ordinary yoghurt, but the one beside it has "25 GRAMS OF PROTEIN", with an image of a person who has just finished an Ironman.'

I spent most of my childhood completely unaware of protein.

I never remember my mother putting my dinner down on the table and telling me: “That chicken breast has 32 grams of protein, and if you eat the broccoli it has another 12 grams.”

I did get the whole “eat your dinner; there are people in the world starving” routine, but I never felt I had to hit a macro target by 6pm.

We ate ham, beef, and the odd boiled egg, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t know it was called protein.

Walking around the supermarket today, the word itself is now a brand. It’s written on everything.

Today, alone, on my daily food aisle jaunt, it was plastered across yoghurt, milk, bread, cereal, bars, pudding, and a mind-boggling array of ‘protein shakes’.

I have been reliably informed by my more nutritionally cultured friends that you can even get protein water. How did poor old water get sucked into it? I thought water had been doing a reasonable job over the last few million years giving life to the planet.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough.

I joked on my Instagram last week: "What if I just started writing ‘protein’ on my food? Would it then have protein in it? Maybe I should start writing it on my underwear, socks, clothes, and bed sheets so I could be lathered in it 24 hours a day. Imagine the macros I’d hit then.”

I often imagine what would have happened if someone had had the smarts to copyright the word ‘protein’ 20 years ago. They would be billionaires today.

I’m thinking of copywriting the following words: Chewing, breathing, sitting, napping, and regular.

I think I could make a fortune off ‘regular’. I can easily see shoppers doling out their hard-earned money on regular cabbage, regular pears, even regular toilet paper.

But it’s the supermarket where the protein anxiety begins. I’d reach for an ordinary yoghurt, but the one beside it has ‘25 GRAMS OF PROTEIN’, with an image of a person who has just finished an Ironman, and that face is looking at me, thinking, ‘You’re a weakling’.

Of course I’m going to buy it. I panic. My internal voice starts: “You are not getting enough protein, and we could die. How could you do this to yourself?”

I go to buy the regular milk, but out of the corner of my eye I see the protein milk, and if I don’t get that one, my kids will be almost instantly deficient in this essential nutrient.

Within a matter of minutes, pushing the trolley, I’m a bad parent and, even worse, I can feel my muscles deteriorating.

But I draw the line on chocolate. How dare they touch the one joy I have in life. They now have plastered it onto the one treat that has been imbued into my soul.

However, I welcome its addition to ice cream. Where once I’d eat, slurp, and gulp over 1,000 calories a night when the kids went to bed, now I’m just topping up my protein. It says it on the tub, so it must be good for me.

I know there is science behind it. I know protein is important. Especially in middle age, we need to consume it a bit more.

When you were 20 years of age, you ate a chicken fillet roll because you were hungry or hungover or both. Today, it’s because I’m preserving my muscle mass, which makes this trend even more annoying, since there is an awful lot of truth to it.

But the truth is passed out in the pit lane by a heavily branded car, and the race is only competed when you hit your targets.

That’s where I begin to think: Since when did eating become homework?

Like millions of other people, I now finish my day by looking at my MyFitnessPal app.

Mostly, I’ve had a bad day because I didn’t hit my fibre, protein, vitamin D, and god knows what other target. Yet miraculously I’m still alive. Am I some incredible superhuman being?

Are our parents extraterrestrials? They must be. My father walked three times a day for 70 years. I never heard him say to my mum, "Mary, I didn’t hit 10,000 steps today".

My mother has never tracked her daily protein intake in her life. They have to be from another planet, or at least be involved in some high-end US military experiment.

How did they live every day without knowing what was going into their bodies? Were they like ALF? Were they secretly eating stray cats without us knowing? Was that how they survived?

Or maybe we just knew less growing up. Maybe our diets weren’t perfect. But there was something lovely about dinner simply being dinner. Nobody scanned it, logged it, photographed it, or asked what its macros were.

Someone put it in front of you. You ate it. I should copyright that!