Seeking a Stable Weight? Maybe You Should Bring Home the Bacon.

Hunger pangs are hard to resist.

So the recent findings that a little extra lean protein at breakfast will last you until lunch could provide the boost to help you maintain your weight during the upcoming holidays -- and beyond.

Of all the macronutrients that we eat, "protein blunts your hunger the most and is the most satiating," notes Wayne Campbell, who leads a team investigating protein at Purdue University's Campbell Laboratory for Integrative Research in Nutrition, Fitness and Aging.

In October, Campbell and his colleagues reported at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity that women who added a little lean protein to their breakfast -- in this case, a slice of Canadian bacon added to an egg sandwich made with an English muffin -- experienced less hunger over the next four hours than those who ate the sandwich sans bacon.

Blood levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin also rose significantly less in women who ate the bacon breakfast.

Welcome to Week Three of the Lean Plate Club Holiday Challenge. If you're new to the challenge, this is not a diet. The goal is simply to maintain your weight from now until New Year's Day. Do that and you'll be a step ahead when 2007 arrives. That's because research suggests that overweight and obese adults -- now accounting for two-thirds of the adult population in the United States -- gain about five pounds during the holidays. More important, they don't shed that weight in the spring.

This week's goal is simple: Just add a little lean protein. (More on that later.) And stick with the past goals: Eat two cups of fruit and 2 1/2 cups of vegetables per day, and increase your intake of fiber-filled food, such as whole-grain cereal. Activity also helps with weight maintenance. So today, try to take two 11-minute walks or four walks of five to six minutes each. Over the next week, add a few more minutes each day. Find forms to track your activity, food and weight at http://www.leanplateclub.com.

The Purdue study is just one of a growing number of studies that point to some weight benefits from eating more protein.

In 2005, University of Washington researchers tested the effects of placing 19 slightly overweight people on a low-fat, high-protein dietary regimen to maintain their weight. Participants ate about 30 percent of their daily calories in protein. That's about twice the average intake of protein and roughly equal to the protein content of the breakfast sandwich in the Purdue study. About half the daily calories came from healthy carbohydrates, including plenty of fruit, vegetables and whole grains, and the rest from fat.

The higher-protein fare made participants feel full -- so full that they complained about it, according to David Scott Weigle, professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the study's lead author.

Over the four-month study, participants continued to eat the high-protein food dictated by the researchers. To avoid nutritional boredom, participants also could eat one meal of their choosing and drink up to three alcoholic beverages weekly.

The study found that on the low-fat, high-protein regimen, participants spontaneously cut their daily intake by 441 calories -- roughly a quarter of their total calories. Although the goal was weight maintenance, participants lost an average of 11 pounds, including about eight pounds of fat, all while feeling satisfied.