Why protein intake guidelines are bullsh*t

First off I'd like to say I'm not a sports nutritionist or a dietician.

This is just me speaking what I know from experience.

All the protein intake guidelines you read are pretty much arbitrary numbers. Somebody can do a study and then trot around some magical number of grams of protein like it's the end all be all protein number just because they put a subject on that protein number and he made a strength gain.

The problem I have with the protein Nazis is most of the time your actual protein needs are always higher or lower than their guidelines dictate.

What are you going to do if your body is hungry and it's craving animal protein but you can't eat because you're strictly adhering to some made up protein intake number?  Are you just going to ignore your body's wants for beef? Are you going to stifle your muscle growth and deny your body the ability to repair its muscles just because some researcher in a lab setting did a study on rats and assigned some arbitrary protein number?

On the flip side, what if it's this scenario?  You're between training sessions on your rest day and you're feeling stomach discomfort from eating a big steak and eggs breakfast.  Lunchtime rolls around and you know if you eat anymore protein you're going to expel it in the toilet.  Do you say to yourself well the magical protein intake fairies told me to consume 1 gram of protein per 1 pound of bodyweight so I guess I gotta go suck down a sirloin steak for lunch. Two hours later you're shooting it out your backside watching your expensive steak flush down the drain.

Then you have the body listeners of which I'm a member.  They're connected to their inner aura or some other new age nonsense and they're just letting their bodies tell them how much protein to ingest. The problem with that is the protein you intake may be far greater or less than you actually need.

So what's the answer? There is no cut and dry answer. I heard Michael Phelps was taking in six hundred grams of protein per day when he was training for the Olympics.  During the coldest days of January I could easily digest 450 grams of protein in a day.  Now that it's summer I'm barely hitting two hundred grams.

Incidentally some of my biggest strength gains came from  me eating far more than my protein requirements of 1 gram per 1 pound of body weight. Of course I spent the last of my resting time the day before and up until my workout on the toilet watching all my protein flush down the drain which is disgusting and time consuming and expensive. Beef and chicken are not cheap.

The only guideline I can think of is try to hit the 1 gram per 1 pound of body weight the first 36 hours after you workout and track your protein intake using myfitnesspal.com.  If you feel like  the protein is not going to digest properly and be used for muscle repair, back off the protein for the whole day. Maybe eat some yogurt or some bread or a banana for the rest of the day. Let your body reset itself. Try not to upset your stomach with a lot of fiber. And then hopefully on the next day for breakfast you can gorge yourself on meat and then start the strength gains again.