The Guide to the PE Diet

The PE Diet is the diet popularized by Dr. Ted Naiman, MD, in his 2018 book titled The P:E Diet. The PE Diet may offer many health benefits, including benefits against type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. When used along with appropriate exercise, the PE Diet can aid in improving body composition, helping to lose excess body fat while building or maintaining muscle.

What is the PE Diet?

The focus of the PE Diet is to achieve a high level of satiety per calorie, which means your food choices should provide the maximum amount of nutrients and satiety (feeling full and satisfied) while minimizing the calories, or energy, you consume.

The Protein to Energy Ratio

The PE Diet classifies the macronutrients you eat into two categories: Protein and Energy. In this case, energy refers to non-protein energy, or the amount of carbohydrates and fat eaten. The goal is to be aware of the ratio of protein to energy you consume, and to gradually increase this ratio.

The protein to energy ratio of a food is calculated by dividing the grams of protein by the combined amount of carbohydrate and fats grams.

Note: Net carbs are total carbs subtracted by fiber.

You can use a tool such as The PE Diet Calculator to help you calculate the P:E Ratio of a food.

To see how everyday foods compare before you start scoring them yourself, the PE Diet food list ranks 50 common foods by their protein to energy ratio.

How you cook a food changes its ratio too. Air-frying a chicken thigh instead of pan-frying it in oil keeps the protein and drops the added-fat calories, which nudges the ratio upward — see the best air fryers for healthy cooking for how the oil swap works and which models do it well.

The ratio is computed from grams, so it is only as honest as the grams you feed it — and the foods that move it most are the ones people never weigh. Oil, nut butter, and dressing land almost entirely in the energy half of the fraction, so an eyeballed spoonful can drop a meal a full band. Our roundup of the best food scales for macro tracking names a winner for each use case — budget, 0.1 g precision, tare workflow, and USB-rechargeable — and works through what an unweighed add-in does to a real meal.

If you would rather think in calories than in grams of energy, the Protein-to-Calorie Ratio Calculator scores the same foods on grams of protein per 100 calories — a bounded scale that makes two already-lean foods easier to tell apart.

Because the goal is losing fat while holding onto muscle, body fat percentage is the measure that tells you whether it’s working. For a picture of the target most people on this diet have in mind, see what 15% body fat looks like — and why the same number reads very differently on a man than on a woman.

What counts as a sensible target also shifts as you get older, because the range moves up roughly five to ten points between your 20s and your 60s. Check yours against the healthy body fat percentage by age chart before setting a goal number.

Raising the ratio means anchoring meals with protein-dense foods, but it doesn’t answer how much protein the day should add up to. How much protein per day covers the evidence-based targets for fat loss and muscle retention, and ranks common protein sources by their PE ratio. For your own number in grams, the protein calculator works it out from your bodyweight, goal, and training load.