Q: does Whey powder come in pill form? my body is unable to handle this nasty stuff. it doesn't taste bad, but the strawberry smell is HORRIBLE. i can't take it any longer. how many times a day should i be drinking it? i do 30 minutes of cardio (treadmill) and 15 minutes with weights. sadly, i only get 1300 calories a day. i am CONSTANTLY hungry. to avoid my hunger, i end up taking sleeping pills. what's going on here?

A: Sounds like you just picked up a nasty flavor. As I said in my Protein Supps article, chocolate flavors tend to be the safest choice for protein powders. There are no whey pills (you'd have to take like 15 of them anyway), but I recommend that you don't give up on whey altogether but find a better-tasting brand and flavor.

As far as how often and how much of whey you need to take, the answer is that the whey powders are simply replacements for protein-rich foods. So if you wanted to, you could just have lots of chicken or fish or meat or cottage cheese with every meal and then you wouldn't need whey at all. Take a look at my sample diets in the Nutrition article -- you'll see that almost all of them use whey for breakfast and use 'real foods' the rest of the day. But again, there's no magic in whey. It's just an alternative source of protein if you are not getting enough protein in your regular diet.

The other thing is that you said you only eat 1300 calories and are constantly hungry. 1300 is VERY little. It might be OK if you're a petite woman, but it's too little for anyone else. If you starve yourself like that, your body will start burning more muscle instead of fat which is exactly the opposite of what you want. It doesn't sound like you are following a good nutrition program overall -- please read that same Nutrition article and use the calorie calculator in it to see roughly how much you should be eating. Then slowly make changes in your diet (over the course of a few weeks) to ramp up to those suggestions. I am not sure what kind of weights program you're following, but I also recommend reading my Weighttraining article and implementing its suggestions.

My nutrition and weighttraining recommendations go hand-in-hand, so if you don't follow my style of weighttraining, then my nutrition guidelines won't apply to you. But I urge you to follow both for optimum results. Good luck!