How Do You Put On Weight?
Q: How do you put on weight? I’m asking because I’m skinny as fuck. How skinny? Ha, have you ever looked at a stick figure drawing and said that it looks jacked? Well, that’s because you haven’t seen me to compare it to! Real talk, I’m skinny as fuck!!!
A: If you’re like the average skinny person who wants to put on weight, the type of weight that you more than likely want to put on is muscle. Toward that end, it’s common for naturally thin people to have trouble adding mass to their frame. Reasons for the difficulty in some cases might include substance abuse, an eating disorder, or serious medical condition. More often than not though, it’s usually just a matter of the person not eating enough.
Weight loss is about taking in less calories than your body burns by way of such things like performance of its vital functions. Because that’s how you lose weight, it makes sense that you have to do the opposite to gain weight. As such, you should eat at a caloric surplus of at least 500 calories above your maintenance level.1An easy but not so accurate way to calculate your maintenance calories is to multiply your current body weight in pounds by 15 if your lifestyle is moderately active. From there, you should weigh and track everything you eat and drink to make sure that you’re actually consuming as many calories as you should be.
Now, eating as many calories as you’re supposed to eat might be challenging. To make that easier, it might serve you well to eat more frequently, as eating 5 or 6 smaller meals and snacks might be more comfortable than trying to cram all of your calorie needs into 2 or 3 big meals. Concerning what those meals and snacks should consist of, they should be items that provide a lot of calories per serving. Such foods include nuts, seeds, full-fat dairy products, avocados, dried fruit, oily fish, fatty cuts of meat, granola, trail mix, coconut milk, peanut butter, potatoes, and pasta. Use those items as key components or as toppings, garnishes, and add-ins to provide more calories to meals and snacks, as well as other ingredients. So if you’re making oatmeal, for example, then use milk in place of water and toss in raisins, bananas, egg whites, yogurt, peanut butter, or protein powder to increase the caloric load.
Eating every few hours, choosing foods with more bang for the buck, and adding extra calories to meals and snacks where possible are all ways to increase your calorie intake without having to feel like you’re stuffing yourself. What else you can do is refrain from drinking while eating and instead save the imbibing for after to help leave room in the stomach for food. Follow those recommendations and you should gain weight. And to make sure that the weight you’re putting on is muscle and not fat, you should consume at least your body weight in grams of protein and perform resistance training with a focus on compound exercise movements that involve multiple muscle groups. Having adequate protein is essential for building muscle tissue and lifting weights is necessary to prompt muscle growth, with exercise also having the benefit of helping to stimulate appetite.
Putting on weight is doable but it requires work. If that’s something that you’re adverse to, then there are other options. One is to change the way you dress, as wearing certain types of clothes in a certain way can help create the illusion of a fuller appearance without having to do anything to your actual body. Such style tips include dressing in layers, wearing light colors, and donning textured fabrics to add visual bulk to your silhouette. And if you don’t have the money to undergo a wardrobe makeover, then you can just accept your body as it is. I know, that’s silly, but yeah!
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: calories, fat, fitness, muscle, muscle group, nutrition
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