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How to Gain Weight?

Unless you have a hormonal imbalance, the key to gaining weight is proper food and exercise — eat more food than you burn and exercise to increase your metabolism.

If you want to gain weight to meet your body mass index, you must gain both muscles and fats in a healthy proportion. If you want to gain weight to 'look good' or increase your confidence, you need some psychological help. Whereas, if you need to gain weight for high performance sports, aim to gain only muscles.

How to Gain Muscles?

Muscles either grow naturally as in the case of a child growing to adulthood, or grow by some external influence as in the case of a body builder. In either cases, muscles grow by feeding on amino acids (the constituents of protein). This is why protein is an essential nutrient for the growth of human body; and of course, body building too.

To gain muscles naturally, just feed them the required amount of proteins. The muscle size gained will depend on genetics: some are lean (ectomorphs) while some are muscular (mesomorphs).

But if you want to influence the natural growth of your muscle to gain more, you need to —

• Work the target muscle group to the point of exhaustion. This will tear the muscle fibres of that body part.
• Then consume the right amount of complete protein. The amino acids in it will 'stitch' the torn fibres together adding mass.
• Rest that muscle group while this 'stitching' occurs. It takes about a week for a muslcle group to totally recover.

This is the basic science of muscle building through external influence. Bhooti suggests you to take professional help for body building workouts.

How to Gain Fats?

Gaining fats is much simple — eat as much of fatty and sugary food and you gain fats. Fatty food feed the body with fatty acids, sugary food feed the body with sugars that are converted to fatty acids by the insulin. The fatty acids then build the fat layers.

Remember that if you are trying to gain weight by consuming more sugary food, it can be a load on your pancreas to produce insulin and convert sugar into fats. Moreover, cancer cells are known to gobble up sugars many times more than other cells. Therefore, considering both the risks, it is healthier to gain fats by eating food rich in saturated fats (ghee, butter, oil, animal fats, etc.), or engage in a healthy proportion of fats and sugars.

Weight Gain Diet

As explained in our earlier post, in order to gain weight, you must eat more calories than your body spends. To calculate how much your body burns, you need to have an estimate of your metabolism and your work. Your metabolism can be roughly estimated from your body type; and the calorie requirements for your work can be estimated by your hunger (not to be confused with one's craving for food).

How and what to eat depends on a handful of factors such as your body type, metabolism, day to day activities, daily routine and current medical conditions. Considering our ignorance of these specific factors pertaining to you, we will not blindly publish a diet plan. For now, we will only state some general rules to be observed.

• Consume all nutrients. Do not cut back on anything. Carbohydrates will feed your energy requirements and any extra carbohydrates will be converted to fats by the body.
• Feed yourself food dense in nutrition: meaning food with higher calories per gram. You now will have to eat comparatively less for the same amount of calories.
• Make sure to consume sugars and carbohydrates before you exercise or do anything physically intensive in order to sustain the energy requirements. Do not let your body burn your fats and glycogen to feed your energy requirements.
• Eat multiple meals: never leave your body in what is known as a catabolic state, where your muscles and fats are broken down for the energy requirements. Feed yourself consistently every 3 to 4 hours and stay in an anabolic state where the body receives its energy from the food.

The Impact of Exercises

Exercising and burning calories might appear to be counter productive to gaining weight since you are supposed to conserve calories to gain weight. However, exercises will increase your metabolism, which will then push you to eat more, and what you eat at this point will determine the productivity or counter productivity of exercises to your weight gain goal.

A high calorie balanced diet consisting of protein, carbohydrates, good fats, vitamins and minerals is the right diet to consume. Proteins will build muscles, carbohydrates will replenish carbohydrates preventing your body from eating muscles for energy, good fats will facilitate various biological processes in your body, and vitamins and minerals will facilitate the various biological processes.

If your goal is to gain only muscles (say, for sports) and you are already lean, avoid saturated fats and include only a tiny amount of carbohydrates — just enough to compensate for the low sugar level. Else, the excess sugar will be converted to fats defeating your goal of an athletic body. Don't avoid sugars even if you have some fats to loose. When you have low blood sugar, your body prefers to first burn the glycogen present in your liver and muscles, than burning your muscles and fats for sugars.

If your goal is to gain weight with good proportion of muscles and fats, consume good quantities of carbohydrates and saturated fats too. Let your eyes be the guide on the proportional aesthetics of your body.

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