How To Actually Gain Weight As A Skinny Guy Without Ruining Your Health
I wish I knew this 5 years ago
Gaining weight is simple and straightforward.
For most of my life, I was skinny. People used to call me a stick, an alien, someone who doesn’t eat, etc. I’ve been called by the worst names you can imagine.
Till the age of 16, I did nothing about it and let it affect my mental health.
Until one day, someone told me to try this whole gym thing. And then I saw a few successful transformations of skinny guys on Youtube.
Boom! Game over.
I thought this was it. I’ll finally gain weight. I’ll finally look handsome. I won’t be bullied anymore. After a few months, the reality hit hard. I didn’t notice any change. I followed the advice you usually hear from people. Eat bananas. Eat a lot. Force yourself to eat more. Eat potatoes. Drink a liter of milk.
Sorry sir, doesn’t work like that.
Then suddenly, everything happened, once I followed the advice of the *legit* fitness influencers. I gained 20 kgs (45 lbs) in 6 months.
Good. Right?
Wrong.
Most of that weight was fat. On top of that, I got stretch marks, a lot of stretch marks, all over my body which made me insecure about my looks, again. After correcting my mistake, I’ve slowly but surely put on healthy weight and muscle.
Here are the things I did to gain weight (in a healthy way) and how you can replicate that:
Eat (Just) Above Your Maintenance Calories
There’s a reason the advice about eating more doesn’t work.
You don’t know what your maintenance calories are. You don’t know how much should you eat. The right method is to eat anywhere between 300–500 above your maintenance calories. If after following this, you still struggle then increase 500 more.
Keep doing that until you start gaining weight.
On the other hand, some people will be completely fine if they just eat 300 calories above their maintenance. Your job is to try and adjust according to the results you’re getting. Weigh yourself weekly to understand what’s going on. And definitely don’t go as fast as I did, this will not end well at all.
From stretch marks to bad health to a lot of fat, the results you’ll get will suck.
Aim to gain no more than 1 kg per month. Ideally, 750 gms. Of course, this comes from personal experience. The data might suggest differently. Don’t hesitate to look at that as well.
Eat Calorie Dense Foods
Now you know how many calories to eat. It’s going to be a walk in the park.
Yeeeeaaaa!!!
Not really.
For hard gainers, the actual challenge is to eat the required calories every day. You may not have the appetite to consume that much food. You may develop all sorts of digestion issues along the way.
The trick is to eat foods that are high in calories without getting your stomach full.
This is where bananas, potatoes, eggs, chicken, nuts, nut butter, etc. are beneficial. You just need to calculate the calories. Ignore the foods that are low in calories but get your stomach full. Don’t cut them altogether. Just keep the quantity to a minimum.
The best hack is to drink your calories, literally.
There are hundreds of high-calorie smoothie recipes. Check them out. You can get 1000–1500 calories through just one serving of a smoothie. And they’re delicious as well.
It won’t break the bank, nor your stomach.
Eating that many calories in one go is difficult. But drinking it is like walking in a park. Simple yet effective. And don’t include junk foods just because they are high in calories. They won’t be good for your body.
Choose the healthier options.
You can follow the 80/20 rule where 80% of your calories comes from healthy options while the other 20% comes from your favorite foods. But personally, I would recommend the 90/10 rule as that’s much healthier, at least for me.
And that’s it for the food.
You don’t need to do anything else. Don’t complicate the nutrition. Keep it simple. Making progress will become easier.
Strength Train Atleast 3 Times A Week
You knew this was coming.
This is the most important of it all. Weight training is the easiest way to make sure the weight you’re gaining is not getting stored as fat. If you don’t want to gain fat, guess what you’ll need to gain.
Muscle.
Now it doesn’t mean you need to go out there, inject yourself with steroids, and turn yourself into a hulk. That ain’t healthy, legal, and definitely not recommended. What I mean to say here is when you gain weight make sure most of it is muscle. You won’t get muscular because that’s harder than you think.
If you do it well, you may end up looking like a lean athlete or achieve a male model physique.
Most fashion models don’t have a lot of fat and they have decent-sized muscles. If you don’t want to look skinny then you’ll need to gain at least that much muscle mass. To get there, you’ll need something around two years (a rough estimate) or so of solid training varying from individual to individual.
After that, it’s up to you whether you want to maintain that physique or gain more muscle.
If you get the eating part right, sleep 7–8 hours each night, and hit the gym 3x a week without skipping a day, you’ll see results. Of course, there are things like training volume, intensity, progressive overload (very important), deload, etc.
You’ll figure that out later.
First, get the basics right. After almost 6 years of training, I can say that these are things that worked for me. It took a lot of trial and error to figure this stuff out. And I hope you can learn from them.
Above all, don’t obsess over the size of your bicep or your looks, in general.
Life is much more than that. Compliment it with fitness, not the other way around.
All the best.
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