Eat more to Gain Weight – Quality First, Quantity Second
Being underweight may result when energy taken in kilojoules is less than expended. This implies that you must eat more so that you may gain weight.
The secret to healthy weight gain is to make all your kilojoules as nutrient-rich as possible. Eating more empty-calorie foods such as soft drinks and chips is not a successful way to build muscle, strengthen bones or repair tissue after surgery.
Suggestions include:
⭐️ Use a kilojoule-counter book to calculate how many kilojoules you eat on an average day. The amount may be smaller than you think.
⭐️Have three good meals each day. Give yourself extra large servings if you can.
If your appetite is small, eat five to six times a day. Fluids are taken before and after, but not with, meals. ⭐️This leaves room for more food.
⭐️To gain weight successfully you must increase the amount of carbohydrates you eat each day. Stay away from low carbohydrate diets.
⭐️Taking enormous amounts of dietary protein will not create faster growth for your muscles and will be putting unfair pressure on your system, especially the kidneys. Avoid high protein diets.
⭐️Food for a healthy snack may include fruit, yoghurt, muffin, rice pudding, low-fat custard, milkshake or liquid meal nutritional enhancer
⭐️Avoid taking too many high-fat junk foods. If you wish to have high-fat foods, select healthy ones like avocado or nuts.
⭐️Avoid taking too many high-fat junk foods. If you want to have high-fat food then selects healthy ones like avocado or nuts.
⭐️Sprinkle your usual foods with some high calorie foods like grated cheese. Spread peanut or almond butter on a wholegrain muffin.
⭐️Prepare hot oatmeal or other cereal with milk instead of water. At the end of cooking, add powdered milk, honey, dried fruits or nuts.
⭐️Add healthy oils to salads, including olive oil, whole olives, avocados, nuts and sunflower seeds.
⭐️Pump up soups, casseroles, mashed potatoes and liquid milk with one to two tablespoons of dry milk powder.
⭐️Monitor your weight gain progress
Monitoring your progress helps to boost motivation.
Keep a diary to track your kilojoule intake and training schedule.
Be consistent. Weight gain requires that you increase your daily food intake every day. It may help to write up meal plans.
Set realistic goals. For instance, it may take a year to achieve an increase of a few kilos. Gain of lean body weight takes time and so you must not get disappointed with smaller gains.
Consult your doctor on a regular basis to get yourself checked about your progress.
Where to get help
Your doctor
ESSA Exercise & Sports Science Australia Tel. (07) 3862 4122
Physiotherapist
Qualified gym instructor
Qualified personal trainer
Building muscle – the basics
⚡️Anatomically, it is made up of a collection of parallel cylindrical fibers called skeletal musclesTrusted Source that can be contracted to produce force. It is this actual muscle contraction that permits all external human movement to occur.
⚡️Your body is constantly regenerating and recycling the amino acids, also known as protein building blocks, in your muscles.
⚡️You’ll lose muscle mass if your body removes more protein than it adds. No measurable change in muscle size occurs if the net protein synthesis is even. Your muscles will grow if your body deposits more protein than it removes.
⚡️That brings us to how to increase the rate of protein deposition with a minimum muscle protein breakdown rate, which is essentially the key to building muscle.
⚡️This process of muscle hypertrophy is what increases your muscle mass, and it is a principal aim of resistance trainingTrusted Source.
⚡️A number of factors drive the muscle-building process, including hormones, particularly testosterone and growth hormone, and the availability of amino acids and other nutrients.
⚡️Appropriate resistance training forces your body’s hormonal response toward an anabolic muscle-building effect, but this can only be assured of leading to muscle gain, rather than muscle loss, when there is adequate protein and energy availability, researchTrusted Source shows.
Tips for how to gain muscle
1. Decide your target number of repetitions
2. Choose the right amount of weight
3. Choose your exercises well
4. Structure your workout to avoid overtraining
To build new muscle tissue, your major tools to up the body’s rate of protein synthesis are performing resistanceTrusted Source training and getting sufficient amounts of proteinTrusted Source and overall nutrients.
This amount of resistance training pushes the body’s hormonal response to build muscle, but it needs ample protein and energy availability to make sure the process is building muscle versus losing muscle, research says.
Though scientists and experts continue to investigate the science behind optimizing muscle gain, resistance training with the use of moderate to heavy loads in conjunction with relatively high protein intake remains as the only tried-and-true training method for building muscle mass.
