HOW TO GAIN WEIGHT: HEALTHY TIPS TO GAIN WEIGHT
Do you already know how to gain weight healthily? There is a high percentage of overweight Brazilians. Despite this, gaining weight clean and with quality is very difficult, even more so if you have a diet based on natural foods. Need to hit calorie goal, macro, and micronutrient goals, need to distribute nutrients in several meals throughout the day. This requires dedication, programming, and discipline!
Unless you can afford someone to do everything for you, like paying a nutritionist to prepare your diet, a cook to prepare meals that are always fresh, and a personal trainer to train you.
I don’t think that’s the reality of many people here, at least it’s not mine, so I’m going to tell you what and how to do to gain dry weight and lean mass. But before that, we need to define a few things:
- What are lean mass, fat mass, and muscle
- How to gain weight: see tips to get started
- How to gain weight: check out the main foods
WHAT ARE LEAN MASS, FAT MASS, AND MUSCLE
Fat mass is only fat. What accumulates on the back of the arm and moves when we say goodbye, what remains in the breeches leaving the woman looking like a pear. What stays in the belly and shakes when we jump – there’s no mistaking it!
It turns out that people confuse lean mass with muscle. Lean mass is everything that is made by the skin, organs, ligaments, vascular system… What is not water or fat can be called lean mass. Muscle, or muscle mass, is just muscle tissue (chest, biceps, triceps, and buttocks).
HOW TO GAIN WEIGHT: SEE TIPS TO GET STARTED
In theory, the diet to gain weight is very simple, it is enough that we consume a greater amount of calories than the one that our body expends. That is, if you need 2,000 kcal to keep your body functioning and be able to carry out all your daily activities and yet at the end of the day step on the scale and be at the same weight, and to gain weight you need to eat a diet with 2,500 kcal, 3,000 kcal (or more) a day.
This may seem easy for someone with pizza, ice cream, soft drinks, and highly tasty and low-nutrition foods on the menu, but for a person who wants to create healthy habits and have a dry and developed physique, this is a challenge.
That’s because your diet should be, as we call it, “clean” – that is, free of ultra-processed foods. The less industrialized food and the more natural or minimally processed food, the greater your gains and development.
Ah, yes, eating more than we spend is very important, but there is a fundamental detail: the exercises that help you gain and maintain weight by increasing and maintaining muscle mass. Without a strength training/weight training routine, you cannot gain muscle mass. Exercising is necessary to use the surplus calories consumed to build muscle mass.
HOW TO GAIN WEIGHT: CHECK OUT THE MAIN FOODS
Foods that will help you gain dry weight are all-natural, like vegetables (all of them); meat, chicken, eggs, fish, milk, and derivatives; bread, pasta, extra virgin olive oil, fruits, and nuts.
But if you have any dietary limitations, as in the case of vegetarians and vegans, don’t worry, you can do it too. The point is that you need to be more careful in your choices, especially proteins.
The vegan diet should bet on cereals, oilseeds, and legumes as the main source of this nutrient. In addition to the quality of food (if they are natural or industrialized), we still need to pay attention to the quantity to be consumed. One of the great difficulties of those who cannot gain weight is to hit the target number of calories needed per day.
The amount of food eaten is a matter of habit. Underweight people usually have a kind of natural limitation when it comes to eating. The hypothalamus, which is located at the base of the brain, regulates the feeling of satiety or hunger and prompts us to seek or refuse food.
Patients Who Want To Gain Weight
It is influenced by several factors, and most of the time, people with low weight eat until they feel full, but this does not mean that they have ingested enough calories. Most of the complaints in the office in the case of patients who want to gain weight are “I nourish, I eat a lot, but I don’t gain weight”; “Nutri, I eat several times a day, but I don’t gain weight”.
But what then, to do when the patient wants to gain body and hypertrophy, in those cases where the individual is already feeding with the maximum amount he supports?
It’s quite simple, check it out: one of the factors that influence satiety is the consistency of food and the movement our jaw makes when we chew – the more times we chew, the more satiated we feel. You can add liquid meals to complement the diet. This is exactly the function of dietary supplements for mass gain. When we cannot ingest all the nutrients that our body demands through food, we can use supplements.
The list of possible supplements is quite large and subdivided into many classes. We have the ergogenic ones, like caffeine and creative; energy drinks, which would help you reach your calorie goal; isolated proteins, carbohydrates, and fats; micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals; as well as phytochemicals and several other substances that could be used in muscle recovery or in improving sports performance, a fact that will directly contribute to muscle mass gain.
Would you even like to consume supplements but don’t have money?
No problem, I’ll give you some tips on how to whet your appetite, and how to eat more and I’ll also talk about foods that can hinder weight gain.
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
High-intensity workouts can produce different reactions. In some people, they can stimulate appetite, but in others, they can cause an anorectic effect. If you completely lose your appetite after training, don’t worry, try to rest and relax. By lowering your adrenaline levels, you’ll feel hungry, so you can blast off a good portion of healthy, nutrient-dense foods like rice, beans, meat, and salads.
DO NOT DRINK LIQUIDS WITH SOLID MEALS
Organize your meals so that you add liquid meals with foods as ingredients when possible – you will need a blender to blend some fruit, oatmeal, milk, and peanuts and make a homemade hypercaloric.
Try to reconcile as much as possible the “pleasure of eating” aspects with “nutrient-rich foods”. As tasty as they are, you can’t live on fast food, they don’t have nutrients, they only have calories.
Food Supplement To Gain Weight
Food like this would be a good recipe for how to gain a body but not how to gain muscle mass fast. Just as you cannot have a diet without taste and any pleasure, there will be no sustainability in the project, with less than two weeks you already abandon the diet.
Sometimes, so-called “fit” foods or fad foods get in the way of gaining muscle mass. This is because they may contain fewer calories than good quality “traditional” foods.
Let’s take the case of rice and beans, for example, it is one of the richest mixtures of Brazilian cuisine. People increasingly despise and devalue it, even though it provides calories and nutrients. Some people prefer to eat sweet potatoes as a source of carbohydrates instead of eating rice and beans, but check this out: 100 g of sweet potatoes (ready-to-eat food) offer 77 kcal, whereas a dish with 100 g, including 60 g of rice and 40 g of beans will provide 114 kcal with a higher amount of micronutrients and nutritional benefits.
Fit recipes and preparations that use only the egg white also reduce an important portion of the caloric and nutritional value of the egg. Consuming the yolk is safe as long as it fits your daily calorie requirement.
Don’t be afraid of real food, and don’t overestimate superfoods and trendy supplements. Doing work well requires discipline and willpower.
