Effective Ways to Gain Healthy Weight if You are Skinny
Although a lot of people aim to be thin and lean, being underweight can be a concern, especially if it’s the result of an unhealthy lifestyle, poor eating habits, or the presence of other health issues.
You are recommended to meet your doctor or a dietitian for help, and maybe he will put you on a weight gain program aiming to add on more pounds. However, keep in mind, healthy weight gain requires a balanced approach, just like a weight loss program for overweight people.
If you consider necessitating adding pounds and muscle mass naturally and safely, it is essential to understand and follow below listed main principles about how to gain healthy weight if you are skinny.
TIPE#1 How many calories should I eat a day to gain weight?
You Should Consume More Calories Than Usually Burn But in a Healthy Way (NO junk Food)
Let’s say that the amount of your daily calorie intake is around 2000, which is the average daily energy requirement for a healthy adult. If you want to gain weight slowly should consume an additional 300 to 500 calories each day, but if you strive to achieve it faster, you need to consume an extra 700 to 1,000 calories per day.
What’s that mean?
let’s look at an example where a proper diet is combined with a suitable sports activity, a combination that would give you the best results.
If you’re exercising more but also tries to gain weight meanwhile, then you have to add the calories burned through workouts to your daily diet plan
For example, if your daily number of calorie intake is 2,000 and you burn an extra 600 calories during exercise every day, you would need to add the further 300 to 500(or 700 to 1,000) calories to the base number of 2,600.
2000 (Calorie intake trough your diet) + 600 (Calories spent trough activities) + 300-500 (additional calories to eat) ≅ 3000
It means that in a case that you are sporting each day, you need to consume a daily basis at least 2900 calories to gain weight.
Keep in mind that adding extra 500 calories to your daily intake for a week will help you to add around a pound of body mass per week. However, until you get the desired body weight, maintaining the increased mass will require persistence in consuming the necessary extra calories.
The fundamental rule, if you aim to gain weight, is to eat more calories than you burn through implementing calorie-dense food in your diet
TIPE#2 Include Healthy Calorie-Dense Food in Your Diet
Protein-Rich Foods
Eat high-protein such as:
- Grass fed beef (240 calories per 100g)
- Organic Chicken (218 calories per 100g)
- Eggs (155 calories per 100g)
- Pastured poultry (272 calories per 100g)
- Fatty fish like salmon, sardines, mackerel (206 calories per 100 g)
Healthy Fats
The best is choosing to eat a higher healthy fat diet, instead of selecting fried foods. You can opt for snacks and meals containing fats like:
- Avocados (160 calories per 100g)
- Fatty fish (206 calories per 100 g)
- Butter(717 calories per 100g)
- Cheese (402 calories per 100g0
- Coconut and coconut oil (862 calories per 100g)
- Olives and olive oil (884 calories per 100g)
- Nuts(718 calories per 100g) and seeds.
Complex Carbohydrates
These foods are high in fibre, which helps improve the digestive system and food absorption, but also helps in blood sugar management:
- Homemade granola (489 calories per 100g)
- Sweet potatoes(101 calories per 100g)
- Whole grains(123 calories per 100g)
- Chickpeas (164 calories per 100g)
- Whole fruit as bananas, avocados, coconut, and mango
Intake of High-Calorie Drinks
- Milk(61 calories per 100g)
- Smoothies
- Protein shakes
- Fresh fruit juice
- Nutrient-rich beverages for weight gain
Increase high-calorie food in your diet, but the key is to combine it always with enzymes rich food
TIPE#3 Strong Digestion and Healthy Gut
If you are underweight, a high-calorie diet alone is not enough to promote weight gain. You should enhance your digestion and nutrients absorption to aid the natural weight gain process in your body
If the food is assimilated poorly through the digestive tract, the extra calories from your diet will result in more toxins in the body rather than healthy body tissues and muscle mass. So that’s why, in some sense, the quality of your digestion reflects your health status and weight issues. Better degradation, assimilation, and transformation of food substances together with the complete disposal of waste products will lead to proper metabolism and better food converting in healthy tissues.
And for a better nutrient’s absorption, your body needs potent enzymes as well as the full palette of beneficial bacteria living in your gut
Implement in Your Diet Enzymes Rich Foods
Enzyme Factor
The enzymes are biological molecules (typically proteins) that speed up the rate of the chemical reactions within body cells, which allowed you to absorb and utilize the nutrients from food much more effectively. They participate in all biochemical body reaction as supporting them to they run smoothly and efficiently. They are vital for life and assist a broad range of essential body functions, such as aiding in metabolism and digestion.
For all digestive processes from the break down the food you eat, to it efficiently absorption through the small intestine and enter the bloodstream nourishing all your tissues and organs, you need specific enzymes.
Although your body creates them naturally throughout the digestive system, the modern lifestyle and age can decrease its ability to produce a sufficient supply. Furthermore, this will end in bad quality of food absorption that you eat and will stumble your efforts for healthy weight gain.
While a digestive enzyme supplement can undoubtedly be a smart addition, better will be for you to rely on help from the enzymes in food itself.
Here is a list of foods that have the highest content of so needed for the body enzymes:
The Fruit as a Natural Storehouses and Providers of Enzymes
Many fruits contain natural digestive enzymes that assist in the digestion of proteins, carbohydrates, and sugars.
- Pineapple contains bromelain. It’s a mix of ingredients that includes cysteine proteinases that help and support protein digestion.
- Papaya contains proteolytic enzymes, called papain, that will help you break down the proteins, and especially the large protein molecules into amino acids.
- Mango is a delicious fruit-filled with healthy substances. It mainly provides an amylase-digestive enzyme that breaks down starches into maltose, a disaccharide (two-sugar molecule) — a great reason to snack on mango.
- Bananas are rich in amylase and maltase. Those are enzymes that aid the digestion of the carbohydrates, and especially the maltase assists in breaks down complex sugars into pure glucose.
- Kiwi will provide for you actinidin. It’s a substance that will help you in breaking down the proteins, and particularly those found in red meat, eggs, dairy, and fish.
- Avocados, which are considered fruit, are a great source of healthy fats and contain lipase. It’s an important enzyme that helps break down fats but specifically helps against the discomfort in indigestion.
Improve Your Gut Health
Many microbes support human health, and if some of them are vital, others can be dangerous, mainly when they multiple. These bacteria, yeasts, and viruses (in the body exist around 100 trillion) compose so-called “gut flora.”
Take care of gut health and keeping the appropriate balance of these microorganisms is requisite for physical and mental health, immunity, and more.
An imbalanced gut can weaken your body’s ability to digest nutrients, which is an excellent reason to aid the gut microbiome, improving in this way, your overall health.
Ways To Improve Your Gut Flora :
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Eat Fermented Foods
Fermented foods are excellent natural sources of probiotics.
Including these foods in your daily diet may improve gut health:
all kind of fermented vegetables, kimchi, kefir, kombucha, tempeh, miso, and sauerkraut.
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Eat prebiotic-rich food
Prebiotics are nondigestible carbohydrates that appear as food for probiotics. It’s a natural process that is encouraging beneficial bacteria to multiply, which makes your gut much more effective in the digestion, absorption of nutrients, and the excretion of waste.
But not in the last place, it also has a significant impact on the immunity power, as well as on gut-brain interactions.
The latest research suggested that prebiotics may help probiotics become more efficient in certain environmental conditions, including pH and temperature changes.
If you want to enhance your gut health, implement more of the following prebiotic-rich foods in your diet: asparagus, bananas, onions, garlic, chicory, garlic, beet, and whole grains.
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Take Probiotics and Prebiotic as Supplements
Another way to boost the good bacteria, or probiotics, in your gut, is choosing to take probiotic supplements, which definitely will support a healthy gut microbiome supporting full nutrient absorption. They are an excellent choice because they contain the full range of beneficial bacteria needed for the proper functioning of your gut.
TIPE#4 Avoid Refined Carbohydrates (Bad Calories)
Why should you avoid refined carbohydrates while trying to gain weight?
The truth is that our bodies are naturally programmed to keep our fat stores as a biological means that was protecting humans in periods of long-term starvation.
A big part of your body fat accumulates thanks to the carbohydrates in your diet.
The carbohydrates act as fast fuel for us, but when taken in large quantities and are of poor quality, the body starts to store the excess of them in the form of body fat. And when this process grows, it may lead to troubles for your health.
That’s why you should pay attention to what kind of high-calories food you eat!!!
Bad Calories
It is no coincidence that many dietitians name the refined carbohydrates as “bad calories.”
The bad calories mainly contained in high-sugar foods or fast food will offer you almost no nutrients and will make you feel full just temporarily.
They will not provide needed essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals required to maintain all internal body processes and functions. Instead, they will supply your body with solid fats and added sugars, substances which in the long term, can cause your high body toxicity resulting in unhealthy weight gain.
More specifically, the weight gain will happen in your belly area in the form of a belly fat tissue. It’s a so-called abdominal fat that, if develops and enlarge, can later result in diseases like stroke, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.
It’s important to remember that the presence of more refined carbs in your diet will cause you more belly fat rather than healthy weight gain with lean muscle mass
TIPE#5 Strength Training For Weight Gain
Strength training is vital when the goal is weight gain. On a muscular and hormonal level, there’s nothing more good to give your body a clear message to grow.
When you’re working on gaining weight, the critical moment thing is to make sure you’re performing some kind of strength training minimum 3-4 days a week with no exception. What type of strength training you do is less important than doing it consistently over time.
You can gain weight doing bodyweight exercises in your living room if they’re sufficiently enough and combine them the right eating and supplementing. But gym and weights would also be an excellent means for weight gain if you have access to them.
Here a few points to follow and implement in your training routine:
As you training gaining weight, try to pull, push, or squat with more weight. Muscle and strength go together, and “mechanical tension,” which is the strength that your muscles produce when struggling against the weight is the best and most efficient mechanism resulting in muscle growth.
More Heavy Weights(near to your limits)+Fewer repetitions(4 to 8)=More Muscle Growth
You need to choose your weights so that it would be best to keep the maximum number of repetitions for an exercise to be between 4 and 7 repetitions. It will give you the best result.
Train hard, but even more important is to give yourself time to rest in between sets. Adequate periods of rest will help get your heart rate down and recover your muscle cells before you begin your next set. Doing in that way, you can reach effective and satisfying muscle gain.
Intensive Work +Adequate rest=Muscle Growth
The same applies to your weekly and monthly cycles. Make your program, so you don’t have two consecutive days of heavy training. The effect of heavy training continues the next day. By giving your muscles a proper break, you allow for natural and sufficient muscle growth.