Most healthy diets tend to focus on either helping people to lose weight or maintain their weight. Rarely are diets calibrated or designed to help people gain weight. Although it happens less often, there are many diets that are designed to help people gain weight. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who need to gain weight for various reasons. Many of these people are athletes who need to bulk up for the sake of competition or people whose weight is too low. Being underweight can be just as unhealthy as being overweight.
How to Gain Weight in A Healthy Way
There is a right way and a wrong way to gain weight. Unfortunately, you cannot just sit down and eat copious amounts of ice cream to feel better. Just like when you attempt to lose weight, you have to gain weight in a systematic way that helps you to avoid developing chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes or heart disease. The following methods are ways to gain weight properly:
Eat More Calories Than You Burn
The classic method for losing weight is to burn more calories than you eat. It makes sense that you would reverse this method to achieve the opposite.
If you want to slowly gain weight, increase your caloric intake by 300-500 calories a day.
If you want to gain weight quickly, then increase your caloric intake by 700-100 calories above your maintenance level.
Eat Lots of Protein
Protein is the most important nutrient you can eat to gain weight. Muscle is mostly made of protein. If you don’t eat protein, then the weight you gain will end up as fat. Muscle weighs three times as much as fat, so it will make you weigh more while remaining lean.
In short, eating sugar laden foods is not a good idea for gaining weight. Eating calorie dense healthy foods and protein is a sure shot way to gain weight without gaining diabetes or other chronic diseases.
