Benjamin.my … and his miscellaneous takes on life.

How To Put On Weight For The Skinny People #2: What Not To Do

This is the follow-up from my first article How To Put On Weight For The Skinny People #1: Fix Your Daily Routines. Personally I feel that it's not in a very refined state to be published, but with my busy schedule, I am afraid that it would never get published if I wait till I have time to work on finalizing the article.

So here it is... I hope that the information would help any skinny people reading on tips to gain more weight. :)

Don't drink coffee/tea

I am sure that you have heard all about coffee being bad and harmful to the body etc. But the reason why I recommend against drinking coffee, is somewhat different. It is not so much about the caffein, but rather, drinking coffee comes with two undesirable consequences that may hinder your progress into gaining more weight.

First, coffee tends you make you bloated. After drinking a cup of coffee, you may notice that your appetite is affected in the sense that, you don't feel like eating. Yes you may be hungry, but the craving for food to solve the hunger isn't quite there. I personally don't think it is the caffein, but probably the milk and/or sugar that causes the problem. However, I have observed that this is not applicable to everybody. Some's appetite is generally more steadier than the others and remains unaffected.

Second, coffee tends to increase your metabolism rate. I have no scientific proof whatsoever, but I do notice how my heart rate is generally higher after I gulped down a cup of coffee, and how the food eaten gets digested faster. I am not sure if this is applicable to everybody, so you should pay some attention to see how your body reacts.

Coupling this two problems together, what happens is that... after drinking a cup of coffee, not only that you get hungry earlier than usual, you tend to eat later than usual due to the loss of appetite. As mentioned in my earlier article, it's undesirable for us skinny people to have an empty stomach because since we generally do not have much fats to burn, whenever there is a lack of energy, muscles are the first to go. This, as a result, would eat away all your hard earned muscles.

Don't over eat

I know, you are skinny right, you gotta eat more! That's what everybody says. But there is a physical limit to your stomach and it is a bad idea to push it to the extreme. Extra calories will definitely help, but not at the expense of the stomach. You can eat more, but if you are really really full, best is to stop. I have seen friends trying to hard to force down meals just for the extra calories. I am not sure if they end up getting gastric or not, but I am pretty sure all of them have stopped.

Note that if you overstressed your stomach and weakened it, it would affect the digestion and absorption of food... which basically makes it harder for you to gain weight instead. So please don't overdo it despite how impatient you are to a better body.

A better way to increase your food intake, is to eat slightly more every time, and stretch your stomach linings gently. Just that one extra bite more every time does wonder. This may be a slower progress, but it is definitely more consistent, and your appetite will stay with you for the rest of your life. After a meal, if you want to eat some more, eat a banana or something. Then maybe 2 bananas. Slowly, you will get comfortable enough to stay eating 1.5 meals or 2 full meals every time. :)

If you want a cheating way... I usually gulp a big cup of water down after a meal. It was never meant to be stretching my stomach, but to wash away all the tastes of the food I ate. What I observed however, is that it has probably stretched my stomach by quite a bit after doing this for years. Sometimes I could eat 2 main meals if I am really hungry.

Don't split up your meals

I have heard that some people recommend splitting up your meals into smaller chunks and eat more often for gaining weight. But I am also hearing the same thing for people who wants to lose some of their weights so this gets me really confused. So I decided to follow my natural instinct that is to eat 3 main meals a day and be done with it. I don't really snack in between.

My logic is simple, everyday, when consistently eating only 3 main meals, it is easy to gauge my own intake. You can slowly push for more food with every meal. Another thing is that, you will find yourself preferring food with more calories as you will not feel hungry as easily. And you will try to eat more to last till the next meal.

With snacking, you might just constantly be eating up rubbishes without observing how much energy each food has, since you would just eat whenever right?

Besides, in Chinese medicine, it is believed that lunch is the most important meal of the day (as opposed to breakfast in the Western beliefs). I can't remember the exact reasoning behind, something to do with either bodily functions are most active during the time of the day, or maybe just specifically your digestion. But what I can point out is that, as soon as I started taking lunch very seriously, my weight starts shooting up rather easily. After a large intake of food during lunch, I don't usually feel like more food until it's dinner time.

Don't drink protein drinks

Personally, I feel that protein is overrated. I mean seriously, do horses or cows take any protein drinks? They eat grass and they are huge and musclular! Why then do we humans required so much protein to increase our size? It makes no sense. I feel like it's just some marketing gimmicks.

Besides, don't you know that your body operates in a balanced manner. Ie, too much of something may hinder the absorption of some other nutrients, and if prolonged, could cause illness. Mr Universe may all look good on the outside, but god knows how healthy they are from the inside. If they are not healthy from the inside, then the body form that they adopt would only be temporary. I mean, a lot of them use steroids too to boost their muscles development, would that be a good assurance that you should follow the same path? My common sense says no to anything unnatural. So no to steroids, no to protein drinks.

Plus, have you heard about stories of how excessive proteins, when unused by the body would cause kidney stones? >.> I am not sure if that's true, but still something to be cautious with. I have increased my weight so far without any protein drinks... So can you.

Oh don't take me wrong. I am not saying that they don't work. In fact I did give them a try long long time ago and I gained a little bit of weight. 1 to 3 kg around there. I just feel that it's not natural to inject so much proteins into our body and feel that it may lead to unwanted damages if done in a long-term basis. So I stopped, and started pursuing a path that is more natural and sustainable. And the results is a 10kg gain so far. :)

Don't eat instant noodles

I used to think that instant noodles are god-sent! They are so tasty, so easy to cook, and with an egg, it would be a quick and easy meal. It was not until I went to study in Australia that I noticed, heck I am still shivering after filling up my stomach with 3 packs of instant noodles. How come?! It was like there was no energy in my stomach to be absorbed and converted into maintaining my body heat. That's when I suspected that, instant noodles probably carries little to none calories that are beneficial to our body.

More over, usually in the next morning, I would be having stomach ache problems, and it feels like a detoxification process to get rid of all the rubbish I ate the day before. Then when the stomach is agitated, you can guess it right that I don't eat as much that day.

Of course I don't think it would be that extreme to everybody, especially when you were not eating 3 packs of instant noodles at one shot and feel the combined effects of them all. But my point still stands that they probably contains little to none beneficial calories to our body. It may be okay to eat them as snacks, but never as main meals. You need real food!

Generally, I try to stay away from most processed food. That includes cereal, soft drinks, junk food, instant noodles, and all the other food that came out from a factory. Food in the most natural form, is easier to be digested, and contains better calories. Processed food in general, drains your body of energy to break them down into absorb-able energy, and the net-gain to your body would be greatly reduced. If you are curious about this theory, you should look up on the arguments raw foodists have against eating anything cooked, or processed. They have a lot of interesting (and logical) points.

As a conclusion...

You may notice that my approach is always aiming for the small steps in a sustainable way. Now we don't just want to gain weight, we want to keep it too! What's the use of forcing your weight up to say 80kg and have it going back down to 60kg the very moment you stop pushing right? The thing is that, at its most natural form, a body would neither be skinny or obese. That's how a healthy body should be like, just at the right size. Gaining weight for the skinny people is a lot about making sure that you are in the right health conditions too. When you body is balanced and in the right health conditions, any attempts to gain weight would create very fast results.

However, if your body is hardly healthy... Then you would probably need to spend a lot of time to work on your health condition first before any attempts start showing significant improvements. If that's the case for you, do more cardio exercises while slowly incorporating some weight lifting exercises into the routine.