Weight Gain Tips

How to Gain Weight - and Muscle

Detoxify and get the digestive system working optimally
Gaining weight is not as simple as counting calories. You are not simply what you eat but you are what you eat, digest and assimilate. One of the best tips of ways to gain weight is to improve the digestion.)

Enzymes
In a study ("The Treatment of Indigestion, Underweight and Allergy with the Old and New Forms of Digestive Agents") by Dr. W.D. Sansum of the Potter Metabolic Clinic, Santa Barbara, California, he reported that people who were below normal weight gained weight when given supplemental digestive enzymes. The digestive enzymes helped make up the enzyme deficiency which had impaired digestion and absorption of food.

There are many good sources of digestive enzyme supplements available today. I have a very good product from plant sources which functions over a wider pH range than animal-derived enzymes and is contained in vege-caps. Also see the books listed in the weight gain links and resources section.

Toxins
I have heard of people who have struggled with this problem for years and upon having amalgam fillings removed from their teeth found they could gain weight much more easily. Toxins in the body could potentially interfere with its normal functioning. A detoxification program is good for general health and may, in the long run assist with weight gain. However, the usual short-term result is a loss in weight, perhaps even significant. All those toxins weigh something. Many people carry around an excess, perhaps many pounds of toxic material, most commonly as a lining of encrusted fecal matter in the large intestine. Many people who go on a program of detoxification and improved diet do lose weight for a time, then level off and often normalize. Detoxification - getting out toxins that have built up over decades - may take considerable time and effort. A program of improved health and detoxification often involves juicing but again the initial result may be weight loss as toxins are released and flushed from the body.

Fat-lean ratio
Covert Bailey has a Master of Science degree in nutritional biochemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his book The New Fit or Fat (Resources section) he recommends a healthy amount of body fat to be 15% for men and 22% for women. (There are scales readily available to easily measure percent body fat.) He suggests that the question an underweight person needs to ask is something like "How much lean weight do I need to add in order to be the weight I want and still have a healthy fat ratio?" As he explains "You can't add muscle by just eating a lot. To stimulate muscle growth you must exercise."

Do weight-bearing exercise
It is common in people who are generally sedentary to lose about a half pound of muscle mass per year after age 35 without doing anything different. Your body is essentially saying: "If I don't need it, why feed it?"

Lifting weights or other weight-bearing exercise sends a signal to your body something like: "These muscles are getting called upon to do work that they are barely capable of doing. It's time to bring out some materials and build them up a little to handle this load the next time he tries this."

There is lots of information about weight lifting technique without repeating it here except to mention a few points that would especially relate to the theme of weight gain tips.

Do not use the high protein supplements that are promoted for bulking up. The excess protein (especially that from animal sources) is not needed to add muscle. A bull is big and strong and gains all his muscle eating grass! Excess protein contributes to an over-acid body and is hard on the kidneys and leaches calcium (an alkaline substance) out of your bones to neutralize the excess acid.

Be sure to exercise the legs and buttocks. These contain the largest muscles in the body and so exercising them properly will result in the most weight gain. Plus exercising these largest muscles can produce a general body reaction that can contribute to an overall increase.

To achieve weight gain, muscles need to be worked with sufficient resistance for sufficient duration to send the right signal to the body. That means to the point the weight cannot be lifted and then keep trying to lift it anyway for 10 seconds beyond the point of fatigue. Getting weight-bearing exercise is a weight gain tip that can't be ignored if you want to do it in a healthy way.

A couple of miscellaneous weight gain tips regarding exercising for weight gain:

1. Avoid doing many sets of abdominal exercises as there can be an effect, theorized to be due to a numbing effect on the solar plexus, of slowing down weight gain.
2. Be sure to take sufficient B-complex viatmins as these increase the appetite and weight gain.

Sun exposure and exercising in the sun is reported to contribute to increased muscle mass. You just want to avoid excessive exposure and burning.

Deep breathing exercises
I heard someone who is very knowledgeable about health and weight lifting say: "The brain will not allow the muscles to grow if it is short of oxygen." I will try to find out more about this. The following quote relates to this:

"All deep breathing exercises are body-building exercises. This is because oxygen is the invisible food, the life-giving miracle force of the body's 75 trillion cells and the vital food. These exercises will help build up a person who is underweight and trim down and person who is overweight." (Bragg and Bragg, Super Power Breathing p.55)

Deal with possible parasites
Parasites don't just rob you of food they may take the best of it by selecting essential nutrients and leaving you with the leftovers. There are several good books on the parasite problem which is not just a third-world country issue. See, for instance, Gittleman in the resources section. I can also direct to a very good product (AIM Para 90®) to deal with parasites.

So there are a number of weight gain tips. They may not all apply to you, so do a careful evaluation and determine which ones do. Then check out the other weight gain tips that relate to a healthy weight gain diet.