Gain Weight Fast

If you’re trying to gain weight, a lot of times it can be a frustratingly slow process. While many people struggle to lose weight, it’s sometimes just as hard to put weight on. Depending on whether you’re trying to focus on putting on muscle weight or fat, the process for how to gain weight fast varies a bit.

Gaining muscle weight

To gain muscle, you need to exercise the muscles you already have. Weight training will increase strength and muscle mass, and therefore boost muscle weight. It’s important to eat enough calories and protein to support muscle growth at this point, but a lot of people end up consuming more protein than they need in the mistaken belief that this extra protein will cause their muscles to grow faster.

In reality, your body will use as much protein as it needs, when it needs it. Ensuring that you get enough protein that fits your fitness regimen is good enough- extra protein isn’t necessarily helpful. The average person needs about .4 grams of protein per pound (roughly .45 kilograms) of body weight. A person who is trying to gain muscle by exercising needs about 20% of their total intake to be protein. For someone on a 2000 calorie diet, that means that 400 calories of their total diet needs to be protein. That translates to about 100 grams per day.

Getting enough sleep is also important. Sleep is when your body repairs tissue, including muscles.

Gaining fat

For someone who wants to gain fat, the game is a little different. Exercise won’t help you gain fat, but it’s not good to be sedentary, either. Keep up moderate exercise to help keep your heart and lungs healthy, but avoid burning too many calories per day. Consuming more calories than you burn is the only way for someone having trouble gaining fat to try to put on weight.

It’s important to not simply resort to eating junk food, either. Junk food will certainly make you fatter, but at the cost of your health. Instead, eat healthful, high-calorie, fatty foods like seeds, nuts, coconut oil, canola oil, avocados, and dairy. These will help you consume more calories, while contributing essential fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals to your diet. In contrast to junk foods, many of these foods can actually help prevent things like heart disease. Fat contains more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrates, so adding more fat to your diet is a fast, easy way to increase your calorie count.

A pound of fat (about .45 kg) is about 3,500 calories. Therefore, to put on about ten pounds, or 4.5 kilograms, you need to eat 35,000 calories. That’s a bit over an extra thousand calories per day for a month. So, if your age, weight, and activity level means that you need 1,800 calories per day to function, you need to eat 2,800 calories per day to gain that weight.

Gaining muscle is very different than gaining fat, in many ways. No matter which you’d prefer, with these easy formulas, you should be able to gain weight fast.