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Weight Gaining Techniques

Being underweight can be just as frustrating as being overweight for the affected person. If you struggle with keeping your weight up, there are things you can do to slowly gain weight in a healthy way, increasing your overall health and feelings of well-being. Stay away from fads or miracle products that promise to pack pounds on and instead take a healthful, nutritionally balanced approach to gaining weight.

  1. Create a Food Diary

    • Before you determine how many calories you need to eat each day to gain weight, you will need to understand how many calories you are currently consuming. Begin by keeping a food diary while eating your normal diet. Write down everything you eat each day, along with how many calories are in each item. Do this for one to two weeks and then go over the results with a nutritionist, who can help you to understand your eating patterns better. This exercise should give you a good idea of what your normal caloric intake is.

    Determine New Caloric Goals

    • Once you have a good idea of what your current caloric consumption levels are, it is time to start thinking about how to increase your weight. Eating 500-1,000 additional calories per day will give you a weight gain of one to two pounds per week. So, if you normally consume 1,500 calories per day, then increasing your caloric intake to 2,000 calories will give you about one pound of weight gain per week.

    Choose Wisely

    • While trying to gain weight, choose your foods wisely. Adding calories to your diet through consuming junk food will negatively impact your overall health, even if you gain the weight you want to gain. Instead, stick to nutritionally dense foods such as peanut butter, cheese, granola, juice and whole milk.

    Assess Along the Way

    • As you are changing your dietary habits, continue to assess your progress through maintaining your food diary. Adding up your caloric intake for the day will help you to understand whether or not you are truly consuming the proper amount of calories for weight gain. If you begin consuming too many or too few calories, your food diary will help you to recognize this; change your eating habits accordingly. When you reach your goal weight, your food diary will also help you to modify your food intake so that you can maintain your new weight.

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