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[MorleyDev]

Hello, so I recently weighed myself. I'm 8st11, also known as ~56kg. Now, that's not a problem until you consider that I'm also 6ft2'', also known as ~188cm. I'm 22 years old and this represents something of a health concern, as medically I'm what's referred to as a "skinny fucker".

So, that leaves to me perhaps wanting to at some point stop being a skinny so-on. The problem seems to partly be volume of food, I get full very quickly so often only have 2 meals a day (eating a often breakfast makes me feel queezy). The food I do eat is fairly healthy, lots of vegetables with rice and eggs and the like, but not very fattening. I occasionally throw some bacon or sausage in for good measure, but when I have meat it's typically chicken.

But ultimately, I'd want to be optimal about gaining weight. Exercise wise, I'm (obviously) quite physically weak. But I do have good endurance, or at least I'm good at ignoring pain. On the rare occasions I do gym work, I've done some pretty lengthy cardio sessions without much complaint. If anything I go for too long, in that it's when my arms/legs often stop working that I get clued in to having gone too far. I can go for a good while on rowing machines, running and cycling machines.

Now, I'm not too concerned about gaining "muscle mass", (I can't even lift, bro!), but I'm mostly trying to figure out: If I wanted to stop being skinny, what would be the most optimal/healthy way to go about it?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Muscle mass. It's pretty heavy, and also pretty useful. All of your exercises are low muscle growth in nature, however, and you should start to include, well...lifting and other strength training in your routine. Note that your appetite is probably going to explode if you do this. Do not be alarmed, this is normal as muscle tissue is more of an energy hog than almost any other kind.

[weenog]

You need muscle mass whether or not you're concerned with it.

To build muscle mass, you're going to need protein. Salad won't cut it, muscles aren't made out of fiber and carbohydrates.  You're also going to need significant rest periods, because doing strength training effectively is going to involve deliberate injury; you need time to heal.  "No pain, no gain" isn't just a cute slogan.  The way strength training works is, you overtax your muscles until they suffer minor damage throughout, then you rest with plenty of protein in your system and let your body heal.  While repairing the damage, the body reinforces the points at which the muscles failed, and they come back slightly stronger than before.  Then you break them down again and rebuild them again, and so on until you have the results you want.

Strength training isn't about going long, it's about going hard.  You don't have to go to a gym to get results, you just need to find a way to heavily stress your muscles, and the will to do it, and keep doing it after you discover how much it hurts.  I actually managed to put on 70 lbs of muscle in a few months without going to a gym even once.  I was at about 280 lbs and I'd been sedentary, so my legs weren't in the best shape for walking or standing long periods.  My mother lived about 1/4 of a mile up a roughly 20 degree slope, so I'd go out at night when there was no traffic, walk to the bottom, then run my fat ass back up... I don't mean jogging, this was full on sprinting the whole way.  Then if I could still stand, I'd walk back down and run back up.  I kept doing this until I couldn't stand anymore (didn't take long, 280 lbs is a lot of weight), then I'd crawl my ass home, eat a big pile of protein (a couple of thick peanut butter or egg sandwiches on whole wheat toast, for example), then rest for the next 2 days... then go beat the hell out of my legs on the hill again.  Came out of it at 350 lbs with legs that enable me to, among other things, push start a half ton pickup truck uphill by myself.

The peaks of my upper body development were when I was in high school (backpack weighed 45 to 65 lbs depending on what I had in it, and I was picking up, setting down, and carrying that thing all day every day), and when I day labored turning fallen trees into firewood (most sections I had to pick up and shift from the chainsaws to the truck averaged about 100 lbs before I got them to the splitter).

You say you can't even lift.  I say bullcrap. If you can move your body's own weight, you can move a little more (you wear a watch? You wear clothing? You're lifting, to a tiny degree).  So why not add a little more?  You don't need to try to be some herculean ideal, on the weight bench putting up a quarter or half a ton.  Maybe just try carrying a bit more when you're moving around.  Keep some big bottles of water in your bag or your pockets (most people should be drinking more water anyway).  When you're carrying your groceries out of the store and back home, try shifting all of the bags (or as many as you can safely handle) to one hand, and then curl it a few times.  Why not lift yourself?  You say you don't weigh much, maybe some pushups, pullups, situps, or other moves where you use your own weight as resistance would be a good way for you to start off heavy enough to hurt, but not so heavy you destroy yourself.

As for being able to eat more, try eating bigger.  Your stomach can stretch or shrink depending on what you've been doing to it.*  If you'd like it to be able to hold more, try gradually stretching it by eating especially bulky things that fill it slightly more than is comfortable (you'll feel bloated, that's the point, yes it sucks).  Popcorn, rice cakes, salads, big bottles of water, anything that takes up a lot of space can work for this.

*: This is one reason overweight people tend to continually overeat and it becomes a runaway problem.  There are specialized stretch receptor nerves in the stomach, you don't really feel full until those are stimulated.  If your stomach has already been expanded by overeating, you'll need to eat more in the future to avoid feeling hungry all the time.

[Sappho]

That's a tough one. I've been underweight my whole life as well (currently 53 kg, 170 cm), though because I'm a girl everyone acts like that's a good thing and I have very little support when trying to gain weight. Keep in mind that what's healthy for you will never be exactly the same as what's healthy for other people. So just because your weight is far lower than average for your height, that doesn't necessarily mean it's unhealthy.

If you're dead set on getting heavier without getting unhealthy, then muscle is probably the way to go. You can gain weight through fat, which is generally not healthy, and anyway it tends not to work the way you want it to. When I spend periods of time sitting around eating junk food and my hormones are at a point where they make me gain weight, it's ALWAYS in my stomach and ONLY in my stomach; it makes me look pregnant, and my arms and legs stay the same. You can't make your bone structure bigger, and fat doesn't normally accumulate on your arms and legs. If you want to gain weight overall, you'll be fighting your natural body type, and the only way to do that without damaging your health is to gain muscle.

You don't have to kill yourself with intense workouts. But a little bit of research will show you which types of exercise build muscle, rather than just burning calories or improving muscle tone.

My best suggestion would be running. That's far easier said than done, because running is a very difficult thing to start doing, but it makes a big difference. The fittest people I've known have generally been runners. One guy I knew was a marathon runner. He actually ran for four hours every single day, and although he was very skinny before he started, after a couple years of training he became very wiry, with impressive (but not huge and bulky) muscles from head to toe. That's rather extreme, but on the other hand, my tai-chi teacher is a very small guy, but with great muscles from running a few times per week, practicing tai-chi, and doing various strength training a couple times per week. I've also heard that swimming works in the same way.

Good luck. Let us know if you make any progress. I've tried building up muscle mass a few times in the past, but it never worked. It was like I was fighting against my body the whole time. Slowly, very slowly, over a course of months, I might gain just a little bit of muscle, but all it would take was one illness (a flu or something) and it would all vanish in a matter of DAYS. Eventually I gave up. I wish you better luck than I've had!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My best suggestion would be running.

No, no, no. Running is how you lose weight, as it burns massive amounts of energy without triggering hypertrophy. It can give you well-muscled legs if you push it, but mostly it increases vascularization, not muscle mass.

[Sappho]

My best suggestion would be running.

No, no, no. Running is how you lose weight, as it burns massive amounts of energy without triggering hypertrophy. It can give you well-muscled legs if you push it, but mostly it increases vascularization, not muscle mass.

Well, whatever your fancy science says, all the runners I know are extremely muscular, and most of them don't do any other exercise. That one extremely muscular marathon runner literally did nothing else but run for four hours a day. He ate junk food, smoked cigarettes, and was utterly lazy aside from that. And he showed me pictures of how skinny he was before he started running. So maybe it varies person to person, but I don't think it's as simple as Run = Lose Weight. Just as it's not as simple as Eat Lots = Gain Weight. I can tell you one thing with a great deal of confidence, and that's if a very skinny person starts running, they are not going to lose weight. They are going to gain it from the muscles they build while running (and you use more than just your legs to run). Someone overweight is likely to lose weight because they are burning fat. If running made skinny people even skinnier, you'd hear about skinny runners dropping dead all the time because they had no more fat to burn.

[weenog]

Why not run with a loaded backpack in a hilly area? Or run in knee-deep water, if you're near a coast or have a handy stream nearby?

[scrdest]

If running made skinny people even skinnier, you'd hear about skinny runners dropping dead all the time because they had no more fat to burn.

That's not how organism works. You couldn't run yourself to death by malnutrition unless you couldn't or wouldn't eat, and even then you'd probably just tire your leg muscles before you could drop dead.

[nenjin]

I've been underweight my whole life. My wrists are small enough I can touch my thumb and middle finger together when I wrapped my hand around it. Of course, smoking cigarettes and having a feast/famine eating routine most my life has always upset any real attempts to gain weight in a good way. Even when I was in weight training (and basically eating whatever junk food I liked, as has pretty much been my way my whole life), I couldn't really bulk up. My favorite food is pasta, FFS. Been eating it by the pound probably my whole life. Even the parts of my body that "train well" (my legs) didn't really get fuller. They just got rip cord lean. My chest actually filled out doing bench press a bit. Meanwhile, my shoulders, forearms and lower arms got leaner too, but never any bigger. Now that I'm getting older and totally inactive, I'm developing a gut over the almost sixpack I had. But the arms/shoulders? Still look like the scrawny arms of a teenager.

While you hopefully don't have the lifestyle habits I do, it sounds like you have a similar metabolism. This:

The problem seems to partly be volume of food, I get full very quickly so often only have 2 meals a day (eating a often breakfast makes me feel queezy).

Is me exactly. I can't eat breakfast in the first hour or two of waking up, or I feel nauseous. So my first meal is typically lunch, then a large dinner. Unlike you, I don't get full quickly. When my body is ready to eat, I can eat enough that puts far larger guys to shame. That bit of pride being said, it's not a healthy pattern for the body. I believe it's one way to end up diabetic, is the feast/famine cycle. I suspect the reason I've been putting on weight the last few years is I'm working and getting a more consistent diet.

One thing to remember is that muscle doesn't become fat. Fat just goes on top of it. So if you spend some time developing a good core while focusing on a high calorie, high carbohydrate diet, and your body hopefully works with you, you can fill out without necessarily having to go to the gym to work at it for the rest of your life.

The key is probably going to be your diet. You're going to have to eat more than you're burning off, consistently, for months. When actors need to transform themselves for a role, they eat in truly mind blowing amounts. You don't have to go that extreme, but there are some tips you can take.

For example, snacking. I don't really do it. I tend to only eat when I'm truly hungry, because I enjoy the feeling of being satiated. But it's what's kept my metabolism so high strung all these years. So start carrying some high calorie, high fat snacks with you. Eat something every hour, as much as you can stomach. Having a touchy stomach myself, I know that sounds pretty unappealing. But I find after the first 3 or so hours from waking up, my appetite picks up. Whether you do breakfast or brunch or lunch or whatever, start the snacks around that time.

Because maybe what you're needing most isn't necessarily more food, it's rewiring your metabolism to store fat differently. That, combined with meals aimed at calorie gain (meat, potatoes, pasta, breads, cheeses, sugars, fats) and working out should give you some noticeable results. I wouldn't go hog wild on complete junk food though, there's a lot of things processed junk food that you don't want to be eating in large quantities and will probably leave you feeling unhealthier.

Just remember. You've got to be eating more than you're burning off, and so for guys like us that might mean feeling uncomfortable full throughout the day, since we're so used to running on fumes because that's how we've taught ourselves it's time to eat something.

[MorleyDev]

You say you can't even lift.  I say bullcrap.

That was a joke, sorry I more was mostly just joking that I wouldn't particularly care about the cloud-look xD

So the basic summary is "actually do something about muscles, and then eat more meat than just dicing chicken or bacon with a bowel of rice and noodles" xD I do own some weighted arm-bands and leg-bands, but any exercise with them was still always cardio in the end. Never really made a difference.

I probably should acquire some heavier weights, hand-dumbbells of the like

[nenjin]

Well, in order to form new muscle, you have to push your muscles beyond their current comfort zone. That's how they grow. Leg and arm bands is not lifting. That will never, ever give you new muscle growth unless you're strapping 50 pnds of weight on. The most it will do is burn fat and tone the muscle you have.

Put another way, working your muscles to exhaustion doing lower weights is not the same thing as working them to exhaustion doing higher weights. One merely conditions them to work more efficiently at their current weight. The other actually breaks their conditioning, causes new muscle to form and bulk to appear.

[Vector]

My wrists are small enough I can touch my thumb and middle finger together when I wrapped my hand around it.

From a thumb-and-pinky perspective, I endorse your post!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My wrists are fairly large and I can do both those things, so I think it might be an element of relative size.

[Vector]

Ok, as a person who is pretty small and keeps on accidentally losing 10 pounds here and there ._.

[GlyphGryph]

If the goal is just to put on some weight, get one of those big vats of carb supplements they sell. Some of them are explicitly called "Weight Gain", because they are basically just straight up calories and don't really fill you up.

If you're already fairly underweight, it's practically required if you want to build muscle in anything approaching an efficient manner as well, especially if you're not keen on eating. You'll want to add some protein too though.

http://www4.netrition.com/now_carbo_powder_page.html
http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/opt/whey.html?MCID=CG-PLA-US&mr%3AtrackingCode=96F1AED0-BC1A-E111-973E-001517384908&mr%3AreferralID=NA&mr%3Adevice=c&mr%3AadType=pla&mr%3Adevice=c&mr%3Aad=29751536466&mr%3Akeyword=&mr%3Amatch=&mr%3Afilter=26441253562