Most fitness information is geared towards fat loss.

Let’s talk about the basics of healthy weight gain.

My friend Tynan approached me one day asking about fitness.

“No matter how much I eat, I can’t put on weight.

But naturally skinny folks have experienced this throughout their entire life.

You’ll findthe particular fitness skillthat’s most important to you depends on your starting point and your goals.

Let’s see why.

The researchers sought to overfeed prisoners with a normalbody mass index(i.e.

When the experiment concluded, the prisoners had no problem returning to their original weight.

This research inspired a recent BBC documentary (available on YouTube) that corroborated the prisoners’and Tynan’sexperiences.

Naturally skinny people seem to be biologically programmed to stay at a given weight.

They literally could not finish all of their meals.

We asked Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, an osteopathic physician that specializes in helping obese patients.Dr.

Nadolskysays:

One can put on weight in a healthy manner if the weight is lean mass.

Body fat percentage is a much better indicator than BMI when it comes to predicting health outcomes.

Okay, so to put on “healthy” weight, one must gain muscle.

The best way to do that is totrainrather thanexercise.

But additional caloric burn is the last thing that people need to get to put on weight.

The word exercise also doesn’t imply progression, which is needed to build muscle.

Building muscle requires something called “progressive overloading.”

This allowsmuscular hypertrophy, the increase in skeletal muscles, to occur.

Hypertrophy also increases your capacity to storemuscular glycogen, or glucose stored within your muscles.

Almost invariably, when you track these big eaters, they really aren’t eating that much.

Research has routinely shown that overweight individuals tend to under-estimate food intake (e.g.

Remember, your body is constantly trying to maintain homeostasis.

Here’s a list of calorically dense foods that are easy to incorporate into your diet.

consuming more calories than he burned every day).

This was difficult at first, and many times he had to force himself to eat.

Within a year, Tynan had put on 20 pounds while maintaining the same waist measurements.

Just stick to something.

Adding just two tablespoons of olive oil to your meals will net you 250 calories more.

(Note: We have previously recommended 1g per pound of target body weight.

Images byra2studio(Shutterstock),x1klima,Tom Pumphret, andisafmedia.