I weigh 107 pounds and stand five foot eleven. My BMI says that I am starving. When I read about ways to gain weight, they all tell me to eat a varied diet and to lift weights. Would I not gain weight if I ate ice cream and cake all day long and stared at the tube? I know I might miss out on my nutrition, but just from the weight aspect, would it not work?
You can be underweight and still have an unhealthy body fat percentage.
Much better for you to gain muscle than fat.
Also, do you know your current body fat levels?
You’d shit a ton of junk food.
Yes, from the weight aspect, it would probably work. Which just goes to show what a crock of shit BMI is when looking at an individual rather than group of people.
The simple answer is “yes”. A generalized explanation is: When you consume more calories than you expend, your body stores the calories as body fat. The more your body fat increases, the more you weigh. When you consume less calories than you expend, your body breaks down the stored fat and converts it into fuel. The more body fat you convert to fuel, the less you will weigh.
And now for the unasked-for opinion: if one wishes to gain weight solely through increasing one’s caloric intake, the advice I’ve read most often is to increase the size of the portions of the healthy food one eats and to add to the diet vegetable material that is high in polyunsaturated fats. Examples include: nuts, avocados, olive oil, olives packed in oil.
Increasing one’s caloric intake by eating highly processed snack or convenience foods adds large amounts of sodium, saturated fat and simple sugars to one’s system. This can strain the circulatory system (leading to heart disease) and increase one’s risk for developing Type II diabetes. Bon apétit!
Do you feel starving? Can you do light exercise without fainting? Does your doctor say your blood levels / weight is too low?
If yes, yes, no - then ignore. The BMI is a first-impression, easy-to-measure rough guide; once you see a real doctor with a lab and other tests, BMI is unimportant. Lots of highly fit atheletes have an “obese” BMI because muscles weigh more than fat; but because their doctors tell them “you’re healthy” BMI doesn’t matter to them.
Because increasing weight while loosing nutrition doesn’t make any sense. (Also, why lift weights? What’s this obsession with weight lifting in the US culture?)
If you want to gain weight for your health, you want to be fit, so you need nutrition and exercise. If you need muscles for a specific purpose (not: looking like Arnie, but to lift things, or strong back muscles to sit straight), then you train those specific muscles and increase protein intake (not those artifical shakes, but normal protein-high food. Doesn’t have to be only meat, either, that comes in high volumes with other problems like elevating acid levels - don’t know the english names - that heighten the risk of arthritis and rheuma; rather a good mixture of animal and plant protein).
Gaining weight only in order to be fat is rather dumb, esp. considering how people are encouraged to loose weight to be more healthy.
The wiki article doesn’t mention the man interviewed in Super Size Me who had eaten at McDonalds daily for decades and was quite healthy and thin. (I googled but my fu was weak; couldn’t find a reference to him.) Also if you read the whol link, you’ll see this:
I agree that BMI numbers are sketchy at best, as an indicator of overall health. I am a relatively thin female (always buy size 6-8 or small) and for a while some years back I worked out diligently and weighed about 160 lbs at 5’ 7"…but according to the caliper tests, my actual BMI was about 20. I was in the Navy Reserves at the time and there were a couple of very serious weight-lifter guys in my unit who were short and extremely muscular and would have been classified as fat or obese according to raw numbers but were anything but. I also know a couple of extremely skinny, yet fit and healthy people (both runners.)
One of those friends tried gaining weight for a couple of years by doing lots of carbs and high-protein shakes and lifting weights. He got fitter and more muscular, but didn’t gain any weight. He’s since concluded that his frame and weight are genetically pre-programmed.
Sorry if that was a sort of IMHO answer, but I am not sure there’s really a cut and dried GQ answer to this. Too many variables. But I can’t think of any scenario where eating a “shit ton of junk food” would be a good idea in the long run.
Fat Head: another video that rebukes Spurlock’s assertions. (Watch in it’s entirety; very entertaining).
A couple of memories - this is anecdotal.
1: Someone I knew years ago who hated vegetables, was an elderly woman (well into her 70s) who didn’t cook much, and smoked: Crazy-low cholesterol numbers…this was 20 years ao and she was my landlady for seven years and lived next door so we talked. She smoked, drank, ate horribly (I remember this because I was in a “healthy eating” phase at the time), refused to eat vegetables, very healthy, no meds, no conditions, and she worked part time. She was really thin.
2: A study on centenarians I was following in the early 90s when I lived in Colorado. One thing I remember very clearly - a radio interview with one of the primary researchers, during which she said how surprised she was that all of the centenarians were daily meat-eaters. And that all had been thin (outwardly at least) during their lifetimes.
If you are not otherwise suffering from illness or disease and that’s your body type (at 5’11" and 107 lbs most normally proportioned people would be dead or close to it) I’d really have to question if you have the capacity maintain a weight gain. Are you just naturally thin and this gain is for aesthetic reasons, or is there some medical/psychological issue involved?
I assume you mean that your percentage body fat was around 20%, not your BMI which only cares about height and weight. Athletes generally get have high BMIs regardless of their body fat.
Both. I’ve always been underweight, but I’ve come down with a disease and have lost some additional weight since. I question if I have the capacity maintain a weight gain, which is why I asked the question in the first place.
As suggested above, you ought to work with your physician and perhaps a nutritionist. They can tell you first if you need to gain weight, and second how to do so properly.
I’ll note that when my seventy-something father was underweight a few years ago, my mother prepared grilled fish dishes and encouraged him to take supplemental nutrition products like Ensure.
Pet peeve alert: Whenever I see someone talking about “loosing fat”, I always picture someone shooting arrows made from lard out of a bow. The word that’s the opposite of “find” is spelled “lose”, not “loose”.
Well, first I’d say BMI for most people is absolutely worthless.
That said, for you personally, I’d say get to a doctor fast and discuss how to put on weight in a healthy fashion.
Do NOT just load up on junk food. That won’t help you in any way.
What does a normal days worth of food look like for you?
My doctor said that my weight is purely a cosmetics issue, then again he died from cancer a few month ago. He said that people who are underweight live longer, which makes me think that “normal” should be considered slightly overweight and “underweight” should be considered normal.
Yummy!
So you haven’t found a new doctor since then? I would do so were I you and ask him or her to refer you to a registered dietician.