Nobody wants to be a skinny guy among all of the buff ones at the gym.  Sometimes it can seem like you’re working out twice as hard as the rest of the guys and yet the scale doesn’t budge.  What are the best ways to gain weight without killing yourself at the gym?

The best ways to gain weight depend more on what you put into your body than on what workout you take out of your body.  Your diet is very important to gaining weight and it isn’t just about the calories you take in either.  What you take in must be quality calories—the kind that go straight to muscle as you’re working out.

The first of the best ways to gain weight is to make sure you are eating every two to three hours.  This type of eating pattern keeps your metabolic rate up so that there is a steady flow of nutrition to your muscles.  You need to eat about the same number of calories per eating session and the amounts of calories you eat depend on your current weight and your desired weight.  If you desire to gain ten pounds in ten days, that is the equivalent of 3500 extra calories per day.  One pound equals ten calories.  This is the amount you need to eat above the amount your body normally needs per day, roughly 2500 to 3000 calories, depending on your energy needs and your total weight.

This means you need to eat about 6000 calories per day, spread out over about six meals.  That’s a lot of calories but is one of the best ways to gain weight.  And you can’t just eat junk food as a way of getting the extra calories.  What you eat is as important as how much you eat.

One of the best ways to gain weight is to concentrate on the protein in your diet.  You’ll want to eat high quality steak or other beef, chicken breasts, salmon or other fish and plenty of beans and nuts.  All of these are high protein foods and go straight to muscle as you work out.  One chicken breast is about 300 calories so if you are intending to eat a diet of 6000 calories or more per day, you’ll want to eat at least two to three chicken breasts per day.

You’ll also want to eat complex carbohydrates and not simple carbohydrates.  One of the best ways to gain weight is to have whole grain bread with your meat, or eat brown rice or potatoes.  These are complex carbohydrates that gradually release themselves into your bloodstream.  Sugar, on the other hand, is not one of the best ways to gain weight.  Sugar and substances containing them are simple sugars that dump into the bloodstream, trigger the insulin in your pancreas to spill out into your system and can make you hypoglycemic—having low blood sugar.  Low blood sugar is bad for your work out and can make you feel tired and dragged out.  Complex carbohydrates, on the other hand, help you gain weight by gradually putting the nutrition into your system and gradually allowing the insulin to work on putting the nutrition away in your muscle cells.

You need to know that one of the best ways to gain weight is to eat healthy fats.  Healthy fats come from fatty fish and nuts.  Some vegetable oils contain healthy fats in them.  Healthy fats contain essential fatty acids which are fatty acids your body doesn’t make by itself and you need to eat them in your diet in order to get them.  Such fats are vital to cell growth and metabolism and you can’t gain weight without them.

In the end, the best ways to gain weight is to eat frequently, eat enough calories to allow you to gain weight, work out so that the calories go to muscle mass and eat a balanced diet of protein, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats.