Revenge of the Skinny Nerds: How to Put on Weight

 

While the fitness world might know those who struggle to gain weight as “hard gainers,” Steve Kamb has another word for it: skinny nerds. In fact, Kamb has created a website dedicated to such individuals, as he used to be a skinny guy too. Here are Kamb’s top tips for skinny nerds who are trying to up their weight wellness:

 

1. Eat a Lot: Kamb admits, ‘This sounds much easier than it really is. Whatever you’re eating now, you should probably double it. If you eat three meals a day, instead eat six. You need to be eating every two to three hours, and each meal needs to be the size of a normal meal. This is going to be difficult for a few weeks, because you’ll often have to force yourself to eat even when you’re not hungry. 500 extra calories a day = one extra pound gained per week. Whatever you’re eating now, add an additional 1000 calories (spread throughout the day), and you’ll put on two pounds a week.’

 

2. Eat a Lot of Good Things: According to Kamb, ‘You need to eat a ridiculous amount of calories (probably 3500+ per day) if you want to gain weight, but you want to make sure most of those calories are GOOD calories. You could easily get 3500 calories eating Taco Bell and Twinkies, and drinking Mountain Dew, but that will just make you fat. If you want to build muscle, you want to eat healthy calories that are loaded with good protein, good carbs, and healthy fats. Protein is the building block for your muscles. Chicken, fish, meat, eggs, milk, almonds, peanuts. Eat lots of this stuff, all the time. Carbs will help you put on weight, but it won’t be muscle – pasta, brown rice, wheat bread, oatmeal, etc. will help you put on weight, but a lot of that weight will be fat. Every meal should have vegetables and fruit. If you just eat protein, your body will resort to using it for energy rather than building muscle.’

 

3. Keep Track of Everything You Eat: ‘Sign up for a site light dailyburn.com (it’s free), input your stats and start to track every one of your meals,’ Kamb instructs. ‘It will tell you if you’re eating enough calories, enough protein, and enough carbs. This site has helped me put on 15lbs since last fall.’

 

4. Do Compound Exercises: ‘Compound exercises are your friend,’ says Kamb. ‘Concentrate on complex, compound exercises that recruit as many muscles as possible: bench presses, dumbbell presses, squats, dead lifts, pull ups, chin ups, and dips. Do these exercises, and concentrate on lifting as much weight as possible. Don’t worry about triceps extensions, shoulder shrugs, bicep curls or crunches. All of the compound exercises listed here use every muscle in your body, and when you overload your body with calories and protein, those muscles will grow. Don’t worry about isolation exercises until you’re up to your goal weight and ready to tone down.’

 

5. Concentrate on Fitness, Not Appearance: Kamb notes, ‘Appearance is a consequence of fitness – this is the mantra of the actors of who trained for the movie 300 – would you be okay looking like a Spartan? Concentrate on being really strong and lifting heavy weights, and your body will follow suit. It doesn’t matter if you can only bench press 10lb dumbbells right now. Wherever you’re starting out, concentrate on being stronger each and every time you exercise.  Push yourself, get stronger, lift more, and before you know it you’ll be ripped.’

 

Categories: compound exercises, Food Diary, weight gain

How to Successfully Lose Weight

If you’ve struggled to lose weight and seem to have trouble sticking to a plan, these tips and tricks could help you shift those pesky pounds for successful weight loss. Although there is no foolproof plan for success, these are strategies which could really work for you.

 

Commit to change

The first step towards losing weight is to accept that you need to change your lifestyle – weight loss isn’t something which happens overnight, and it always requires dedication and willpower. Once you’ve made the commitment to losing weight, you can develop a plan and get started on it.

 

Keep your goals SMART

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and track-able. For example, cutting out dairy, sugar, meat and carbs isn’t a realistic goal, nor is dropping four dress sizes in two months. But making achievable goals can help you stay on track, keep you motivated and help you to stay on track.

 

Watch your portions

Portion sizes are more important than you think – over the past few decades, they’ve grown significantly which makes us overeat without even noticing. Overeating with big portion sizes will absolutely sabotage your diet, so it helps to compare your food to everyday objects. For example, one slice of bread or a pancake is the size of a CD case, 1/2  cup of cooked rice or pasta is the size of a cupcake wrapper, and one medium apple is the size of a baseball.

 

Mix up your diet

It’s a good idea to update your diet and review your eating habits when you’re changing your lifestyle. Be more adventurous, try new foods and step outside of your comfort zones. If there are fruits you’ve not tried, give them a go – you may find that you love them and it can be another thing to add to your diet to make it more interesting. Mix up your breakfast by having low fat Greek yoghurt with chia seeds, honey and berries. Opt for quinoa instead of brown rice, or try Israeli couscous for a tasty snack or lunchtime option.

 

Fill up on fibre

High fibre foods will keep you fuller for longer, helping you to limit snacking and helping you to stave off overeating. These include fruit and vegetables, oatmeal, whole-wheat pasta and high fibre cereals, flax seeds and prunes.

 

Keep a food diary

Keeping a food diary can help you stay motivated and to track where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Studies suggest that daily diaries on your food intake can help people lose twice as much weight as those who didn’t keep track. Taking the time to jot down a few notes about what you’ve eaten throughout the day can help you monitor any areas where you need to improve, as well as to help you keep track of places where you’ve done really well. It helps you to make better health choices, as you’ll see it in black and white what has gone into your body throughout the week.

 

Move more

No weight loss programme will work without some exercise thrown in, so you need to up your physical activity. You don’t need to spend every waking minute in the gym to see results though – the key is variety. For example, if you do one intense gym session each week, perhaps mix it up throughout the rest of week with something lighter and more fun. Dance classes, aerobics or cycling are all great options. If you get bored, you’ll be less likely to stick with it, so find something you enjoy and then enable that to give you ideas for similar activities that you may like as well.

Categories: diet, exercise, Fat, Food Diary, high fibre, Lose weight, Losing Weight, nbsp, track, weight, Weight Loss

How to Successfully Lose Weight

If you’ve struggled to lose weight and seem to have trouble sticking to a plan, these tips and tricks could help you shift those pesky pounds for successful weight loss. Although there is no foolproof plan for success, these are strategies which could really work for you.

 

Commit to change

The first step towards losing weight is to accept that you need to change your lifestyle – weight loss isn’t something which happens overnight, and it always requires dedication and willpower. Once you’ve made the commitment to losing weight, you can develop a plan and get started on it.

 

Keep your goals SMART

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and track-able. For example, cutting out dairy, sugar, meat and carbs isn’t a realistic goal, nor is dropping four dress sizes in two months. But making achievable goals can help you stay on track, keep you motivated and help you to stay on track.

 

Watch your portions

Portion sizes are more important than you think – over the past few decades, they’ve grown significantly which makes us overeat without even noticing. Overeating with big portion sizes will absolutely sabotage your diet, so it helps to compare your food to everyday objects. For example, one slice of bread or a pancake is the size of a CD case, 1/2  cup of cooked rice or pasta is the size of a cupcake wrapper, and one medium apple is the size of a baseball.

 

Mix up your diet

It’s a good idea to update your diet and review your eating habits when you’re changing your lifestyle. Be more adventurous, try new foods and step outside of your comfort zones. If there are fruits you’ve not tried, give them a go – you may find that you love them and it can be another thing to add to your diet to make it more interesting. Mix up your breakfast by having low fat Greek yoghurt with chia seeds, honey and berries. Opt for quinoa instead of brown rice, or try Israeli couscous for a tasty snack or lunchtime option.

 

Fill up on fibre

High fibre foods will keep you fuller for longer, helping you to limit snacking and helping you to stave off overeating. These include fruit and vegetables, oatmeal, whole-wheat pasta and high fibre cereals, flax seeds and prunes.

 

Keep a food diary

Keeping a food diary can help you stay motivated and to track where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Studies suggest that daily diaries on your food intake can help people lose twice as much weight as those who didn’t keep track. Taking the time to jot down a few notes about what you’ve eaten throughout the day can help you monitor any areas where you need to improve, as well as to help you keep track of places where you’ve done really well. It helps you to make better health choices, as you’ll see it in black and white what has gone into your body throughout the week.

 

Move more

No weight loss programme will work without some exercise thrown in, so you need to up your physical activity. You don’t need to spend every waking minute in the gym to see results though – the key is variety. For example, if you do one intense gym session each week, perhaps mix it up throughout the rest of week with something lighter and more fun. Dance classes, aerobics or cycling are all great options. If you get bored, you’ll be less likely to stick with it, so find something you enjoy and then enable that to give you ideas for similar activities that you may like as well.

Categories: diet, exercise, Fat, Food Diary, high fibre, Lose weight, Losing Weight, nbsp, track, weight, Weight Loss

How to Lose Weight with Small, Simple Changes

For some reason, when you decide to lose weight, you often overhaul your whole life, make drastic, complicated strategies, and end up sitting on the floor two days later with a tub of ice cream in your hand and a look of disappointment on your face. This “diet mentality” emphasises the “no pain- no gain” approach to weight loss, which makes the whole thing seem so painful and intimidating that you might as well not bother.

However, there is a real strength in simplicity. Simple weight loss changes, which are based on wellness principles, are easy to apply to your life and much easier to stick with than your average diet. So rather than take the extreme, take-no-prisoners approach to weight loss, look after your wellbeing and stick with the basics. The truth is, you don’t need to traumatise yourself to lose weight, but, actually, the more pleasant it is, the more weight you will lose.

Firstly, try keeping a food diary. This will enhance your awareness of all the different food decisions you make each day. It’s best to write down in the food diary as soon as you eat something, so you might like to keep one on your phone. If you leave it until the end of the day, you can forget certain things, such as snacks. Speaking of which, take a look at your work space and around your home. Are there any tempting treats sitting there, taunting you? Hide them! The appeal of junk is often in its convenience, and so you’re less likely to want or even think about unhealthy snacks if you can’t get to them easily.

When it comes to meal times, cut down your portion size by a small amount, say 5-10%. It may only be a case of putting half-a-handful less pasta in the pan, but over a few weeks, this alone will make a remarkable impact on your weight. Another small change you can make in this department is to remove one “bad” food from your life. You might be tempted to do a clean sweep and throw out everything, but this rarely works. Just pick one food that is hard to resist once you start, and stop buying it.

How to Lose Weight with Small, Simple Changes

Categories: Food, Food Diary, Food Journal, life, Lose, Lose weight, loss, simple, weight, Weight Loss

Tweeting Your Way To Weight Loss

Weight loss is a tricky business. It’s easier to lose weight than you’d imagine, at least physically it is. When it comes to keeping up the motivation required to lose weight consistently you can have issues. That’s the key to weight loss really, motivation and the continual, steely will to succeed and plough ever onwards. If you consider how long it took you put on the weight in the first place, you’ll find it took a fairly long time. Weight loss takes less time that that but it’s never going to be immediate and as such some patience is required.

One of the most effective tools when it comes to weight loss is a weight loss diary. This is a little book in which you detail any food you’ve eaten, your current weight and anything you’ve done at all which relates to your weight loss. This will help you out in two ways. First you’ll find that by keeping track of what you ate very specifically you’ll find it easier to stick to your diet and harder to cheat. Secondly, motivation is tricky and remembering exactly how far you’ve come is important. If you can see exactly how much weight you’ve lost since you started then you can take pride in it. Not knowing or keeping track makes it much harder to feel good about your progress!

Twitter can make a much more modern method of the food diary. As well as keeping track of your progress for your own sake, you’ll find that friends and family can offer their encouragement. This is great in terms of motivation as weight loss is often very isolation. Having constant streams of comments from people you love and care about can be really supportive of your struggle and make it so much easier in the long run.

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Tweeting Your Way To Weight Loss

Categories: Food Diary, twitter, Weight Loss