Bulking has never been easy for me, and it still isn’t. Here’s what I’ve done for the past 3 years to get to a healthier weight and what I plan to do in the future.
Contents
Skinny Timeline
I’ve been skinny my whole life. I must just have a genetic predisposition to having low appetite and a fast metabolism. I’ve never particularly enjoyed food and I was also never one for the gym. But a sudden increase in free time is a magical thing. The classic breakup cure… the gym. I came out of a relationship at my default weight at the time or 55kg. I’m 185cm tall so that is not a healthy weight to be. I’d always known I was skinny but it was only once I started putting some weight on I realised just how skinny I was.
Here’s the evidence if you don’t believe me:
The past 3 years of me tracking my weight with my “smart” bathroom scales. You can see how quickly I managed to pile on some body weight and you can also see where I started to struggle and where I continue to do so. I was single at the very end of 2021, around the end of September I think, so you can see the consistent increase from the start of 2022.
Like many others, I started going to the gym because I was single and had nothing better to do and quite honestly it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Especially for the first year I felt amazing. Newbie gains are some of the best motivation you’ll ever have in your entire life. Turning up every day and being able to lift more really does just make you desperate to head back in and get a PR. Not that I don’t still love the gym but that insane drive has diminished, especially since my surgery and starting full time work.
I’m trying to make consistent weekly trips to the gym now but I have to admit I’m far more tired than I was when I was working part time. Also my sleep schedule is a bit all over the place so waking up before work seems almost impossible these days.
Still Skinny?
The weight I’m hovering around just now is 64-65kg. Ideallly I’m aiming for 70kg. That’s been my target for at least a year but I always seem to get stuck just around 68kg. I would still consider myself skinny. I’m far heavier than I was but I’m still lean. If I had to stay this weight the rest of my life it wouldn’t bother me one bit. I like the way I look, however I would like to fill out my t-shirts a bit more so I don’t just look good with my top off.
You can also see from my graphs I lost a pretty substantial chunk of the weight I had gained just before and after my Nuss surgery. Before the surgery I knew I was going to be incapable of going to the gym so I sort of pre-emptively lost my motivation knowing I would lost a tonne of progress. The smart thing to do would have been to keep going to the gym all the way up until the surgery but clearly I’m an idiot.
I’m managed to recover a decent portion of that lost weight although still haven’t got back up to my heaviest. I’m tracking my calories more often now though to make sure I’m actually hitting at least close to my target rather than just eyeballing my meals for calories.
You Don’t Eat Enough.
Speaking of eyeballing meals for calories. If you think you can gain weight without counting calories, you’re wrong. I tracked my calories at the start and made huge gains. I got overconfident in my calorie counting and thought I knew exactly how much I was eating and lo’ and behold I stopped gaining weight. Tracking calories is just as important as weighing yourself and tracking your workouts. You don’t have to be completely religious about it but your probably need to be tracking more meals than you don’t track. Don’t freak out about tracking meals out with friends and stuff like that but if it’s regular stuff with a barcode, tracking stuff like that is just so easy.
I recently started using MacroFactor, which is the app that science-based YouTuber Jeff Nippard is a co-owner of. I was previously a MyFitnessPal user however I thought I’d give the smarts of MacroFactor a try to see if I can learn anything about exactly how much my body needs. It is subscription based though which kind of bothers me so we’ll see if I stick with it.
For me, to maintain, I believe it takes around 2800 calories per day. To gain, just over 3000. When I was at my heaviest I was hitting around 3200 calories I think, mostly due to the mass gainer shakes I was demolishing every day. They’re easy calories to an extent but they were wrecking my digestion. Same goes for granola, that stuff had me clearing a room with the gas I was producing. If you have sensitive insides bulking can really get difficult when you can’t even eat certain foods.
The Gym is Easy
What you should find if you’re going regularly is that the gym is the easy part. You turn up, you lift heavy circles, you get stronger you do it all again. There’s measurable progress there and you come out of the gym feeling absolutely huge, whereas you’ll finish your 800 calorie meal feeling like you’re going to fall into a food coma. At least that’s my experience. I’m a slow eater, which doesn’t help. I’ve spent my whole life getting hassled for not eating quick enough so I do need to make a measurable effort to eat larger meals quicker so I don’t lost interest in eating them. Perhaps the gym being easy isn’t actually the gym being easy for me at all, it’s just easier than eating. I would rather go to failure god knows how many times on the worst exercises imaginable than force down the end of a meal that I could have given up on 20 minutes prior. It’s a totally different kind of endurance that that requires.
Get Over a Plateau – Fill Your Plate-O
You can see in my graphs, I’ve plateaued right now. I’m still pretty close to when I had my operation – around the April/May time – so I’m happy with where I am but it does bother me that I’m starting to not put on the weight or the strength again and I know it’s just case of not putting in enough calories. I’m not scared of getting fat. I’ve noticed I’ve got a slightly higher body fat but not enough for me to care. I can still mostly see my abs and considering I went from 5% body fat (according to my not very smart bathroom scales) to what I believe is around 10%, I really cannot complain. I’m back to eating some form of bulking shake to try and get the extra calories in but realistically I’m short one meal per day. I’m at the maintenance level now and I can manage that fine, but I’m not at a level where I will need to start eating an uncomfortable amount of food.
It’s really at the point now of weighing up (hehe get it, weighing) whether I want to put the extra time and effort into adding those extra few kg’s on to meet my original target. 70kg really isn’t that heavy so I feel like I should be able to do it but the fact is it’s just not easy for me. I’ve had people just tell me – eat more. Well duh, I would if I could but I just don’t have it in me most of the time. But the target is there and I’d love to hit it. I fee like the extra mass might help me shift some extra weight in the gym as well which always gives me buckets of motivation. So my advice when it comes to putting on the weight is really very simple. You just need to eat, and you need to know how much. You can’t judge calories off vibes, no matter how good you think you are and I guarantee you you’ll be underestimating just how much you eat.
Leave a Reply