You may lose a pound of fat by skipping just 10 calories a day or as many as 55, depending on whether you’re improving food quality or restricting food quantity.
If the 3,500 calories per pound of weight loss rule is bunk, what’s the alternative? To lose a pound of fat, how many fewer calories do you have to eat or how many more do you have to burn? That’s the topic of my video The New Calories per Pound of Weight Loss Rule.
There are validated mathematical models that take into account the dynamic changes that occur when you cut calories, such as the metabolic slowdown, and they’ve been turned into free online calculators you can use to make personalized estimates. For instance, one is the Body Weight Planner from the National Institutes of Health (http://bit.ly/NIHcalculator) and another is the Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Weight Loss Predictor Calculator out of Louisiana State University (http://bit.ly/LSUcalculator).
The NIH Body Weight Planner has been found to be more accurate because the LSU model appears to overestimate the drop in physical activity, but they both have their own pluses and minuses. The NIH Body Weight Planner tells you how many calories you need to restrict and/or how much more you need to exercise to achieve a specific weight-loss goal by a specific date. If you click on the “Switch to Expert Mode” button, you can get a graph and exportable chart showing your day-to-day weight-loss trajectory. See below and at 1:15 in my video to see the Body Weight Planner.
For instance, if you are a middle-aged, sedentary, average-height woman who is obese at 175 pounds and wants to be closer to her ideal weight within a year, consuming 2,000 calories a day would prevent future weight gain and taking in about 1,400 calories a day would bring down your weight, and you could maintain that lower weight at 1,700 calories a day. If you also walked a mile a day, you’d have a little more calorie leeway.
The LSU Weight Loss Predictor, however, doesn’t allow you to tweak physical activity, but its advantage is that you don’t have to choose a goal or time frame. Just put in different calorie changes, and it graphs out your expected course, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:00 in my video. Is there an easy rule of thumb you can use? Yes. Every permanent ten-calorie drop in daily intake will eventually lead to about one pound of weight loss, though it takes about a year to achieve half the total weight change and around three years to completely settle into the new weight. So, cutting 500 calories a day can cause the 50-pound weight loss predicted by the 3,500-Calorie Rule, but that’s the total weight loss at which you plateau, not an annual drop, and it takes about three years to get there. A 500-calorie deficit would be expected to cause about a 25-pound weight loss in the first year, followed by an additional 25 pounds lost over years two and three, but that’s only if you can maintain the 500-calorie deficit, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:38 in my video.
If you’re eating the same diet that led to the original weight problem but just in smaller servings, you should expect your appetite to rev up by about 45 calories per pound lost. So, if you were cutting 500 calories a day through portion control alone, even before you were down a dozen pounds, you’d feel so famished that you’d be driven to eat 500 more calories a day and your weight loss could vanish. For this reason, if you’re dead set on eating the same diet with the same foods, just in smaller quantities, you have to cut down an additional 45 calories per pound of desired weight loss to offset your hunger drive.
So, to take off that one pound, instead of consuming just 10 fewer calories a day using the 10 Calories per Pound Rule, you’d have to eat 10 fewer calories on top of the 45 fewer calories to account for the revving up of your appetite. Thus, it would be 10 + 45 = 55 fewer calories. Indeed, just by changing diet quantity and not quality, it takes 55 fewer calories per day to lose a pound, so that daily 500-calorie deficit would only net you about a 9-pound weight loss over time instead of 50 pounds. That’s why portion control methods can be such a frustrating failure for so many people.
I have loads of other weight-loss videos, which you can see here on the topic page, and there are gazillions more coming soon, based on my book How Not to Diet.
What are the metabolic and behavioral adaptations that slow weight loss?
Thanks to millions of years of evolution hard-wiring us to survive scarcity, our body has compensatory survival mechanisms to defend against weight loss. When we start losing weight, we may unconsciously begin to move less as a “behavioral adaptation” to conserve energy. There are metabolic adaptations as well; our metabolism slows down. Every pound of weight loss may reduce our resting metabolic rate by seven calories a day. This may only translate to a few percent differences for most, but it can rapidly snowball for those who achieve massive weight loss. I discuss this phenomenon in my video The Reason Weight Loss Plateaus When You Diet.
During one season of the television show The Biggest Loser, some of the contestants famously had their metabolic rates tracked. As you can see in the graphs below, above and beyond the hundreds of fewer calories it takes to just exist when more than a hundred pounds lighter (at 0:55 in my video), by the end of the season, their metabolic rates had slowed by an extra 500 calories a day (at 1:03 in my video).
What’s mind-blowing is that when they were retested six years later, they still had the 500-calorie-a-day handicap. So, the contestants had to cut 500 more calories than anyone else their size to maintain the same weight loss. No wonder the bulk of their weight loss was regained. As you can see in the graph below and at 1:23 in my video, most remained at least 10 percent lower than their starting weight, though.
Even a 7 percent drop has been shown to cut diabetes rates about in half, as seen in the graph below and at 1:31 in my video. Still, the metabolic slowing means you have to work that much harder than everyone else just to stay in place. Analyzing four seasons of The Biggest Loser minute-by-minute, researchers noted that 85 percent of the focus was on exercise rather than diet, though the exercise component accounted for less than half of the weight loss. Even six years after their season ended, the contestants had been maintaining an hour of daily, vigorous exercise, yet still regained most of the weight they had lost. Why? Because they had started eating more. They could have limited their exercise to just 20 minutes a day and still maintained 100 percent of their initial weight loss if they had just been able to keep their intake to less than 3,000 calories a day. That may not sound like much of a challenge, but weight loss doesn’t just slow your metabolism. It also boosts your appetite.
If it were just a matter of your weight settling at the point at which your reduced caloric intake matches your reduced caloric output, it would take years for your weight loss to plateau. Instead, it often happens within six to eight months. You can see illustrative graphs below and at 2:34 and 2:43 in my video. You may know the drill: Start the diet, stick to the diet, then weight loss stalls six months later. What happened? Don’t blame your metabolism—that only plays a small part. Instead, you likely stopped sticking to your diet because your appetite went on a rampage.
Let’s break it down. If you cut 800 calories out of your daily diet—going from 2,600 calories a day down to 1,800, for instance—and your weight loss stalls after six months, what may have happened is, at the end of the first month, you think you’re still cutting 800 calories, but you may actually only be down about 600 calories a day. By month two, you may only be down about 500 calories, 300 by month three, and, by month six, you may only be eating 200 calories less than before you went on the diet. In other words, you may have inadvertently suffered an exponential increase in caloric intake over those six months. But, you may not even realize it because, by that time, your body may have ramped up your appetite by 600 calories. So, it still feels as if you are eating 800 calories less, but it’s actually only 200 fewer calories. Since an 800-calorie drop in intake may slow your metabolism and physical activity by about 200 calories a day, with no difference between calories in and calories out at six months, no wonder your weight loss grinds to a complete halt.
The slow upward drift in caloric intake on a new diet is not because you got lazy. Once your appetite is boosted by 600 calories after dieting for a while, eating 200 fewer calories at the end is as hard as eating 800 fewer calories at the beginning. So, you can maintain the same disciplined level of willpower and self-control yet still end up stagnating. To prevent this from happening, you need to maintain the calorie deficit. How is that possible in the face of a ravenous appetite?
Hunger is a biological drive. Asking someone to eat smaller portions is like asking someone to take fewer breaths. You can white-knuckle it for a bit, but, eventually, nature wins out. That’s why I wrote How Not to Diet. There are foods that can counter the slowing of our metabolism and suppress our appetite, as well as ways of eating to counter the behavioral adaptation and even eat more food—yet still lose weight.
Due to “the ongoing slowing of metabolism and increased appetite associated with the lost weight,” sustained weight loss requires a persistent calorie deficit of 300 to 500 calories a day. This can be accomplished without reducing portion sizes simply by lowering the calorie density of meals, which can result in the rare combination of weight loss with both an increase in quality and even quantity of food consumed. (See the two graphs below and at 5:34 and 5:40 in my video.) The bottom line is that sustainable weight loss is not about eating less food. It’s about eating better food.
How many fewer calories do you have to eat every day to lose one pound of body fat?
The first surgical attempt at body sculpting was in 1921 on a dancer “who wanted to improve the shape of her ankles and knees.” The surgeon apparently scraped away too much tissue and tied the stitches too tight, resulting in necrosis, amputation, and the first recorded malpractice suit in the history of plastic surgery. Liposuction is much safer today, killing only about 1 in 5,000 patients, mostly from unknown causes, such as throwing a clot into your lung or perforating your internal organs. You can see a “Cause of Death” chart below and at 0:37 in my video The 3,500 Calorie per Pound Rule Is Wrong.
Liposuction currently reigns as the most popular cosmetic surgery in the world, and its effects are indeed only cosmetic. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine assessed obese women before and after having about 20 pounds of fat sucked out of their bodies, resulting in a nearly 20 percent drop in their total body fat. Normally, if you lose even just 5 to 10 percent of your body weight in fat, you get significant improvements in blood pressure, blood sugars, inflammation, cholesterol, and triglycerides. But liposuction sucks. None of those benefits materialized even after massive liposuction, which suggests that the problem is not subcutaneous fat, the fat under our skin. The metabolic insults of obesity arise from the visceral fat, the fat surrounding or even infiltrating our internal organs, like the fat marbling our muscles and liver. The way you lose that fat, the dangerous fat, is to take in fewer calories than you burn.
Anyone who’s seen The Biggest Loser television programs knows that with enough caloric restriction and exercise, hundreds of pounds can be lost. Similarly, there are cases in the medical literature of what some refer to as “super obesity.” In one case, a man lost a massive amount of weight “largely without professional help and without surgery” and kept it off for years. He dropped 374 pounds, losing about 20 pounds a month by cycling two hours a day and reducing his daily intake to 800 calories, which is down around what some prisoners got at concentration camps in World War II.
Perhaps “America’s most celebrated weight loss” seen on television was Oprah’s. She pulled out a wagon full of fat, representing the 67 pounds she had lost on a very-low-calorie diet. How many calories did she have to cut to achieve that weight loss within four months? If you consult with leading nutrition textbooks or refer to trusted authorities like the Mayo Clinic, you’ll learn the simple weight loss rule: 1 pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. Quoting from the Journal of the American Medical Association, “A total of 3500 calories equals 1 pound of body weight. This means if you decrease (or increase) your intake by 500 calories daily, you will lose (or gain) 1 pound per week. (500 calories per day × 7 days = 3500 calories.)”
It’s the simple weight-loss rule that is simply not true.
The 3,500-calorie rule can be traced back to a paper published in 1958. The author noted that since fatty tissue in the human body is 87 percent fat, a pound of body fat would have about 395 grams of pure fat. Multiplying that by nine calories per gram of fat gives you that “3,500 calories per pound” approximation. The fatal flaw that leads to “dramatically exaggerated” weight-loss predictions is that the 3,500-calorie rule fails to take into account the fact that changes in the Calories-In side of the energy-balance equation automatically lead to changes in the Calories-Out side—for example, metabolic adaption, the slowing of metabolic rate that accompanies weight loss. That’s one reason weight loss plateaus.
Imagine a sedentary, 30-year-old woman of average height who weighs 150 pounds. According to the 3,500-calorie rule, if she cuts 500 calories out of her daily diet, she’d lose a pound a week or 52 pounds a year. In three years, she would vanish. She’d go from 150 pounds to -6. Obviously, that doesn’t happen. Instead, as you can see in the graph below and at 4:33 in my video, in the first year, she’d likely lose 32 pounds, not 52. Then, after a total of three years, she’d probably stabilize at about 100 pounds. This is because it takes fewer calories to exist as a thin person.
Part of it is “simple mechanics”: More energy is required to move a heavier mass, in the same way a Hummer requires more fuel than a compact car. Think how much more effort it would take to just get up from a chair, walk across the room, or climb a few stairs if you were carrying a 50-pound backpack. Even when you’re at rest, sound asleep, there’s simply less of your body to maintain as you lose weight. Every pound of fat tissue lost may mean one less mile of blood vessels through which your body has to pump blood every minute. So, the basic upkeep and movement of thinner bodies take fewer calories. As you lose weight by eating less, you end up needing less. That’s what the 3,500-calorie rule doesn’t take into account.
Imagine it another way: A 200-pound man starts consuming 500 more calories a day, maybe by drinking a large soda or eating two donuts. According to the 3,500-calorie rule, in ten years, he’d weigh more than 700 pounds. That doesn’t happen because, the heavier he is, the more calories he burns just by existing. If you’re 100 pounds overweight, it’s as if there’s a skinny person inside you trying to walk around balancing 13 gallons of oil or lugging around a sack filled with 400 sticks of butter. As you can see in the graph below and at 6:13 in my video, it takes about two donuts’ worth of extra energy just to live at 250 pounds, so that’s where you’d plateau if you kept it up. Given a certain calorie excess or deficit, weight gain or weight loss is a curve that flattens out over time, rather than a straight line up or down.
Nevertheless, the 3,500-calorie rule continues to crop up, even in obesity journals. Public health researchers used it to calculate how many pounds children might lose every year if, for example, fast-food kids’ meals swapped in apple slices for french fries. You can see the “Counting Calories in Kids’ Meals” graphic below and at 6:39 in my video.
They figured that two meals a week could add up to about four pounds a year. The actual difference, National Restaurant Association–funded researchers were no doubt delighted to point out, would probably add less than half a pound—ten times less than the 3,500-calorie rule would predict, as you can see below and at 7:06 in my video. That original article was subsequently retracted.
The damage to the lungs and heart, the smell, the breath are all reasons to quit smoking. It is a tough habit to break, but critical for long term health. It is a tough journey to get it fully out of the system. But why do people gain weight after quitting smoking? While people tend to chalk it up as replacing one habit with another, or as an expression of anxiety, a study provides some much-needed scientific explanations.
Published in the Nature journal, the study suggests that the gut’s microbiome plays a part in the association between quitting smoking and gaining weight. Still, the mechanisms as to why this occurs are not clear.
Scientists devised a variety of tests involving mice, exposing them to smoke and then noting their fluctuations in gut bacteria. The first results showed that mice exposed to cigarette smoke resisted gaining weight when consuming a diet containing high fat. When the smoke was halted and the mice continued to eat the same diet, they gained weight.
Photo by brazzo/Getty Images
Subsequent studies proved gut bacteria’s importance in this situation; scientists provided antibiotics to the mice, depleting their microbiome, and found that it could impact their weight gain. Lastly, scientists transplanted fecal samples of the mice exposed to the smoke towards regular mice, finding that the regular mice experienced weight fluctuations as well.
Researchers then pinpointed the elements in the microbiome responsible for this change, calling out dimethylglycine (DMG) and acetylglycine (ACG) in particular. By enhancing and reducing these elements in mice, they found that even mice who weren’t exposed to smoke experienced weight fluctuations. Healthy mice with DMG supplements gained weight, while healthy mice with ACG supplements lost it.
Ninety-six human participants also took part in this study, all of whom displayed similar results as the mice. While this isn’t a complete win in terms of understanding how smoke influences our stomachs, it’s a significant first step, one that might help people understand the impact of cigarettes on gut health and might even provide a few solutions in the future that might encourage people to quit the habit without having to worry about the possible side effects.
In the 1970s, they tried lithium. Then it was zinc and THC. Anti-anxiety drugs had their turn. So did Prozac and SSRIs and atypical antidepressants. Nothing worked. Patients with anorexia were still unable to bring themselves to eat, still stuck in rigid thought patterns, still chillingly underweight.
A few years ago, a group led by Evelyn Attia, the director of the Center for Eating Disorders at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, tried giving patients an antipsychotic drug called olanzapine, normally used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and known to cause weight gain as a side effect. Those patients in her study who were on olanzapine increased their BMI a bit more than others who were taking a placebo, but the two groups showed no difference in their cognitive and psychological symptoms. This was the only medication trial for treating anorexia that has shown any positive effect at all, Attia told me, and even then, the effects were “very modest.”
Despite nearly half a century of attempts, no pill or shot has been identified to effectively treat anorexia nervosa. Anorexia is well known to be the deadliest eating disorder; the only psychiatric diagnosis with a higher death rate is opioid-use disorder. A 2020 review found people who have been hospitalized for the disease are more than five times likelier to die than their peers without it. The National Institutes of Health has devoted more than $100 million over the past decade to studying anorexia, yet researchers have not found a single compound that reliably helps people with the disorder.
Other eating disorders aren’t nearly so resistant to treatment. The FDA has approved fluoxetine (a.k.a. Prozac) to treat bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder (BED); doctors prescribe additional SSRIs off-label to treat both conditions, with a fair rate of success. An ADHD drug, Vyvanse, was approved for BED within two years of the disorder’s official recognition. But when it comes to anorexia, “we’ve tried, I don’t know, eight or 10 fundamentally different kinds of approaches without much in the way of success,” says Scott Crow, an adjunct psychology professor at the University of Minnesota and the vice president of psychiatry for Accanto Health.
The discrepancy is puzzling to anorexia specialists and researchers. “We don’t fully understand why medications work so differently in this group, and boy, do they ever work differently,” Attia told me. Still, experts have some ideas. Over the past few decades, they have been learning about the changes in brain activity that accompany anorexia. For example, Walter Kaye, the founder and executive director of the Eating Disorders Program at UC San Diego, told me that the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, both of which are involved in the brain’s reward system, seem to act differently in anorexia patients.
Perhaps some underlying differences in brain chemistry and function play a role in anorexia patients’ extreme aversion to eating. Or perhaps, the experts I spoke with suggested, these brain changes are at least in part a result of patients’ malnourishment. People with anorexia suffer from many effects of malnutrition: Their bones are more brittle; their brain is smaller; their heart beats slower; their breath comes shorter; their wounds fail to heal. Maybe their neurons respond differently to psychoactive drugs too.
Psychiatrists have found that many patients with anorexia don’t improve with treatment even when medicines are prescribed for conditions other than their eating disorder. If an anorexia patient also has anxiety, for example, taking an anti-anxiety drug would likely fail to relieve either set of symptoms, Attia told me. “Time and again, investigators have found very little or no difference between active medication and placebo in randomized controlled trials,” she said. The fact that fluoxetine seems to help anorexia patients avoid relapse—but only when it’s given after they’ve regained a healthy weight—also supports the notion that malnourished brains don’t respond so well to psychoactive medication. (In that case, the effect might be especially acute for people with anorexia nervosa, because they tend to have lower BMIs than people with other eating disorders.)
Why exactly this would be true remains a mystery. Attia noted that proteins and certain fats have been shown to be crucial for brain function; get too little of either, and the brain might not metabolize drugs in expected ways. Both she and Kaye suggested a possible role for tryptophan, an amino acid that humans get only from food. Tryptophan is converted into serotonin (among other things) when we release insulin after a meal, Kaye said, but in anorexia patients, whose insulin levels tend to be low, that process could end up off-kilter. “We suspect that that might be the reason why [SSRIs] don’t work very well,” he said, though he emphasized that the theory is very speculative.
In the absence of meaningful pharmacologic intervention, doctors who treat anorexia rely on methods such as nutrition counseling and psychotherapy. But even non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, are more effective at treating bulimia and binge-eating disorder than anorexia. Studies from around the world have shown that as many as half of people with anorexia relapse.
Colleen Clarkin Schreyer, a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, sees both patients with anorexia nervosa and those with bulimia nervosa, and told me that the former can be more difficult to treat—“but not just because of the fact that we don’t have any medication to help us along. I often find that patients with anorexia nervosa are more ambivalent about making behavior change.” Bulimia patients, she said, tend to feel shame about their condition, because binge eating is stigmatized and, well, no one likes vomit. But anorexia patients might be praised for skipping meals or rapidly losing weight, despite the fact that their behaviors can be just as dangerous over the long term as binging and vomiting.
Researchers are still trying to find substances that can help anorexia patients. Crow told me that case studies testing a synthetic version of leptin, a naturally occurring human hormone, have produced interesting data. Meanwhile, some early research into using psychedelics, including ketamine, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, suggests that they may relieve some symptoms in some cases. But until randomized, controlled trials are conducted, we won’t know whether or how well any psychedelic really works. Kaye is currently recruiting participants for such a study of psilocybin, which is planned to have multiple sites in the U.S. and Europe.
Pharmaceutical companies just don’t seem that enthusiastic about testing treatments for anorexia, Crow said. “I think that drug makers have taken to heart the message that the mortality is high” among anorexia patients, he told me, and thus avoid the risk of having deaths occur during their clinical trials. And drug development isn’t the only area where the study of anorexia has fallen short. Research on eating disorders tends to be underfunded on the whole, Crow said. That stems, in part, from “a widely prevailing belief that this is something that people could or should just stop … I wish that were how it works, frankly. But it’s not.”
Bad things happen to a human body in zero gravity. Just look at what happens to astronauts who spend time in orbit: Bones disintegrate. Muscles weaken. So does immunity. “When you go up into space,” says Saïd Mekari, who studies exercise physiology at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, “it’s an accelerated model of aging.” Earthbound experiments mimicking weightlessness have revealed similar effects. In the 1970s, Russian scientists immersed volunteers in bathtubs covered in a large sheet of waterproof fabric, enabling them to float without being wet. In some of these studies, which lasted up to 56 days, subjects developed serious heart problems and struggled to control their posture and leg movements.
Weightlessness hurts us because our bodies are fine-tuned to gravity as we experience it here on Earth. It tugs at us from birth to death, and still our intestines stay firmly coiled in their stack, blood flows upward, and our spine is capable of holding up our head. Unnatural contortions can throw things off: People have died from hanging upside down for too long. But as a general rule, the constant push of g-force on our body is a part of life that we rarely notice.
Or at least, that’s what scientists have always thought. But there is another possibility: that gravity itself is making some people sick. A new, peer-reviewed theory suggests that the body’s relationship with gravity can go haywire, causing a disorder that has long been a troubling mystery: irritable bowel syndrome.
This is a rogue idea that is far from widely accepted, though one that at least some experts say can’t be dismissed outright. IBS is a very common ailment, affecting up to an estimated 15 percent of people in the United States, and the symptoms can be brutal. People who have IBS experience abdominal pain and gas, feel bloated, and often have diarrhea, constipation, or both. But no exact cause of IBS has been pinned down. There’s evidence behind many competing theories, such as early-life stress, diet, and even gut infections, but none have emerged as the sole explanation. That is a problem for patients—it’s difficult to treat a condition when you don’t know what to target.
Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, has a different idea: People with IBS are hypersensitive to gravity as a result of any number of factors—stress, weight gain, a change in the gut microbiome, bad sleep patterns, or another behavior or injury. The idea came to him after watching a relative confined to a nursing-home bed develop classic symptoms of IBS. “We’re upright organisms,” he told me. “We’re not really supposed to be lying flat for that long.” The hypothesis, published late last year in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, is just that, a hypothesis. Spiegel hasn’t conducted any experiments or patient surveys that point to a “mismatch” in our body’s reaction to gravity as the cause of IBS, though the mechanics are all based in firm science. But part of what makes the theory so alluring is that it might encompass all of the other conventional explanations for the disease. “It’s meant to be a new way of thinking about old ideas,” he said.
So exactly how would someone’s relationship with gravity get off-kilter? Consider serotonin, a chemical that carries messages from the brain to the body. Spiegel sees serotonin as an “anti-gravity substance” because of the role it plays in so many important bodily functions influenced by g-force, such as blood flow. Serotonin can cause blood vessels to narrow, slowing circulation. It can make certain muscles contract or relax. It’s also crucial to digestion, helping with bowel function, getting rid of irritating foods, and regulating how much we eat. Without serotonin, gravity would turn our intestines into a “flaccid sac,” Spiegel writes. Because 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, if levels spike or plummet from factors such as stress, then the chemical’s possible handling of gravity would be thrown into chaos, affecting digestion. The result, he theorizes, is IBS.
Other parts of our body that respond to gravity can also be in on the problem. We are hardwired to react negatively to situations in which the pull of gravity might harm us; walk to the edge of a cliff and your body will tell you something. The amygdala in our brain is key to fear responses, and stress of various kinds can cause it to go into overdrive. Spiegel thinks that when stress taxes the amygdala, a person begins overreacting to potential threats, including from gravity. The digestive issues that make up IBS are a manifestation of that overreaction. Sure enough, people with IBS have been shown to have a hyperactive amygdala.
That is hardly anything close to proof. The thought that this painful and prolonged condition could be a gravity disorder is a major stretch, relying on a renegade interpretation of basic biology. “People just think I’m crazy,” Spiegel said. Many of his fellow doctors are not sold on the idea. The gravity hypothesis is another in a long parade of unconvincing theories about IBS, Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist at UCLA, told me. He’s heard them all: “It doesn’t exist; it’s a hysterical trait of neurotic housewives; it’s abnormal electrical activity in the colon.” He added, “I don’t think there’s any other disease that has gone through these peaks of attention-grabbing new theories.”
Spiegel’s idea has clear holes. If a faulty reaction to gravity triggers IBS, says David C. Kunkel, a gastroenterologist at UC San Diego, then you would expect to see higher rates of IBS among populations living at sea level versus at high altitudes, where g-force is slightly weaker. But that doesn’t seem to be the case: About a quarter of Peruvians live high in the mountains and most Icelanders live at sea level, yet both countries have high rates of IBS. Likewise, IBS rates appear to decrease with age, “which would not be expected if the disease was caused by a constant gravitational force,” Kunkel told me.
Spiegel is aware that the gravity hypothesis has little support in the field and no proof. But the gravity hypothesis has some logic behind it. The fact that the weightlessness of space travel can drastically change the body lends credence to the idea that other shifts in our relationship to gravity could do the same, says Declan McCole, a biomedical scientist at UC Riverside.
And the gut may be particularly sensitive to gravity changes. McCole has found that weightlessness made epithelial cells—which line the gut and stop invaders from entering the body—easier to evade. So if our internal chemistry can change in a way that makes us hypersensitive to gravity, then, to McCole, it stands to reason that such a shift could hit the gut hard. He’s less sure of whether that hypersensitivity exists. If it does, then why haven’t we identified any chemicals that help handle gravity, as we have for fear or sex drive or hunger? That molecule may indeed turn out to be serotonin, but right now there’s no proof.
The gravity hypothesis really matters only if it is meaningful for people with IBS. And that’s not guaranteed. Tying the very real pain of IBS to such a fantastical idea may seem closer to mythology than medicine, leaving patients feeling dismissed or belittled. Or they may throw up their hands in despair and prepare for a lifetime of pain: If the immovable force of gravity is the enemy, then why bother fighting?
But if there is some truth to it, then the hypothesis could also provide a possible starting place for treatments. Some of Spiegel’s suggestions are already common, such as weight loss and medications that decrease serotonin, but he also advocates for some gravity-specific therapies. “I do talk about it with my patients,” Spiegel said. “I recommend certain yoga poses; I recommend tilt tables.” People who have IBS may balk at his more radical ideas, such as moving to a higher altitude or farther from the equator.
The gravity hypothesis may never be anything more than a hypothesis. We have a long way to go before truly knowing whether the human body can develop a hypersensitivity to gravity that can make us ill, or whether some of us are better equipped to handle gravity than others. But the weight of evidence is enough to make us think twice before ignoring the idea that our body’s relationship to gravity can go awry—including for those of us not coping with IBS. If gravity might contribute to IBS, why not other ailments too? And then, why can’t it also be harnessed for good? Mekari and his colleagues recently found that lying at a six-degree downward angle sped up response times to cognition tests—pointing to a possible link between gravity and executive functioning. Antigravity treadmills, which help astronauts prepare for weightlessness, are being studied for the treatment of cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, and sports injuries.
All of these unknowns about gravity can feel haunting. Life on Earth has changed a lot since its first forms appeared about 4 billion years ago, but through it all, gravity has seemingly remained constant—perhaps the single thing that connects every organism that has ever lived. What if there’s still much we have to learn about what it’s doing to us? After all, right now your body is coping with gravity, just as it has been for every other second of your life. Perhaps it would be weirder if gravity wasn’t doing anything to us over time. “Every fiber in our body is straining to manage this force,” Spiegel said. You don’t need to spend 56 days in a bathtub to figure that out.
You’ve come to the right place, because this is what we do!
This guide covers the exact weight gain strategies I’ve used to go from my “before” (on the left above) to reach my “after” (on the right above). Believe it or not, that “before” photo is me after a DECADE of strength training and trying to get bigger.
It’s the stuff in this guide that finally allowed me to actually get results (the after).
It’s also exactly how we help our online coaching clients: nutritional guidance and workout plans that line up with their goals.
Oh, and if you sign up in any of the yellow email boxes throughout, you can download our “Gain Weight and Build Muscle” Shopping List and Cheat Sheet to hang on your fridge!
Download our free skinny guy’s guide to putting on muscle!
Enter your email below to download now
The Nerd Fitness “Get Bigger” Shopping List
Bulk like the Hulk with our rules for getting bigger
Let’s start putting on weight right NOW.
These are the 12 lessons I wish I knew when I started trying to get bigger (click to jump right to that lesson):
“If you’re not gaining weight, you’re not eating enough food.”
It’s science and thermodynamics.
Allow me to explain: depending on your current size and level of activity, your body burns 1200-2500+ calories every day just doing all of its daily processes:
Breathing.
Keeping your heart beating.
Powering your liver, kidneys, and brain.
Powering your movement.
Rebuilding muscle.
And dozens of other things. We burn a lot of calories just keeping the lights turned on.
Here’s the problem: because your body efficiently uses up all of the calories you consume every day, there are no calories left over to build muscle (or get stored as fat).
Note: we have used The Mifflin-St Jeor Equation to create this calculator![1]
Hooray! You now know estimates of your Basal Metabolic Rate (calories you burn existing) and TDEE (calories you burn while moving throughout the day)![2]
So, in order to get bigger, you need to eat ABOVE this TDEE number consistently.
Although there is SOME variation regarding metabolism variability, it’s insignificant when compared to the effect of the more important part of the equation:
We overestimate how many calories we’re eating each day, we don’t account for the calories we burn through movement or exercise, and there aren’t enough calories left over to create a “caloric surplus.”
And without that surplus, we’ll never gain weight or get bigger.
MY STORY: I had been training in a gym for 6 years without gaining size.
It comes down to your personal preference. You might struggle to eat 3000 calories in 3 meals, so having 6 500-calorie meals throughout the day might make you feel less bloated and full.
Your results may vary!
See the next section for tips and tricks on WHAT foods you should eat to gain weight.
If you want somebody to help keep you accountable and help you actually bulk up safely and quickly, we have a pretty great online coaching program that has helped people reach their weight gain goals safely and quickly.
If you want to build muscle, target whole foods that come from high-quality, high-calorie sources whenever possible.
Sure, you could obtain 3500 calories eating Taco Bell, Twinkies, candy, and Mountain Dew. However, this isn’t a good long-term solution to gaining weight and building a good physique (goodbye health).
Trust me, I know. I put on 18 pounds in 30 days by eating meatball subs from Subway, drinking whole milk, eating McDonald’s, and drinking weight gainer shakes.
I certainly wasn’t healthy, and today I’m much more intelligent and knowledgeable about how to bulk up safely.
Consume at least 1-1.5g per pound (2.2-3.3g per kg) of body weight in protein daily.
Consume .25-.4g per pound (.5-.8g per kg) of body weight in fat daily.
Consume the rest of your calorie goals from healthy carbs.
Eat vegetables so that your body can process all the extra food.
If you are not gaining weight, add more carbs and/or fats to your meal.
We’re going to start building a Balanced Plate, like so:
The most important macro we’re going to focus on is protein.[6]. Studies show you’re more likely to put on the right kind of weight with a high-protein diet compared to a low-protein diet.
So that’s where we’ll start.
FOOD PRIORITY #1: PROTEIN
Protein can come from any number of sources, including:
As you can see, you can eat an extra 500 calories of “healthy fats” by eating lots of “heart-healthy” fats like nuts or adding more olive oil to your meals.
PRIORITY #4: VEGETABLES!
Last but not least, you need vegetables in your diet.
If you start to eat a lot more food, your “indoor plumbing” is going to really benefit from eating some high-fiber veggies with each meal:
A serving of veggies is about the size of your fist:
Here’s a quick, non-complete list of veggies that you can choose:
Broccoli
Broccolini
Cauliflower
Spinach
Kale
Spaghetti squash
Brussels sprouts
Zucchini
Cucumber
Carrots
Onion
Asparagus
“BUT STEVE, I REALLY STRUGGLE TO EAT ENOUGH CALORIES FROM WHOLE FOODS EVERY DAY!“
I do as well. It’s why I consume a good portion of liquid calories every day too.
It’s a surefire way to make sure you hit your calorie goals.
As I lay out in our massive Protein Shake Guide, creating high-calorie protein shakes to eat between meals can be the game changer:
Also, download our Skinny Guy Guide which has both lessons and a shopping list you can use to prioritize eating the right high calorie, high-quality foods!
Download our free skinny guy’s guide to putting on muscle!
Enter your email below to download now
The Nerd Fitness “Get Bigger” Shopping List
Bulk like the Hulk with our rules for getting bigger
If you’re of healthy weight, active, and wish to build muscle, aim for 1 g/lb (2.2 g/kg).
If you’re going to be strength training while getting bigger, intakes up to 1.50 g/lb (3.3 g/kg) may help you minimize fat gain.[13]
Let me simplify it for you:target at least 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight (2.2 grams per kg).
Provided you’re a healthy individual with a healthy liver, you don’t need to worry about eating too much protein[14] – you should be more concerned with eating too little protein.
Long story short: studies suggest you will not put on the right kind of weight without consuming enough protein!
Okay, so let’s talk portions. Here’s how much protein is in a palm-sized serving of food:
4 oz (113 g) of chicken has around 30 g of protein.
4 oz (113 g) of salmon has 23 g of protein
4 oz (113 g) of steak has 28 g of protein.
EXAMPLE TIME!
Let’s say you weigh 150 pounds (68 kg).
That would mean a day of eating could be:
1 serving of protein with breakfast: protein shake (30g).
2 servings of protein with lunch: 2 chicken breasts (60g).
2 servings of protein with dinner: 2 portions of steak (56g).
Creating a high-calorie protein shake with foods like frozen fruit, oats, milk, and a scoop of protein can be huge.
It’s how I hit my goals every day!
MY STORY: I am currently bulking up, and according to my online coach, I need to eat 3200 calories with 240g of protein on workout days (I weigh 172 pounds).
Target 2 portions of carbs, and 2 portions of fat in your meals.
Remember, our portions look like so:
If you’re not gaining weight, increase those numbers even more.
This is all about math! Not getting bigger = need MOAR food.
What about other foods like pizza, pasta, candy soda? Sure, you can get away with consuming less healthy things ON OCCASION (pizza, subs, etc.) but avoid fueling yourself with ONLY junk food.
If you’re not sure specifically what you should be eating for protein, carbs, and fats, download our “Get Bigger” Shopping List by putting your email in the box below:
Download our free skinny guy’s guide to putting on muscle!
Enter your email below to download now
The Nerd Fitness “Get Bigger” Shopping List
Bulk like the Hulk with our rules for getting bigger
My advice: Rather than chasing massive weight gain over a month, you’d be much better off gaining .5-1.5 lbs. (.25-.75 kg) a week, every week, for six months…and keeping the weight on!
So, how do you know if your efforts are working? Simple.
If the scale is moving UP, keep doing what you’re doing.
If the scale is NOT moving: EAT MORE.
If you’re ever unsure if you’ve eaten enough that day, eat more.
Once you start to get a good feel for how many calories you eat each day, try to eat the same meals to keep it easy.
Still convinced you can’t gain weight even after tracking things? Let us help. I too was convinced that it was my “fast metabolism,” until I learned from my personal trainer that I simply wasn’t eating enough.
As we lay out in our “Beginner Strength Workouts” guide, these are the BEST exercises you can do to gain weight:
Get as strong as possible with these exercises while eating enough calories and protein, and you will gain the right kind of weight! It’s how I bulked up correctly:)
Here are some resources to help make heads or tails of the above:
Important point: don’t worry about isolation exercises like triceps extensions, shoulder shrugs, bicep curls, or crunches.
You can certainly do them, but only AFTER you’ve done your heavy lifts for the day!
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.
Want more workouts to follow? Read through our Strength Training 101 series that will answer all your questions!
Terrified to even step foot into a gym? We understand! Check out our Beginner’s Guide to the Gym article for some basic strategies and workouts.
Want somebody to tell you EXACTLY how to exercise and how to eat? Check out our 1-on-1 Coaching Program.
So how do you progressively overload your muscles?
Lift more weight than last time.
Do more sets or reps than last time.
Wait less time between sets than last time.
Do a more difficult movement or variation.
If you did 3 sets of 5 reps of squats at 95 pounds last week, go for 3 sets of 5 reps at 100 pounds this week!
Did knee push-ups last month?
Great, try to do regular push-ups this month.
Coach Jim breaks down the ins and outs of progressive overload for you in this video:
The trick with progressive overload is to continuously increase the challenge, and the best way to do that is by tracking your workouts!
Write down how you train, so that way you know exactly how to get stronger next time. I use Evernote on my phone, but you can use an old school notebook or whatever floats your boat.
Write down exactly:
And then next time?
Pick up more.
In addition to the protein shakes mentioned back in Rule #3, consider a creatine supplement – it allows your muscles to store more water – which will both help you potentially lift heavier and improve your performance in the gym!
If you don’t want to build your own workout routine, or you’re not sure how and when to scale up your workouts for the best results, let us build a routine for you!
Our coaches will build a workout program for your goals, and every day you can check your coaching app and know exactly what to do:
Muscles are made in the kitchen and while sleeping, NOT in the gym.
When you train, you are essentially ripping apart and breaking down your muscles.
Then, during the next 48 hours, as you are eating a caloric surplus and recovering, your muscles get rebuilt bigger and stronger.
For this reason, never exercise the same muscle before it’s ready.
In other words, try not to exercise the same muscle on two consecutive days.
Here are the best common practices for weight gain: Do a gym workout 3-4 days a week with a day off in between each (while consuming plenty of calories). This is plenty of training to promote muscle growth and weight gain.
Long story short: pick up a heavy weight in the gym 3-4 days a week for an hour.
“Inadequate sleep impairs maximal muscle strength in compound movements when performed without specific interventions designed to increase motivation.”
Think of it this way:
Building muscle is hard work, your body can use all the help (and calories) it can get. Your body is doing nothing but lying there and building muscle while you’re sleeping. [19]
If you are only getting 6 hours or less, you’re not going to get all the benefits of your exercising and diet, and not giving yourself the best chance to gain weight and grow bigger.
We often spend quite a bit of time with our coaching clients working with them on their sleep and environmental habits! From turning off the TV an hour earlier to even becoming a morning person, we build fun missions and challenges for our clients around stuff like this to get results.
Depending on how you currently feel about running, this next sentence will either make you happy or miserable:
“Running might work against your efforts to gain weight and build muscle.”
When you run, your body uses up calories to fuel your runs. This leaves fewer calories left over to build muscle.
Now, nobody will refute the benefits of improved cardiovascular health, nor would I EVER tell you to not do an exercise that you find fun.
In addition, a 2016 study[20] showed that doing endurance training AND strength training actually created larger muscle hypertrophy in untrained subjects than just resistance training alone.
What this means:
If you’re somebody that runs and enjoys it, great!
If you’re trying to get bigger, here’s what I would recommend:
Find a way to increase your food intake, and still know that you might be building muscle slightly slower than if you ONLY did strength training.
Cut back on running until you reach your goal weight/size, and then introduce it back into your routine.
Is your SOLE focus on getting bigger? Do 3 things:
Eat (a lot).
Lift (heavier).
Sleep (a lot).
Interested in giving your heart a workout without steady cardio?:
Want to incorporate cardio the RIGHT way into your life, along with strength training, to start gaining weight?
Our coaching program builds custom programs to help people just like you reach your goals.
With all of this eating, you will probably put on some fat along with your muscle.
That’s okay!
You might even be skinny enough that a bit of extra “cushion” on you is a good thing!
If you are trying to put on MOSTLY muscle and minimal fat gain:
Target at least 1.5g of protein per pound of body weight (3.3g per kg).
Eat a caloric surplus that is 250cal over your current TDEE.
And then fine-tune it from there:
You’re trying to thread the needle of “only build muscle, don’t add fat” which is fairly advanced and challenging.
As this 2017 study points out[21], “Protein overfeeding or the consumption of a high protein diet may not result in a gain in body weight or fat mass despite consuming calories that exceed one’s normal or habitual intake.”
This is incredibly challenging, and you do run the risk of not eating enough to build muscle. In addition, you might build less muscle than had you consumed a larger surplus of calories.
Now, what if you’re “skinny fat?”
What if you have a gut/belly, and thin arms?
IF YOU ARE “SKINNY FAT”:
Then, once you get to a low enough body fat percentage that you can see some abdominal muscle definition, you can get back to bulking up.
It’s important to build a system that sets you up for weight gain success.
It comes down to two things:
Don’t miss workouts.
Don’t miss meals.
So do whatever you need to do to make those things happen!
Here’s my final piece of advice: If you want permanent success, stop thinking in terms of “How fast can I gain weight?” and instead think:
“What can I do today that feels sustainable enough that I can stick with it for a year?”
This is how I get results, and how you can use the tools and tips in this article to get results too. Build small habits that become permanent parts of your life, and the results you’ll get will be permanent too.
Now, if you’re somebody that wants even MORE guidance, and specific instructions to follow, I got you:
1) Our 1-on-1 online coaching program, work with a member of Team Nerd Fitness that gets to know you and your situation. We’ll provide expert guidance and accountability, a custom workout, and regular ongoing support:
2) Exercising at home and need a plan to follow? Check out Nerd Fitness Journey!
Our fun habit-building app helps you exercise more frequently, eat healthier, and level up your life (literally).
Try your free trial right here:
3) Sign up for our free email list, the Nerd Fitness Rebellion! Join a few hundred thousand rebels just like you and I’ll send you a bunch of free guides too. I’m nice like that.
Download our free skinny guy’s guide to putting on muscle!
Enter your email below to download now
The Nerd Fitness “Get Bigger” Shopping List
Bulk like the Hulk with our rules for getting bigger
To recap our full article, here are the “12 Rules To Gain Weight Quickly”:
Most people with HIV gain weight after they start antiretroviral therapy (ART). In fact, it’s usually a good sign that your ART is working. You might hear your doctor call these early extra pounds a “return to health.” But too much treatment-related weight gain can sometimes lead to future health problems.
“Three decades ago, when the HIV epidemic was fresh and new, we worried about malnutrition and wasting,” says Onyema Ogbuagu, MBBCh, an infectious disease specialist who treats people with HIV at Yale Medicine. “Now that we’ve done a better job of catching people earlier in the disease and have more effective treatments, we have a different kind of metabolic problem, which is obesity.”
Tell your doctor if you’re worried about treatment-related weight gain. They’ll go over all the pros and cons of your ART. They’ll also help you find safe ways to lose weight.
Here are some other topics you might want to go over with your health care team.
What Are the Health Risks of Treatment-Related Weight Gain?
Ogbuagu says older kinds of ART might cause lipodystrophy. That’s when your body shifts how it stores fat. You can end up with the kind of belly fat that’s linked to insulin resistance, diabetes, and heart problems. But those kind of fat changes are a lot less likely to happen with newer drugs.
But there is evidence that short-term treatment-related weight gain from modern ART can still raise your odds of certain metabolic problems. More research is needed to know all of the long-term effects of treatment. But ART-related weight gain might lead to the following:
Type 2 diabetes
High cholesterol (also known as hyperlipidemia)
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
“The data for diabetes and liver fat is certainly present,” says John Koethe, assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. But he says there’s conflicting evidence when it comes to cardiovascular disease. Obesity and overweight up the chances anyone will get cardiovascular disease. But he says it’s still not known whether ART-related weight gain raises those odds even higher. We need more research to find out.
“People with HIV are already at a markedly increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” Koethe says. “The issue there may be that any attributable risk from the weight gain hasn’t really turned up in studies yet.”
Keep in mind that excess body weight, regardless of which ART you’re on, can raise your odds of certain health conditions. That includes the following:
Sleep apnea
Cognitive decline
High blood pressure
Heart disease and stroke
When Should You Watch for Weight Gain?
After you start ART, your odds of weight gain are highest within the first 12 to 18 months, Koethe says. In that period of time, studies show about 37% of people will gain 5% of their body weight. Another 17% will add 10% of their body weight.
Your weight might keep going up for several years after the start of ART, Koethe says, “but at a much slower pace.”
Does All Treatment-Related Weight Gain Come With Risks?
If you’re underweight or normal weight, a few extra pounds can be OK and even healthy. “Weight gain is not always a bad thing,” Ogbuagu says. “For some people, it’s desirable.” He says it might even boost your sense of well-being.
But in general, Koethe says doctors usually start to worry about future health problems if you gain 5% of your body weight after starting ART. People store that weight in different ways, but he says your odds of certain medical problems go up if you hold fat in the area around your internal organs.
“Those folks are at a higher risk of also accumulating fat around the liver, around the heart, and within their skeletal muscles,” Koethe says. “It’s those individuals who are going to be at a higher risk for metabolic diseases like diabetes and other comorbidities down the road.”
It’s hard to tell where your fat is just by looking at your body. But there are some tests your doctor can do to get a more detailed look. Koethe says that might include the following:
Measure around your waist. Your odds of diabetes and heart disease are higher if your waist is greater than 35 inches for women or 40 inches for men.
DEXA (or DXA) scan. This is a type of bone density test. But it can also show where your body stores fat and muscle.
CT scan. This is a more advanced tool that’ll give your doctor info on the fat in and around your liver, skeletal muscles, heart, or other organs.
Who Is More Likely to Gain Weight on ART?
Koethe and his colleagues found that 3 years after the start of ART, about 22% of healthy-weight people became overweight. Among those who were already overweight, he says about one-fifth became obese. But those numbers don’t help experts predict much.
There’s ongoing research into how much of a role your genes play. Koethe says there’s emerging data that certain drug-metabolizing enzymes might affect weight gain. In the future, that might shine a light on who’s more likely put on extra pounds after the start of ART.
Should You Change Your ART?
Talk to your doctor about your treatment. They might want to switch you to a different drug if you’ve gained lots of excess weight. But there are a lot of things to think about it before you make a change.
If you haven’t started treatment, current pre-ART guidelines include a consideration for weight gain or metabolic problems. Bring it up with your doctor if those are health problems you or other family members have had.
But right now, Koethe says there’s not enough scientific data to support a change from the standard guidelines. He says that’s because integrase inhibitors, which are linked to weight gain, “are just so much better when it comes to preventing (drug) resistance.”
The best thing you can do, Koethe says, is to start or continue a healthy diet and exercise routine, especially at the start of ART. And keep your doctor in the loop about your weight gain. They can run routine checks on key health measures, such as:
Blood sugar
Blood pressure
Cholesterol levels
Your doctor might not choose or change your ART based solely on excess weight concerns. But Ogbuagu says you should still talk to your doctor if it happens. “I think we should take action early, in the first few months or year, so that people don’t continue to gain weight and develop new complications along the way.”
I don’t remember the exact date when I found out I was HIV positive, but I remember the first conversation I had with my doctor very well. He diagnosed me with AIDS and said I had only 3 months to live because my T-cell count was under 10. That was in 1999.
When I finally found an infectious disease specialist at a new clinic in my area, I was told that with medication I could live a long, full life. I’m 54 now.
In 2000, I started treatment. I’ve been on several different regimens since then, but now I have an undetectable viral load.
My normal weight used to be about 190 or 200 pounds, but when I was diagnosed, I weighed about 160 pounds. About 6 months after I started treatment, I gained 40 pounds and was back to my normal weight. I remained at this weight until I started a different medication plan.
After I started that therapy, my weight went up a lot, to 230 pounds, which is where I am now. When I switched to my current regimen, I didn’t gain any more weight, but I didn’t lose any either.
Most of the extra weight is in my stomach area. I have to wear my shirts two sizes bigger than my bottoms. I have to do a lot of mixing and matching when I buy clothes. If I get dresses, I get them altered or have someone make them for me. It’s hard to find clothes that fit me, and it always costs more to have clothes look right.
I’ve talked to my doctor a lot about my weight gain. He always tells me to change the way I eat and to exercise more. I have other health conditions that make extra weight even more dangerous.
My doctor recommended that I see a counselor to help control my diabetes and change my eating and exercise habits. But making changes hasn’t been easy for me.
Diet, Exercise, and Lifestyle
A few years ago, I went on a very strict no-carb diet and I lost 50 pounds. But my stomach stuck out even more and I looked like I was pregnant. I was told that if I could lose another 10 pounds, I’d be a candidate for liposuction. But I just couldn’t lose those 10 pounds. After that, I stopped the diet and gained all my weight back.
I don’t think fad diets work well at all. When you start one, it seems like as soon as you don’t eat according to the plan, all the weight comes back — and even more.
But in the last year, I’ve been doing better with exercise and small changes in how I eat.
I have arthritis in my lower back. With all the extra weight, my back hurts more and makes it more difficult to exercise. But even though I have some mobility issues, I’m an active person.
Last year I did water therapy to help with my arthritis. When it was over, I took up swimming. Now I go to the YMCA twice a week and do my exercise with water therapy and swim some laps. When I started, I was barely doing five laps. Now I’m up to 20.
Even though it seems like I just can’t lose the weight I’ve gained, I do feel like swimming and exercising in the pool is good for me. This is the first time since I’ve gained the weight that I’ve actually done any type of exercise. I haven’t lost any weight but have noticed my legs and arms are more toned. Some people have asked me if I’ve lost weight because it looks like I have, but the scale says I haven’t.
Emotional Ups and Downs
My weight gain has been difficult emotionally. It affects my self-esteem. I have a lot of negative thoughts about what I look like. When I see pictures of myself and see how far my stomach sticks out, I don’t feel good.
But I feel optimistic about the new studies that are looking at the issue of weight gain with HIV medication. It also makes me feel better to know that the weight gain isn’t all my fault. My meds are making it harder for me to lose it.
My advice for anyone who’s gained weight from HIV treatment is to talk with your doctors, friends, and other support systems. Don’t try to do everything by yourself. Seek out help from others, and read up on all the latest medical advances.
Hopefully these new studies on weight gain from HIV treatment will lead to the development of new medications that won’t cause weight gain and will help us either maintain our weight or lose weight more easily.
If you’ve ever asked yourself “Am I doing too little or too many reps and sets?” then this guide is for you.
This article is part of our Strength 101 series, and we’ll show you exactly how to determine the number of repetitions and sets for specific exercises, so you can build your own workout routine.
It sounds easy, but depending on your goals, the answer to “How many reps and sets should I do?” can vary greatly.
We work hand-in-hand with our Online Coaching Clients to create the correct workout program that suits their goals, needs, and available equipment
In today’s guide on workout programing, we’ll cover (click each to get right to that answer):
As Coach Jim mentions above, “Rep” stands for “repetition” and defines one complete motion of an exercise.
And one “set” is a consecutive number of reps without stopping.
And one “smorgasbord” is a buffet of food.
(This has nothing to do with this article, but it’s a fun word to say.)
As we mentioned throughout our Strength Training 101 series, how many reps and sets you should do is really going to be dependent on your goals.
For example, is your goal to improve:
Muscular endurance
Muscular hypertrophy
Muscular strength
Muscular power
Depending on what your goal is, the sets, reps, and rest intervals will change.
Oh, you’re just starting your strength training journey?
Well, make sure you grab our free guide, Strength Training 101: Everything You Need to Know. I’ll send it to you for free when you join the Rebellion (that’s us!).
Download our comprehensive guide
Everything you need to know about getting strong.
Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.
How to find the right gym and train properly in one.
Alright, let’s break down reps and sets for you, because I can see you still have questions.
The scientific term here is “sarcoplasmic hypertrophy,” as it focuses on increasing the amount of sarcoplasm, the non-contractile fluid found in your muscle.
Up to 30% of your muscle’s size is attributed to the sarcoplasm, so focusing on this type of hypertrophy helps build overall size (i.e., increased cross-sectional area of the muscle).
If you’re training for specific sports and just want to get stronger with more power – but not necessarily get bigger, this is the strategy for you.
This type of training focuses on strengthening the myofibril, the contractile part of the muscle, hence the name “myofibril hypertrophy.”
For this, target reps in the 1-5 range. And yep, that means you’re going to be picking up heavy weights, focusing all that concentrated effort into just one or a few reps.[4]
Something to note when lifting for strength and power: not only are you shocking your muscles, but you’re also putting a lot of pressure on your body’s central nervous system (CNS).
So what does this mean?
In a way, it means your body’s ability to communicate with its muscles has grown fatigued, and performance may suffer.
That’s why you may want to rest between 2-5 minutes in this range.
Oh, and your CNS will adapt and become stronger, which will be critical for building strength and power.[5]
Since powerlifting really taxes the central nervous system, you may be waiting 3-5 minutes between sets when training in this fashion.
TO RECAP, these are the rep ranges you should be considering:
Reps in the 1-5 range build super dense muscle and strength.
Reps in the 6-12 range build equal amounts of muscular power, strength, and size.
Reps in the 12+ range primarily build muscular endurance and size and also cardiovascular health.
I realize this is a lot to figure out, so if you are somebody – like me – who just wants to be told what to do and outsource all the worry of “am I doing the right workout for my goals?” I got you covered!
I’d love to learn your story, and then build a custom program that fits your goals. We’ll help you with your nutrition, your workouts, and even check in regularly to keep you accountable!
If you’re not sure if “3 sets of 10” or “5 sets of 5” is right for you, we got you covered.
We’ll build a program that fits your goals, and then adjust it each month based on your progress. Never guess or wonder what you should be doing again.
Now that you have “edumacated” yourself on how your specific goals influence the number of reps per set, and what sets actually are, you can build your workout program around this info.
TO RECAP, aim for 3-5 sets in the following rep rangers per exercise based on your goals:
Endurance: 12+ reps per set.
Hypertrophy (bigger muscles): 6-12 reps per set.
Strength (dense, powerful muscle): 1-5 reps per set.
Two points worth mentioning:
A recent study showed that heavier weight for low reps created more muscle mass than a higher volume (lower weight for more reps).[8]
Studies show that bodyweight training exercises can build muscle, but require a LARGE number of sets per rep, and pushing oneself to absolute failure.[9]
What this means: studies suggest targeting heavier weight with fewer reps for big lifts like squats and deadlifts to build muscle, while targeting high reps to absolute failure with bodyweight exercises for muscle building.
Just remember to rest enough between sets so you don’t fatigue your central nervous system too bad.[10]
One last point: Nutrition is still 90% of the equation!
Your rep range doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think, so don’t overthunk it!
It doesn’t matter if you train like a bodybuilder, you ALSO need to eat enough food to provide your muscles with enough calories to rebuild themselves bigger and stronger! This is the biggest mistake I see skinny people make when trying to bulk.
This brings me to my final point: because nutrition is 90% of the equation, your sets and reps don’t matter nearly as much as you think they do!
All that matters? Doing MORE this workout than the last workout.
Remember, how you build muscle and strength and burn fat: “progressive overload.”
One more rep than last time.
Doing one more set than last time.
Picking up a weight that’s 5 lbs. heavier than last week.
So get out of your own head, and START TODAY:
1) GET HELP: If you want expert guidance and accountability so you don’t have to figure out all of this stuff on your own, I got you.
Click the red button below to get the details about our amazing online coaching program:
2) FIGURING IT OUT OUT ON YOUR OWN!
Download our free Strength Training 101 Guide! You get it free when you join our Rebellion (the name of our awesome free online community). Sign up in the box below:
Download our comprehensive guide
Everything you need to know about getting strong.
Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.
How to find the right gym and train properly in one.
3) WORKOUTS YOU CAN DO NOW:
Remember: the goal should be to get stronger each workout.
Write down what you did last time, and then do MORE this time.
By continually challenging your muscles to do more, they’ll have to adapt by getting bigger, stronger, burning more calories, etc.
There are a lot of different truths and fallacies on plateaus and how your muscles can get “used” to working out and stop growing.
If that’s something you’re battling, here’s a way to continue making progress:
Spend a week in a different rep range with different amounts of weight.
This will introduce a little chaos into the system, which could be a good thing…unless you’re Batman.
What we’re talking about is muscle confusion theory, which is a preplanned period of variation.[13] Not, you know, wandering into the gym with no plan and just doing something different every time (whatever you feel like doing at that moment).
That won’t help.
But spend a week deliberating mixing it up. Then go back to your regularly scheduled routine and you’ll be right back on track.
Make sure you know what you want, and then design a plan to get there.
-Steve
PS: If you want a nice shiny app to tell you EXACTLY how many seps and reps to do, our shiny new app will do just that!
You can sign-up for a free 7-day trial to Nerd Fitness Journey, which will build a workout around your experience level!
As much as we look forward to holiday parties and dinners, many of us suspect we’ll overindulge and gain weight.
Indeed, the average American eats and drinks 4,500 calories and 229 grams fat (as much as in 3 sticks of butter) on a traditional Thanksgiving day? Studies show that the average American gains 1 pound during the winter holiday season. Year after year, they can add up, and contribute to overweight or obesity later in life.
Although we may not all gain weight over the holidays, there is no question we tend to eat and drink more — and exercise less. With the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping, parties and festive traditions, healthy eating and exercise are usually the first things to go.
No one wants to be on a strict diet during the holidays. We want to enjoy the bounty of traditional favorite foods. How can you enjoy the holidays without gaining weight? Dietitians say it’s not so hard, with a little planning.
First, change your mindset. If you’ve been trying to lose weight, when mid-November rolls around, shift your focus from weight loss to weight maintenance. “The holiday season is tough enough to just maintain your weight let alone try to lose weight. So do yourself a favor,” says Joan Salge Blake, MS, RD, Boston University clinical assistant professor. “Allow yourself a few treats and set your goal on weight maintenance so you can enjoy the holiday foods and wait until the New Year to get back on your weight loss plan.”
Second, get strategic with calories. If you are the host of dinners and parties, trim calories wherever you can without compromising tradition or flavor. You’ll help everyone enjoy the bountiful food without unneeded calories. Keep in mind that it is much harder to lose weight than it is not to gain it in the first place.
Here are 10 tips to lighten up your holiday meals.
1. Shop Smart for Healthy Holidays
Plan your menu to include plenty of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, seafood, whole grains, and low-fat dairy.
Consult the nutrition label to choose foods rich in nutrients but lower in fat, calories, and sugar.
To shave calories, go easy when adding nuts, cheese, cream sauces, gravy, butter, and whipped cream.
2. Start the Party Light
Most appetizers tend to be loaded with calories. And it is so easy to overeat them before the meal.
Make it easier on your guests by offering light and satisfying appetizers. For delicious yet healthy appetizers, serve shrimp cocktails, whole-grain crackers with reduced-fat cheese, vegetables with a low-fat yogurt dip, or fresh fruit skewers.
3. Harness the Diet Power of Produce
Add more simple vegetable and fruit dishes to your menu instead of heavy dishes with sauces. Your guests will fill up on healthy fiber without lots of extra calories.
For example, green bean almandine with a squeeze of lemon is healthier than traditional green bean casserole. Simple peas or corn are healthier than creamed peas or corn. But if you must have casserole, use low-fat soup, increase the veggies, and top it with a crunchy whole-grain cereal instead of fried onions.
4. Go Frozen in Winter
Fresh is usually the best when fruits and vegetables are in season. But when prices are higher in winter, head to the frozen food aisle.
“Frozen fruits and vegetables are usually less expensive and can be more nutritious because they are picked at their peak ripeness and frozen immediately” says Sarah Krieger, RD. Buy frozen produce in bags, use only what you need, and save more by not wasting spoiled produce.
Canned foods can also be a healthy option. Read the nutrition labels to find fruits and vegetables with less added sodium and sugar, Krieger says. Reduce the sodium and sugar solutions even more by rinsing the vegetable or fruit under cold water before you cook.
5. Respect Special Requests
As you plan your holiday menu, ask if guests have any food preferences or intolerances. For example, a dear friend may be lactose intolerant. A favorite cousin may have cut red meat from his diet.
You can’t please everyone. But you can include a wide variety of healthy foods. Then, your guests can pick and choose, filling their plate with a satisfying meal no matter their food issue.
6. Shave Calories With Simple Swaps
Create healthier versions of your holiday favorites by shaving calories wherever you can.
“Simple swaps of lower-fat ingredients are easy ways to save calories — and no one will even notice the difference” says Cheryl Forberg, RD.
Use chicken stock, fat-free yogurt, light cream cheese, and low-fat milk in place of high-fat ingredients. Substitute non-fat yogurt or applesauce for oil in baked goods.
7. Roast or Grill for Rich Flavor With Fewer Calories
Roasting or grilling meat, seafood, vegetables, and potatoes, is a simple, low-calorie cooking style that brings out the natural sweetness and flavor in foods.
Roasted sweet potatoes with a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar and a spritz of butter spray are delicious substitutes for the traditional calorie-laden casserole.
Grilled pork chops served with a mango salsa are great to replace pork chops slathered in mushroom cream.
8. Serve Healthier Desserts
For dessert, try chocolate-dipped strawberries for a colorful and delicious finale.
If you want to offer pie, choose the healthier pumpkin pie. Make it with non-fat evaporated milk. Top it with fat-free whipped topping.
9. Spritz Your Drinks
Eggnog and other holiday beverages can add a huge number of calories. Offer your guests plenty of low-cal beverages such as diet soda, sparkling water, or a low-calorie punch.
Alcohol releases inhibitions and can increase hunger. That’s a combination that can lead to eating more than you planned. So do yourself and guests a favor: Offer simple alcohol choices such as wine and beer without the heavy cocktail mixers. And make sure you have mocktails or other no-alcohol options for those who don’t drink.
10. Plan and Scan to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain
“In anticipation that you will be eating and drinking more than usual, try to trim your calories and make sure you fit in fitness everyday so you can enjoy a ‘controlled’ feast without the guilt” says Joan Salge Blake, MS, RD, clinical assistant professor at Boston University.
“Scan the buffet and fill your plate with foods that are simply prepared, without sauces or fried, sit down and take your time to taste and savor every bite,” she says. Resist the urge to go back for more by waiting at least 20 minutes for your brain to register that you are comfortably full. If you are still hungry, eat more vegetables and drink water.
Remember, the holidays are marked with many traditions, but the real meaning is about spending time with family and friends.
If you keep these tips in mind, you’ll get through the holidays without gaining a pound. And if you do splurge, just get right back to normal eating and exercising, and try to do make better choices at the next party.
In my previous video, I dive into how 
