So my boyfriend and I are happy together but I can't get over his body. He's a foot taller than me and weighs 10-15lbs less than me depending on the day. He looks like this minus about 10lbs of fat While I'm short and beefy and a little chubby. Anyways it's like he always looks severely starved even though he eats twice as much as I do and he's getting thinner. I'm always worried I'm going to hurt him and I'm terrified for his health. Whenever I see him I feel horrible because I think I don't feed him enough or try hard enough to help him gain weight. He wants to gain weight but even after eating 2XL Pizzas a day for a few days (he eats a lot healthier now) the scale didn't even move.
So if anyone has advise to help guys gain weight as far as diet or supplsment or whatever at this point I'd be very thankful :)
There is some really poor advice on this thread regarding diet and training. Barring illness, there is nothing wrong with your boyfriend that food will not fix. There is no such thing as a hard gainer. Only a person not willing to eat enough.
If you're serious about addressing your boyfriend's weight, the first thing you need to do is have him keep a food log. Without knowing what he actually consumes, you don't have a baseline from which to work. Data shows that skinny people don't eat as much as they believe they do while the opposite is true for overweight people.
Determine how many calories a day he consumes. Increase that by 200 calories a day for a week. See how his weight reacts to that. If he isn't gaining weight, increase it by another 200 calories a day for a week. Continue until you find a caloric count that adds about 1 to 2 pounds a week.
He is skinny. He can eat calorie dense foods. That means he can afford to eat dirty. Weight gainers, bulking powders, etc., are not a replacement for food.
They are called supplements for a reason. If at all possible, you want him to get his calories from real food.
As for lifting... that only yields results if he is willing to put in the work. It isn't something that is going to be noticeable after a few days, weeks, or months. It will take a minimum of 6 to 9 months to make any appreciable gains. It takes years to build any real size.
There are no shortcuts.
Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength is an excellent place to start. Avoid gym bros and their BS like the plague.
Stop trying to feed him so much, he'll end up getting fat at 30! :-D
My wife tried to do that to me and consistently was pushing me to eat more when I started losing some muscle mass (was busy working in the office for a few seasons straight), and I ended up getting love handles I had to work off and had to gradually taper down. She also didn't like it cause my six-pack started fading until I started fixing the diet again and working out more.
Try getting him to work out a bit. Pump weights to muscle failure -- something like 8-12 reps before he can't do another rep no matter how hard he tries. Then down some protein shakes after. He should start filling out quite quickly if he keeps at it.
I don't feed him that much haha I just make him meals or else he won't eat that healthy. Even if I fed him a lot he'd just look half pregnant with all that food and be mr. skinny the next day and never keep the mass lol. I'll try getting him to work out more consistently and on some sort of protein. Thanks :)
I was similar when younger -- had super fast metabolism. I was a tad less skinny in terms of build, but could eat 3 large pizzas in one sitting and not gain any weight. I found working out gave me mass a lot more than eating, and especially combined with the protein. It was hard for me to gain fat but a little easier for me to gain muscle.
When I was a teenager at around 14-15 years old, I went from something a bit more like your picture to where guys and girls wanted me to flex and grab my forearms and biceps for a while. That didn't last for long though after the rest of the guys started getting in the football and wrestling team and started bulking up a lot more than I did. I got some home weight equipment, not gym, and just started working to muscle failure. My legs also started bulking up really fast since I was into skateboarding vert ramps (half-pipe).
I never made a formal kind of note of progress, and it was hard to tell since I built most of my mass during my teens when my body was still growing simultaneously.
That said, even doing a full-body workout to muscle failure will tend to, within days, make your body look more pumped and bulky -- not permanently but just a temporary effect, the "pump". Combining it with protein shakes seemed to make it easier to keep that mass though and keep bulking up.
Does your guy engage in physical activities, or was into like lots of running and climbing and leaping and that sort of stuff as a child? I usually don't find someone with such a fast metabolism if they didn't have a very active childhood. In my case I was always climbing and jumping and running all over the place even from a very young age, and I think that's where I got the fast metabolism (though it slowed down when I reach 30s -- now if I do eat tons of pizza, I'm going to get fat).
"I was similar when younger -- had super fast metabolism."
^^ Science has actually shown, conclusively, that there is absolutely no such thing as "a fast metabolism". (It's also common sense -- if 2 engines are built the same way, one of them will not magically burn more gasoline than the other one.)
If you are a hard-gainer, then that boils down to one or both of 2 things: • You have less of an appetite than other people, or • You have more "resting thermogenesis" than other people -- like, you fidget, twitch, bounce legs, etc. more. (This can actually add up to a few hundred calories over the course of a day.)
There is such a thing as a SLOW metabolism -- but that's an extremely rare genetic mutation (in a gene called KSR2), and it's an extreme thing when it does happen (we're talking weighing like 200lbs while still single digit ages). But, "fast metabolism" is not a thing that exists.
@redeyemindtricks I'm defnitely excluded from the first bullet point, since I ate to a point of shocking people. Had quite a massive appetite.
The second point is interesting. I was a major twitcher. People would point out to me that my biceps were always twitching all the time, for example, and I didn't even notice, and I had a hard time breaking that habit of shaking my legs.
Aside from that I had a love for skateboarding vert all my life -- X-Games style since the age of 7. It was pretty demanding exercise and did it every day after school for a few hours up until university. Other than that I wasn't a gym freak or anything, but often got that, "Where does all the food go?" response a lot.
@redeyemindtricks That's very interesting about this metabolism myth. I subscribed to it my whole life, need to unlearn a lot of info. Another thing about me particularly is that I was a sprinter time. I didn't have long-term endurance (far from a marathon runner), but I could do burst kind of motions and quite a distance on long jump and high jump (could grab basketball rim even at my height even though guys a head could not). Maybe all of that kind of factored into how I was burning calories.
Every day for a few hours, and you wonder where the food went? Lmao...
Also, lots of kids can throw down a shit-ton of pizza and still not be eating too many calories overall, as long as they're not DRINKING calories. The kids I know who got really fat -- almost without exception -- drank, in retrospect, probably *four figures* of calories per day. Like, 2-3 cans of sugared soda and 2-3 glasses of fruit juice a day = about 1000 calories/day of pure sugar... and some kids drank a lot more calories than that.
But, yeah. "Fast metabolism" is lies. 100.0000% lies and 0.0000% truth. It's one of the few ideas out there about human nutrition that has literally NO truth to it AT ALL.
@redeyemindtricks I'll really have to undo some brainwashing. That's an interesting point about drinking calories. I don't think I drank too many sodas growing up -- also had a weird lack of sweet tooth (didn't like cake and cookies and things like that or even candy that much). I was so weird that when I was a kid, I tried putting salt on vanilla ice cream thinking it'd make it taste better. That was a pretty horrible idea, but I was a weird one when it came to sweets.
"Maybe all of that kind of factored into how I was burning calories." ^^ Yep.
__
Dude, you can also dispel the "fast metabolism" myth by just THINKING ABOUT IT, if you have (a) basic intelligence and (b) a basic understanding of how all engines -- including animal bodies -- work.
When fuel goes into an engine, it is burned, and the products of the reactions either (i) produce work, or (ii) are lost as friction or heat. Obviously, all human bodies are running the same reactions (we don't metabolize food differently). So, **IF** someone theoretically had a "faster metabolism", there would be exactly 2 possibilities: (i) More physical work, (ii) More heat loss. Outcome (i) is the twitching/"resting thermogenesis". Outcome (ii) is obviously impossible, because you'd die of hyperthermia. Like... duh. This ain't rocket science.
The *slow* metabolism from the KSR2 mutation comes from extreme insulin resistance -- like, the body can't shuttle nutrients anywhere except into fat cells, and
@redeyemindtricks That's definitely a lot simpler. With all the kind of nutritional and health-related info out there, it almost seems like rocket science to me sometimes. I've kind of halfway tuned it out before and just put emphasis on trying to stay in intense motion from time to time and eating well (something I do have to pay more attention to nowadays or it does start to catch up with me quickly).
Honestly, "some people have faster metabolisms than others" is just another one of the 2901865298463456872 excuses people use for why they shouldn't bother even trying to get into better shape.
Why don't you both join a gym? I sense some insecurities you may have with your own figure.
My boyfriend is very thin. He's a swimmer so what he has is muscle, but he looks very thin. He's also got about 100 lbs on me due to his height. Guys burn calories differently than girls. I can almost guarantee you your boyfriend is healthy and fine.
You can't really change someone's body type. He's a man with a fast metabolism. That's not going to change any time soon.
I'm okayish with my body, but I workout twice a day so it isn't an issue. He's getting close to 120lbs so it's a little scary. He isn't the healthiest of eaters so I honestly doubt he is relatively healthy.
You're not supposed to be with someone you wanna try and change. Why don't you come to terms with it? There's nothing wrong with his body, some people are just like that. Getting him to put on weight is not gonna help him at all. Kill the policeman in your head, and all that. Not being attracted 2 someone is a state of mind
Because both of us are concerned about his health.. him, myself, and his doctor think he needs to put on weight. I don't care what he looks like I just want him healthy.
His labs suggest that his diet is relatively bad (I'm trying to help that) and has a family history of high BP and high cholesterol. His BMI is 17 though so it's rather scary
His doctor said eating more healthy fats and such but he's used to a hard core southern diet so getting him to eat nuts and fish and avocados isn't easy lol
Sorry I was judgmental before, I understand you are worried about his health. If he's really getting 3k calories his diet sounds fine, honestly. Losing a lot of weight can be indicative of a big problem, but some people really are just that light
Don't worry about it! I understand :) Yeah I am worried about an underlying issue but no symptoms have presented. If they do though his ass is going to the doctors so questions asked haha ^^
He barely works out. And he is too slim. He is drastically underweight. Keep in mind I said that -10lbs of fat and he his little muscle mass. Now I may be exagerating but I am genuinely concerned for his health. And no it isn't my own insecurity. He means the world to me and I usually cook for him now, and seeing that knowing that I feed him a good part of the time makes me feel like a shit care giver and that I'm not doing my job right.
Sometimes that just happens, my first boyfriend was extremely skinny but always ate more than me it was just his body type, he basically burned more calories than he consumed just sitting there lol. I'd say protein powders that make you gain weight theyre easily searchable.
He sounds like he's just one of those skinny people that can eat anything because they have high metabolisms. As long as he is eating and eating healthy things then don't worry, he'll be fine. If really worried, have him see a doctor. I'm sure he's fine though.
Try weight gaining powder and natural ways of gaining weight. Consider going to a doctor and getting him checked out, it might be something more serious but even if it's not the doctor can give him some help with gaining weight (a diet or just foods to eat that will help)
you might try any mass gainer supplement by muscletech : mass tech, but i think some people body's tendency is limited, no matter how much they eat they can't gain any mass or weight
@Laura_Marx Calories are different for everyone. For example me, an inactive woman needs about 2k while as a very active person I need 1700 or else I will gain weight
2k for women and 2.5k for men are sort of a rough requirement that comes from somewhere - the same source as the recommended intake stuff on labels, I believe - I know it won't work for everyone but its a fine minimum... Sometimes being healthy means gaining weight!
@Laura_Marx I agree on it being relatively rough. Unfortunately gaining weight wouldn't be healthy for me at this point since my BMI classifies me as overweight. But I'm content with my lifestyle and my doctors say I'm healthy! :)
the BMI is kind of a load of bull, honestly. I know they don't use it *at all* in the UK, there are a lot of problems with it. It's kinda overly-perscriptive. I don't doubt you're healthy tho ^___^
@Laura_Marx True, but it's a good reference point for most people (although I'm like a bull I have a lot of muscle haha). I wish they did that here in the US and actually looked at the patient and evaluated their health versus Height? Weight? Age? and answer lol
Ayyy this is why I tell little phaggots on this site to lift but sexually repressed feminist on this site have them brainwashed into thinking every female on this world likes skinny guys who talk about their feelings. Let this be a lesson boyos.
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Anonymous
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Maybe he should hit the gym and try to build muscle. He shouldn't just eat pizza etc. though since it's harmful to him even if he does not gain weight from it, and he risk his metabolism not staying this high forever and then he will get a shitload of weight.
He needs to see a doctor.. I hope everything will be fine but you should be sure about it.. there are many disorders which cause people to lose weight and make them unhealthy skinny.. he really really should see a doctor..
Get some protein shakes like Boost, Ensure etc. and make him work out a bit. Also try getting him to eat more. He has a fast metabolism and I can tell you, having a fast metabolism myself, it is annoying af.
I can't lose weight (medical reason I won't get into it) but he hates the gym. I would say do it at home with me since I do it daily but there's no room :(
Make a suggestion to him that he should bulk up a little if he does he'll have protein shakes and eat a lot more meat which will probably put some weight on him but only let him do this if he will work out and do weights otherwise he will just get fat.
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