Struggling to gain weight? You need to consume more calories. Simple fact is, if you are not consuming more than you are burning, you ain’t gonna put on size son. I have found the ultimate solution to every hardgainers problem; sugar laden soft drinks. Fruit juices, ‘full fat’ Coke, none of that ‘diet’ sugar free rubbish.
If I catch any dude in the gym who says ‘I eat loads but never put on weight’ I am gonna hand them a coke. Why?
1) Sugary soft drinks contain a lot of calories. As said before you need to consume more calories than you burn if you want to gain weight. Liquid calories such as those from fruit juices or even better lucozade are very easy to consume and they are macronutrient dense.
2) They have no impact on our appetite. Studies have shown that people who drank full fat variety soft drinks didn’t compensate by eating less later on. That means they ate what they normally would and had these drinks on top of that. For the hard gainer this is mega handy, it means you can effortlessly increase your calorie intake.
3) Sugar sweetened soft drinks can increase our consumption. Yup they can actually make you eat more than you normally would, a double whammy for weight gain. Studies have even shown that if you feed people the same number of calories in sweet form rather than sugary drink form you’ll compensate and eat less. So as a hard gainer you are better off drinking your sugar than eating it.
So there you have it, sugary drinks are not just easy to consume in addition to our diet, they actually make us eat even more. Hence why they are the hardgainers solution, they ultimately will lead to weight gain.
What can we learn from the above?
Sugary drinks if awesome for hardgainers, those actively seeking to put on weight, who have a hard time eating enough, are therefore pretty awful for the rest of us.
1) They are ’empty calories’. They provide zero micronutrition, unless of course you opt for a fruit juice, but you would still be better off eating the whole fruit. Plus by eating the whole fruit you get fibre, which is very important for a healthy digestive system.
2) We don’t get any fullness from them. I suspect due to the lack of fibre and the ease of digestion our bodies don’t compensate for their consumption. This means we could easily end up over consuming total calories for the day and putting on weight.
The Solution
Right now I hope if you are a hardgainer you are sipping on a can of Coke, but anyone else reading this you are hopefully thinking sugary drinks are a no no. However, there are some ways around this fact.
1) If you track your nutrition they can be incorporated. The fact is our bodies might not be good for compensating for the sugary drink, but if you actively track your calorie intake then you will force a compensation. This is how a lot of my online clients drop fat, gain muscle and get in terrific shape, we track our nutrition. This also means we can enjoy everything and everything, just not always the amount we want. This approach to dieting is called flexible dieting or some know it as IIFYM (if it fits your macros).
2) Milk does get compensated for. Any liquid drink that contains milk or milk proteins has shown to be the equivalent to food. So our bodies do compensate for those calories by eating less. So please do not stop drinking milk.
3) Drink diet drinks. In the video below, that I made years ago and probably look and sound like an idiot, I explain how the current scientific studies don’t show any reason why we cannot drink diet sodas in moderation. Personally I drink a can of Pepsi Max once or twice a day. This also gives us a solution to those who currently drink sugary drinks and want to lose weight. Switch to a diet variety. A simple switch of 2 cans of Coke vs. Diet Coke would save you around 300 calories, if you drank 2 a day, over the course of a week that would save you 2100 calories, enough to spur weight loss.
Further Reading:
– If you want to gain Lean Muscle mass effectively or Lose Fat guaranteed then these two articles will get you in the right place Need to know nutrition Part 1 & Need to know nutrition Part 2 Practical Application.
– If you want to know how anything can be health or healthy given the right context then this article is for you The Importance of Context.
Even with small manipulations downwards of her overall intake and incremental additions of cardio, her weight still didn’t budge. Of course weight is not always entirely accurate, but her waist wasn’t moving much and she expressed that her body had not changed in composition. We had no reason to believe her metabolism was low, she didn’t have a history of excess exercise in comparison to total calories. So building her metabolic rate up (like I have had to do for many female clients) didn’t seem like the answer.
So what did I do, well I asked a few of my fellow coaches, told them about the above situation. We had lengthy discussions and came to the conclusion that she may beunderreporting her food intake. But, how do you really assess such a thing? I couldn’t accuse my client of not tracking everything, as she certainly thought she was. So I asked for access to her myfitnesspal, and this is where I found my answer.
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