How To Gain Weight (Healthily!)
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What Do You Have To Gain?
We have previously promised a three-part series about changing one’s weight:
- Losing weight (specifically, losing fat)
- Gaining weight (specifically, gaining muscle)
- Gaining weight (specifically, gaining fat)
There will be, however, no need for a “losing muscle” article, because (even though sometimes a person might have some reason to want to do this), it’s really just a case of “those things we said for gaining muscle? Don’t do those and the muscle will atrophy naturally”.
Here’s our first article: How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
While some people will want to lose fat, please do be aware that the association between weight loss and good health is not nearly so strong as the weight loss industry would have you believe:
And, while BMI is not a useful measure of health in general, it’s worth noting that over the age of 65, a BMI of 27 (which is in the high end of “overweight”, without being obese) is associated with the lowest all-cause mortality:
BMI and all-cause mortality in older adults: a meta-analysis
Here was our second article: How To Build Muscle (Healthily!)
And now, it’s time for the last part, which yes, is also something that some people want/need to do (healthily!), and want/need help with that.
How to gain fat, healthily
Fat gets a bad press, but when it comes to health, we would die without it.
Even in the case of having excess fat, the fat itself is not generally the problem, so much as comorbid metabolic issues that are often caused by the same things as the excess fat.
So, how to gain fat healthily?
- Obvious but potentially dangerously misleading answer: “in moderation”
- More useful answer: “carefully”
Because, you can “in moderation” put on less than one pound per week for a few years and be in very bad health by the end of it. So how does this “carefully” work any differently to “in moderation”?
The key is in how we store the fat
Not merely where we store it (though that’ll follow from the “how”), but specifically: how we store it.
- When we consume energy from food in excess of our immediate survival needs, our body stores what it can. This is good!
- When our body is receiving energy from food faster than it can physically process it to store it healthily, it will start shoving it wherever it can instead. This is bad!
This is the physiological equivalent of the difference between tidying a room carefully, and cramming everything into one cupboard in 30 seconds just to get it out of sight.
So, you do need to consume calories yes, but you need to consume them in a way your body can take its time about storing them.
We’ve written before about the science of this, so we’ll share some links to that in a moment, but first, here are the practical tips:
- Do not drink your calories. Drinking calories tends to be the equivalent of injecting sugars directly into your veins, in terms of how quickly it gets received.
- See also: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver ← this is highly relevant, because the same process that results in unhealthy weight gain, results in liver disease, by the same mechanism (the liver gets overwhelmed).
- Eat your greens. No, they won’t provide many calories, but they are critical to your body not being overwhelmed by the arrival of sugars.
- See also: 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars ← the other 9 things are also helpful for not putting on fat unhealthily, so using these alongside a calorie-dense diet can result in healthy fat gain as needed
- Get more of your calories from fats than carbs. Fats will not overwhelm your body’s glycemic response in the same way that carbs will.
- Again this is about getting calories while not getting metabolic disease. See also: How To Prevent And Reverse Type Two Diabetes as the advice is the same for that, for the same reason!
- Consider going low-carb, but even if you choose not to, go for carbs with a low glycemic index instead of a high glycemic index.
- For reference, see: Glycemic Index Chart: Glycemic index and glycemic load ratings for 500+ foods
- Need healthy fats in a snack? Enjoy nuts (unless you have an allergy); they will be your best friend in this regard. As an example, a mere 1oz portion of cashew nuts has 157 calories.
- See also: Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
- Need health fats for cooking? Enjoy olive oil, as it has one of the healthiest lipids profiles available, and is a great way to increase the calorific content of many meals.
Lastly…
Be patient, enjoy your food, and stick as best you can to the above considerations. All strength to you.
Take care!
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5 ways to naturally boost the “Ozempic Effect”
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Dr. Jason Fung is perhaps most well-known for his work in functional medicine for reversing diabetes, and he’s once again giving us sound advice about metabolic hormone-hacking with dietary tweaks:
All about incretin
As you may gather from the thumbnail, this video is about incretin, a hormone group (the most well-known of which is GLP-1, as in GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, etc) that slows down stomach emptying, which means a gentler blood sugar curve and feeling fuller for longer. It also acts on the hypothalmus, controlling appetite via the brain too (signalling fullness and reducing hunger).
Dr. Fung recommends 5 ways to increase incretin levels:
- Enjoy dietary fat: this increases incretin levels more than carbs
- Enjoy protein: again, prompts higher incretin levels of promotes satiety
- Enjoy fiber: this is more about slowing digestion, but when it’s fermented in the gut into short-chain fatty acids, those too increase incretin secretion
- Enjoy bitter foods: these don’t actually affect incretin levels, but they can bind to incretin receptors, making the body “believe” that you got more incretin (think of it like a skeleton key that fits the lock that was designed to be opened by a different key)
- Enjoy turmeric: for its curcumin content, which increases GLP-1 levels specifically
For more information on each of these, here’s Dr. Fung himself:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Semaglutide for Weight Loss?
- Ozempic vs Five Natural Supplements
- How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes ← this was our “Expert Insights” feature on Dr. Fung’s work
Take care!
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Turmeric (Curcumin) Dos and Don’ts With Dr. Kim
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Turmeric is a fabulous spice, most well-known for its anti-inflammatory powers; its antioxidant effects benefit all of the body, including the brain. While it fights seemingly everything from arthritis to atherosclerosis to Alzheimer’s and more, it also boosts brain-derived neurotrophic factor, looks after your cardiovascular health, holds back diabetes, reduces the risk of cancer, fights depression, slows aging, and basically does everything short of making you sing well too.
Dr. Leonid Kim goes over the scientific evidence for these, and also talks about some of the practicalities of taking turmeric, and safety considerations.
For the most part, turmeric is very safe even at high doses (up to 8g at least); indeed, at smaller doses (e.g. 500mg) it largely does the same job as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen, with fewer problems.
It also does the job of several antidiabetic medications, by increasing uptake of glucose (thus reducing blood sugar levels) while simultaneously decreasing the glucose secretion from the liver. It does this by regulating the AMPK signalling pathway, just like metformin—while again, being safer.
Dr. Kim also looks at the (good!) evidence for turmeric in managing PCOS and undoing NAFLD; so far, so good.
Dosage: he bids us pay attention whether we’re taking it as turmeric itself or as curcumin standardized extract. The latter is the active compound, and in principle more powerful, but in practice it can get metabolized too quickly and easily—before it can have its desired effect. So, turmeric itself is a very good choice.
Absorption: since we do want it to be absorbed well, though, he does recommend taking it with piperine (as in black pepper).
You may be thinking: isn’t this going to cause the same problem you were just talking about, and cause it to be metabolized too quickly? And the answer is: no! How piperine works is almost the opposite; it protects the curcumin in the turmeric from our digestive enzymes, and thus allows them to get absorbed without being broken down too quickly—thus increasing the bioavailability by slowing the process down.
Lipophilia: no, that’s not a disease (or a fetish), rather it means that curcumin is soluble in fats, so we should take it near in time to a meal that contains at least a tablespoon of oil in total (so if you’re cooking a curry with your turmeric, this need is covered already, for example).
Supplement provenance: he recommends picking a supplement that’s been tested by a reputable 3rd party, as otherwise turmeric can be quite prone to impurities (which can include lead and arsenic, so, not great).
Contraindications: for some people, curcumin can cause gastrointestinal issues (less likely if taking with meals), and also, it can interact with blood-thinners. While taking aspirin or curcumin alone might help avoid circulatory problems, taking both could increase the bleeding risk for some people, for example. Similarly, if taking curcumin and metformin while diabetic, one must watch out for the combination being too effective at lowering blood sugar levels, and thus causing hypoglycemia instead. Similar deal with blood pressure medications.
There’s more in the video though (yes really; we know we wrote a lot but it’s information-dense), so do check it out:
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Want to know more?
You can also check out our related articles:
Why Curcumin (Turmeric) Is Worth Its Weight In Gold
Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)Share This Post
Older, Faster, Stronger – by Margaret Webb
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The author, now in her 60s, made it her mission in her 50s to become the best runner she could. Before that, she’d been a keen runner previously, but let things slip rather in her 40s. But the book’s not about her 40s, it’s about her 50s and onwards, and other female runners in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s.
There’s a lot of this book that’s about people’s individual stories, and those should certainly be enough to prompt almost any reader that “if they can do it, I can”.
A lot, meanwhile, is about health and exercise science, training methods, and what has worked for various later-life athletes, including the author. So, it’s also partway instruction manual, with plenty of reference to science and medical considerations too.
Bottom line: sometimes, life throws us challenges. Sometimes, the best response is “Yeah? Bet” and surprise everyone.
Click here to check out Older, Faster, Stronger, and become all those cool things!
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When And Why Do We Pick Up Our Phones?
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The School of Life’s Alain de Botton makes the argument that—if we pay attention, if we keep track—there’s an understory to why we pick up our phones:
It’s not about information
Yes, our phones (or rather, the apps therein) are designed to addict us, to draw us back, to keep us scrolling and never let us go. We indeed seek out information like our ancestors once sought out berries; searching, encouraged by a small discovery, looking for more. The neurochemistry is similar.
But when we look at the “when” of picking up our phones, de Botton says, it tells a different story:
We pick them up not to find out what’s going on with the world, but rather specifically to not find out what’s going with ourselves. We pick them up to white out some anxiety we don’t want to examine, a line of thought we don’t want to go down, memories we don’t want to consider, futures we do not want to have to worry about.
And of course, phones do have a great educational potential, are an immensely powerful tool for accessing knowledge of many kinds—if only we can remain truly conscious while using them, and not take them as the new “opiate of the masses”.
De Botton bids us, when next we pick up our phone. ask a brave question:
“If I weren’t allowed to consult my phone right now, what might I need to think about?”
As for where from there? There’s more in the video:
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Further reading
Making Social Media Work For Your Mental Health
Take care!
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Lacking Motivation? Science Has The Answer
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The Science Of Motivation (And How To Use It To Your Advantage)
When we do something rewarding, our brain gets a little (or big!) spike of dopamine. Dopamine is popularly associated with pleasure—which is fair— but there’s more to it than this.
Dopamine is also responsible for motivation itself, as a prime mover before we do the thing that we find rewarding. If we eat a banana, and enjoy it, perhaps because our body needed the nutrients from it, our brain gets a hit of dopamine.
(and not because bananas contain dopamine; that dopamine is useful for the body, but can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the brain)
So where does the dopamine in our brain come from? That dopamine is made in the brain itself.
Key Important Fact: the brain produces dopamine when it expects an activity to be rewarding.
If you take nothing else away from today’s newsletter, let it be this!
It makes no difference if the activity is then not rewarding. And, it will keep on motivating you to do something it anticipated being rewarding, no matter how many times the activity disappoints, because it’ll remember the very dopamine that it created, as having been the reward.
To put this into an example:
- How often have you spent time aimlessly scrolling social media, flitting between the same three apps, or sifting through TV channels when “there’s nothing good on to watch”?
- And how often did you think afterwards “that was a good and rewarding use of my time; I’m glad I did that”?
In reality, whatever you felt like you were in search of, you were really in search of dopamine. And you didn’t find it, but your brain did make some, just enough to keep you going.
Don’t try to “dopamine detox”, though.
While taking a break from social media / doomscrolling the news / mindless TV-watching can be a great and healthful idea, you can’t actually “detox” from a substance your body makes inside itself.
Which is fortunate, because if you could, you’d die, horribly and miserably.
If you could “detox” completely from dopamine, you’d lose all motivation, and also other things that dopamine is responsible for, including motor control, language faculties, and critical task analysis (i.e. planning).
This doesn’t just mean that you’d not be able to plan a wedding; it also means:
- you wouldn’t be able to plan how to get a drink of water
- you wouldn’t have any motivation to get water even if you were literally dying of thirst
- you wouldn’t have the motor control to be able to physically drink it anyway
Read: Dopamine and Reward: The Anhedonia Hypothesis 30 years on
(this article is deep and covers a lot of ground, but is a fascinating read if you have time)
Note: if you’re wondering why that article mentions schizophrenia so much, it’s because schizophrenia is in large part a disease of having too much dopamine.
Consequently, antipsychotic drugs (and similar) used in the treatment of schizophrenia are generally dopamine antagonists, and scientists have been working on how to treat schizophrenia without also crippling the patient’s ability to function.
Do be clever about how you get your dopamine fix
Since we are hardwired to crave dopamine, and the only way to outright quash that craving is by inducing anhedonic depression, we have to leverage what we can’t change.
The trick is: question how much your motivation aligns with your goals (or doesn’t).
So if you feel like checking Facebook for the eleventieth time today, ask yourself: “am I really looking for new exciting events that surely happened in the past 60 seconds since I last checked, or am I just looking for dopamine?”
You might then realize: “Hmm, I’m actually just looking for dopamine, and I’m not going to find it there”
Then, pick something else to do that will actually be more rewarding. It helps if you make a sort of dopa-menu in advance, of things to pick from. You can keep this as a list on your phone, or printed and pinned up near your computer.
Examples might be: Working on that passion project of yours, or engaging in your preferred hobby. Or spending quality time with a loved one. Or doing housework (surprisingly not something we’re commonly motivated-by-default to do, but actually is rewarding when done). Or exercising (same deal). Or learning that language on Duolingo (all those bells and whistles the app has are very much intentional dopamine-triggers to make it addictive, but it’s not a terrible outcome to be addicted to learning!).
Basically… Let your brain’s tendency to get led astray work in your favor, by putting things in front of it that will lead you in good directions.
Things for your health and/or education are almost always great things to allow yourself the “ooh, shiny” reaction and pick them up, try something new, etc.
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Carrot vs Kale – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing carrot to kale, we picked the kale.
Why?
These are both known as carotene-containing heavyweights, but kale emerges victorious:
In terms of macros, carrot has more carbs while kale has more protein and fiber. An easy win there for kale.
When it comes to vitamins, both are great! But, carrots contain more of vitamins A, B5, and choline, whereas kale contains more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, C, E, and K. And while carrot’s strongest point is vitamin A, a cup of carrots contains around 10x the recommended daily dose of vitamin A, whereas a cup of kale contains “only” 6x the recommended daily dose of vitamin A. So, did we really need the extra in carrots? Probably not. In any case, kale already won on overall vitamin coverage, by a long way.
In the category of minerals, kale again sweeps. On the one hand, carrots contain more sodium. On the other hand, kale contains a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Not a tricky choice!
But don’t be fooled: carrots really are a nutritional powerhouse and a great food. Kale is just better—nutritionally speaking, in any case. If you’re making a carrot cake, please don’t try substituting kale; it will not work 😉
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
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