How to gain muscle mass in a healthy and safe way

Not everyone is trying to lose weight. Everybody and every person is different. While many of you are trying to lose kilos, we know that others are trying to gain weight, building muscle in a healthy way. That’s why we are here to help you!

Trying to gain weight can be quite a challenge, especially if you are trying to do it correctly and in a healthy way, without increasing your body fat percentage. In this way, you will continue to have a toned body, but with more muscle mass. To achieve this, we have spoken with nutrition specialist Carrie McMahon, who has explained the concept of “reverse diet” to us.

This type of diet is a way to gain weight slowly but surely, concentrating only on gaining muscle, as well as repairing metabolic damage due to other strict diets that you have practiced on previous occasions. “This repair is essential to achieve your goals. Strict diets do enormous damage to our metabolism, since on many occasions, the body is subjected to fasting. As a consequence, the metabolism will go much slower.

Even if you haven’t been on a strict diet, the reverse diet is also useful for those people who have always been skinny and would like to gain a few extra kilos of pure muscle. The diet consists of increasing food intake, slowly but steadily, in such a way that the metabolism can get used to this increase without going into “shock”, which is what would happen when you drastically and suddenly increase the food you introduce into your diet. the body.

What is the reverse diet?

The first step is to start counting macronutrients. Macros or macronutrients are those nutrients that supply most of the body’s metabolic energy, therefore we speak of: fats, proteins and carbohydrates. The way you distribute the macronutrients in your diet (such as heavy protein, light carbohydrates, and fat) have an effect on your metabolism that determines whether you lose or gain weight.

When you’re starting out on the reverse diet, the professionals’ recommendation is to keep your macronutrient intake ratios the same as you did before. Little by little, gradual adjustments in intake will be made. If you’ve never counted your macros, try to remember the foods you’ve eaten the past week, and write down the information to get a rough idea of ​​what you’re eating. “The key is to start where you were until now.” As McMahon explains, if you happened to be on a detox or low-calorie diet for a week, it doesn’t count. Think about what you have done in the last 6 months. That is where you have to start.

A healthy diet has on average approximately between 30% and 35% protein, 25% fat and 45% carbohydrates. Once you start adding more foods to gain weight, you should do it in small amounts every week, in such a way that you do not change the diet daily, but for weeks. Each week you add more food, so you will eat between 50-100 calories a day. Progress is slow.

We leave you here a list of healthy foods rich in macronutrients perfect for the development of muscle mass:

The reverse diet also mentions that to gain muscle in a healthy way, it is not enough just to make these changes in the diet, but it must be complemented with strength exercises.  “Combined with weight-bearing exercise, eating more calories will allow your body to gain more weight and focus on building muscle.” It is much healthier and less dangerous than going on a diet to gain weight by suddenly overeating yourself.

As we explain, gaining weight will not make you look fatter, especially with this method, because the body, by focusing on gaining muscle, will make you look more toned. Don’t worry about what the scale says, focus on how you feel inside.