How many calories do I need to gain weight?

To gain weight, you need to eat more calories than you consume. Women burn, on average, 2000kcal per day and men 2500kcal. A typical weight gain diet adds about 500kcal on top of that. If you are very active, you need to consume even more. For people who want to build muscle and therefore gain weight, a 500kcal surplus is not always necessary. Aim for around 250kcal more than you burn for lean gains.

Find out how much you need to eat to gain weight

What are the best foods to gain weight?

There are no particular foods that will make you gain weight. Even candy or dessert doesn’t make you gain weight alone. It’s all about your total calorie intake by the end of the day.

If you struggle to gain weight, you’ll want to eat foods that stimulate appetite. Typically, a mix of carbs and fat will achieve that. Another way to make sure you eat enough calories is to consume liquid calories. That means smoothies, juices, milk, protein shakes, or other drinks.

Although soda contains a lot of calories, we recommend you to avoid soda due to it’s high sugar content. We want our users to achieve healthy weight gain with nutritious foods.

How to choose a diet to gain weight

When choosing a weight gain diet, it’s important to consider your goal. If muscle building is what you’re aiming for, a protein rich diet has plenty of benefits for you. Lifesum’s diets adapt to your goal, so if you choose “gain weight”, the recommended intake of total calories, fat, protein and carbs will increase. For weight gain, we typically recommend our High Protein, Scandinavian, or Mediterranean diets. However, as weight gain means you’ll need to eat a little bit more than usual, simply choose the one diet that seems most tempting to you (to make it easier to eat) and change your goal settings to “weight gain”. See our full overview of diet plans here.

Diet Plan Test

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Sample recipe to gain weight

Let’s just remind you that there are no particular foods that will make you gain weight. It’s all about the total amount of carbs, fat and protein you consume. Here is a delicious and healthy recipe that can help you gain weight thanks to its combination of fat, carbs and protein.

Do you want to gain weight? Activate one of our in-app diets and choose “weight gain”!