How to gain good weight?

Omnipod said:

I have been a type 1 for 14 years but gradually over the years I have been slowly losing weight and as I get older, I am finding it harder to maintain and put good weight back on.
I am not talking muscle or that type of weight. By good weight, I mean fleshy weight in areas like thighs, calves, shoulders, arms, face etc.
They say more insulin helps weight gain.... but if I take more, I hypo. If I take less I go hyper and loose even more weight.
I do go to the gym and eat more protein etc but I dont find myself gaining.

If I do put on weight.... its on my stomach which I do not want.

Has any others experienced this and managed to find a way to put on good weight?

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I'm a skinny old bird, and I wouldn't mind gaining 3 or 4 kilos, if I could. For me, things seem pretty rock solid. As a T2, considered to have resolved my condition, I still eat a reduced carb diet, which I enjoy. I reckon I could probably gain weight if I kept up the low carbing, with the fat I need to maintain my weight, but also increased the carbs, but I'm somewhat reluctant to do that.

I'm not T1, so have no direct experience of that regime and all the challenges it entails, but theoretically, you could increase your cabs and matching insulin and see what happens. That's obviously not a recommendation, just trying to apply some very basic logic.

On the subject of where gained weight goes on the physique, I can give you some input on that. Many moons ago (thankfully), I was seriously anorexic and did go through a period of having to gain weight, in order to regain my health. I have really excellent support through all of that, and access to all sorts of experts who indulged my need to understand everything going on( ). Like you, I didn't fancy gaining a tummy when I had spindly limbs and very overly boney hips, shoulders and jab bones, but my experience, research and consultations informed me that that is an interim phase I had to go through. Yes, on gaining weight, it feels like it's all going where we don't want it, but (and it's an extremely important but), if I exercised sensibly, the weight started shifting a bit and smoothed out the sharp edges, over time. I'm talking a couple of months to really see any softening of the edges and the tummy disappearing.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not suggesting you have any form of eating disorder, just relating my life experience.

So, maybe you have to stick with it a bit? If I recall, you like to work out? If that is the case, I reckon you'd do fine, but I do agree it's extremely frustrating. When we (deliberately) lose weight, it's never where we'd like it to go, but when we gain, it's the same rough deal!

Good luck with it all. It's indeed a bit of a balancing act.

If I want to put on weight, I increase my carbs and adjust my insulin accordingly. Yes, you're right about it being hard to get the weight in the right place. I can't say I've found a magic answer to that, but what I do is exercise to try to shape my body as the weight is going on. I also keep active as I find that stops the weight just being fat weight.

I'm wondering whether @TorqPenderloin may have advuce, so I'm tagging him

Edit- thank you @azure for thinking of me. I was already typing when you tagged me

I'm confused. You said you're not talking about muscle, but "good weight" in the areas you mentioned. Can you explain that a little better? That's EXACTLY what muscle is in my opinion.

My next questions are:
When you go to the gym, what does a typical routine look like for you?
How many calories are you eating each day and how much of it is protein?

To answer your question, yes. I do find ways to put on good weight. For me, it's all about maximum strength resistance training. To move big weights around you need force, and physics tells us that force=mass x acceleration.

Basically, if you get stronger....you WILL get bigger. I've never met a skinny person who could squat 500+ pounds.

Don't make the mistake of going to the gym and doing circuit training workouts. That's nothing more than cardio. Focus on specific muscle groups each day (back, shoulders, legs, arms, chest, abs, etc) and target 3-5 sets of very low repetitions 3-6 reps.

Diet is arguably more important especially for someone with type 1. The only way you'll gain muscle is to consume more calories than you burn. Ultimately, you are correct: insulin does help with weight gain, but it's important to understand how and when you want insulin to help.

What works for me is changing my diet up in a way that requires me to increase my basal insulin requirements with as little change to my bolus as possible. The basic concept is to space out your insulin needs as much as possible rather than limited to three meals per day.

That's where the glycemic index, glycemic load, excess protein consumption, and fat consumption come into play. Eating low GI foods means your body converts them into glucose much slower. Excess protein can also be converted into glucose, but I find it's a pretty slow process. Fat consumption also slows down the digestion of carbohydrates.

The alternative would be to eat candy or something that is quickly converted into glucose. Not only will that make it difficult to manage your insulin, but when we have a bunch of excess energy (carbs) all at once, our bodies tend to store it as fat.

Long story short: eat healthy and eat often. Lift heavy and lift often.

Thank you for the kind words. I have (what most consider) a very advanced background in fitness and this topic has always been extremely interesting to me.

I want to be sure you saw my signature and it's important to understand that our situations are very different. While my artificial insulin requirements are increasing, I still do have some natural insulin production (but not as much anymore it seems).

Don't worry about getting muscled up. I wish it were as easy as waking up one day and gaining 25 pounds of muscle, but the fact of the matter is it's a very slow process to gain lean and healthy mass (muscle).

Counting calories isn't a requirement, but I believe it becomes necessary when you have a body transformation goal (gain or losing weight) and hit a road block. I don't count calories every day, but there are many times I do in order to pinpoint exactly where I can improve my diet.

500 pounds/227kg is definitely a lot of weight. I wasn't suggesting you needed to lift that much. I was just using it as an example to say that increased strength goes hand in hand with increased muscle.

As far as my insulin requirements, again, please don't read too much into this because our situations are very different. Like you, I low carb and there are ways to gain weight without adding (too many) carbs back into your diet.

I try to keep things as consistent as possible and the three main variables I focus on are body weight, insulin, and protein.

If I want to increase my body weight I focus on increasing my insulin needs. Rather than focusing on increasing my carbs (although I do eat about 30-50g more) I eat excess protein which converts into glucose. Your body may be different, but mine processes protein much slower than most carbs and it's a very gradual increase in comparison. That makes it easier to manage my insulin.

If I want to decrease my body weight (fat loss) I simply reduce my carbs and moderate my protein to a point when I reach ketosis. I won't touch on that much since that's not what this thread is about.

When I want to gain lean mass, a typical day includes a lot of almonds and pecans, low-carb Greek yogurt, just about any meat (pork tenderloin is my favorite hence my username, lol), cheese, eggs, avocado, avocado oil, and huge amounts of vegetables (broccoli, spinnach, lettuce, peppers, etc). I would say I eat around 300g protein, 50-75g of carbs, and about 175g of fat for a total of just over 3000 calories (WAY MORE than you probably need). To put it into perspective, I weight about 210lbs/95kgs at the moment.

My insulin needs are ever changing largely because of my recent diagnosis, but when I want to gain weight slowly, I take 10-12 units (Levemir) at night and 8-12 units in the morning. To be honest, I have no idea what my carb ratio is because i eat so few carbs, I am extremely sensitive to insulin, and exercise plays a tremendous role in my diabetes management. Without exercise its probably around 15g:1unit, but with exercise it can be as high as 30:1.

As a follow-up, I want to say that if you do decide to make changes, be very slow and methodical with them. Still having a bit of natural insulin production has been a bit of a "safety net" for me and it's allowed me to make some very big changes in a very short amount of time that probably aren't advisable.

If you do decide to begin doing heavy resistance training I would be very slow working into it. It can have a dramatically different effect on your blood sugar.

For me, jogging and circuit training causes my blood sugar to spike halfway through but then return back to where it started (looks like a mountain top). With heavy weight training, it rises gradually but then drops like a stone about 30 minutes after my workout (looks like a cliff).

I actually can't bolus within 3 hrs before heavy weight training because I'll hypo even with the slightest correction. It's why I workout in the mornings (and also to combat dawn phenomenon).

To answer your other question, I do own protein powder (Optimum Gold Standard Whey), but I rarely use it. In the instances I do, I take half a scoop (12g protein) before and then after my workouts but do not bolus for it. In contrast, if I took a full scoop and didn't workout, yes, I would have to bolus for it.