Alright, I’m quite slim and occasionally too slim, but every now and then I put a heavy focus on gaining weight. This has been an on-and-off goal for a long time. However, I don’t enjoy it, and I’ve been considering why I have it as a goal and whether or not I should actually keep it.
I think the main thing is that the correlation between weight and strength led me to believe that, for me to have sufficient strength and confidence, I would need to be a certain size. Obviously, it’s a fact that having more muscle mass makes you stronger, but what I have learnt is that just hitting a weight doesn’t bring about much satisfaction…
I’ve often wanted to hit some arbitrary weight goal that’s always a little out of reach of wherever I am, with the logic being that I’ll hit some new level of strength or perceived confidence. But each time I closed in on whatever number I set, two things happened: firstly, I realised I felt near exactly the same (not better, just heavier); and secondly, I then moved the number further away, and so the cycle continued.
I am quite certain that people have the same feeling if they’re trying to lose weight, but that’s not my story. Though, if it is yours, feel free to invert what I’m saying.
So why am I still chasing it?
Well, a little backstory is in order. I’ve never had that much of an appetite because I never ate that much (a fun biological loop), and for a long time my hobbies primarily consisted of seeing how many substances I could take in one night without injury (a lot) and video games. Neither demanded much physical strength or caused much calorie exertion, skanking included.
A lot of people tend to gain weight in their late teens, the so-called “filling out”, but this didn’t really happen much on my side because my appetite didn’t increase and I continued doing limited exercise. Silly boy.
Breaking free from that a few years later, at around 22, I started going to the gym and noticed it felt good being stronger. Who knew? I figured that, to do that effectively, I ought to gain some weight. However, I did mostly fail to increase my calorie intake, despite monitoring it diligently after a long talk with a longevity doctor that same year.
A little to unpack there, but you probably shouldn’t see a longevity doctor when you are in your very early 20s because, well, you’re young already, and because a lot of the advice, while likely true, might not be helpful for your use case.
If your goal is “gain weight”, but then you’re given some pretty hardcore parameters on what you can and can’t eat and told to heavily reduce your blood sugar levels and triglycerides due to blood test results, you get stuck between a rock and a skinny place. I found it was easy to cut the blood sugar levels by switching my diet up and basically eliminating actual sugar-ific foods, but that, in doing so, my calorie intake dropped further. Not good.
Combine a little food knowledge with a lot of hypochondria, and you’re in for a difficult time.
Nevertheless, I wanted to gain weight to feel stronger but felt that eating for the gain was compromising my healthy diet. When I re-tested blood sugar levels and triglycerides and saw a marked improvement, I thought I was on the right track, and yet I was still practically underweight. Aggravating.
I did stick with the gym at least, and I noticed my strength was actually improving regardless.
A series of weight gain attempts where I’d go hard at shakes and peanut butter and milk and eggs and oils and blah blah blah ensued, but then failed when, to sate the hypochondria, I’d get some blood test that would show high cholesterol or high creatinine levels, and then it’d be back to minimal cals with the knowledge that they were at least safer or healthier.
More recently, a few years back, I lived right next to a KFC, and the Thailand-only Zabb Wings there formed the basis of one of these attempts. This one I knew was obviously damning for my health, but sure as shit it did bring my weight up to the heaviest I’ve been, and I had reached a scale goal. But it didn’t come with some big positive swell of confidence or additional strength that I thought it would. In fact, I didn’t feel anything.
At that point, I started to clock that arbitrary weight gain, as opposed to strength gain, was not helpful at all and I was chasing the wrong metric.
It’s very easy to chase a number because it feels measurable, even when achieving it doesn’t change how you feel.
Plus, with this particular bulk attempt, the side effects were dire. I was red-faced, out of breath more often than usual, and cholesterol levels got to the point where a doctor from the blood test place sent me an email with “you must take statins” in red text, bold, and underlined.
I am often apt to listen to words a doctor tells me and ignore them specifically.
Saying no to the statins felt like a good move, provided I also dropped the KFC and switched to a hardcore high-fibre, nearly exclusively salad-based diet. Big up Jones Salad for literally fixing me. I ate near nothing but salad like a fucking rabbit for three months or so and lost a lot of weight, which curiously didn’t knock my confidence or really reduce my strength from usual levels.
I would say it changed nothing, except I also got re-tested and, hey ho, the cholesterol levels dropped. This time, the email only said “if you want to, you could take statins”, and no more red writing. I always knew I was a medical expert.
Side note: I twice nearly gave myself sepsis trying to get a stuck nail out of my toe.
Anyway, these little misadventures in weight gain and loss were revealing. I had realised that I wasn’t really chasing a weight. Instead, I was chasing what I thought weight would give me. Physical strength. More confidence. Or a full-on personality shift to some bigger version of me.
But the number on the scale never delivered any of that.
I never particularly felt better when I hit a scale goal or worse when I lost it. Instead, I only really felt good when I got stronger, and that just came from consistent effort in the gym rather than force-feeding.
The strength and fitness, not the weight, is what brought the positive feelings and additional confidence.
With that in mind, my focus this time has been to gain strength through muscle gain, but without setting an unrealistic weight target that requires me to chug ice cream or devour KFC every day to hit the cals, and not to focus on a scale at all.
My new hobby of boxing has been quite a useful demonstration of this fact: being heavier isn’t necessarily better. I’m now acutely aware that even at lighter weights, you can be absolutely strong as fuck, as my 58kg and jacked coach would attest, and I know I’m gaining way more than just muscle from improving at fighting than I would gain from chasing a weight.
So perhaps it’s time to kill that goal (he says, while eyeing up overpriced mass gainer on the kitchen counter), stop chasing numbers, focus on the training, and stop eating bloody zabbs.
Quotes I’m vibing with rn:
It is you who must accept yourself, the rest of the world already knows – Jim Carrey
Don’t tangle your self worth in your goals. The work gets easier when it’s not about proving who you are – Attributed to a video I can no longer find on TikTok
In laughter, truth – James Joyce (kind of)
Favourite song for now:
Sumb Luck 