How about gaining weight?

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Permalink Reply by Rick Dorey on June 11, 2009 at 7:17am

Sounds like you are one of the ones blessed with a high metabolism. In order to gain weight you will most likely have to increase your calorie intake and do some strength/weight training to add the muscle. You mention you can eat all day but don't eat a lot and this is a sure sign of many people that eat several small meals a day but never eat a bunch of calories.

Work on eating high calorie dense foods (I suggest healthy choices rather then junk food) and adding the weight routine to your lifestyle and you will put on muscle weight.

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Permalink Reply by Ellen S on June 28, 2009 at 11:30am

Hi - so glad you asked this question! You just described my childhood and early adulthood to a T.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here, because I have lived a life where putting on weight has been a real issue. You should also know that, due to heavy medication I also became very overweight at one point, so have lived my life from both perspectives...

Balance is important. With all due respect to everyone here, having a high metabolism is not a blessing, it is a curse if it is not in balance with the rest of the body.

You need first to find out why you are not gaining weight.

If your metabolism running too high is your trouble, there are things you can do to help slow your metabolism, both naturally and with medicine if necessary. If you have high or low metabolism, you may have an autoimmune disease. Autoimmunity can be dangerous. It happens when your body's immune system begins to attack itself instead of just the occasional virus or bacteria. If autoimmunity is affecting your thyroid, there are things that can be done to help you. You may not feel ill for a very long time with this, but it can be very dangerous.

Usually if you are hypERthyroid you have Graves' Disease. Usually if your thyroid is too low you have Hashimoto's, but it is interesting to note that during the course of Hashimoto's, many patients go thru a period of increased thyroid output resulting in a hypERthyroid condition. Eventually the thyroid burns itself out and you become hypOthyroid. Either case is a serious need for medical intervention. Thyroid hormones influence every cell in your body, so when your thyroid is unhealthy, your entire body is unhealthy and suffers damage that can become permanent. Additionally, autoimmunity can cause death if left undiagnosed or untreated.

If your problem isn't an overzealous metabolism caused by thyroid or adrenal or other hormone imbalance, there are other things your doctor will want to consider including food allergies and gastrointestinal problems such as Celiac or Crohn's Diseases. These can all cause an inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract that results in decreased absorption of the food that you are eating. You can eat all the food in the house and not gain a pound because it's going straight thru you. I suggest WEGO Health's Gastrointestinal Disorder forum where you might ask questions of people living with some of these things. A DEXA scan to see if you have poor bone density linked with being underweight might be important for you and help add another piece to the puzzle. Also, a basic blood panel will help the doctor decide if you might have a problem with your liver or any of a number of other causes of the inability to gain or maintain weight. All of them are important tho.

Being skinny is not a blessing, for me it was/is a curse. It is so wrong to tell 'fat jokes' in public, or tease overweight persons, but for some reason people feel free to tell skinny jokes and tease/harass/bully those who are underweight. Skinny people are harassed mercilessly and it is considered okay. We learn to smile and 'go with the flow' because no one is there to stick up for the underweight - we're at the bottom of the food chain... so to speak. No one considers the jokes and teasing to be harassment (after all, we're lucky, right?) so those who suffer end up feeling further victimized by a society that doesn't recognize it is just as wrong as the discrimination and harassment of those who are overweight.

Please remember, you should always look for the cause of a health problem. Don't take "you're genetically made this way" as a cause either. Those genes are doing something to alter your body and can actually be autoimmunity, malabsorption, or any other of hundreds of genetic errors that cause disease. Just because they're genetic doesn't mean that they are okay. Get answers and work on fixing the problem that is at the foundation of the symptoms.

That said, please remember that eating healthy is the most important thing to do beside seeing your doctor. Junk food is calories, but you need more than calories. Being underweight generally means you have lesser stores of vitamins needed for building tissue that is healthy, and maintaining healthy tissue that is already there. You may even need testing to see where those levels are at because it may hold the key to your diagnosis.

You probably know the drill: Stay away from white/refined things like sugar and flour, take a good multi-vitamin, and vital for those of us who are underweight: avoid caffeine. Period. Caffeine is a drug, plain and simple. It makes your body like a car with the gas pedal pushed all the time. You end up wasting a ton of fuel (calories, vitamins, nutrients) doing nothing and going nowhere. If you feel foggy in the morning, you may be low in B vitamins, or there may be something else causing the feeling that needs to be investigated. Your doctor can help you with this. Interestingly enough, doctors who deal with overweight patients are often a great place to go for those of us who are underweight.

One last thyroid point you'll not likely hear elsewhere: There are a minority of thyroid patients who lose weight when their thyroid is low, and gain it when the thyroid production is too high. Use labs, but also go by how you feel when deciding treatment and even further testing.

Lots of luck to you - you can do this....!

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