How to gain muscle mass in a healthy and safe way

Not everyone is trying to lose weight. Everybody and every person are different. While many of you are trying to lose kilos, others are trying to gain weight, healthily creating muscle. Therefore, 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 healthily without increasing your body fat percentage. In this way, you will continue to have a toned body but more muscle mass. To achieve this, we have spoken with nutrition specialist Carrie McMahon, who has explained the concept of “reverse diet,” or reverse diet.

This type of diet is a way to gain weight slowly but surely, concentrating only on gaining muscle and repairing the metabolic damage due to other strict diets that you have practiced in the past—McMahon’s words: “This repair is essential to achieve your goals. Crash diets damage our metabolism enormously since the body has fasted on many occasions. As a consequence, the metabolism will go much slower.

Even if you have not been on strict diets, the “reverse diet” is also suitable 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, so that the metabolism can get used to this increase without going into “shock,” which would happen when drastically and suddenly increasing the food you put 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 proteins, light carbohydrates, and fat) affects your metabolism, determining whether you lose or gain weight.

When you are starting with the reverse diet, the recommendation of the professionals focuses on keeping the proportions of the intake of macronutrients the same as before. Who will make little by minor, gradual adjustments in the input? If you’ve never counted your macros before, remember the foods you’ve eaten in 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 happen 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 six months. That is where you have to start.

A healthy diet has, on average, approximately 30% to 35% protein, 25% fat, and 45% carbohydrates. Once you start adding more foods to gain weight, you should do it in small amounts each week so that you are not changing the diet daily but for weeks. Each week you add more food to 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 it is not enough to make these changes in the diet to gain muscle healthily, but One must complement it with strength exercises. “Combined with weight training, eating more calories will allow your body to gain more weight and focus on building muscle.” It is much healthier and less dangerous than starting a diet to gain weight by suddenly overeating.

As Carrie McMahon explains, gaining weight will not make you look fatter, especially with this method, because the body will give you the appearance of a more toned body by focusing on gaining muscle. Don’t worry about what the scale says; concentrate on your feelings inside.