It is not a secret that in order to build muscle, you will need to push your calories up to a surplus, and with that – as well as gaining quality tissue through training and recovery – will also come some body fat gain.
Of course, this is completely normal and in fact, quite healthy and necessary too, as staying lean year-round is unsustainable at best, and exhausting and damaging at worst.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop most people struggling with a weight-gaining phase. After all, you have spent months strictly dieting, sticking to a rigorous cardio and step regiment, and you have made substantial changes to your lifestyle in order to get into the best shape of your life.
How are you expected to “give it all up”? To gain weight AGAIN?
It’s by no means a straightforward process, but with the right tools and support in place, the journey is far more enjoyable than you might have anticipated it to be.
Although this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are some daily/weekly practices that I implement with my clients, and that can help you enjoy this phase and be happy in your body irrespective of what it looks like!
Connect with your sense of self-compassion and care before stepping on the scales (if you need to weigh yourself, that is!)
It may sound silly at first but whispering (or shouting!) “My worth is not determined by this number” before you weigh yourself can have a positive impact on how you may respond to the scale reading. It helps remove the emotion attached to numbers and gives you an out-loud confirmation that you are more than just a scale weight.
Of course, the disclaimer here is that trying to say something that sounds compassionate but not believing it or connecting with that feeling can sometimes do more harm than good. As such, in that case I would prioritise practicing and cultivating a sense of self-compassion that can then accompany you when doing things that could make you feel a bit weary (e.g., weighing yourself and seeing the numbers go up, even if that’s your current goal).
Divert your focus of attention away from your appearance and place it on performance
If you are reading this, it is likely that you are trying to improve your physique by training hard in the gym. As such, you’ll love the feeling of getting stronger and being able to progress your lifts at the gym. Consider, therefore, that more food and more body mass will give you the energy and force to get brutally strong. And who doesn’t want to feel like a superhero when training?
Realising that you can practice where you place your focus of attention. and practice directing it to more helpful cues (e.g., bracing your core and pulling your shoulders back, instead of honing in on how your lifting belt feels around your midsection) can make a big difference.
Practice body neutrality
Gaslighting yourself into staying body positive all year round is unlikely to help if you find that gaining weight / moving away from dieting is difficult. As such, taking a more body-neutral approach and emphasising factors such as body functionality – that is, a focus on what your body can do for you – can be more helpful.
Remember that you are not just your body – your body enables you to BE in the world, to respond to events in the world, and to make an impact in the world too. As hippie-dippie as it may seem, if you ever find yourself criticising your appearance, write a list of things that you can ONLY do because you have a living body to inhabit: feel the sunshine on your skin? Hug a loved one? Lift heavy? Pet a cat/dog?
Of course, it’s not always this simple and some people can struggle more than others. These are just some of the techniques I implement with a lot of my fitness coaching clients who are working to gain bodyweight after a dieting phase (whether that was structured and agreed amongst us, or whether they’ve been dieting for as long as they can remember on their own).
