If you happen to tell someone they’re eating too much, chances are, they probably are. It’s only until they can identify the amounts; portion size, calorie and macro content can they then comprehend how much they are ‘Over-fuelling’ their bodies. For the ‘Hard Gainer’ –someone with a high Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)– these same amounts are just as important, if not even more so than someone who is purely overindulging.

In order to ascertain why you are not gaining weight, first you must ask yourself ‘On a typical day, how often am I hungry?’ This is the first give away, the typical time between each ‘meal’, not a snack or a protein hit, one comprised of all three macronutrients; protein, carbs, fats. When you are hungry, your energy mostly comes from that which you have eaten previously, and so, if you’re looking to gain weight, each meal to succeed exercise MUST provide enough energy going through to the next. Feeling hungry is essentially using energy from time previous as well as NOW, if you make it so, what you currently have in your stomach is the determining factor of whether you can both recover and perform later on. Fuelling purely for performance aside, we’re not all swimming the channel, cycling the Tour de France or need 10,000 calories a day, but how often do you drive with your petrol light on? this is essentially being hungry. There’s only so far you will be able to get on less fuel, and when it comes to filling up do you only put in half a tank or the full thing? The answer will determine both how much stress you may inflict on your vehicle rationing gears, if you can comfortably make it to your destination and at what cost.

If petrol stations were not open for 24 hours and we had to ensure a full tank throughout the day who would benefit the most; the morning or evening filler? neither, and while one can simply park a car until its next use, the body continues to metabolise during sleep regardless of whether it has been filled up or not. My point being one with the intention of addressing the malpropre justification of impending excess, built up from the days of rationing nutrients to surmount an even bigger challenge of appetite, only then surmounted by an even greater height of satiety which later stands to sister the peak of nourishment that your body REQUIRES daily. If the goal is to gain, there has to be no other route than the one which sustains beyond what which could allude to be the peak, sustaining a contingency plan for another treacherous slump. The mood gauge swayed by the gravity plummeting momentum if you make it so or the catalyst to scale the next scramble.