How to Gain Weight!

It seems like the whole world is focused on weight loss. All we really have to do to be reminded of this is peruse the magazine covers in the supermarket while on line to have our (healthy) groceries rung up. While there are benefits to losing weight, there are significant health benefits to not gaining additional weight, even if someone is already overweight. Often preventing additional weight gain, is a much easier a goal to accomplish than losing weight. We often forget that not gaining weight can help decrease the odds of developing health conditions, especially in people who are considered normal weight, just like weight loss will. Researchers at Harvard recently published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine (Mizaffarian et al. NEJM 2010;364(25)) that looked at the habits of about 120,000 Americans over a 20 year follow up period to determine if there were specific behaviors that affected the strategy of eating less and moving more to prevent weight gain. So I thought that I’d take an opportunity to discuss what the authors identified as sure ways to gain weight.

First, eat potatoes, especially French fries, potato chips, and baked potatoes with lots of sour cream and cheese and bacon. People who ate potato chips gained 1.69 pounds over a four year period, with potatoes coming in second at causing a 1.28 pound. Second, drink lots of sugar sweetened beverages like soda, and eat processed meats and unprocessed red meat. Consuming each of those regularly will result in an approximate one pound weight gain. Also, watch a lot of television; people gained 0.31 pound for every hour spent in front of the TV. And drink lots of alcohol, people gained 0.41 pounds for each drink they had per day.

Then, avoid fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and yogurt. Eating all of these foods prevented between approximately one half and one pound of weight gain over four years. In fact, not making any healthy dietary changes will prevent you from losing almost four pounds over the same four year follow up period.

And lastly, don’t do any exercise, or well move, at all. People who increased their moderate activity, such as briskly walking (5 METs), by approximately 40 minutes a day or added approximately 30 minutes of vigorous activity (7 METs) each day lost almost 2 pounds.

The moral of the story is that little changes can result in big outcomes when it comes to weight change. We do not need to completely overhaul our current lifestyle to prevent ourselves from gaining weight, or accomplish weight loss. The authors concluded that weight changes that were attributed to one particular lifestyle factor, were relatively small, but when combined with other lifestyle choices, there were significant changes in weight. So making a few tweaks to one’s lifestyle (e.g. decreasing TV watching time and the consumption of sodas while also getting up and walking more), when combined together, can yield measurable weight gain, or loss.