How I Gained My Weight Back

I, for the first time, recently posted a side by side picture of myself showing the difference in my body over a two year time span.

For those who don't know the back story, I am a true ectomorph body type.

I can lose weight easily but its very hard to gain. Prior to having my child, I could atleast maintain my weight.

However, after having her, I could no longer do that. The scale went down until I was officially considered underweight.

After speaking out about the struggles I have had, I have had many women come forward saying the same exact thing happened to them. After having their first child the struggle to put on weight became more difficult.

Is it from lack of sleep? Stress? Hormones? The fact that we're burning more energy than ever caring for an infant or small child? Who really knows, but these are all things I have contemplated.

Several women reached out to me after sharing my picture from two years ago versus now asking me how I did it. They are experiencing the same struggles I have had and I just got to the top of the hill where I can say, "I've been there!"

It really is an exhausting struggle to have!

So I am going to layout how I accomplished gaining my weight back for y'all.

I want to stress the importance of the fact that I gained my weight back in a healthy way!

You do not want to up your calories to an extreme amount and eat very unhealthy food because packing on 10-15 pounds of fat in a short period of time would not be good.

This is not an easy process. For me it took two years of hard work. But I was able to put my weight back on in mostly muscle as a little body fat.

SO, the first thing I did was saw a nutritionist. I knew I needed to better understand my body. She put me on a machine that is able to measure how much of your body weight is water, how much is fat, and how much is muscle.

She also sent me to my doctor for blood work to ensure I didn't have an underlying condition causing this. Turns out I just have a freakishly fast metabolism.

What I found shocking is that the results of the machine said I needed to gain a few pounds of fat. I was not surprised at all that I needed more muscle weight but I think I realized how much I needed to gain when I didn't even have a healthy amount of fat.

The nutritionist started me off on a meal plan that consisted of 1,900 calories a day and had me track that through the my fitness pal app (I will discuss this app a little later) for two months. As well as working out doing weight training only. I needed to gain muscle and cardio type trainings would've really only had me burn and tone.

After going back and seeing that I was still not pushing the scale up, I was increased to 2,300 calories a day and needed to continue my weight training.

So the 2,300 calories a day was broken up into 50% carbs, 30% fat, and 20% protein.

This is where the my fitness pal app comes in. You're able to create an account and enter how many calories a day you want to stay at and then enter the percentages of your macros in. Someone trying to lose weight would obviously have different percentages than I had.

Then you are able to log what you're eating into the app and it will calculate how many calories that meal was AND it will also deduct how much of your macros has been consumed and it will show you how many more you still need to eat that day.

The app is SO FRUSTRATING at first because you're having to manually enter everything you eat in. However, you're able to save your meals. So the more you use it the easier it gets because your then able to just add the things you eat from your saved meals.

I will be honest, I only actually tracked what I ate for a few months. I didn't enjoy tacking, so after I did it for a few months I felt like I atleast had an understanding of how to look at my plate and know what I'm taking in.

Had I been more serious about the tracking, I may have been able to put the weight on quicker than I did.

Some of the things you have to understand when trying to gain weight is that you have to eat nutritious food because the healthier foods are going to fuel your body. I've learned that the bad food gives your body nothing to hold on to and us ectomorphs burn it before we can store it.

So for example, choose whole grains. Brown rice over white, wheat bread over white. etc.

So in addition to the meal plan, I also made sure to workout 3-5 times a week. This really depends on what my schedule that week looks like.

My workouts, like I stated earlier, consisted of weight training only.

My exercises consisted of low reps, high weights. So instead of choosing a lower weight where I could do 10-12 reps, I would get a weight that I found heavier and would have to push myself just to get to 6-8 reps.

When you make your body struggle just to get to 6 reps, you are tearing down muscle. When you tear down muscle, it rebuilds.

Now here's where you HAVE to listen because I think this is where I made my biggest mistake at first. Ectomorphs as we previously addressed burn calories fast. So after an exhausting workout you have got to immediately replenish your nutrition or your body will not have anything to rebuild that muscle with, meaning if you don't get something in your body, you just did all of that work for NOTHING.

This is where my not so secret weapon comes in.

After my workouts I drank a protein drink.... but not just any protein drink.

Serious Mass is the one I used faithfully. One serving is about 1,200 calories. But in all honesty, a full serving would've made me barf.

So I would take a half serving after my workouts which was about 600 calories.

Thats still wayyyyy more than the average protein drink. I want to say my husbands is just over 100 calories.

He's a true mesomorph. He can gain easily and lose easily. If he were to drink my protein after every workout he'd probably gain a lot of weight that he doesn't want. That just shows the differences in body types.

I am not going to go into the exact meals I ate and the exact workouts I did because that would take far too long.

But I am going to tell you in summary:

- Eat Healthy foods and track your calories (chances are you're not eating enough for

your metabolism)

- Do weight training only (high weights, low reps)

- Get calories in immediatly after any strenuous activity

- If youre not getting very sore muscles from your workout, you're not going hard

enough with your workouts.

The internet is a wealth of knowledge when looking for weight training workouts as well as meal prep ideas. I would have NEVER started eating healthy had I not meal prepped.

Healthy foods have to be prepared ahead of time because once you get hungry you're going to go for whatever is the easiest and fastest. So preparation is key.

For those going through what I have already been through just know that you are not alone and that I am here if you need me!

I am by no means an expert in all of this, but I have put in the time researching and reading about my body type and the things I need to be doing for myself and I really encourage you to do the same!