Papri’s Weight Gain Challenge Episode 1: The Diet Plan

‘How To Gain Weight’

If you ever Google the above sentence, or simply ‘weight gain’, 3 out 10 times you would find yourself staring at articles that help you achieve exactly the opposite. That is, to lose weight.

Once I narrowed down my search, I realised there are very few legit websites and information banks that have anything helpful on weight gain.

Unless you count the online fitness gurus who simply ask you to ‘eat more healthy’. Duh!

So, I revisited Dr Ashwini Setya’s advice and started looking up nutritionists near me.

Finding the right nutritionist was tricky, as almost everyone specialised in weight reduction rather than weight gain.

Finally, a colleague of mine asked me to visit Dr Rupali Dutta.

Consulting a Nutritionist

On our first session, Dr Dutta measured me from top to bottom, and all sides: she measured my height (oddly I turned out to be shorter than I thought), my weight, my upper arm thickness, my thighs, my wait and finally she calculated my Body Composition Analysis (BCA).

Based on her findings, she calculated that my ideal weight was 45 kgs!

So, the challenge was to gain 12 more kgs of weight in the next 8 weeks.

While Dr Dutta said it wasn’t entirely impossible for me to gain weight, another 12 kgs in 8 weeks, she made no secrets about the fact that it won’t be an easy task.

Firstly, we need you to start eating food, increase your daily intake first. We will discover together how your body is accepting that. We will take each day as it comes and once your body get comfortable with it, we would build on that.

Dr. Rupali Dutta

When I met her next, she had my weekly diet chart or menu with her.

The Diet Plan to Gain Weight

The menu for the first week of my diet, looked like this:

It was a carefully menu prepared to keep all the nutrients, my body composition and my weight target of 45 kgs in mind.

But all I could see were the eight meals in a day! For a person who barely managed to finish two whole meals in a day, mustering 8-meals seemed like a Herculean task.

As I was a beginner in the world of healthy eating and balanced diets, she also asked me to keep the following things in mind:

• Eat the amount mentioned
• Eat at the same time daily
• Last meal should end at 9pm
• Eat fast but chew well
• Eat in an upright position, do not lie down immediately after a meal
• Eat major meals at least 2hrs before your exercise
• During exercise rehydrate with natural fluids like coconut water, fresh lemon water with a little sugar and salt, diluted fresh apple juice

These were things my mother had always advised me as a kid, but of course as I grew older, bad habits had crept in my lifestyle.

As the week progressed, far from reaching my weekly calorific target, I realised that the real challenge was not to forget my meals.

Catch me next week to find out if I managed to conquer my diet menu.

(Follow @Quintfit and @PapriTweets on Twitter for updates on how I fare, and keep an eye out for my first few days of progress that I’ll be posting in the coming week.)

Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya, Athar Rather, Abhay Sharma, Sumit Badola and Abhishek Ranjan

Graphics and Art: Erum Gour and Arnica Kala

Editor: Deepthi Ramdas