195; Quick Weight-Gain Program
Been feeling huge all week, especially just after lunch. Read a book on weight-gain advice, Dr. David Reuben’s Quick Weight-Gain Program™, whose enthusiastic tone occasionally reminded me of Dr. Nick Riviera in the Simpsons episode “King-Size Homer“:
Now there are many options available for dangerously underweighted individuals like yourself. I recommend a slow steady gorging process combined with assal horizontology. You’ll want to focus on the neglected food groups such as the whipped group, the congealed group and the choco-tastic! Be creative—instead of making sandwiches with bread, use poptarts. Instead of chewing gum, chew bacon!
Well, the advice in the book is not really that bad, though as the book is aimed at the underweight, he tends to focus on the dangers of underweight (which has been found to increase the risk of mortality from just about everything except heart disease and cancer[1]) and the need to escape it, which in several places he puts forward as a straightforward life-or-death proposition, e.g. in chapter six:
Eat your way through each meal deliberately and methodically, from start to finish—as if your life dependend on it. And—in a real sense—it does.
Outside of that, though, the book does have good advice for those of us who are trying to gain weight but aren’t gluttonous by nature. Though eating more often is suggested for those who have the opportunity, a larger emphasis is on eating similar amounts of food but by choosing foods with higher calorie values (or enhancing foods with easy calories, e.g. by adding oil or sugar). Some example menus and recipes are given, from benign things like switching from orange juice to grape juice at breakfast, to more dramatic-sounding measures such as eating cereal with half-and-half instead of milk.
Also touched on are increasing one’s inclination to eat, and decreasing metabolism. The former mostly hinges on your eating environment, but also, for example, having food that’s ‘organoleptic,’ i.e., appealing and interesting not just to the taste but to the other senses as well. All three components of metabolism are covered: exercise, specific dynamic action (the thermic effect), and the basal metabolic rate, and how to make sure your body isn’t working against you with them.
Anyway, there are a lot of interesting ideas there and I’ll hafta work on implementing some of them…