> Eating can be a pleasure or pain, but eating for weight gain isn’t fun, particularly when the weight gain is elusive.
I've never been the recipient of cancer surgery or had to undergo this kind of long recovery the author has, but I was a professional nutrition coach in a previous life and I have eaten for weight gain in the traditional weightlifting sense, both "clean bulks" and "dirty bulks" and about everything in between.
I would much rather be 30 pounds overweight and try to lose that weight than be 15 pounds underweight and try to gain it. If you're really killing it in the gym, 4-6 days a week, 60-ish minutes of heavy weight training at bulking RPEs of 8-9, and hitting the numbers of sets you need to be for muscle hypertrophy, eating becomes the worst part of your day. The classic "dirty bulk" of a couple big macs and a non-diet soda for lunch is great for the first few days (maybe) but it becomes a chore very quickly, and it's easily 5x worse when you're trying to eat clean and realize your lunch is going to be 2.25 pounds of chicken breast plus multiple normal servings of rice and broccoli. It's a big part of why people bulking end up eating less healthy foods (the caloric density), and seeming eat all day every day (because they do).
Not sure I understand the information at your link, but as far as I can tell, the most weight that has been deadlifted by a teenage female (<20yo, open weight) is 391lbs.
Maybe I suck at web search? Is there a teenage female record holder who has smashed that weight and I’m just not finding anything about it?
What are you basing your protein requirements on? Even a gram per pound of protein is overkill [0] (Menno knows his stuff), and the protein you get from other sources besides meat (rice, beans, dairy) counts as well. There are plenty of vegans that lift that prove that. That clean eating is a diet of nothing but lean meats, rice, and broccoli is a myth. There's lots of flexibility in your macros once your basic requirements are satisfied. All those chickens don't need to die for you to get strong.
And pretty common for a clean bulk unless you only weigh 150 pounds or so. If you're in the 200-225 pound range you're probably eating 250-300g of protein a day, which if it's only chicken breast will be approaching 3 pounds daily.
To be clear, this is for traditional bulking. And you only really do that if you're trying to get bigger weightlifting numbers for the sake of getting bigger weightlifting numbers. Nobody casually gets a 450 lb backsquat, they do this kind of stuff to get there.
That's the food intake of what, 4 or 5 'regular' people?
And probably 25 in the poor part of the world. I'm not a vegetarian but I wonder if the people that do this sort of thing realize the impact of what they are doing, it's the equivalent of consuming 1000+ chickens on an annual basis and that's not all they eat. I get it that kids in their teenage years eat a lot because they grow so fast and really need it but this feels excessive to me.
Damn near every hobby imaginable will have externalities. Asking as gently as I can: Maybe this isn't a battle to pick?
Tangentally, some clever children, when told to "Think of the starving kids in Africa. Finish your plate" will retort with "Then give me a stamp". Someone who's hobby is improving their squat or deadlift, and picking up lots of chicken at the store, is not (intuitively to me, at least) taking food off the plate of someone with less - especially those >3 timezones away. That's a distribution problem, not a lack-of-food-worldwide problem
You still gotta eat big. You can pin HGH if you really want to gain weight, but understand that it doesn't discriminate in what kind of soft tissue it grows.
I've never been the recipient of cancer surgery or had to undergo this kind of long recovery the author has, but I was a professional nutrition coach in a previous life and I have eaten for weight gain in the traditional weightlifting sense, both "clean bulks" and "dirty bulks" and about everything in between.
I would much rather be 30 pounds overweight and try to lose that weight than be 15 pounds underweight and try to gain it. If you're really killing it in the gym, 4-6 days a week, 60-ish minutes of heavy weight training at bulking RPEs of 8-9, and hitting the numbers of sets you need to be for muscle hypertrophy, eating becomes the worst part of your day. The classic "dirty bulk" of a couple big macs and a non-diet soda for lunch is great for the first few days (maybe) but it becomes a chore very quickly, and it's easily 5x worse when you're trying to eat clean and realize your lunch is going to be 2.25 pounds of chicken breast plus multiple normal servings of rice and broccoli. It's a big part of why people bulking end up eating less healthy foods (the caloric density), and seeming eat all day every day (because they do).