r/gainit

So i 28M started this short 6-month journey at 186cm and 59kg.

I went through a breakup and felt like I needed a change of some sort. So I started lifting. I have been skinny my whole life and never really cared about what I ate, I just ate when I felt hungry, and I rarely felt hungry.

So I began with some fairly easy rules, eat twice a day. Simple, but hard.

My body wasn't used to getting this much food, so sometimes I had to eat, while I wasn't even hungry.

I wanted to make it as easy as possible for myself, so I make food for 3 days at the time, so I just have to put it in the microwave.

My body adapted pretty quickly, and now I feel hungry way more often. Which is nice.

I went out and bought some dumbells and a bench because I didn't feel ready to go to the gym, I'm too uncomfortable in my own body.

And here, 6 months later, I still dont see myself getting a gym membership. Maybe when I hit the 1 year mark, I will get one. But for now, I like working out in my own little bubble at home.

I wanted to share this somewhere because I don't really have anyone else who would appreciate it, and I hope you will 😃

I'm proud of myself for how far I have come since I started.

30yr Male, 5'8", 158 lbs

Photo 1: Me 65 days ago

Photo 2: Me today

I've spent the past 65 days consistently eating about 3000 calories a day and following a PPL program, going until around 12 reps with 1-2 RIR on all lifts. A little higher rep range 15-18 with 1-2 RIR on some accessories like curls and tricep extensions.

Some days I'll get closer to 3800 calories, and occasionally I'll miss and hit like 2500. But I've only missed calories a handful of days over the past two months. I hit 1g+ of protein per lb of bodyweight per day and take 5g of creatine per day.

The scale has gone up slightly, I was fluctuating between 148 - 152 when I started, now I fluctuate between 156 - 160 lbs. I'm extremely discouraged that I look exactly the same after 65 days of working my ass off. What am I doing wrong?

I was packing around Asia for 7 months prior to the first photo, I was barely eating and walking/ hiking ALOT. Since ive been back I’ve been on 3200+ calories a day and 4-5 days a week in the gym, I’m 6,2 24yr M

I struggled with an eating disorder, specifically orthorexia and an exercise compulsion with led me to get down to a low of 85 lbs. my heart rate was 19, blood sugar in the 40s, and my electrolytes were out of wack. This led me to check myself into a hospital and get my shit together. As far as diet I started out at 3200 calories and a lot of eggs, fruits, bagels, chicken but have since increased to 4500 calories. I started by just doing pushups and it took me a while to be able to do one and now I can confidently say I can do 41 straight. I just got back into the gym and started lifting again and just wanted to post this to encourage others that are struggling that there is always light.

5’9 and currently on PPL. Used to powerlift for a while before stopping from hurting too much in my day-to-day. Now I just lift like a bodybuilder. My appetite is trash, so I literally have two shakes a day. Morning and at night to supplement my calorie intake. My appetite goes down the drain even more if I stop lifting for a few days.

Gaining weight has been a slow and steady thing for me these past 13 years. I’m stalled pretty hard at 215lbs and wonder if I’ll ever make it to 220 or even 230. I do plan on doing a show at some point just to try it out.

The Why

I see a lot of great progress posts from younger folks in their teens and 20s. This is awesome and I wish I started my weight gain journey earlier. I do believe it would have led to an overall better quality of life for me during the decades I spent being underweight. That being said, I don't see too many posts from the older crowd. I've been asked a number of times to write up a post about my weight gain journey, so here it is.

The Before

I had always been somewhat tall and thin as a kid. My nickname was "Skinny" growing up. I never really paid attention to, or minded my weight all that much. It was only when I got into my late teens did it begin to affect me. We had all gone through puberty at that point, and most of the skinny kids around me got larger, while I stayed the same size.

I coped by telling myself my metabolism was just super fast. I became a goth/emo freak, where they embraced my pale and gaunt look. I wasted time with drugs. I hung around in circles that looked down upon the football jocks as nothing but stupid meatheads. The same jocks that were dating all the girls and too busy enjoying their lives to even notice.

Fast forward another 25+ years and things weren't all that much different. Now married, with a daughter and bills to pay, one thing that hadn't changed was my weight. I was still 130-135 pounds. I had this weird habit of wearing business style clothes all the time, no matter the occasion. My apologies for not having a better "before" picture, but that's because very few exist. I wouldn't let myself be photographed because I hated the way I looked.

When I looked at my diet, it basically consisted of 6-7 large coffees throughout the day, a good sized lunch most days, a snack or two, and then a six pack of beer in the evenings. I never ate in the morning, and would only have dinner occasionally.

The Change

Things suddenly got real for me at age 46 when I had a major health scare. After things settled down a bit, I sat at my desk one day and just stared long and hard at the 7 different medications I was now forced to take. It honestly felt like maybe I didn't have much time left to live. My life choices had finally caught up to me. Suddenly, long ingrained habits like drinking, smoking, porn, video games... They all just seemed like such a waste of time.

That was when I finally started to force myself to eat more. Even just starting with a banana in the morning. At first it was hard and I felt like a loser for having to spend half an hour nibbling at a banana just to get it down. But eventually I got used to it and the banana turned into a danish and eventually a full breakfast sandwich. I began tracking my calories and gave myself a goal of 3000 a day, not knowing anything about maintenance or any of that. I really didn't care. I just knew I wanted to get bigger and 3000 seemed like more than enough to get me there.

I didn't always eat clean, especially in the beginning. Many times I would have to hit the drive-thru for a couple of double cheeseburgers or pull out the jar of peanut butter at night, putting it on the food scale and just eating small scoops until the calorie app said I was finally over 3000. It was sometimes really not fun. I would get to dinner time and look down at a big bowl of rice and ground beef and just feel like I was going to throw up. I would turn on "eat big to get big" motivational videos to pump myself up and eventually get it down even if it took an hour and I had to eat tiny little bites.

The beers at night were getting in the way. They just weren't enough calories and they would fill me up terribly. One day I decided enough was enough. I quit both drinking and smoking that day and will never drink or smoke again. Both my ability to eat and my workouts improved quickly.

As far as workouts, I used what I had available. And up until a month ago, that consisted of the bottom half of a BowFlex Xceed machine and x2 15-pound dumbbells. I had maxed out the machine a couple years in, but would attach my dumbells to the grips and hang sandbags off the bar to increase the weight. At the end I was wearing a backpack full of books while doing very slow sets of 30-50 reps for some exercises to try and hit failure. Whatever it takes, right?

Fast forward to today:

The Diet

I only track calories and protein and don't really get into macro details other than that. I started off at 3000 calories and 120 grams of protein each day. That worked well for quite a while and I gained a decent amount of both muscle and fat. Eventually I bumped it to 3300, then 3500. Currently I am pushing from 3500 towards 3800 with 150 grams of protein each day.

I try to eat fairly clean, but I don't mind getting dirty when I need to. Common foods I consume: milk, greek yogurt, ground beef, ground pork, chicken breast, chicken thighs, eggs, bananas, peanut butter, rice bran oil, protein shakes, smoothies, pancakes, pasta.

If you notice something about this list, they are all soft and easy to digest foods. That's because I currently have a total of 10 teeth in my mouth. I lost the majority of my teeth before I began bulking due to alcohol and tobacco abuse. Yes, I eat 3800 calories a day while having almost no teeth!

The Workout

My previous workout where I made nearly all my gains was anything I could do from the bodybuilding section of the BowFlex manual, with as many weighted objects tacked on as possible. My current gym workout however focuses on slow controlled movement, machines, and keeping away from super low reps or trying to identify 1-rep maxes:

DAY 1: BACK

4x Lat Pulldown

4x Low Cable Row

4x Assisted Pull-Up (Wide grip, body forward)

DAY 2: CHEST

4x Machine Chest Press

4x Incline Machine Press

4x Machine Chest Fly

DAY 3: SHOULDERS

4x Machine Shoulder Press

4x Cable Lateral Raises

4x Machine Shrugs

DAY 4: LEGS

4x Hack Squat

4x Seated Leg Curl

4x Leg Extensions

DAY 5: ARMS + MISC

4x Cable Bicep Curl

4x Tricep Pushdown

4x Leg Press Calf Raises

(anything else I feel needs work)

These 5 days are on repeat. Sometimes i'll mix up the order of the exercises during the session if a machine is busy. If I need to take a rest day I will, usually every couple of weeks. Living in Bangkok, I also get about 10k-15k steps in daily with a number of flights of stairs.

The Age

For older folks who think they can't gain, you may be surprised! I was able to pack on 65 pounds in just over 6 years, including about 2 years where I hovered in the 170s until I boosted calories again.

I am now in the best shape of my life. Clothes fit better, people treat me better, women have more interest in me even at my age, I have more confidence, and I even reduced my medications from 7 pills down to 4. It feels like a total life reboot. If you are interested in gaining weight, no matter if you're young or old, go for it my friends!

22 months progress, first photos were when I had already been training for a year and second photos were recent. First year was just calisthenics, mostly handstand pushup variations and second year was lifting weights also, just free weights no cables or machines, mostly things like squats, bench press, deadlifts, log press, atlas stones, rows, weighted pull ups etc

Didn’t really take nutrition seriously until recently which I regret and I’m sure I could have made more progress if I did but oh well you live and you learn. Went into an untracked surplus in the past 3 months and pushed from 77kg-83kg, have another 7kg to go until I hit my goal weight of 90kg.

First photo is before I started going to the gym in February 2023 and current/after photo is June 2026.

Barely could squeeze into these pair of shorts anymore for the after photo. Can’t even wear it in any real way plus the zipper refused to fully close. But wanted to put it on for old time

2 years between the pics.
Started at 115 lbs and slowly bulked up to around 180 lbs before doing a cut. Sitting at 150 lbs now.
Calories started around 2,400 and gradually worked their way up to 2,800 and eventually around 3,500 as I gained weight.
Training was a pretty basic 5-day bro split:
Chest + tris
Back + bis
Shoulders
Legs
Chest / chest-focused day
Chest was always a priority for me, so I gave it a bit of extra attention throughout the bulk.
Diet was mostly whole foods — lots of rice, chicken, vegetables, bread and eggs. Towards the end of the bulk, getting 3,500 calories in every day started getting pretty difficult, so I relied more on things like olive oil, chocolate milk and other easy calories to get the food down.
Nothing particularly complicated — just eating consistently, progressively gaining weight and training hard for 2 years.
Definitely still have a lot to improve, but pretty happy with the progress so far.

For those who asked for an update when I finished my bulk and just to share my overall progress. You can find my workout split and bulk diet on my last post on here (like 3 posts down on my profile)

I did a PPL split when bulking and I worked out 5 days a week, since the cut started I do upper lower and work out 4 days a week and go as heavy as possible. If you look at my last post and see my diet, here are some things I would've done differently as I believe I was a bit too aggressive with my bulk. I would limit the amount of peanut butter significantly and truly track the amount of fats I would intake as well as switch from whole milk to either 2% or 1%. I did put on way more fat than I should have but my strength did increase significantly. I do believe in my original post I said I was eating roughly 3000 calories a day, it was more like a 3500-3800 average (since starting to actually count my calories and measure my intake i realized how off I was with my loose tracking during my bulk) and I realized I should've lowered that to around 3200 and did a slower bulk.

I do still struggle with the tracking when it comes to carbs and fats and I know I need to dial that in especially for this cut. I've been cutting for 7 weeks and have went from 210 to 201 and I am noticing how fatigued ive been feeling. Im eating 2400-2600 calories a day currently (except yesterday my friend took me to a buffet for my bday and I probably far exceeded that yesterday 😅) I make sure to hit 200gs of protein minimum a day and I get this from shakes, chicken, greek yogurt, fish, and 2 packs of protein oatmeal (the oatmeal is what i eat every morning with 1-2 scoops of protein powder)

Strength, since my last post whete I weighed 192 I could bench 225, I currently can bench 260

I could squat 285, currently can squat 365

I could curl 30lb dumbells for 8-12 reps, can now curl 40lb dumbells for 8-12 reps

Leg press went from rep 400 something to now repping 590 for 15

Pull-ups from 3 to 8 (my back is where im lacking the most but ive started to dial it in and get some real progress there)

Workout changes: for back i used to just do rows and lat pull downs with a wide grip. I've started doing rear delt flies, close grip pull downs (with the V attachment) and pull ups starting with unassisted and for the last set assisted.

For chest: stayed mostly the same except I've started implementing dips every week and low to high cable flys.

Legs: I was pretty lazy when it came to squatting in the beginning, have gotten better on that and I no longer do seated calf raises, standing has proven to be far superior for me.

Biceps: seated incline curls have been great for me, I stopped doing preacher curls (they give me incredibly bad tendinitis) and rope cable curls started with a hammer curl grip and twisting out at the top

Triceps haven't changed much, standard pushdows and single arm kickbacks with the occasional skull crushers.

Traps: heavy shrugs thats it 😅 I typically use dumbells

Core: started implementing leg raises with decline crunches or crunch machine, i will usually superset these and they are my only superset

Cardio: ive started upping my cardio, was doing only 10 minutes and am now doing 20-40 minutes on a 13° incline at 3.5mph.

Since starting the cut my strength has definitely stopped increasing on most lifts but I've also not gotten weaker so I'll take that as a win. I definitely fatigue faster and can't nor do I want to do as many sets. All in all im happy with my progress, I would do some things differently if I could but I dont have any agonizing regrets.

First 2 pics are lowest weight, second 2 are highest weight, last 5 are current