We often associate liquid meal replacements with dieting or losing weight, but for many, this is not the point. Food replacements are just as often used to help people gain weight, whether they’re attempting to put on weight for athletic purposes or attempting to recover from an illness or injury. But wait — isn’t gaining weight easy? Don’t you simply need to eat?
In fact, gaining weight can be more complicated than it looks. We can all gain weight, barring medical conditions that prevent us from doing so physically. But gaining weight in a healthy way is more complicated. If you’re regularly exercising and maintaining a healthy diet, which we all should, you will often stay the same weight. This is why adding something like chocolate meal replacement powder is beneficial for your weight gain efforts; it doesn’t disrupt your healthy lifestyle, but it can make the addition that’s necessary for gaining weight. But you need to be strategic about it. Let’s explore some of the ways that you can use chocolate and vanilla meal replacement powders to help you healthily gain weight.
1. Stay Consistent
If you want to gain weight, you need to be consistent about what you’re taking in, how much of it, and how you’re taking it. Chocolate meal replacement powder is usually liquified before it is consumed, and with good reason. One of the reasons why liquid meal replacements are so appealing is that they don’t necessarily feel heavy or give an “overly full” feeling the way food can. Therefore, it’s easier to consistently drink these meal replacements, as opposed to eating more food.
You need to consider your natural metabolism and body makeup. If your goal is to add one pound per week, this will usually be done by consuming an additional 500 calories a day. For context, women usually are recommended to eat 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day while men are recommended to consume 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day. Although counting calories isn’t necessarily healthy for everyone, this kind of consistent addition could be a great way of measuring out weight gain.
2. Calories Are Good, Too Much Sugar Is Not
The chocolate meal replacement powder that you consume is probably going to be on the sweet side. It is chocolate-flavored, after all! Though liquid meal replacements are often sweet in order to make them easier to consume, you don’t want their sugar content to reflect that sweetness. More sugar does usually equal more calories, and more calories often equal more weight. But eating more sugar is not a healthy way to gain weight.
For one thing, you’ll probably have a sugar crash if you eat too much sugar. For another, consistent excessive sugar consumption could affect your insulin levels, as well as the quality of your teeth. There are no nutrients included in sugar. The calories they provide are empty, and you don’t need sugar to sweeten your meal replacement. Check your meal replacement powder’s sugar content before you commit to it.
3. Focus on Protein
A great way to gain weight in a healthy way is to simply choose a vanilla or chocolate meal replacement powder that is high in protein. A lot of people want to gain weight not by increasing their fat stores but by building muscle. Protein helps you do that.
Protein will fuel your new workouts and for that matter ensure that your muscles are less likely to tear as you work out.
4. Exercise in Conjunction
As previously mentioned, it’s healthier to build muscle than it is to increase your fat stores in most cases. While not everyone is able to jump right into heavy workouts, exercising to the extent that you can while also consuming liquid meal replacements can help you gain weight healthily.
It’s important to remember as you gain weight that moderation is key and that you should do all of this under the advisement of your doctor or nutritionist. While there are plenty of reasons why you may want to gain weight, you should be careful when doing so. The goal is not simply for you to gain weight, but for you to do so healthily.
