How Can a Skinny Woman Gain Weight?

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I'm a Registered and Licensed Dietitian with The Austin Regional Clinic and I'm going to talk to you about how a skinny woman can gain weight. Now if you are a very thin woman the first thing to identify is if you have a poor appetite. If you just don't ever feel like eating and you have a poor appetite the best thing to do is actually go see your doctor first and find out if there is an actual medical reason why you have a poor appetite. Sometimes there is some underlying condition. You may be deficient in different vitamins or minerals or you may be anemic and it is just causing you to not have much of an appetite for eating so if any of those conditions are in place you have that treated first and then your appetite will actually increase and you may be able to eat a more normal level. Now if you are a woman who has a very high metabolism and you don't have any problem with your appetite and you feel like you are eating on a regular basis the thing to do is to concentrate on high calorie foods. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you want to go out and eat a lot of junk food but you do want to eat more of your healthy fats. For example nuts, seeds, avocados, you want to prepare foods with oils like canola oil or olive oil so again those are fats in fatty foods but they are very healthy fats, they are very heart healthy and you don't have to worry about them raising bad cholesterol levels or raising triglycerides. They are still very healthy for you. You are still going to be getting a lot of other nutrients and a lot of other vitamins and minerals. Some other high calorie foods that you can use are full fat yogurts and cheeses. You may also want to use whole milk. Now even though these items do have some more saturated fat in them than the other fat sources I was talking about previously, they generally if you are just using them short term to gain weight will not cause a significant increase in your cholesterol levels. The thing is just to monitor your intake, monitor your weight and once you get to the weight that you want to be then you can cut back a little bit on those high fat dairy products and rely primarily on those plant sources of fats and again the nuts, the seeds, the avocado and olive oil, canola oil or even olives themselves and then make sure that you are still eating plenty of your other foods. You still want to include your fruits and vegetables, you still want to include sources of proteins such as fish, meats, poultry any of those types of things but make sure you are getting a daily source of those healthy fats."