How to (not!) get fat in five easy steps

Monday, February 07, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: weight gain, weight loss, obesity

You may think it's strange to find a "How-To" article focusing on five easy steps for adding fat to your body. You might say that we already know how to do that: two thirds of the people in the United States are overweight and one third are considered clinically obese. Obviously we've mastered this topic.

But I challenge that. I think even though we do tend to be overweight and obese as a nation, very few people are aware of how they actually got there. There's not a great deal of awareness of the steps it takes to actually add excess body fat. In other words, we're living with the effects of the obesity plan every single day in our own lives and in our society, and yet we're not really cognizant of the causes. This article is designed to help make you aware of the causes by presenting the topic of weight loss to you in a unique way.

Suppose a billionaire appeared at your doorstep and offered you $10,000,000 if you could add 100 pounds of body fat in less than one year. How could you actually do it in 12 months or less?

Step one to adding body fat: slow your metabolism

The very first thing you've got to do is slow your metabolism; by slowing your metabolism you'll burn fewer calories when you're at rest and thus, even if you don't increase the amount of food you intake, you'll automatically add weight and store body fat. The easiest way to slow your metabolism is to stop all forms of exercise. Avoid walking. Spend a lot of time in front of the television. Take elevators instead of the stairs. And certainly don't sign up for any physical activities or spend much time outdoors.

Some of the best strategies for lowering your metabolism include getting a desk job, finding parking spaces as close as possible to the stores where you shop so you don't spend much time walking across the parking lot, and of course purchasing one of those electric chairs or scooters so that you can get around town without having to walk at all.

Avoiding physical exercise has a second effect -- it also causes your body to break down the existing muscle mass that you have today. And by breaking down muscle mass, your metabolism will be slowed even further. This will accelerate your weight gain efforts and allow you to pack on the pounds almost automatically.

Remember that when you don't use your muscles, your body gets rid of them. That's because your body adapts to the level and intensity of physical exercise you choose to pursue. The quickest way to get rid of the muscles that you don't want is to simply stop using them, and your body will take care of the rest.

Step two: drink lots of carbonated soft drinks

Avoiding physical exercise is only the first step to gaining weight and achieving your goal of packing on extra pounds in 12 months or less. But it won't get you there all by itself -- you've got to assist that effort by altering your diet.

One of the very first things you should do is get yourself addicted to caffeinated soft drinks. You can start by purchasing a 12-pack of any soft drink beverage in grocery stores and consuming it at every possible opportunity, including breakfast. This is an absolutely wonderful way to pack on the pounds, because soft drinks are made with high-fructose corn syrup. When this ingredient is consumed, it spikes the blood sugar in your body. This sends an emergency signal to your pancreas, which produces increased levels of insulin in order to keep the blood sugar levels from going too high. This insulin signal is picked up by the cells in your body, which then remove blood sugar from your bloodstream and, through a somewhat complex biological process involving the liver, manage to store that blood sugar as body fat. If you drink enough soft drinks with enough frequency, you will be well on your way to achieving your goal of gaining 100 lb in 12 months or less.

Step three: choose high caloric density foods

While you're at it, be sure to purchase foods with very high caloric density. You see, raw, uncooked fruits and vegetables will fill you up before you get very many calories in your meal. For example, it's very difficult to eat 1,000 calories worth of apples at one sitting. Your stomach will simply fill up before you reach 1,000 calories and you won't feel like eating any more. But if you choose processed foods with ingredients such as white flour, hydrogenated oils or saturated fats, you can pack in a couple of thousand calories in one sitting without topping off your stomach. This is hugely important for achieving your weight gain goals.

Fortunately there are a great number of foods available at every grocery store in America that can help you accomplish this. It's very easy to buy them, as most are quite affordable. All you have to do is look for brand-name foods packaged in beautiful boxes with delicious-looking pictures of foods on the front.

If you read the ingredients label, you'll find these foods are made with ingredients like hydrogenated oils, white flour, sugar and other ingredients that have a very high caloric density. It is important that you eat these foods at every meal. You want to make sure your diet consists of things like cheese, fried foods and lots of white bread. As you probably guessed, pizza is an outstanding choice because it not only has a high caloric density from the cheese and whatever meats are on the pizza, but it also has the high glycemic index that accompanies the white flour crust. In a similar way, it's also a good idea to eat lots of sugary breakfast cereals with high-fat cow's milk. This will give you saturated fat from the cows' milk and the high sugar content of the breakfast cereals, thereby adding fat to your body through two different biological mechanisms: fat and refined carbohydrates.

Step four: load up on junk foods

Junk foods are, of course, another outstanding choice for achieving your goals. A bag of potato chips provides an impressive quantity of dietary fats as well as refined carbohydrates - and various nacho chips and other snack foods operate in much the same way.

You can also accelerate your weight gain goals by turning to fried foods. Fried foods have very high caloric density and the batter in which these foods are fried is normally made with white flour, so you also get the high glycemic index effects from the carbohydrates in the batter as well as the absurdly high caloric density of the fried fats.

Step five: visit fast food restaurants frequently

If you had to name an ideal source for the combination of food ingredients that would rapidly accelerate your quest for obesity, you'd have to put fast food restaurants at the top of that list. The more popular the fast food chain, the faster their food packs on the body fat, it seems. (Maybe that's what the "fast" in "fast food" really means...)

If you were to eat in fast food restaurants at least once a day, you would easily be able to meet your weight gain goal within one year and cash that $10,000,000 check. Be sure to order the largest quantities of soft drinks, fries and hamburgers, because it's quantity that counts here. Aided by menu items from fast food chains, you can pack in as much as 2,000 calories in a single meal! This is going to rapidly accelerate your weight gain efforts, because the average adult human being needs only 2,000 calories per day.

If you can consume 2,000 calories at each meal while eating three meals a day, you can pack on an extra 4,000 calories a day! It takes about 3,000 calories to make one pound of excess body fat, so by eating 6,000 calories a day, you can achieve slightly more than one pound of body fat each day. This means in one week alone you can pack on 7 or 8 pounds of body fat, which would put you well on your way to achieving your weight gain goal. In fact, using this approach, you would probably be able to achieve your goal in 90 days or less. Cash that $10,000,000 check well ahead of time and retire as the global champion master of obesity!

The high price of weight gain success

Of course by the time you actually win this $10,000,000 you will have suffered the devastating health effects of consuming these processed foods, junk foods, fast foods and disease-promoting food ingredients. Yes, you will be $10,000,000 richer, but if you don't reverse everything you've done over the last 90 days you will soon learn that you can't take it with you. In other words, your life will be shortened if you don't put an end to this weight gain effort and get back to a normal body weight.

Fortunately, reversing your achievement is fairly straightforward. Simply do the opposite of everything that you've followed so far. In other words, start exercising, increase your lean body mass by engaging in strength training. Spend time walking, swimming or cycling. Find ways to move your body at work, even if you have a desk job. Avoid all processed foods and foods made with high-fructose corn syrup, white flour, refined white sugar and other refined carbohydrates. Remove soft drinks from your diet, avoid all fried foods, snack foods, junk foods and any foods made by food-manufacturing corporations whose packaged foods line the shelves of America's grocery stores.

Once you do all that, your liver function will begin to improve quite rapidly; the hardening of your arteries that was taking place as your pursued your weight gain diet will begin to reverse; your cardiovascular health will improve dramatically; your brain function will even improve. Your pulse will slow, and your body fat will slowly begin to melt off. Your level of energy and vitality will gradually rise. You will find it easier to sleep at night and get up in the morning. You won't get sick as often, and you'll find that your immune system begins to function the way it's supposed to in a healthy human being. In fact, every function of your body will steadily improve as you shift to a healthy, nutritious diet that avoids processed foods and all of those lifestyle choices you pursued to gain weight in the first place and win $10,000,000.

But here's the bad news to all of this: while it may have only taken you 90 days to pack on 100 extra pounds, it will probably take you 100 weeks to remove it! That's because weight loss strategies that work in the long term typically shed no more than one pound per week in actual body fat. So you can count on spending almost two years taking that fat off of your body, even though it only took 90 days to put it on.

Why most Americans are already on the weight-gain plan

If all of this discussion about how to gain weight sounds rather silly, by the way, that's because it is silly. And what's ever crazier is the fact that half the population in America is on the weight-gain plan right now, and they're doing it for free!. How's that for crazy? It's one thing to compromise your health for a huge financial reward or some other significant goal, but it's quite another to destroy your health and have nothing to show for it other than medical bankruptcy when the hospital bills start arriving at your door.

It's true: people are following this five-step plan right now! They're actively following the precise strategy that a human being should take if they were trying to pack on 100 pounds of excess body weight and win $10,000,000.

And here's something even more shocking: many people still haven't figured out the link between the choices they make and their level of body weight or body health. They've been convinced by their physicians and organized medicine that health is just a matter of luck. There's nothing you can really do to control your health outcome, they're told. If you get cancer, it's just chance or family history. If you're obese, it's just a genetic mutation that alters your brain chemistry. At least, in their minds.

And so each and every day, Americans go to the grocery store and load up their shopping carts with foods that will inevitably create obesity and chronic disease in their bodies. And then they wonder why they don't feel well. They go to the doctor and say "Doc, please, fix me! Because I don't feel so good." That's because they're following the weight gain plan: the diet of obesity and chronic disease.

Why I'm serious about all this

Enough toying around with the weight gain recipe. Let's get serious about what all this means. To do that, first realize that you, me and everyone alive has a great deal of power to control our own health outcome. If we take responsibility for our health and look at the effects of the actions we are taking, we can determine what outcome we wish to experience. (By the way, the vast majority of readers of this site already know this. But I'm sure you'll agree that many of the people around you, who aren't so well informed about health, truly have no clue...)

Some people may be fine with going through life experiencing chronic disease. For some people it's actually a pattern that's comfortable and familiar. Others, though, would like to go through life in a healthful state. And too few people realize they have the full power to make that choice and follow that path in their own lives.

What I'm sharing here today is that there is a recipe for gaining weight and being diseased, just as there is a recipe for losing weight and being free of disease. You can choose to follow whichever recipe you want, and you will get exactly the results of the recipe you follow. You can also invent your own recipe and experience the natural results of that recipe based on the laws of physiology, biochemistry, nutrition and health.

You can make a new choice starting now

So if you're standing on a path right now, and it's not the path you want to be on in terms of your own health, I invite you to stop walking down that path, take a look around and find a new path to walk down. Then put one foot in front of the other and start walking down that new path. It's not going to change your health overnight, but if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, you can end up on a completely different path than where you started. And if you open your eyes so that you actually see where you're walking, you can look down the path to see what kind of result you want to achieve and then aim for that goal.

You don't have to walk blindly and leave your health up to chance or food advertising gimmicks. You can take control of the outcome you wish to experience and move towards it steadily, with determination, and ultimately experience it each and every day for the rest of your life. Take back your health power! (And ditch that body fat recipe, too.)