Most of the world at the moment seems to be entirely focused on weight loss efforts. In others words, most people are struggling with a situation where they have more weight than is healthy (or aesthetically proper) for them. So they seek to lose it, in a bid to avoid the health risks that come with excessive weight, and in a bid to look better aesthetically. What is forgotten in all this discussion is the fact that there is another group of people faced with another sort of weight problem. That is the group of people who are struggling to gain weight. Our focus for this discussion then, is shifted to that group of people: those who are looking to restore weight lost following a major illness.

There is a huge variety of illnesses that can lead to weight loss. There are indeed some illnesses which primarily manifest through weight loss (those mostly being the illness whose mechanism is that of protein wastage). In these, the primary symptom is inexplicable weight loss, which can be very alarming. In other words, these are not just illnesses that lead to weight loss, but also diseases in which the weight loss is actually the illness! These are the sorts of illnesses that can reduce you, from being a health 80 kilograms, to being less than 20 kilograms in a couple of weeks’ time! There are also many other illnesses that manifest through muscle wastage. And then there are those that don’t necessarily lead to body mass wastage, but whose treatments have the same effects.

Very few people will go through a chemotherapy course, for instance, and still retain the weight they originally had. Illnesses that interfere with a person’s appetite by way of negating it also fall into this category, especially when they persist for long.
There are two reasons for wanting to restore such weight lost due to major illness. For starters, being severely underweight, just like being severely overweight, is very unhealthy. Furthermore, when you are severely underweight, you tend to look generally feeble and unhealthy, and this can compromise your opportunities in life, both economically and socially. In that situation you come across to others as being weak and vulnerable, and that is definitely not a good thing.

So, how do you go about restoring such lost weight after a major illness?
Well, the key to weight gain, as is indeed the key to weight loss, lies in careful dietary modifications and exercise. This is especially the case where you are not just looking to gain weight, but also gain weight in a healthy way. You need to avoid a situation where, from a struggle to gain weight, you subsequently find yourself looking to lose weight (on account of your having gained weight in the wrong way). To gain weight, what you need to do is not over-eating. That would be counterproductive.

Rather, you need to eat the proper types of foods (especially those rich in the right types of fat, like fish, chicken, avocadoes, nuts and so on)… but still in modest amounts. Then you need to engage in certain forms of exercise that have been known to be helpful in weight gain – so that the weight you ultimately gain is not of that ugly flabby variety, but rather of a lean, healthy and aesthetically appealing variety.