I know you have heard it before but I will say it again – if you are not eat­ing enough calo­ries, you will NEVER gain weight, no mat­ter what you do. THERE IS NO WAY AROUND IT! Even if you have the per­fect train­ing rou­tine, you will never grow unless you pro­vide your body with the proper nutri­ents. It’s like say­ing you want to build a house but you don’t have enough bricks, cement or wood. It will be impos­si­ble to build that house. It’s like try­ing to buy a $100,000 house and you only have $50,000. It’s going to be down­right impos­si­ble. Long story short – if you are not grow­ing, there could be two problems:

1. You have not applied energy bal­ance (energy in ver­sus energy out) prop­erly. It is a lot trick­ier than sim­ply mul­ti­ply­ing your body weight by a fac­tor of 18–22 as most authors sug­gest. This fac­tor neglects your unique rest­ing meta­bolic rate, your unique cost of daily activ­ity, your unique cost of exer­cise activ­ity and the ther­mic effect of food.
2. You com­bine the wrong food at the wrong times. Obvi­ously eat­ing 3000 calo­ries of chips and Dori­tos is not as effec­tive as eat­ing 3000 calo­ries of high qual­ity carbs, fats and proteins.

There are also a few crit­i­cal win­dows in the day when you must con­sume the major­ity of your nutri­ents to max­i­mize mus­cle growth. If you wish to ensure that your mus­cles have enough fuel to sup­port your work­outs, train intensely, recover from work­out to work­out and, let’s not for­get, grow NEW mus­cle, you have to keep track of what you are eat­ing every day. There is no way around it. This is the num­ber one rea­son why skinny guys never gain weight or why any­body, for that mat­ter, will not make the qual­ity gains that they so des­per­ately strive for.

.