The Truth About Weight Gainer Supplements

I talked a little bit about weight gainers in my article regarding supplements a little while ago but I think this is an important topic that deserves revisiting simply due to the fact that this is a website dedicated to those trying to gain weight and build muscle.

Before I delve too deep into weight gainers, there’s one thing that I need to put out there, and that’s this:

"If I had the money and the time to be constantly eating real quality food, I would never ever take weight gainers"

If you’re going to take one thing away from this article, it is that weight gainers are a means to an end and not something that you should be relying heavily on.

Weight Gainers are a meal supplement, NOT a meal replacement. So you should take them IN ADDITION to your meals, not INSTEAD of them.

One thing that all weight gainers will have in common is that they are:

  • all high in protein
  • high in carbohydrates
  • and of course, high in calories

Personally, I always try to compare a number of different brands in order to get the one with the highest calorie to carbohydrate ratio.

That is, it should give me as many calories as possible without giving me the excess carbohydrates.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that the protein content in weight gainers, while very high, isn’t so important because you aren’t drinking them as protein shakes. You can and should be getting more protein elsewhere.

The second is that if you’re bulking (and if you’re taking weight gainers, then you are bulking), you want to strictly monitor the amount of carbohydrates you are ingesting lest you gain too much fat that you struggle to shed later on.

Finally, if I’m going to take a weight gainer, I’m going to get the most bang for my buck so I have to try to maximize the amount of calories that I’m getting from it.

Aside from learning how to choose the correct weight gainer, the other important point to mention about this supplement is when exactly to take it.

The easy way to think about this is that in essence, weight gainers are your “cheat meals” in that they don’t require time or effort to eat or prepare. So take them whenever you don’t have the time or aren’t in the right place to sit down and eat a full meal.

For the most part, for someone who works 9 to 5, this usually means twice a day, one about 2 hours after lunch, and one right before the commute home.

Until Next Time,
Jim