Been at a desk for 20-years, now at physical labor. Recently figured out that I’m running a serious caloric deficit, and I’m already a skinny fucker. Also, I’m aiming to build a little muscle and a lot of endurance. How do I eat?!
Back when I was working hard, ate tons of fast food. Too expensive and time consuming, don’t want off the clock to go eat (hour round trip including eating). Took a 12-hour shift today and did OK sucking down granola bars, water and kratom, ate my wife’s kickass meal when I got home.
What can I cook or bring to work to power me? What’s simple and cheap and doesn’t require much on-site prep? (We have a microwave, toaster, all that, I just want calories and protein in my face with no fuss). Afraid I’m half-ass cannibalizing myself.
When trying to gain weight (or simply not go minus as in your case) the method will be the opposite of what is needed to lose weight. I have helped someone with this in the past and what I saw as his greatest trouble was that he would get too full to eat more very quickly. I asked about his diet and it was just full of foods which are very filling without actually containing many calories. Lots of fruits and vegetables with almost no carb and no fat.
So really what you need are easily digestible and not too filling calorie rich ingredients. Think lots of grains and fat. Buttered potatoes instead of air fried potatoes. Carrots instead of lettuce. White pasta over whole grain pasta. Cream or mayo based sauce instead of a stock/water based sauce etc. However still try to eat healthy. If going for bread take the white bread without added sugar for example. And still include vegetables but don’t make them over ⅓ of your plate. I have read many success stories with adding heavy amounts of dairy to the diet which makes sense since milk is there to grow a calf as fast as possible. Drinking a package of milk a day is almost a miracle cure to being underweight if you can stomach it. In fact the medical food packs they give to malnourished children are dairy based. Consider it if your diet allows it.
However what specific meals which are convenient to bring I don’t have many ideas. But I hope this mode of thinking will help at least a bit. It has to be a big portion that you can actually stomach. Think about which foods you seem to be able to eat a huge amount of and then narrow those down to the most calorie rich. They also have to not clog your stomach for the whole rest of the day so being easy to digest is also key.
I’m basically in the same boat as OP except opposite job direction (went from labor to desk). Over a decade of manual labor with no scheduled lunch breaks has left me with poor eating habits. I tried meal prepping but ended up doing what your friend was doing, loading up on fruits and vegetables with some protein. Wouldn’t eating stuff like buttered potatoes and drinking a couple glasses of milk everyday lead to heart problems? Or would cardio and being underweight basically cancel that out?
I don’t have data to quote here but considering heart problems were rare back in the day when butter, lard and tallow was used in generous amounts in combination with obesity being rare and daily labor was common, I would assume it would be mostly fine. Heart problems in non-overweight people are rare even today, especially at younger ages.
There are also 2 new high quality studies out there showing milk fats being significantly safer for heart health compared to other saturated animal fats. I can link that study for you on request. However you wouldn’t need to use butter for your potatoes necessarily. You can oven bake potatoes in rapeseed oil or olive oil just fine and get the same calories in, if you happen to be afraid of milk fat that is. Finding a milk alternative would be harder however since the seed and nut oils out there are generally much less nutrient dense than whole milk. The exception would be soy milk but then you have to be careful not to get a version full of sugar.
Fat has been way over demonized in modern times, it’s nowhere near as bad as people think it is. There are some unhealthy trans fats, but those have been banned pretty much everywhere.