 Question is from that fly guy. I'm a hardgainer and have read your hardgainer guide. My issue is still getting enough calories while not eating junk. Would you recommend a weight gainer if it's from a great company like Legion? I feel like this is like one of Mike's guys that works for him. Yeah, I feel like we got infiltrated. Should I try a weight gainer like this great company Legion makes for you? So a hardgainer guide is available for, it's still available and it's free. So it's basically a guide that helps people who have trouble gaining muscle mass. That's at mindpumpfree.com. Now, here's the thing with eating junk. I know how hard it can be to eat adequate calories to gain muscle when you are somebody who burns a lot of calories either because you have a fast metabolism or because you have a very active life. I know the struggle. Now, those of you who don't know what that struggle is like, you're listening, you're thinking, oh, I would love that. That's such an awesome problem to have. I wish it was always greener. Yeah, it sucks. It's hard. You're feeding yourself and feeding yourself and you're not putting on muscle and it's like, I can't eat anymore. So there are certain tricks of the trade that will help you do that. Now, part of that is seeking out hyper palatable foods. Now, this doesn't mean you eat junk food necessarily, but junk food definitely has more of a place with a hardgainer than it does with someone who's trying to lose weight because junk food does a very good job of getting you to eat more calories. It's tasty, so it makes you want to eat more. So the kinds of junk food that I like to eat when I was trying to gain that isn't super unhealthy is like I would make my own french fries and I'd use olive oil, for example, put them in the oven, hyper palatable salad, it's salty, I could get my carbs and starches that way or I'd make a bowl of rice and put a bunch of soy sauce in there and maybe some butter or something like that, give me some extra calories or cook the rice with bone broth to add the proteins. So there's definitely some value into eating things that are hyper palatable when your problem is not eating enough food. Now, is drinking your calories a good strategy? Absolutely, actually one of the easiest ways to boost your calories when you're struggling and you're hitting, what you feel like as you're ceiling is to drink your calories along with the stuff that you eat. A weight gainer is one way to do that. You could make your own weight gainer as well, you could use things like whole milk. I prefer that. But here's the thing, protein sources tend to be an issue, how do you increase the protein content of making your own gainer? Typically you'd use a protein powder, unless you want to do what I did a few times, which I only did it a few times because it was gross, which is blend up chicken breast, it's just disgusting. Well, I use that part of the monster mash thing, like the vertical dining room. No, not in the blender. I never had a lot of success with weight gainers. And I did all the, in fact, most of the time whenever I take a weight gainer, just give me the shits afterwards. I felt like I was horrible, horrible gas. I just drank that and I feel like it literally just came out. Like 30 minutes later, that's how I felt. Now, I've actually never used Mike's weight gainer, so I don't know what it's like, but here's my strategy when I was bulking. And this is like really new for me, I mean, really close to when I was just doing this, right? So when I was competing and trying to put mass on and I was training at the volume I was, I was eating north of 5,000 calories. That's really hard to do all clean. So I had my targets of what I wanted to hit from like all whole natural foods. So it was about 35, in order to get my protein intake, a good amount of good vegetables and greens in my diet, I needed to hit roughly about 3,500 calories of like whole natural foods. And then when I allowed myself, that's when I would allow myself to go outside of that. And so I know Sal was giving examples of things that I was lazier than that, I would order five guys and fries. Like that would be how I pile on the calories later on to hit my 5,000. I'd go 3,500 of eating clean, my made prep meals. And then once I hit my target, then the way I rewarded myself was I would allow myself to have more, you know, palatable foods that I really, really enjoyed. So. Now I got, I pulled up, so I didn't know he even had a weight gainer, the products that I'm most familiar with from Legion are Pulse and their protein powder. But he does have a weight gainer. So here's the difference. The weight gainers that we took when we were kids, because I took those same weight gainers at them and the same thing happened to me, they gave me the, you know, they gave me liquid poops. What, how many calories was your, were those weight gainers? Oh dude, some of them were like 900, yeah, 900 calories. Packed full of just sugar and shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One serving of his gainer is 370 calories. Okay. Oh wow, it's not even that high. No, it's, it's definitely like a small meal, but it's, and this is why I like Mike. He doesn't make shitty, you know, he's not trying to make shitty products. He's just higher fat probably. Well, 51 grams of carbs, 38 grams of protein. And then the ingredients are, are, are good. The protein is coming from, you know, whey, casein. And the carbs are from things like potato starch, oat flour, you know, he's putting flax seed in there and stuff like that. So not a bad, not a bad choice in terms for, especially for convenience, cause making your own can be different. Drinking calories definitely is a good strategy though. Here's an easy way to do it by the way. If you want to do a simple, simple, simple, how do I drink more calories into my diet? If you're not intolerant to dairy, if you're totally cool with dairy and you could drink milk, drink a glass of whole milk with every meal, you know? That's easy. That's an easy way to add like 500 calories to your whole diet. With breakfast, lunch, dinner, and your meals in between, drink water and at the end of your meal, take a big glass of whole organic milk and just drink it. I mean, in the bodybuilder community, I mean, this is how we all fall in love with peanut butter, man. That's how I like it. So peanut butter is the jam. My homemade, my homemade shake. Peanut butter is not the jam, it's not the jam. Peanut butter. Yeah. No, my, my homemade shake would be a whey and I used almond milk. I didn't even use, I could have got more calories if I used whole milk, but you know, too much dairy does bother me. I can have some of it like my whey protein I can handle, but lots of milk, ice cream, if I'm doing too much dairy, it definitely affects me. So I was using almond milk, which is hardly anything, but man, and whey, which is not a ton of calories, but I've got in there, I've got two tablespoons of peanut butter, one tablespoon of Nutella. I add in like a quarter cup of egg whites in addition to that. And then I used to take hazelnut ground coffee and then pour that in there and then blend that all up. And man, that's, it ends up being a pretty high calorie shake still and it's phenomenal. I need to throw a banana in there too for an extra 120, 130 calories. So here, this is what I did, this was what I did back when I, and that shake, that shake did down, sound delicious. Here's what I did when I was a kid before I could, this is when I could have milk. I can't do this now. We're totally destroying me. I wouldn't need to anyway. I don't have any issues bulking anymore. I'm older now and for whatever reason, I can gain weight far easier than when I was a kid. But I would did, I did the milk thing, right? The whole milk. And I looked up the macros now. One 16 ounce, which is a big glass of whole milk, right? 16 ounces. That's 272 calories. 14 grams of fat, 20 grams of carbs, 14 grams of protein. So you tell me, if you add three glasses of that with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you're looking at almost a thousand calories in its milk. And it's got protein, fat, and carbs. The problem is some people like you and I can't digest it that well. Yeah, well, you remember that, there was a, I think there was like a little thing that was going around for a while. I know there's articles around that that we're talking about all the post-workout shakes and talking shit about it. And they were talking about how one glass of milk is just, studies show that it's just as valuable as someone going about buying something. It's like the same macros. Go ahead. You know what I was thinking of was the whole rocky thing where people would start taking raw eggs. I totally fell into that for a while, trying to be as savage as possible and gain as much weight as I could. I would throw raw eggs in just every shake and then in my mouth and try to make that work. I did the same thing, but have you, did you actually drink the eggs by themselves? Yeah. Did you ever crack them and drink them? Yeah, I did three to four. I would put in a cup and just down the house. I did that one time. It's the worst feeling in the world. So slimy. One more note though, I want to say this. Yeah, I have something I want to give to this person. Oh, okay. So sometimes when you're a hard gainer, it's not because you're not eating enough calories. Sometimes your workout sucks. It's true. And if you send, here's the thing. I tell you what, I used to, I had this debate with someone a long time. We're like, no, it's just about calories. It's okay. If I gave you anabolic steroids right now and you had no extra calories and you did the same workout, do you think you gained muscle? And they said, well, yeah, you probably would gain a little bit of muscle. So there's a lot of signals that tell the body to build muscle. And the main one is your workouts. And if you're not gaining muscle, sometimes it's because your workouts are not effective. Well, a lot of times, a lot of times people are following. I mean, how common is that? That you're following kind of the same type of a routine. Yeah. Yeah, I change up the reps or the snap, but people typically kind of gravitate towards like the same type of routines. But I want to give some other really good tips that helped me, because this was like a fucking decades. I was, this was a struggle for me. I'm so glad. I'm so glad I didn't know you back then. We would have killed ourselves. Oh, I'm sure we, and we, and I've done it all. Everything from setting alarms in the middle of the night. So the things that worked the best for me later on after all the things that I tried, I learned that if I ate stuff that was really high calorie, so a lot of times what happens if you, you know that you need to have junk food or you need to add more, you know, palatable foods in order to hit that calorie intake, I would make the mistake of doing that for lunch. For example, I'd have like a big quiz nose and chips and like a soda or something for lunchtime. Problem with when you eat those really palatable foods like that and you stuff yourself is then you're full for like four to five hours. And when you're trying to eat 4,000, 5,000 plus calories and you're trying to gain like that and you're struggling and you get, and you eat something that satiates you for that long, you get behind on the calories, you can't. So I learned early on that if I ate leaner, whole foods, natural foods early, I found I could eat every two hours. So my body digested it fast. I was ready to eat again. And even if I wasn't starving or hungry, I could eat again another good 3,500 calorie meal like every two hours. And this is where the every two hours thing has value. When you have to try and eat 4,000 calories, dividing that up in just two or three meals is fucking daunting. But if it's broken up in these like 500 calorie meals every few hours, it's a little bit easier. So that strategy worked really well by eating leaner, cleaner, whole foods throughout the day. So I could consistently eat every two hours. And then like I said, if I hit my targets, if I stayed to, stayed the course, I ate all my meals that I prepared, my reward to myself was, oh, now tonight, I'll allow myself to have the burger or I'd allow things like pizza and the diet or I allow these shakes that have Nutella and peanut butter, I would allow these types of, you know, hyper palatable foods to pile on later on to make sure that I hit the caloric intake. That really works. You're right, you're right. And you don't want it to backfire either, right? Eating too much junk food, your health starts to go south, your digestion goes south, you can kiss your gains goodbye. So always consider health. You want to gain as healthy as possible because that's going to give you the longest road to good lean gains. If you do it in an unhealthy way, it's not going to work for very long and it'll backfire, it can backfire many times. I did it to me once, one time I ate a whole bucket of KFC chicken because I was trying to, trying to be on bulk or whatever. I can't eat KFC chicken ever again. I eat so much of it, grossed me out. And I remember that whole day, nothing else. I didn't eat much the next day because I messed up my digestion. Fat just dripping down your arms. I smelled like chicken the next day. I was sweating, no joke. I've done the same. And people are like, did you just eat KFC? Like, dude, I ate it yesterday.