Lifestyle tips

You don't have a job? And you have kids, in this day and age, in California of all places? Wow.

Anyway, I don't know what you mean by eating unhealthily, but I think you could make some changes and still gain. In fact, you probably should, especially since you have kids and likely a much greater share of chore responsibilities since you aren't working a paid job.

One is that I might recommend trying to eat some different food. Even salad can be loaded with calories, if you add enough dressing or add chicken to it. You also need protein, and what store doesn't have fatty cuts of meat. I do wonder what you cook for dinner, since presumably the others don't experience a similar problem.

Here's another idea, which may seem counter-intuitive until I explain it a little more; some exercise. I don't mean marathons, but maybe some light walking; just get out of the house a little bit. Or lift some weights.. that might help build some muscle to help support your future increased weight. Don't worry about whether this physical activity will burn many calories. It won't, and you'll see this if you look up some calorie burn estimates. If you walk a mile but eat another cookie, the cookie would likely more than make up for the calories burned from the walk. Light exercise can also have the effect of making you hungrier, so you may even end up eating even more than you would have. This means more of a gain, and you should feel like you have some more energy. This effect on hunger is probably one of many reasons why weight loss efforts fail.

I don't know if you drink any cream-based weight gain shakes, but if you do, keep those in the evening, shortly before going to sleep. For some folks it has the effect of creating drowsiness. It may also make you feel full for longer, making you eat less. So you probably don't want to drink any of these in the morning.

I hope you find some of these ideas useful.

My wife's been gaining for years and I'm STILL coming to grips with the "no energy" issue, especially since I knew her as a skinny relentlessly energetic clean freak.

Fatties are lazy. No way around it. I've experienced the downward spiral first hand. First it's a "lack of energy" that then produces slothfulness. When slothfulness is normalized, the person normalizes the effects of laziness (they're OK now if there's some dishes in the sink, hard to reach food wrappers in their car, etc). A general slobbing out occurs and they're now naturally fine with what may have been abhorrent to them when they were skinny.

Regardless if you're a feeder or not, this can be really frustrating to the other partner – especially if they work full-time (like your husband) you have kids, etc.

This is what helped me: imagining my entire day if I had to wear a backpack with 125-200lbs of weights in it. That's what my partner experiences 24/7.

Of course every day would be "so draining". I'd be doing a HELL of a lot less and have less energy, too.

I remind myself of that and let my princess take a load off and get her beauty rest. Anything that involves stairs or walking she's slowly handed over to me. Sucks sometimes; and the fattie can come across as nagging because they're simply too drained to get things done or help you out.

But if you want a piggie, expect a little pig sty, expect a little laziness. Comes with the territory IMO. 🐽

While I think there's some truth to this, not always.

There's skinny people with almost no energy, from eating little to almost nothing. Metabolism is rock bottom, each calorie is precious, body goes into survival mode, and there's not much energy to do much else. The most extreme form of this is anorexia, which would ultimately result in death when there just no calories left to burn and the body shuts down from starvation.

On the other hand, I do at times see large women who can really move. I've also noticed that volleyball and soccer players have a tendency to be chunky; football players too. When I was a kid and teen, I thought most of the female soccer and volleyball players (who tended to be thicker) were cuter than most of the cheerleaders (who tended to be thinner). There were plump cheerleaders but they were uncommon. Those soccer and volleyball players had more energy than most folks, despite the additional weight.

So, I don't think it's necessarily that simple.

I get what you're saying. In fact, when I ran a 5K, the thing that amazed me the most was the amount of REALLY obese folks that made remarkable times.

Just saying, carrying around 150'ish pounds is exhausting in itself. Let alone, sadly many obese partners are actually malnourished because they eat predominantly empty calories AND live their day-to-day experiencing sugar crashes that produce tiredness.