Something I inherited from dad’s side is the gene for fast metabolism and an ectomorphic body type. I find it hard to gain weight or build muscle to achieve my dream athletic body. We only ever hear about losing weight in the fitness world but overlook people who struggle to gain weight. This is when I discovered how apps like Body24 can help me plan my nutrition to build my dream athletic body with the perfect muscle tone.

Things to consider before downloading the Body24 app

It can be so overwhelming to navigate the process of meal planning while juggling your professional and personal responsibilities. Unless you’re a professional dietitian or doctor, it can seem impossible to process the vast amounts and often contradictory nutritional information out there. Sometimes it’s just easier to leave the work to the professionals. Therefore, fitness apps like Body24 can be so convenient. These apps are very time efficient and more affordable than buying expensive meal programs. Body24 was an incredibly helpful app that allowed me to plan my nutrition wisely in order to gain weight and it is ideal for women who are struggling to gain weight on their own. You don’t need to comb through a mountain of information to figure out a proper meal plan to gain weight. If you’re someone who is motivated by tracking your progress, Body24 is the perfect app for you. It has an extensive database of recipes and dishes with nutritional information displays for each one. You can easily track your calories and your macro intake. From experience, I can tell you how easy it is to mess up your fitness goals, whether you’re trying to gain weight or lose weight, by not tracking the correct nutritional content of the food you eat. Body24 keeps track for you so that’s one less thing to worry about! Body24 is not a magical diet pill. You would still need to make healthy choices and put in the work. Body24 is also not for women who are obsessed with calorie counting. The calorie counter is just for you to keep track, not to obsess or delve over.

Presenting the product

• Body24 is an incredibly versatile app that has well-thought-out features. In order to gain weight, you need to make changes to your diet as well as your fitness routines. Body24 can help you in both these aspects with features to track your diet as well as your physical activity. If you’ve used fitness apps before, you would have come across the problem of a limited database of food. The good thing about Body24 is that you can enter your own personalized dishes with the ingredients you want. Body24 is an incredibly versatile app when it comes to meal tracking. For example, it offers personalized meal options that cater to various dietary needs such as vegetarian, pescatarian or vegan.

So, let’s sum up the pros and cons of Body24:

Pros

• Simple User Interface- Body24 has a very user-friendly interface that anyone can navigate around.
• Well-rounded app – For anyone to have successful weight gain or weight loss journey, they need to think about changing their fitness routine as well as their dietary habits. Body24 has features that help track progress for both. So, it is perfect for a newbie who has little knowledge of exercising or dieting.
• Affordable – Body24 is an app that is completely free of charge. You won’t find hidden subscription costs. Because it’s free, it is accessible to so many people who either can’t afford professional coaching or meal planning.
• Continuous improvement- Body24 constantly updates its app to provide the most seamless user experience.

Cons

• Body24 is a relatively new app, so it hasn’t yet grown an ecosystem of users for a forum where people can ask questions or share their journey and ideas.

Features and Benefits

To gain weight, there are two things you need to do: 1) Have a calorific excess with a lot of protein You may have heard the phrase BS are made in the kitchen, not the gym’. Your nutritional intake has by the far the most impact on your fitness goals, whether you’re looking to lose weight or gain weight. You can never out-exercise a bad diet. It’s important to calculate how many calories and macros you need to reach your fitness goals. Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the minimum number of calories your body requires to survive carrying out basic survival activities such as breathing and pumping blood. This is the starting point of calculating how much calories you need to eat daily to lose weight or gain weight. BMR changes as you gain muscle because muscle is a high maintenance tissue, so if you increase your muscle mass, you will be burning more calories at rest. I don’t think I need to tell you how important protein is with the amount of coverage it gets from the media. Protein forms the building blocks of your body, from your muscles to your hair. Protein is probably the most important nutrient you need to consider when gaining weight because it can help you gain weight while looking lean. So, it is important to know how much protein you need per day in order for you to accomplish your goal of gaining weight and musculature. 2) Do a lot of weight training exercises that build your muscles. Muscle is quite a dense tissue. Comparing pound to pound, muscle tissue is actually heavier than fat. This is why you see people not losing weight even though they look considerably thinner. Muscle can help you gain weight and achieve a nice toned look at the same time. If you’re an ectomorph looking to gain weight, you need to understand that your body burns fat faster than it gains muscle which is why it’s difficult to gain weight. However, in order to gain muscle mass, you need to do dedicated muscle building exercises such as weight training and fewer cardio exercises. Even more importantly, you need to figure out how many calories and protein you need. Without the right amount of protein, all that weight training you did could be in vain since muscle wouldn’t exist without protein.

Where does Body24 come into all of this?

Dedicated Nutritional tracker Body24 can help you set your weight gain goals and figure out how many extra calories you will need to eat per day to reach your target weight and how much macros you need. With its extensive database on the nutritional information on various foods, you can easily track your macros. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, it can be tough to track your nutrition levels, but it is also terribly important to do it. If you don’t track your nutrient intakes, you will easily gloss over nutrient deficiencies until you end up with serious health problems. Having a visual dashboard of your daily intake could literally be a lifesaver, even for meat eaters. Personalized recipes for a variety of dietary groups Body24 has personalized recipes that cater to various eating styles like vegan or pescatarian, so you wouldn’t need to worry about meal planning. If you’re a vegan or vegetarian who is looking to gain weight, it can be tricky to know which foods to eat to get the correct protein intake for the day to meet your goals. Body24 can simplify that with their personalized recipes that have balanced macros. Monitoring water consumption Drinking enough water is incredibly important for any healthy diet. Sometimes, when you don’t keep track you could be surprised how little water you drink throughout the day. Body24 has a built-in water watchdog. It tells you how much water you need to consume every day by taking into account various factors such as your weight and activity levels. You can then visually monitor how much water you’re consuming throughout the day so that you’re less likely to under-consume water. Monitoring physical activity It’s usually ectomorphs who have the goal of gaining weight. Ectomorphs are people with a high metabolism who find it easier to burn fat than gain muscle, so it is hard for them to gain weight or muscle. Their physical activity would differ from that of other body types who aim to lose weight. When losing weight, you’re encouraged to as much cardio as possible initially. However, if you want to gain weight, you need to change your work out routine. You need to minimize cardio activity and increase muscle building weight training exercises. Body24 can help you monitor the amount and type of physical activity you do. You can monitor it to ensure you’re not doing too much cardio related activities for example. For ectomorphs, gaining muscle (and hence weight) is best achieved by targeting the largest muscle group in your body, which is found in your legs. Leg workouts can be especially beneficial for female ectomorphs who usually have slender thighs and narrow hips. Targeted leg workouts can help build shapely thighs and hips. You can add your weight training exercises such as leg workouts and their duration to Body24 so that it can track your calorie expenditure and figure out how much macros you need.

Meals dedicated to different workout styles

One of the most fundamental flaws I see in most fitness programs is that they treat diet and exercise independently. Most diet programs don’t match the exercise routine that’s recommended with it. Fitness is not about diet or exercise, it is about how these two aspects work together. This is such an under-emphasized point in the fitness world. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that your dietary needs change depending on the type of exercise you do. It’s a philosophy that’s been used in bodybuilding to develop methods like carb cycling. For example, if your workout routine is full of HIIT exercises, you will need to increase the percentage of carbohydrates in your diet. This for me is where Body24 truly stands out from its competitors. It’s the only one I have come across that tailor’s meal plans according to the type of exercise you do. It will also plan your pre-workout or post-workout meals, another area many fitness newbies are usually confused about.

Personalized coaching

As with the previous point, one area Body24 shines is customization of workouts and meal plans according to people’s goals. Not many people have the time, money or accessibility of a health coach. But with Body24, you feel like you don’t need one. You get customized meal and workout plans for FREE. Now that’s what I call a bargain.

Alternative Apps to Body24

Body24 is one of the many dozens of fitness apps out there. With the number of apps out there, it can be overwhelming to know which ones to choose. When choosing an app, it is important to choose that has been designed by qualified health and fitness professionals. Look for apps that have a large following and are backed by qualified people. Some great alternatives to Body24 for people looking to gain weight include:

1. Weight Gain, Diet Tracker

Weight Gain, Diet Tracker is an app that is quite similar to Body24. Just like Body24, it has an extensive database of nutritional info for various dishes and a calorie monitor. It calculates how many extra calories and macros you need to gain weight based on your diet and activity levels. It also lets you keep a food and exercise diary (which it uses to calculate calorie intake and expenditure). Additionally, there are features to calculate your Body Mass Index and Body Fat Percentage as well.

2. MyFitnessPal

This is probably the grandfather of all fitness apps and has been around for years. The shining feature of this app is the incredibly extensive database of nutritional info that they’re constantly updating. It now even has popular food items from restaurants. It has a cool bar code scanner feature for your groceries that lets you automatically log your ingredients for the week. You will then be able to choose from a vast array of dishes you can prepare with those ingredients. MyFitnessPal also has a calorie and activity monitor.

3. Muscle Gainer

Muscle Gainer is dedicated specifically for those looking to gain weight. It has a combined macro and weight tracker which will tell you exactly how much carbohydrate, fat, and protein you need to eat to achieve your target weight. For gaining weight, you can’t just eat extra calories because that will increase body fat. You need to be strategic about it and eat the right macros to gain weight by increasing muscle mass without increasing body fat. The only limitation is that it is only available for iOS. In a world that’s increasingly obsessed with fitness, there is plenty of talk about losing weight. But, what they seemed to have glossed over is that there are people who struggle to gain weight. With the overwhelming amount and often contradictory health information thrown at us by the media, it’s normal to not know where to start. It’s taken over 12 years of trial and error to find out the meal and exercise plan that works best for me as a vegetarian. But, my journey would’ve been far easier and quicker if there were apps like Body24 to give me the correct information to start with.