Yeah, the gym people are definitely a good source of information. They may already have mentioned it to you, but what they refer to is usually called “bulking” in the weight lifting/power lifting/body building/… communities. There are many different guides to it out there which you can find with a simple internet search. They contain a ton of different suggestions on what you can eat/do for gaining weight. Some of these guides are written for people with smaller budgets as well.

For example these guides often include things like protein shakes which have the benefit of being dense in calories while also being a liquid, rather than solid food. But I would advise you to look up some of these guides and then consider what fits you best.

Can highly recommend making one of the diy ‘soylent’ type drinks, using those in the morning so that the rest of your meals throughout the day are where you get your surplus, because you can mix in whatever extras you’d like, if you’re not allergic, throwing a load of nuts into a food processor to get a fine paste can help with boosting the protein and fat content of the drink.

well i can tell you the wrong way to do it… eat for pleasure. find stuff you really like eating, keep a lot of it around all the time in easy access, and any time you feel slightly bored or down or negative in any way eat some. the best foods for this are small, easy to eat only a little at a time, and are sweet with high calorie density. peanut or mint m&ms were one of my go to snacks for this. you eat a few and it feels like youre not eating anything, and you enjoy the pleasure of eating it; the taste, the texture, the joy of chewing it and swallowing it, and you just want that pleasure to continue. so you eat a little more, and before you know it you need to be chewing on something all the time to keep the feeling going. then youve eaten 1000 calories of something and it feels like nothing until your stomach hurts because youve eaten too much. sometimes youll start snacking while doing something else and look down and realize you dont remember eating the entire party sized bag of peanut m&ms and youre sad theyre gone cause you kinda want some more.

maybe dont actually do this though because it can very quickly turn into an eating disorder. thats what i did for a lot of my life, just eating for pleasure, and after a while it didnt even matter if i was hungry or not, i just wanted to eat because it felt good and not eating didnt. it didnt help that my favorite foods were always sweets. i still struggle with binge eating because i just love yummy food so much.

but maybe you can take something positive from this? its way easier to eat more when you like what youre eating. if youre just stuffing your face with crap you dont even like it will be really hard to keep up with it, especially if youre already not very food motivated. other people are recommending to eat a lot of protein, which is good advice for your health generally, but protein is also one of the things your body uses to gauge whether youve had enough to eat or not. if you try to stuff yourself on protein youre likely to have a hard time getting enough calories because eating a lot of protein tends to satiate your hunger faster. you should also avoid stimulants like caffeine if you can, since they tend to suppress your appetite.

i feel like im just telling you to avoid all the things that helped me lose weight lol. hope this helped in some small way. best of luck!

for me I started being able to actually eat once I started eating 3 meals a day, even if thats just a bagel in the morning. warming your body up to eating helps you feel more hungry

Beer

oh hey, i’m in a very similar situation (182cm/53kg, according to the multiple nutritionists i’ve worked with i apparently need to be downing 4’500-5’000 kcal/day even without exercise). now, i’m nowhere near that point yet, but i have managed to get myself up to about 3’500 kcal/day without needing to vomit from the sheer volume of food in my stomach, so maybe this’ll be helpful :)
here’s my thoughts and tips, in no particular order:

first of all, there’s plenty you can do without even having to modify an existing diet that much. oils and other fats are extremely calorie-dense, and you can easily add more of them to a dish you were gonna make anyway. making pasta bolognese? slather the pasta in olive oil before adding the sauce and boom, you’ve just added like 100 kcal per serving! making toast? you can easily slap like 70 kcal worth of butter on there. a single spoonful of peanut butter is 100 kcal, spread some generously on some crackers or use it as a dip and you’ve just made a multi-hundred kcal snack which you can down in just a few bites.

you mentioned ice cream… ice cream is decently calorie-dense, but isn’t great and IME tends to be hard to eat a lot of (especially if it has a lot of sugar, which most ice creams do). i certainly wouldn’t rely on it as a primary source of additional calories; you’re trying to eat an additional 1’600 kcal/day and, to the shock and dismay of 10-year-olds everywhere, eating that much ice cream every day will rapidly become a chore and then pure torture. what it is useful for is smoothies!

smoothies (or any other kind of liquid calories) are your friend because of the very simple fact that it’s much easier to just fuckin chug them even if you aren’t that hungry – or, better yet, right after eating a regular meal to “fill in the cracks”. if you have a blender they’re super easy to make, and generally don’t require a lot of expensive ingredients (normally you’ve got milk or ice cream as a base, plus maybe some sugar and/or (frozen) berries and/or peanut butter and/or whatever other bullshit you have on hand!). you can also just get them pre-made; for example my school cafeteria sells yfood smoothies at a discount and i’ve been buying them to add 500 kcal to my lunch every day for a relatively modest increase in price. there’s also smoothie powder you can get in bulk (mainly intended for protein shakes), but personally i find that those taste pretty gross.

might update this post later if i think of anything more :3

EDIT: oh yeah, consider getting fiber supplements or similar, because after eating a bunch of “food that makes you fat” you likely will have a hard time finding space in your stomach for “food that helps you poop” and end up making yourself very constipated.

On a serious note, add MSG to most of your food it will help you eat more food. Condiments with everything, specifically mayo, I like kewpie mayo. Olive oil with with things like hummus. Bread with butter (and Marmite, if you like it, for b group vitamins). Bacon. White rice and beans. Avoid sugars. Focus on specific workout zone areas.

Keep a bag of seeds, nuts, and/or dried fruit on your person to snack on and drink more very sugary or fatty drinks (soda, fruit juice, milkshakes) while you’re at work. If you’re already stuffing yourself in the evenings you need to spread more calories over the rest of the day.

Genuinely, thank you so much for asking this. My dumb ass didn’t even think to make a post on here lol

hi friend! i am also a hard gainer and i go to the gym all the time. i eat an obscene amount of protein and fat to gain weight. yogurt, cheese, butter, milk, some meat, salad dressing, sweets more than i enjoy like ice cream or doughnuts. tuna, oysters for snack protein.

more small meals through the day rather than one or two large meals helps.

i went from 155 to now 185 in a year. i also started working out about twice a week, sometimes more sometimes less. would love to talk your head off if you have questions

that’s certainly something that one doesn’t read frequently. “anyone have tips for gaining weight?” while 99.9% of the population ask “anyone have tips for losing weight?” xD

anyways, milk. if you’re non-vegan, milk is the way to go. 1 L of milk contains around 500 kcal iirc, so like one full meal. no matter how full you are, milk always goes down. plus it’s delicious.

in case you can’t digest lactose, there’s cheap medication for that. they’re called “lactase pills”, cost $10 for a package of a hundred pills, and you take one before drinking milk. it is active in your tummy and breaks down the lactose for you. it is not absorbed into your bloodstream, so it has no side effects. or i guess you could also just dissolve the pill in the milk before drinking it.

edit: sry i meant it costs $10 for hundred pills, not $100, lmao

Drink whole milk

Ask your doctor! :)

Asking gym people how to gain weight is like asking cocaine addicts how to run faster.