Eat more.......

The key to gaining weight is eating. More calories is mo' betta. Whatever you can do to eat more.

Fat is more calorie dense, so it's easier to increase calories with fat. How? Well that depends on you, but try fatty fish, cream sauces or butter (if you do dairy). Maybe you could try Richard Nikoley's "Fat Bomb Smoothie" over at Free The Animal. Use plenty of coconut oil - actually it may be hard to increase weight on coconut oil... Avocados have a good amount of calories...

Carbs help too, so eat those sweet potatoes/potatoes etc.

And it is totally NOT paleo, but the standard recommendation for hardgainers is milk. GOMAD (a gallon of milk per day) is a tried and true method to put some muscle on. Just don't be like Cartman and forget to workout. Raw, if you can get it is also recommended.

That's all I can think of at the moment...

To start: eat whole foods, and eat as much as you want of them. Going the protein shake, body-building-frankenfood route won't do your overall body any favors.

Beyond that, be patient; your body wants to heal itself first and foremost - and depending on your metabolic derangement, leaky gut, allergies, injuries, omega ratios, etc etc etc... it may be a bit of time before you start to have energy for anything beyond repairs.

In 15ish months of paleo, I have come up to 195ish lbs; I was 167 at the end of my phase of raw veganism. I lift some heavy stuff on occasion and walk several miles every day, but I don't have a regimented lifting program or anything of the sort. You could probably speed the process by doing so - but again, elevated cortisol is just another issue that is going to stall progresss, because your body will want to address that issue first.

Be gentle with yourself, and don't be afraid to put a package of bacon and an avocado on top of an eight egg omelet - with some extra cheese!

A tablespoon of butter or oil is 120 calories. You can put it on anything you eat. Protein, carbs, leafy green vegetables- they can all be used as fat delivery devices.

Being 'underweight'could be the exact thing you need to be for optimum health. Why would you want to load your arteries with fat? Every ounce you put on exerts more pressure on your joints, you don't want that. If you are fit enough to walk several miles a day that's great, how about some yoga for flexibility and strength. Embrace your natural slim shape, there's lots of research now that shows having a less than 10% fat body ratio improves your health long term and your mental abilities. Rheumatoid Artheritis is a PITA.

If you've got that much sensitivity to foods then it probably means you still have leaky gut. Your autoimmune (RA) is not caused by carbs but by specific proteins passing through the gut lining into the bloodstream (leaky gut). You should look into a gut-healing protocol like GAPS or some of the Weston A. Price stuff. Bone broth helps heal the gut, too. Also, I agree that your dinner looks tiny. Believe me, I know where you're coming from. I'm struggling to do paleo and gain weight myself. Sometimes it helps to pump all your food data into Cron-o-meter. This was a real eye-opener for me to see that I wasn't eating anywhere near the amount of calories that I would have initially thought.

Also, I recall reading something at Mark Sisson's blog about doing sprints to tell the autonomic nervous system that it needs to send the signals to gain muscle. You probably wouldn't hurt to gain some fat, but you don't want all of it to be fat. If your body doesn't get the signal to add muscle, then it won't build that tissue. Weight training would help increase bone density which should add some weight.

Good luck from a fellow paleo hardgainer!

I suggest you post this at the crossfit forum on crossfit.org.

There are a lot of crossfitters that do paleo, and they should be able to advise you as to the best way to put on weight. (I assume you want to put on both muscle and fat and maintain a normal ratio.)

BTW, I'm not completely sold on crossfit as an exercise methodology, so this is not a recommendation that you adopt crossfit.

I've been doing the same thing. Been trying to do a mass gain for a while now. No matter how much I ate while staying strict, I couldn't put on the weight. So I've been drinking a crap-load of milk everyday (whole milk, obviously). I've also been eating a lot of rice. Carbs are your friend while trying to gain weight. Since expanding my diet a little, I've put on 10lbs in the past two weeks. I'm 6'2", and was 190lbs. I'm currently at 200lbs, with 25lbs more to gain. I'm also squatting three times a week, as well as deadlifting, pressing, and working on my O-lifts. No conditioning/cardio for me at all, and I'd advise you to do the same. I'm finding it's working pretty well so far, although it's really uncomfortable to eat all the time. But you really do have to just eat, eat, eat, and lift, lift, lift. Anyway, hopefully this helps a little.

I suggest you start by making a log of your food, and then creeping up the calorie total. You definitely need to eat more to gain weight, but don't go all out and eat 8kcal for 2 weeks right away if your current intake is something like 2kcal. Bump it up by maybe 250-500kcal per day until you start seeing a slight steady increase. Do a re-look at the total about once every two weeks. Make small but effective changes.

If you are having trouble getting enough calories on a lower carb diet due to satiety/fullness issues, get a jar of honey or some dried fruit and just eat little nibbles of that before your main food. The fruit and/or honey should seriously increase your appetite.

Lift weights and eat to satiety in your current diet.

My boyfriend has also been trying to gain weight, we have found the only time he gains weight is when he literally glugs olive oil and ghee onto EVERYTHING (literally, he will pour ghee onto his meat) and eats sweet potatoes, yams, and plantains with almost every meal. Smoothies made with berries are great, he can drink them all the time and not feel overstuffed. Also taking regular walks and moving as much as he could really helped bump his appetite up.

Fry your foods on butter. Use TONS of olive oil. Buy the fattiest beef cuts. Deep fried chicken wings (keep the skin on!) Can you have coconut meat? It's very calorie dense. Combine it with avocado and you have an amazing tasting caloric bomb.

You need to eat.. and eat a lot. Go and hit the weights 3-4 times a week and eat as much food within the paleo diet as you possibly can, more than necessary for satiation.

I understand your problem in gaining weight.

Following L.Cordain or wolf, no matter how much I ate of their plan, how many nuts, olive oil, lean meats or sweet potatoes I ate, I could barely maintain my weight - and I spent a lot of time trying. I dropped a lot of weight I didn't want to lose on their recommendations.

Yes, had I been massively overweight that would have been super! but I was already very slim and muscular- abs and veins popping out in my arms etc, so I actually just lost muscle.

THE ONLY WAY in then end, to maintain or gain weight on 'paleo' was to eat VERY fatty meat. I'd eat lamb chops, up to 2kg a day. Eggs - 6 a day and 100 grams of butter a day.

You are on a path to an eating disorder - excluding foods on a whim that they cause you to 'flare up' will take you further than you want to go, trust me.

Everything is a balance. Some foods will cause this, some will cause that. To say Carbs are causing you this problem is madness.

define "eating a ton" i've had people tell me they have a high metabolism and eat alot and they'll list what they had the day before. i tell them i eat that much at breakfast what did you have the rest of the day? alot of people that think they can eat whatever and not get fat or gain weight don't really eat as much as they think. count out the calories add 500 divided out in the day. basically slowly add more. don't expect to eat what a 300 pound body builder can eat. and i find it easier to eat more in smaller frequent meals. i'm 5'7 180pounds 8-9% bf. but thats how you gain weight is to eat more. unless you just have a thyroid problem or some other issue your not digesting food. and do compound movements. isolation doesn't do crap for mass

Raw milk, or pasteurized if you don't care about that... both will help with muscle gain. Be careful eating too much fish. Farmed is super unhealthy and our oceans aren't exactly ideal environments, either.

I wouldn't eat seafood more often than every other day, and I would diversify as much as possible.

I'd say to poke around on bodybuilding.com they're pros on muscle gain.

For weight gain, calories out < calories in.

Instead of just fish, try chicken as well - it's not red meat and the dark meat has more calories. Add lots of fats - avocado, coconut oil, coconut milk. For carbs, eat bananas and sweet potatoes and potatoes and yams and fruit and rice (if you do rice). And work out by lifting heavy.

Dan, I have a lot of problems similar to your own. I'm 38 now, but from age 17 to 25 I was a regular and heavy power lifter; at 17 I was 170lbs but at 25 I was 230 (6'3") with a 1400 lb bench/squat/dead total. I was hovering at around 8000 (up to 10000) calories a day - I am a very hard gainer. Right around that time, I started noticing that my joints were getting achy; I took a little time off my regimen, and the longer I waited, the more pain I noticed (endorphins/adrenaline was killing the pain). I got away from weight lifting as my joints got worse - right now, my joints allow me to do body weight exercises about once a week. I also have irritable bowel and a natural allergic reaction to corn.

A few years ago I started experimenting with Paleo (nothing processed, no grain, no dairy, no potatoes, no legumes - i.e. just meat, eggs, nuts, fruit, veggies), and am now on the autoimmune subset of that (no nightshade, no eggs, no nuts, no seeds, no NSAIDS, no alcohol, or cross reactive foods - Tylenol is ok for pain, but not so great for liver). I had found some definite improvements with my first incarnation of Paleo, but probably twice the improvement since getting on the autoimmune version. The main point I've been building up to is this: the pain in my joints is a sensitive barometer to what I eat - if I break down and have some ice cream (natural as can be) I feel like I have an awful hangover, and am achy for several days. One thing that I have noticed is especially important is the quality of the food I eat: fully grass fed red meat, free range organic chickens, organic vegetables - these things are as important to the way I feel as eating the right types of food. Eating a fatty grain fed steak gives me aches and pains; grass fed steak digests perfectly, and causes no flare up.

I also take a fair quantity of high quality fish oil every day (Carlson's with lemon and Green Pasture fermented cod), which seems to help joints a lot. Like someone else mentioned, I would be careful with the amount and type of fish you are consuming; heavy metal and parasite levels in fish are becoming insane (especially farm raised); at least get yourself checked for heavy metals periodically - no reason to trade one problem for another.

Right now, I'm at 170 again (exceedingly lean), though I eat to capacity at every meal - lot's of fat, lot's of meat. I have been on the autoimmune for about 4 months now, and am greatly hoping that some of the other folks are right about the healing of my gut leading to a general increase in health, and hopefully I will gain back a little weight. Thanks everyone for what you've written here. Dan, you're not alone in pain or difficulty in gaining. Let me know if you find any game changers.