I don’t know where to post this, so I’m posting it here.
I need to gain some weight because I’m borderline anorexic. But I can’t afford much more than bread, potatoes, eggs and cheese, That is my diet. And I hate eating it. It’s the only thing I can stomach that is cheap, but I hate it. I don’t want to eat eggs and potatoes for the rest of my life. I would rather die of malnutrition, like I am currently doing.
I have no appetite, but that is a symptom of something else. Ideally, there is a way to gain weight while eating less mass. Something calorie dense.
I might be slightly exaggerating. But for the last couple of years I’ve been eating potatoes and eggs for almost every single meal of the day. And yes, I eat one warm meal a day. Sometimes I suppliment with some bread to stop the hunger pains. Sometimes I also eat a piece of vegetable.
If you’re eating only plain boiled potatoes, I feel for you. No wonder you don’t want to eat.
If you can, get real butter and 33% cream and learn how to make silky smooth mashed potatoes. Lightly fried bacon chunks and onion scallions also go really well in that. I could easily down an entire pot of mashed taters done just right.
The problem you may also experience is that white bread by itself, while you are chronically malnourished, may bring on Type 5 diabetes. And white bread has almost no nutritional value. You really need to up your proteins and macronutrients. Expensive if you rely on meat, cheap AF if you work with beans and lentils.
If you can afford flour, you can create a lot of dishes that are much healthier and even more fattening than plain white bread. Any German will know of Spätzle, especially when it’s drowned in butter and three or four types of melted cheese.
And a cheap or free crock pot, along with ground beef (which can be cheap), can allow you to make many dishes with beans or lentils that will allow you to gain weight.
Good luck.
Mashed potatoes and whole wheat or multi grain bread
Fermented grains and potatoes may help you gain weight at an accelerated rate without all the pesky eating. You can batch making calories in multiple gallon quantities. Set uqp and processing are about as expensive as adding an extra week or two into the monthly food budget and are rapidly diffused over time. You can serve yourself hot, cold or in between!
it will be hard if its only sugar, you need fatty foods too.
Someone recommended you setup a donation link for a more varied diet… I second that.
Have you had your Vitamin B1 levels checked? Asking for two reasons, one is your diet seems like it would be low in thiamine, the second is thiamine deficiency can cause or exacerbate a lot of conditions that cause low or no appetite.
Like half of America is thiamine deficient, so I am sure the supplement would be helpful to you. If you DM me I would buy it for you.
First, if you can, try eating the potatoes with the skins. Less food waste, less time peeling, and it’s where most of the nutrients and fiber are.
Next, consider something like canned beans. Not “baked beans” because those are mostly sauce and honestly kinda gross. Like a can of black beans or chickpeas or red beans or black-eyed peas. You can season them however you’d like, but they’re good plain too. Versatile and can pair with almost anything. High in protein and fiber. And they’re affordable.
Another option is dried beans which are the cheaper option per bean but they’re more work to prepare because they need to soak. Lentils don’t need to soak though, and a pound of dried lentils isn’t too pricey.
If you can afford whole grain bread, it really does have much more nutrients than white bread. If you have a high metabolism, your body is just going to burn off all the empty carbs from white bread. Butter can add some easy fats too.
Oatmeal is another affordable option. Not the packets. Get the giant cylinder of instant oats. It’ll last you many meals, and all it takes is some hot water. You can adjust to your preferred consistency, whether you like it thick and clumpy or a bit more soupy is up to you.
If you can eat nuts, find one you like and get a big bag of them. Larger quantities are usually cheaper by weight. Walnuts are pretty affordable. Lots of omega-6 fatty acids. You can even crush them up and put them in your oatmeal if you like that.
If you’re not opposed to poultry, you can get a carton of chicken broth and drink maybe half a pint of it at a time. Heat it up first of course. It’s very gentle on the stomach and can stimulate an appetite. Also provides lots of good fats which are what your body needs if you want to put on weight and keep it on.
If you don’t eat meat, then vegetable or mushroom broth could do for stimulating appetite, just be aware that the fat content will be lower.
That’s mostly what I can think of. If you have troubles with digestion you might want to consider live foods/probiotics like yogurt, miso, stuff like that. A little bit pricier but it can make a big difference if your GI tract just doesn’t feel right. And again the larger containers are usually cheaper by volume.
Wait why are we suggesting more fiber to someone trying to gain weight? Fiber makes you feel full easier without giving you any real calories. Like… some of those are really good suggestions for losing weight for someone with a big appetite. However, OP said they have a small appetite and want to gain weight.
Because fiber is still important regardless of one’s weight goals. It also aids in digestion meaning OP will absorb nutrients more efficiently, instead of pooping most of it out. They said they’re on a budget, so why would they want the food they eat to go right through them without nourishing?
Besides, more full = eat less = groceries stretch further. So fiber is important for someone on a budget, even without counting the nutritional benefits.
Look, for just about every other case, I’d recommend eating a bunch of fiber, however:
It also aids in digestion meaning OP will absorb nutrients more efficiently, instead of pooping most of it out
I assure you, people can easily get most of the nutrients from food without fibers. In fact, overweight people don’t usually eat much fiber at all.
Besides, more full = eat less = groceries stretch further
Again, talking about a person who already has zero appetite and is at an unhealthy low weight, at least according to themselves. Eat less = die of malnutrition at this rate.
Overweight doesn’t necessarily equate to over-nourished. Someone can be overweight and still have malnutrition. Fiber is important for everyone, regardless of body type.
Also, eating a fiber-rich diet isn’t going to kill anyone, even if they are recovering from anorexia and need to put on weight. Feeling satisfied sooner because of the fiber content in a meal isn’t the same thing as eating nothing. And it’s more nourishing than low-fiber options.
Plus, in terms of gastrointestinal health, fiber can significantly improve appetite over time. So using no appetite as a reason to avoid fiber is a bit counter-intuitive.
Regardless, ideally OP will consult with their doctor and follow their advice. Lemmy isn’t the place to get critical medical guidance. But when it comes to tips on simple, easy-to-digest foods to eat on a budget, which is what was asked for, I’ve offered my input. Beyond that, I’m not here to defend a thesis.
Beans also complete protein with potatoes. Humans should always easy beans with some carb. Rice, bread, potatoes, yams, corn.
You still need fiber though. It woud be remiss to give this person a recommendation without considering nutrients. You can’t live entirely on bread and potatoes without supplementing other things.
Person said they’re borderline anorexic and have no appetite. Person might literally not get enough calories if they up their fiber intake.
Isn’t buying pre-baked bread usually more expensive than raw ingredients?
Anyway, what’s more important is that you have enough energy for your everyday life.
As long as you don’t start feeling weak at any time of the day, even lower weight should be pretty fine.If your lack of weight is due to heavy physical labour, you can check if glucose powder has a higher calorie count per $ as compared to bread in your area.
Remember though, glucose powder will mean even lesser essential nutrients, so take the advice of bean people. Dehydrated beans should be cheaper than canned ones. It will take longer to prep for eating though. And simple stuff like ginger, garlic and onion can make the thing way more appetising.Do you use spices or hot sauce to add flavor?
A slow cooker could make soups and stews with potwtoes and whatever vegtables or scraps.
Im sure lentils will send a represenitive to talk about them.

please buy some fruits and vegetables from time to time. Actually a lot of time. Different vegetables and fruit. Some nuts too. Eating the same meal every day is very unhealthy and can have very bad l andasting consequences for your health, especially in combination with stress (i know this from my personal experience of being poor and autistic unfortunately). And “hunger pains”? This is already very not ok.
Maybe start a gofundme campaign to at least temporarily somewhat mitigate the money problem? I’ll gladly send you a few bucks, if it helps you avoid what i got through.
I would also chip in a few bucks for OP to have a more varied diet for a while. Lmk if the gofundme or whatever goes up…
Yep, this is basically what caused all kinds of funny malnutrition sicknesses in the past, like scurvy. Get some cheap greens, because they are cheaper than a hospital visit.
Hey my dude, you need some recipes and some mental health. Im happy to help on both fronts if you need.
Eggs and potatoes are easily the two most versatile substances on the planet, other ingredients to make them into things are actually equally as cheap, spices look expensive until you realize that $4 lasts up to 6 months. To add to that, I was once an incredibly picky eater and found personally and through feeding others that, outside of phobia and dietary constraints, the majority of food preferences is based on a history of bad cooking. Give me deets on your dietary limits and I’ll give you every recipe I know. If there’s anything you’re willing to experiment with, I’ll teach you everything you need to enjoy it. Anything from dry beans, to tofu, to grinding your own amaranth or acorns for flour.
If you’re in the western world, mental health services are decently accessible, even in the US without insurance. Shoot me a DM me your location and situation and I’ll do all the leg work, all you’ll have to do is make the appointment.
As for the information provided, the recipe that springs to mind is cheese gnochi bites.
You’ll need 3 large russet potatoes 2 eggs 1 cup shredded chedder or other strong cheese 1 cup flour Salt, pepper, garlic to taste Oil to fry in
Microwave the potatoes until baked, immediately shock in cold tap water and peal by hand. (fantastic trick for any mashed potatoes as it not only takes less time but does not add any moisture leading to fluffier potatoes)
In a large bowl, mash the potatoes and add the cheese, mix so that the cheese melts and spreads evenly.
Once incorporated, feel mix, if still hot, let it cool until luke warm or cool to the touch then mix in the eggs and spices.
Finally, add flour until it holds together when scooped.
Heat oil on medium in either a pot or skillet depending on oil availability and intended shape.
If using a pot with at least an inch of oil, scoop a glob of potato with a spoon and use another spoon to scrape it into the pot. Fry until golden all the way around.
If using a skillet with shallow oil, put the glob in the pan and gently press it flat leaving some thickness. Then flip like a Patty when golden.
If you have access to gallon bags, you can put the mix in the bag, cut off a corner, and squeeze the mix into the fry like a piping bag. Either making dollups for deep oil or doing a tight spiral for shallow.
Let cool on a wire rack but eat warm. Oil can be strained of bits and stored to fry with later.
You can also add extra cheese and cook in an air-fryer but the texture won’t be fried so much as baked. The extra cheese gets more oil in the mix to help the exterior crust up.
Thanks for being a great and kind person! o7
You are a wonderful human being. I hope you always have equally awesome peers by your side whenever you need them.
That sounds like food. If I don’t get literally crucufied for trying to fry something I will try it.
I wonder if my aversion to cooking has something to do with the constant criticism and threats I get… Oh well.
My dude, that does not sound like a great environment. What’s going on?
You get threats? For what?
Hi I have basically the same problem.
a) take a fucking multivitamin before you get fucking
scurvy(til dv vitC of potatoes), anemia, rickets, Wernicke’s encephalopathy, or some other crazy shit in 20 fucking 26.b) find a high calorie protein shake you can stomach enough to keep down. If you’re only eating like one meal a day anyway you can splurge a little on something premixed and tastier. There’s a weirdly ritzy gas station chain near me that does a lovely strawberry banana smoothie that sits real well on my stomach, and I always get the yogurt scoop and protein shot.
c) start mixing your white sauces (anything that would normally have mayo, sour cream, or runny white cheese) with plain greek yogurt to give you a better fat / protein balance to all those carbs.
d) oh and you need metamucil. Desperately. Food that is both tasty and inoffensively bland is almost by definition low in fiber. And tbh you might find giving your bowels a good scrubbing may affect your appetite for the better.
Peanut butter
Can’t go wrong here. High calorie density. Best tasting food; fight me. And actually pretty healthful.
Some of the food packs that were created for humanitarian organizations when they go into a place with people suffering from severe malnutrition are basically peanut butter fortified with vitamins and minerals. It’s great for getting nutrition back on track, and easier to stomach than most calorie-dense foods such as meat.
If you get pure peanut peanut butter. A lot of the shelf stuff has tons of sugar and salt added. Usually I’ll buy the pure stuff and cut it with a small amount of the other to sweeten it
In a thread about how to gain weight, you are advising against sugar sweetened peanut butter.
In a thread about how to survive on very little money you are advising the most expensive peanut butter option.
Get the cheapest, sugariest, oiliest jar you can find. Salt is not evil either.
Good point. Salt DOES drive away evil spirits. It can’t be bad.
spoiler
Not for the body anyway. Maybe for the spirit.
I know we’re downvoting non-cheap options here but if you can, try to find one without palm oil at least, purely out of ethical concerns
At risk of going off-topic, exercise?
I don’t mean run marathons, but just stuff at home. Knee push ups, sit ups, squats, standing on your toes, sitting in a chair to lift your leg with your biceps; whatever you can manage until you are little winded.
You will gain some weight, keep more of the calories you ingest, and eating will feel better too.
I’d recommend some beans too. I like black bean bowls with rice, and both are cheap.
Fry potatoes, boil potatoes, bake potatoes… They will taste very differently. Use seasoning. Don’t be shy on salt/pepper/whatever your culture uses. Eggs can be very different too besides fried or boiled: soak bread with egg and fry it. Very tasty. Add some flour or whatever you have in the fridge to make an omelette. Not a fan of cheese, but I am sure there are many ways to use it too.
Seasoning is the key - i was in a similar situation to op, I figured out how to make breakfast sandwiches that I love out of ingredients that are palatable to me. I use rotisserie chicken, spinach, eggs, and previously ovened cubed potatoes, broccoli or whatever veggies I could afford and bought that week. I’d used salt, pepper, smoked paprika, garlic powder on the ovened veggies and put them in the fridge, buy bulk eggs for cheap, buy bulk croissants, but any carb will do or just skip it and make an omelet.
I toast the bread in the pan. Cheap pan spray, throw in hand shredded chicken pieces, cold veggies, eggs on top of that, and here’s what made the difference for me - then sprinkle Tony’s Cajun on that while it cooks, flip, top with bulk cheese of choice, sprinkle nutritional yeast on top for gut health, bam, now it’s delicious thanks to those added flavors. I actually now love having my same meal every morning and the leftovers a few hours later for lunch. I vary my dinners, but breakfast and lunch are always the same aside from varying veggies in the mix.
Sandwitches and fried bread requires chewing. My teeth are coming loose (probably because of the malnutrition). It’s a bit hard/painful to bite and chew things.
Chicken is expensive. So is cheese. I can afford up to two to three slices a day when rationing for the whole month.
But spinach and broccoli do sound nice. I’ll buy some next month, when I can afford anything aside from the very basics. And eating those will help me gain weight?
Based on your diet you might have scurvy
Her some vitamin c in you! Better yet: take a complete multivitamin daily.
Based on your responses here I think you will object that they are too expensive. But they’re cheaper than the dental care you will need for the rest of your life without meeting your nutritional needs.
I get vitamin C. Oh wait, the energy drink I supplement with has every vitamin under the sun EXCEPT vitamin C. Thanks. I shall raid the medicine cabinet in search of those precious yellow tablets.
And do not worry. Dental care is free.
If dental care is free, go see a dentist asap and tell them about your issues.
If medical care is free or cheap I highly recommend you see a doctor as well, to tell them about your issues around food and eating, both emotional and physical.
They can prescribe high calorie, high nutrition drinks to supplement and support your diet. And a lactose neutraliser if you’re intolerant and the drinks contain milk. And possibly an appetite stimulator to make eating seem more appetising.
No, drop the energy drink completely. What are you thinking, that’s your problem right there. It’s expensive, and probably accounts for half your food spending. It’s also fucking terrible health wise especially if you aren’t eating much of anything else. There is no such thing as “supplementing” with an energy drink.
Things that are cheap and good imo: rice, lentils, bulk nuts, canned beans, tuna tin cans and veggies in general. Porridge sucks but it’s easy to make and cheap. If you want to avoid energy use while cooking, look into cooking in a thermos, stuff like couscous, porridge or noodle soups.
Hunt specials and change where you buy thing if needed. If you don’t like veggies, boil and blend. Ration of like 1/3 potato, 2/3 veggie, stock, plus some onion and garlic.
Get the oil, it’s basically where people get half their calories.
What’s your budget anyways (food total, include the money spent on fast food and energy drinks).
Wouldn’t a multivitamin be cheaper than an energy drink?
Per day a multivitamin is way cheaper. But per container it probably seems like a “big” investment for the multivitamin jar.
A medium potato has 30% of daily vitamin c but you need to eat the skin. So scrub potatoees and leave skin on when cooking. It will also be better to bake or fry. Even if making mashed potatoes, you can bake them and then mash with skins on. They’re better this way imo.
I’m glad you’re looking into vitamin c deficiency. I wasn’t listing my ingredients as suggestions, I was explaining what worked for me and hope you find some analogous recipe for your own meals. I hope you land on something affordable, maintainable, healthy and delicious!
Butter on potatoes if that’s an option too.
Oil is expensive. So is electricity. Boiling is cheapest.
And I’m looking to gain weight, not make my food less miserable.
Gaining weight requires consuming more calories than you use . If you hate everything you cook you will not eat enough. Simple as.
I don’t hate everything I cook, I hate eating. It’s a chore. I have no appetite. I need a way to cram more calories into me without needing to do so much chewing and swallowing.
Then you need to make your food more calorie dense. The only way to gain weight is to consume more than you use. There is no other way.
Been on the no chewing journey, how are you with meal replacement shakes? The bulk powders come in lots of flavours and cand be very cheap per meal. It’s usually got dietary fibre, vitamins, minerals, and will healthify you far faster.
For potatoes, you need the skin included to keep nutritional value, which can be hard with no chew but doable.
You’re essentially thinking newborn diet, you need calorofic nutition that’s easy to eat even when you don’t want to.
You got this, it’ll get easier.
My meal smoothie is basically banana, white beans, spinachs, frozen fruits, lemon flavored yogurt and soy milk. I’d also add hemp hearts (expensive but super dense), nuts and a few other things. Also vanilla and almond extract for taste.
Thick blended soups are also an option. You can just drink them.
On a calories per dollar-ratio, oil is probably at least one quarter of the price of potatoes.
The difference in electricity costs is not going to be significant in the context since you’ll make back the money on the calories you ingest from the oil instead of more potatoes.
Cooking potatoes in oil is also very significantly less miserable than eating boiled potatoes, and this is coming from someone that actually likes boiled potatoes quite a bit
Oil is calories. Oil helps you gain weight. Same for butter, margarine and lard. If you can find a good price on any fat, buy it and use it.
You need 50g of oil to roast a kilo of potatoes, and you can buy 4L jugs of it.
Okay, and how do I gain weight from that?
Oil is very calorie dense
So why not just do a shot of rapeseed oil and be done with it? Why even involve the potato?
Am I going too far? Maybe. Will that stop me from trying? No.
did that some time ago, it’s not particularly nice tastewise, but you can just chug one or two shots a day - that’s about 700kcal if you do 40ml per “serving” the YouTuber “DougDoug” did something similar for his diet. if you buy the cheapest oil (here it’s sunflower I think) you’ll get extremely many calories per unit of Money. in Germany that’s about 3000 kcal per 1€
You absolutely can, if that’s what works for you. Nutritionally, there’s no difference between eating oil with a meal or separately. Lots of people take olive oil shots or mix butter in coffee or whatever and that’s OK. That approach can be particularly good if it’s helpful to think about it more like a supplement than a meal.
People may recommend against that in favor of working it into a meal you won’t hate eating, and there’s some merit to that for some people. But if eating is going to suck either way, just start by doing the thing that gets you calories. Work toward getting a mix of protein, fat, and carbohydrates (with potatoes + oil + eggs you have all 3) and fiber too. (potatoes have a bit) The rest can come later.
This page has a table of cheapest cost-per-calorie foods alongside some other general recommendations that may or may not be helpful. Notable items from that table are flour, bread, sugar, pasta, rice, olive oil, ramen, peanut butter, pinto beans, and lentils.
Ultimately though any food you’ll eat is always better than any food you won’t. A calorie is a calorie pretty much no matter what form it takes. You got this!
It makes the potato have more calories because it has oil in it.
Same amount of chewing and swallowing. More calories. It’s what you want!













