“My doctor told me that I’m underweight and need to gain 5 kg. What is a healthy way to do this?”

First work out whether you are eating all the recommended number of serves from each of the five foods groups, based on your age and physical activity level. This information can be found at the Eat for Health website www.eatforhealth.gov.au. Identify which food groups you need to eat more of, increase your intake of these groups and see if this helps with gaining weight.

If your intake is already at, or reaches, the recommended level but you do not gain weight, you may need to look at boosting the calorie content of your foods. This can be done by adding butter or cream to foods, using full fat products, topping foods with cheese, and mixing in milk powder.

If this doesn’t work, the next step would be to use a nutritional supplement product like Sustagen. I strongly recommend you seek the assistance of a dietitian, who can monitor your weight and give diet advice based on your calorie intake and output. Keep in mind that you should be aiming for a weight gain of ~0.5kg per week, so it will take you around 10 weeks to gain the full 5kg recommended by your GP.

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