Wanting to Gain Slowly...

I (like so many others) am a semi-recovering anorexic. I'm about 5'7-5'8 and weigh 114 pounds. I run on my school's cross country team, play soccer, and do weight training in PE, so my weight when it was healthy was mostly muscle (130 pounds). For the past month I'd been eating well under 1200 calories a day and excercising so much that my body now refuses to work properly (ie weakness, fatigue etc.). I need to gain weight back healthily (and hopefully have it come back as muscle not fat), but...

1) I don't want to gain fast (maybe 1-2 pounds a week)

2) I want most of it to be muscle.

I now eat about 1,200-1,500 a day and run for 35-90 minutes daily, workout for 20-50 minutes daily, and play soccer for 2 hours twice a week plus games on weekends. How many calories should I add?

Hi SoccerJ! 

I wish you the best of luck in your recovery stage. 

So that we can provide advice accordingly to your stats, can you please clarify your age and gender.  That'll be a great help, thanks. 

I think 1200-1500 is a great healthy start.  But if you are trying to gain weight, I would consider slowly adding calories periodically.  You will more than likely (if you are at least 18) need at least 1600 calories just to maintain at a sedentary weight.  With your activity level and the need to gain, I would suggest trying to get your calories around 2000 calories.  Even more so, I would suggest seeing a nutritionalist or your doctor to discuss a safe, healthy plan for your weight gain journey tailored specifically to you. 

thanks! I completely forgot about age/gender. I'm a female and 15 years old.

Soccer, there is no way you can gain weight at that pace. Trust me, I've been there. I needed to gain 1.5 lbs a week last summer running cross country. That was about 90 minutes of excersize a day. I was 5' 4'' and needing to gain 10 lbs before the end of the season. Some days were 2200, some days were 3500. At 2000 cal a day with that much exertion you will still be losing! just from someone who's been there

Yeah man I'm eating 3000-3500 calories a day trying to put on a lb a week, I want to be IFBB pro bodybuilder by my senior year of college and I'm 5'6 129-131, can't tell. I bumped my calories up from 2800 to 3300 this week, we'll see what happens.