Best Herbs for Weight Gain in 2024

Today, we’re discussing the best herbs to gain weight fast.

Herbs are some of the best, most important foods that you can add to your diet to improve your health and weight gain without bumping up the calories or fullness of a meal. 

You can make serious changes to your health with these little additions – or squeeze out those last drops of better weight gain.

Let’s get started with the big question – what are herbs?

What are Herbs?

Herbs are plant extracts where the leaves, seeds, or flowers have nutritional or medicinal properties. We’re also including spices, because they overlap closely and are defined as a vegetable or plant food that are used to flavor other foods.

Herbs are important for their medical and nutritional benefits, and these are part of how they influence your weight gain diet. They’re wide ranging and we’ve included some other items in our list – like spices and rhizomes – that overlap closely with herbs. 

These are important sources of herb-like benefits that you should also take very seriously!

While herbs and spices have different sources, they have similar roles in your diet, and some foods are on the line between herb and food. For example, rocket (astragalus) has a dual-role as a herb and food, depending on how you use it.

The goal for today is just to build more muscle and gain more high-quality weight. 

As a result, we’re not going to worry about the categories – for our purposes, herbs, spices, and leaf-vegetables are going to be used wherever they play the role of herbs, even if they’re not herbs in the strict, scientific sense. If it works, you should use it!

How Can Herbs Support Your Weight Gain?

Herbs help weight gain in many ways – mostly associated with metabolism, hormonal health, and better energy. There are many ways, depending on the herb, and they also have an even wider range of general health and wellness benefits.

Herbs are great for how they change the quality of weight gain. They’re typically associated with improvements in the processes that underlie weight gain. This means things like better energy control in the body itself, better workouts, or better muscular recovery.

A few herbs are great for directly improving muscle growth. 

This is rare but obviously helpful, since it can boost total weight gain – and specifically lean muscle gains. These are the two major factors – quantity and quality – that make up good weight gain diets.

Improving Training and Recovery Processes

Herbs are also great for better training and other factors since they’re easy to use. Many of the most useful herbs – and even spices – are perfect for adding to a range of popular weight gain foods. For example, adding cinnamon to oatmeal is a great culinary and nutrition choice to improve your weight gain.

The ability to work these foods into your diet makes them even better. Herbs and spices are typically low- or zero-calorie, which means that you’re not changing your diet significantly elsewhere in the diet.

This is also a great benefit because herbs are not likely to affect appetite. Herbs can regulate appetite and some – like gentiana – are great for building better appetite.

This is important for weight gain, keeping you hungry and eating throughout the day to help you meet your calorie, protein, and carb requirements.

Weight Gain Quality – Markers You Might Ignore

Weight gain quality is one of the hidden benefits of herbs that you should pay more attention to. Weight gain quality is a reflection of muscle gain relative to fats, as well as the changes to performance and health markers.

Cinnamon is a good example of this, where it improves the way your body controls sugars. Cinnamon is a famous anti-diabetic compound because it improves your sensitivity for insulin and control of blood sugar. 

This is great for both strength performance and weight gain, where it helps shuttle fuel into the muscle cells for performance and recovery.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, piperine from black pepper is one of the best health and nutrition boosters. It improves the absorption of nutrients through the gut, helping you get the best of the things you eat.

Herbs Support Better Recovery and Performance at a Cellular Level

Herbs play this secondary, supportive role in most of your diet. This is the key to the “back end” of your digestion and metabolism.

Supporting these processes supports your muscle health, fuel, and recovery. The development of better total energy supply is the whole point of a weight gain diet, so improving the efficiency of your metabolism is key. This also helps with other factors – like how quickly you get hungry again after eating.

Weight gain quality is the result. This is an important set of benefits to how you exercise, sleep, and grow. The way your muscles perform, recover, and grow are intimately tied to these processes.

The Final Result of Your Weight Gain Diet

The result at the end of a weight gain diet is determined by these processes. Herbs that improve the quality of weight gain are associated with building more muscle and less fat over the course of a diet. 

They’re also associated with things like strength, power, and endurance performance – which are the other markers of weight gain quality.

Last but not least, weight gain quality with herbs comes from health changes – both mental and physical. Many herbs are great for mental health (like chamomile and valerian), while others are useful for organ health - like horny goat weed for the liver or the digestive benefits of piperine.

Best Herbs For Weight Gain

Hunger spark is one of the best herbs for weight gain because it boosts appetite, letting you eat more. This drives up total weight gain and – if your diet is in good shape – muscle gains.

This allows you to eat more often, improving your food intake and driving up your carb and protein intake. This is important for those struggling to get enough food to support weight gain. It’s a great choice for hardgainers who struggle to commit to proper eating.

Improving the amount you can eat helps weight gain, whatever you’re choosing to eat. Having more capacity for eating lets you choose healthier foods, as well as just making it easier to eat the amount you need to hit your calorie surplus.

Piperine: Absorbing More Nutrients

Piperine is perfect for boosting nutrient uptake for energy and muscle growth, and one of the best weight gain herbs. It improves the absorption of nutrients through the gut to get them into your system for growth.

Piperine helps you get the most from your food. It’s not a direct contributor to your eating, digesting, and then metabolism. This is a great way to make sure you’re getting the benefits of the nutrients in that food.

Cinnamon: Controlling Carb Metabolism

Cinnamon is a powerful glucose controlling compound and blood sugar regulator. It reduces the risk of diabetes, but specifically improves carb metabolism. This is the main energy source for muscles, boosting their energy availability as well as their performance and growth potential.

The main compound – cinnamaldehyde – is a powerful antioxidant, supporting better cell health and protecting you from early cell damage, mutation, and death. 

It’s also great for reducing infection risk and supporting immune function, which make it a great all-purpose health booster.

Cinnamon is an easy choice to add to your diet where it works well as a flavor, but also as a nutritional boost. You can get better results from the same meals – like oatmeal – with just a spoonful of cinnamon stirred in.

Tea: A Powerful All-Rounder for Weight Gain

Tea is a powerful fat-metabolism booster, as well as supporting better mental function and recovery. It also produces better post-workout results, increasing hormone release to support recovery and development of important tissues – like muscle and tendon. All of these make it one of the best weight gain herbs.

Tea is also great for reducing total anxiety. It’s been associated with improvements to sleep, mental performance, mental and physical recovery, and even performance during exercise. 

You can also get combinations of tea with other beneficial compounds (like valerian and chamomile) for better results.

Astragalus: A Herbal Absorption Aid

Astragalus is an underrated digestive support compound, helping you to absorb and use amino acids, and a great herb to help gain weight.

These are the components of the proteins your body makes. Improved AA uptake is key to improving your protein metabolism, which takes protein from food and turns it into muscle proteins. 

This process is key, and astragalus is a fantastic aid for better consistency of muscle gains.

Chamomile for Relaxation and Recovery

Chamomile is a classic, effective anti-anxiety compound (anxiolytic). It reduces stress and protects you from future stressors. It also improves sleep quality by reducing muscle tension and improving restfulness.

Chamomile’s improvements to sleep show up all over your weight gain journey. They produce better hormonal regulation, improved workout performance and recovery, and even better total mental health.

You will typically find chamomile combined with green tea and/or other herbs to improve results.

Valerian: A Herbal Sedative for Sleep Gains

Valerian offers many of the same benefits as chamomile – it’s a potent anxiolytic compound with sedative effects. This directly improves sleep quality to indirectly improve muscle gains and performance.

Valerian’s benefits also include reductions in sleep latency (laying in bed awake), sleep fragmentation (waking up in the night), and total stress burden.

Ashwagandha Protects you Against Stress

Ashwagandha is a popular and effective anti-stress compound. More specifically, it is useful for reducing the harmful effects of stress on the body and mind, protecting hormones from the worst effects of a chaotic life.

This is important for improving overall weight gain quality. It reduces stress-dominance and thus improves recovery. 

It also has many overlapping anxiolytic effects seen in valerian and chamomile, helping you get more recovery from deeper sleep – which builds more muscle mass.

Turmeric: A Spice for Full-Body Health

Turmeric is one of the most powerful health-boosting compounds because it is rich in curcumin. This is a whole-body health boosting compound that has been linked to a range of benefits:

•       Anti-inflammatory effect
•       Analgesic – reduces pain
•       Improves mood and mental health
•       Supports better fat metabolism
•       Antioxidant benefits
•       Reduces inflammation and arthritis

Curcumin from turmeric is a great addition to your diet. It’s a great way of improving your fat-uptake for energy and fuel, as well as supporting a healthy metabolism and hormones. The other health benefits are great for healthy weight gain – and not just the quantity. The anti-anxiety effects even improve sleep quality and recovery between workouts, albeit modestly.

Ginger: A Powerful Rhizome for Appetite and Health

Ginger  is our final not-a-herb choice with a powerful suite of benefits similar to those of turmeric and cinnamon. It’s another antioxidant, anti-inflammatory plant spice that offers great digestive benefits. 

These include better food turnaround which we’ve discussed often as key to boosting appetite and improving weight gain quality and quantity.

Ginger also helps regulate digestive health and blood cholesterol, helping support your health and wellbeing in areas most at-risk during weight gain. This makes it a fantastic choice to add to any weight gain diet.

Ginseng: King of Herbs?

Ginseng is one of the most popular and powerful herbs because of its wide-ranging benefits: mood, mental health and performance, sexual health, immune function, and even regulating and protecting your testosterone levels.

Ginseng can be added to a wide range of other foods and even drinks, like tea. It has powerful synergies with DAA, boron, and ashwagandha to better-regulate your hormonal health and support overall wellbeing.

The combination of ginseng with other herbs is a great choice, but even by itself, it offers one of the widest-ranging sets of benefits of any herb. This is perfect for weight gain, but also for general health, recovery, and performance.

Conclusion: Our Final Thoughts

Herb – and spices – are perfect additions to your diet to improve weight gain. They support both muscle gain and the recovery processes that make it possible. Consistently improving these factors produce more weight gain – and better quality overall.

We’ve listed some of the best herbs that help with weight gain, but these are only a handful. You should incorporate these choices into your diet, as well as keeping your eyes open to others that may be useful.

Herbs are a good reminder that there’s more to your diet than just calories and macronutrients. These herbs are some of the best ways to improve your diet, your recovery, and your results. With a few small tweaks, you can get better quality results and drive your appetite up to improve your diet.