From a young age, I was always the skinny kid.
When I was around 9 years old, I was cut from my Pop Warner football team because I couldn’t make weight. Even back then, people were always trying to give me advice on how to get bigger.
“Eat bananas with peanut butter.”
“Just eat more.” "Just do push-ups." I was 8 years old doing 300 push-ups a night!
And there was nothing wrong with that advice — bananas and peanut butter are great. But looking back, I would’ve had to eat a whole lot more than a banana with some peanut butter to actually make the difference I needed.
Being skinny also became something people noticed.
My older brother used to joke that if I ran too fast, my legs would rub together and start a fire because they looked like twigs lol.
At family gatherings, I’d hear the classic:
“You need to put some meat on those bones.”
People were joking, and I laughed too, but when you hear those things your whole life, eventually you start noticing it yourself.
I graduated high school weighing around 130 pounds.
I was athletic. I was good at sports. Basketball MVP, Football Offensive player of the year, But in my head, I felt like I was simply too small to dominate the way I wanted to.
So I made a decision.
I was going to take a year away from playing, dedicate myself to training, put on as much size as I could, and hopefully come back bigger and stronger.
I thought the answer was simple:
Lift heavy. Get stronger. Get bigger.
So I started training.
But it didn’t take long for me to realize something that would shape my entire journey:
There was a lot more to gaining size than lifting heavy weights.
Training was the easy part of it.
The real battle was going to be eating enough to actually grow.
When I first started trying to gain size, I thought the hard part would be the training.
It wasn’t.
I actually enjoyed pushing myself in the gym. Getting stronger gave me something to chase, and I could show up day after day knowing exactly what I needed to do.
The problem started when I went home.
I quickly realized that lifting heavy wasn’t enough if I couldn’t consistently give my body enough food to grow.
I started forcing meals down even when I wasn’t hungry. There were times I would use water just to help get food down because I knew I still needed the calories.
Eventually, I started dirty bulking because it seemed like the easiest way to get those calories in.
And to be fair—
it worked.
The scale started moving. I was finally gaining weight.
But it wasn’t necessarily the kind of size I had pictured.
Instead of looking noticeably more muscular, I started getting a softer, puffier look. I was bigger, but I didn’t always feel like I looked better.
And getting those calories wasn’t cheap either.
There were periods where I was spending $30–$40 a day on fast food and takeout just trying to keep my calories high enough to continue gaining.
That’s over $200 a week just trying to keep the scale moving.
And the moment I stopped eating like that, staying consistent became difficult all over again.
That was when I really started understanding the problem.
I knew how to train. I knew I could gain weight.
What I still didn’t have was a realistic way to consistently get enough calories without forcing myself through meal after meal or spending a ridiculous amount of money every day.
Training was the part I enjoyed.
Eating enough every single day was the real work.
Eventually, all of the training and eating started to show.
I was getting stronger. My body was changing. For the first time, I was starting to look like the person I had pictured when I began this journey.
After spending most of my life being known as the skinny kid, seeing myself actually put on size felt different.
It proved something to me:
I could gain weight. I could build muscle.
But getting there also taught me something I didn’t expect.
The problem was never whether I was capable of growing.
The problem was how difficult it was to consistently eat enough to make that growth happen — and then keep doing it long enough to hold onto the progress I had made.
When I first started making shakes, I was doing what I thought was “healthy.” Spinach, almond milk, whey protein, mixed berries, a little oatmeal. All good foods—but I was trying to bulk on a shake that simply wasn’t built for bulking.
So I kept experimenting.
I added more oats. Then bananas and peanut butter. Then honey. I started paying more attention to healthy fats, using things like coconut oil. Eventually I started incorporating sweet potato, avocado and nuts.
Over time, something finally clicked. Protein mattered, but protein alone wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go. I needed calories. A lot of them. I needed carbohydrates, fats and protein working together.
And for me, drinking those calories was completely different from trying to eat them.
A huge solid meal could leave me feeling stuffed for hours. A shake went down faster, sat differently in my stomach, and I found that my appetite came back much sooner. That meant I could get a serious amount of calories in without feeling like I had just eaten Thanksgiving dinner all day long.
That completely changed how I structured my days.
I’ve never been somebody who wakes up starving. If I waited until I actually felt hungry in the morning, breakfast could easily turn into lunch—and when your goal is 4,500–5,000 calories, losing those first few hours can put you 1,000 calories behind before the day even really starts.
So instead, I would wake up and drink a shake while driving to work.
That could put my first 1,000 calories on the board before I was even hungry.
Once it settled, I could still eat breakfast because I actually wanted food again.
During my shift, I would drink two more shakes. After work, I’d have a smaller pre-workout meal or snack, go train, come home and eat dinner, and then have another shake later in the evening. Sometimes my last one was smaller—around 500 calories with casein—because I wanted an easy way to add more calories and protein before bed.
My day could look like: Shake → breakfast → shake → shake → pre-workout food → gym → dinner → smaller shake before bed.
Was that easy?
No.
It took a ridiculous amount of consistency.
But for the first time, it felt possible.
Without the shakes, my normal day could have looked completely different. Skip breakfast because I wasn’t hungry. Work until lunch. Spend $20 on fast food. Get home, cook something for 30 minutes, eat, go to the gym, then eat whatever leftovers I had before bed.
That lifestyle was easier.
It also wasn’t getting me the results I wanted.
I didn’t want to spend my entire Sunday meal-prepping 20,000+ calories of food for the week. I didn’t want to cook enough food every day to reach 4,000 or 5,000 calories. And I definitely didn’t want to keep spending $30–$40 a day trying to bulk through restaurants and fast food.
The shakes gave me another option.
Once I had them dialed in, my progress took off.
My bodyweight eventually reached around 210 pounds. My strength climbed with it. I benched 365 pounds, squatted over four plates, deadlifted five plates, and military pressed two plates.
I wasn’t just maintaining anymore.
I was growing.
And I did it without steroids. There wasn’t some secret compound behind it. It was years of training, eating, experimenting and finally becoming consistent enough with my calories to support what I was doing in the gym.
That’s also when I started understanding something about people who say, “I eat a ton, but I just can’t gain weight.”
I believed them.
I’ve watched skinny guys destroy four burgers in one sitting, finish an entire pizza, or eat two huge burritos.
The issue isn’t always whether you can eat a massive meal once. The question is whether you can consistently do enough of that, day after day, without feeling terrible, spending a fortune, or eventually giving up.
That was the problem I had spent years trying to solve.
The shakes didn’t make gaining effortless. There were days I missed calories. There were days I went out, had fun and got off schedule. That’s life.
The difference was that I finally had a system I knew I could come back to.
When I was serious about gaining, I didn’t have to wonder where my next thousand calories were coming from. I could make the shake, drink it, let it settle, and when I had room again, keep moving.
That’s what kept me motivated: knowing the number was actually achievable.
Bulk Bag isn’t based on the idea that gaining should be effortless. It’s based on the idea that if you’re willing to put in the work, getting access to the calories you need shouldn’t be the thing that stops you.
That system is what eventually became Bulk Bag.
Bulk Bag is everything I wish I had when I started.
28,000+ calories. Use them your way.
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