Hi JohnW,
Thank you so much in getting back to me. I have thought about your plight a lot as this is a topic I am particularly concerned with.
First of all, how strong is your heart? If your heart can take it, I would suggest to you to just continually eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat and not stop eating. Keeping yourself hydrated. At this stage you, me, your doctors - all of us can speculate WHY you are so underweight (severely underweight) but the real issue, the crux of the matter, is that you simply need to put it back on. For instance, you could have a thyroid problem. But no more talking 'til the cows come home, please just eat, eat, eat and - hopefully - you can return to a proper diagnosis at a later stage. My concern is that you seem to be worried about money, if so - if you cannot afford the extra money you will need to gain weight - then please consider a food bank, where plenty, plenty of the food there will be vegan.
You should not be exercising or exerting yourself any more than is absolutely necessary to live your daily life.
Of course, if you don't think your heart could take rapid weight gain then limit your gain between 0.5-2lbs per week. However, when I turned a corner, I was able to gain weight even more rapidly but the trick is not to strain the heart. Listen to your body, listen out for arrhythmias and lower bpm - or abnormally fast bmp during or directly after eating.
It is absolutely crucial, when you are attempting to gain weight, to guard your heart. Even more so if you are vegan. You should be, religiously, taking a multivitamin containing iron, magnesium, potassium, B12, folic acid. Passion fruit is an excellent food for heart health, try eating as much passion fruit as you can as you attempt to gain weight.
However do try not to gain weight using gluten (flour, bread). This is really one of the worst things to eat in order to gain weight because it can leave you feeling full but bread is simply not nutritious enough and you will be pushing your body into mineral deficiency which always, without exception, results in the leeching of bone marrow into the blood stream (weakening the bones). If you suspect this has already happened, you need to be taking calcium as well.
Nicotine is, apart from being addictive, an appetite suppressant. What we cannot know is whether having smoked for quite some time whether you have possibly damaged the receptors in your brain that notify you when you are hungry. So you must, must, must eat even when you are not hungry. You say you are ravenous, but - who knows - maybe you would normally be even more ravenous. I recommend smoothies in between eating, lots and lots of nut milk-based smoothies because nuts are both calorie dense and it will keep you hydrated and fill the corners.
As for your swollen lymphs, do you massage? What was the outcome of their testing?
If you need to eat more calories (and you do), it will not merely be to the satisfaction of an online calculator it will simply be because you possibly have some kind of metabolic issue and what would normally suffice is not enough. You're not eating to numbers but, you've said it yourself, you are neither gaining or maintaining weight. Until you get the diagnosis there's really only one thing for it: eat more. Hold no prisoners, including yourself.
Re. being 'doomed' - veganism has been shown to reverse all kinds of illnesses and diseases. There are youtube videos of (particularly fruitarians) cancer-curing testimonies and even one woman who refused standard treatment after being bit by a deadly spider. I do not doubt the power of the diet, but I punched in your details where that BMI calculator is concerned and it revealed how seriously dangerously thin you are. So you need to cover yourself with multivitamins.
For 6 ft 2 male, weighing 115 lbs, your BMI is 14.76. The threshold for 'anorexia' (although it technically refers to a disorder, and not necessarily a weight group) is 17.5. This makes me incredibly concerned and thunderstruck that your doctors have not noticed your weight - at a BMI of 14.76 you would be visibly noticeably underweight.
For a minimum healthy weight, at your height, you will need to weigh 145 lbs. I would raise that to 150 lbs, in the hopes of gaining a decent 'buffer' layer of fat and muscle both. For instance, if you get the flu and lost your appetite for a few days you will want a buffer to prevent you from dropping into the underweight category again.
A BMR, which is the link you have sent back to me, is not the DCN (Daily Calorie Need). A BMR is the caloric amount your body would need if you lay completely motionless in a deep coma ('Basal Metabolic Rate') - but since it is possible your metabolism has been damaged, I imagine the estimation from the website it too conservative. We use a BMR to the calculate the DCN (depending on how active our lifestyles are), and in the case of wanting to gain weight we then need to add at least an extra 300 calories - I suspect - to that result.
I hope this information and encouragement helps. If I come across as strong, it is because I consider your situation an urgent one. I hope you do too.
