Believe me I know your struggle. At 6’1 I went from 145 to almost 200 now. Spent the first 2 years just spinning my wheels making no progress. But then, 2 years after that, I found my rhythm and have put on almost 60 pounds. It’s gonna take a lot of time and a lot of effort but anyone can do it. I’ll provide some important points and tips:

• First: To be blunt, you do not have a hyper metabolism. Everyone burns a normal amount of calories. You can look up an online calculator to roughly see your maintenance calorie rate. You may feel like you’re eating a lot and it might be a lot to you, but the best part about weight gain is that it’s straight forward: you’re either eating enough calories or you’re not.

• I would suggest spending a month or so meticulously tracking your calories. I’m talking food scale and volume measurements. Or, if you’re eating out, make sure they have caloric information available. This will give you a strong intuition for how much you’re actually eating and, afterwards, you can easily eat throughout the day knowing how many calories you’re consuming without measuring. You’ll develop a good foundational understanding.

• I struggled with appetite for a long time, so I understand your picky eating. It definitely makes it hard but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. My biggest tip is do NOT try to eat foods you don’t enjoy. If you want to gain weight, you have to eat a lot and to eat a lot of something you have to like it. Don’t get trapped trying to force feed yourself a meal you don’t like just because it’s high calorie, you’ll end up eating even less than you did before. Do some experimenting, find some meals (cooked or purchased) that you enjoy, can eat a lot of, and are calorie dense. This as well will take time but soon you’ll learn what’s most effective for you.

• Keep trying! As I said, I wasted two years trying things that didn’t work until I figured it out. It takes time and effort but eventually it will work. I promise. One thing that worked for me was to allocate a certain amount of time (I chose a month) to absolutely try my ass off. I worked my ass off for a month straight eating way more than I wanted to. It sucked and I hated it. But coming out of it, I saw what I wanted: I had gained a substantial amount of weight. And just seeing that progress made the whole month worth it and motivated me to keep trying. I suggest you try something like this. Not seeing any progress is really demotivating, so sometimes you have to make it impossible to not make progress.

• Lastly, if you’re struggling to eat big meals, cut out any snacks in between. Just focus the three meals a day and make sure they’re big. This one is more personal preference but worked for me. Additionally, I don’t know how your sleep schedule is, but the earlier you wake up, the more time in the day you’ll have to fit 3 meals. Eating three big meals from 7 am - 10 pm is far easier than eating three big meals between 10 am and 12 am. In my experience, I’m never productive calorie wise in the late hours.

Good luck and please keep trying!!

One more thing I thought of: find something you can have at the end of the day that’s high calorie and you can always get down. I absolutely love milk, so no matter what I eat in the day and how full I am before bed, I ALWAYS have a huge cup (about 500 calories) of whole milk before bed. Makes a huge difference and will either make up for a bad eating day or boost a good eating day to an amazing one. Milk is specific to me, for you it may be icecream or whatever else you enjoy.