How Do You Lose Weight Without Sacrificing Your Running Performance?

Audio Transcript

Claire: Welcome to today’s podcast. Today’s question is about losing weight while training and it comes from Cynthia.

Cynthia: Hello! My question is about losing weight while training. In the past few months I’ve had injury, holidays, travel and I gained about five pounds, which added to the five pounds I already wanted to lose. Could you talk about the process of losing weight while training?

I know dieting too much isn’t good because then I’ve got no energy and I’m really hungry, but then eating when I’m hungry doesn’t seem to be getting me anywhere with weight lose either.

I’m not usually up and down with my weight, and so I’m able to maintain my weight generally, but this weight lose has been really, really difficult for me and it’s my priority at the moment.

Anything you can talk to me about weight loss and training would be great. Thanks for your help.

Claire: That’s a very popular question Cynthia and one that we get a lot at Runners Connect.

The first thing I want to talk about weight and running is, we need to talk about losing fat, not losing weight. All weight is not the same.

You don’t want to lose a bunch of muscle because obviously, muscle is power and that will help you become faster and stronger.

What we’re trying to do is adjust your body composition, not necessarily your weight because you could be heavier and stronger versus lighter and fatter.

The priority has to be losing fat and increasing lean muscle. What we want to do is increase your strength to weight ratio, so that scale can be a little deceiving.

Muscle is heavier than fat, so you could be the same weight, and leaner and stronger.

Be careful when you’re simply looking at five pounds on the scale because it’s not always saying what you think it’s saying.

If you need to lose fat, the fast step in the process is figuring out what your calorie needs are. Now, there’s a lot of calculations and I’m not going to go over all the Math right now, but I’m going to outline it in some detail so that you can figure out what your calorie needs are.

The first part of this is to determine your resting metabolic rate; your RMR and that’s how much your body burns at rest.

That’s simply lying around all day, doing absolutely nothing but breathing and digesting, how much do you burn just to stay alive.

The second step is adding in your activity level outside of running. What you do for work, whether you are an office worker who sits eight hours a day, or a waitress who moves around quite a bit, or a heavy construction worker lifting and carrying and walking all day, matters.

Obviously, the things that you do in your everyday life will affect how many calories you burn.

Then the third part of the equation is, how many calories are you burning by running?

Heavier people will burn more calories when they run verses lighter people, so you’ll need to figure out all of that for you.

Without me giving you all of the calculations over the podcast, we’ve actually done the work for you, so you can plug in your data and you can get that calculator at runnersconnect.net/caloriecalculatorcontentupgrade.

We’ve got a couple of calorie calculators there, but the one that says content upgrade is one that is way more in-depth.

You can get the basic calculator just by googling Runners Connect calorie calculator, but the content upgrade one has some upgraded features that will be a lot easier to use.

Now that you’ve figured out your calorie needs, you’ll have to measure how many calories you bring into your body. You can do this with a pen in paper, but easier today is MyFitnessPal app . that will help you record what you eat and you can also use their software to come up with some calorie goals that are appropriate for you.

When you are training, especially for the marathon, you don’t want to go into heavy weight loss mode, because your body needs to build and repair from all your training.

Maybe losing about half a pound to a pound a week, is a healthier goal than trying to go any higher than that, because then you will sacrifice your training gains and some of your recovery.

If you’re going into too much of a calorie deficit, you might be end up burning muscle, and when you lose muscle, you’ll obviously go slower in your race.

That’s not what we want to do.

What this means is that you’ll have to measure your food, use a scale perhaps or use cups and measurements, but you’ll need to know what’s going in.

I know that people resist measuring their food for some reason, and feel like they’ll go a little crazy when they have to measure everything they eat, but this doesn’t need to be every single thing, every single day.

You might want to try doing it for a week and see how you do, and that will give you a sense of where your weaknesses are and what things you can improve, but if you don’t measure it, it’s really hard to improve it.

The key focus is processed foods are not going to be as nutritious and they’re not going to be as filling as whole foods.

When you are changing your diet around, you want to emphasize fruits and vegetables, and whole grains. These are low calorie but high nutrient dense and have lots of fiber.

Another thing to consider when you’re choosing your food, is lean protein.

Protein, like fiber, keeps you fuller longer, and helps to repair muscles that you are damaging when you run or workout.

For runners, you want to aim for roughly one gram of protein, per pound of body weight.

This is more than you need for muscle recovery and general strength, but again, the little bit of extra protein helps keep you satisfied, so hopefully you’re not overeating.

As far as the dietary fat that you take in goes, you need healthy fats to be healthy. A lot of vitamins and minerals that we ingest need fat to be absorbed by the body, but it is so easy in our society to go overboard on fat, since each gram of fat has more than twice the calories as protein or carbohydrates.

Especially sneaky are the added oils, so a tablespoon of oil is about 100 to 120 calories.

Every time you’re frying up an onion you use in a stir fry, you’re pouring on the calories and it’s easy to sauté your onion in water, or low calorie vegetable broth without sacrificing flavor, so that’s one little trick that can cut out some calories out there.

You want to focus on filling foods, every time that you cut calories and especially if you’re running a lot, you are going to feel hungry and that’s not a comfortable place to be in.

First of all, you need to accept that you’re going to be a little hungry sometimes, and that is okay and perfectly normal, but to combat that, you’ll want to choose filling foods.

What is a filling food?

Again, like I said, high protein, high fiber, but also high volume foods.

Those foods that have a lot of water and air in them, and of course the low calorie density, are all going to be the most filling and most satisfying foods.

Research has come up with a whole list of foods that have been categorized as the most satisfying food and at the top of the list is white potatoes.

This is a boiled or baked potato.

This is not French fires that are deep fried in oil. This is just baked in its own skin or boiled. White potato is actually very nutritious, has lots of vitamins and minerals, lots of fiber, a little bit of protein and is low in calories.

You might want to try eating a few more potatoes.

A few other very nutritious but filling foods are oatmeal, vegetables of course, beans, fruits and air popped popcorn.

As long as you don’t drown it in butter, popcorn is a high fiber, lower calorie food.

One thing to also remember is to be sure to hydrate. Drink a glass of water before meals and when you wake up.

That’ll help not only bring water throughout your entire body, but it fills up your belly a little bit before you eat, and that might help you eat a little bit less.

On the other side of the losing weight spectrum is adding in some strength training.

Hopefully, you already are doing strength training as a supplement to your running, but you may want to consider adding a day, getting up to two or three days a week of quality strength training.

Muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat does, so just walking around in your life, if you have more muscle mass than fat, the muscle will take more calories to maintain.

That will mean your resting metabolic rate is higher, if you have more muscle already. That’s another incentive to hit the weights and stay strong, and you especially want to try to incorporate your hard lifting days after a good quality run.

You want to make sure that you’re keeping your easy days easy and if you take off days, you want to make sure that those are full rest and recovery, but if you can, keep strength training that will increase your muscle mass and increase your calorie burn throughout your entire day.

We do loose muscle as we age, so strength training is the best way to keep a good body composition, injury prevention and also good for your speed.

I hope that some of these tips have helped you Cynthia, and thanks for sending in your question today.

If you’d like to submit your own question for a future episode, head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and record a question for the podcast.

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If you are enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes or on your favorite podcast directory. We would really appreciate it. That’s it for today, have a great run today.