Not Losing Weight During Marathon Training

Audio Transcript

Coach Claire Bartholic: Everyone, this is Coach Claire Bartholic coming to you on the Extra Kick podcast, brought to you by Runners Connect.

Today, Marcus asks, “I was hoping I would lose some weight during my first marathon training. However, I haven’t lost much. My diet is about the same, but I might eat an extra cookie or two in the evening. Is it common to not lose much weight during an 18-week training cycle?

I thought after 40 miles per week I’d be dropping around half a pound to a pound a week.”

Coach Claire Bartholic: Marcus, as depressing as it is, it is true, what you are experiencing is very common. Lots of people don’t lose weight when training for a marathon. Some people, myself included, can even gain weight if they are not careful.

But how can that possibly be? Running burns a ton of calories, right? So if you just run a little more, you’ll lose weight; it is simple math. Except it’s not.

Researchers have found what they call the Exercise Paradox, which basically states that it really doesn’t matter how much exercise you do. The human body tightly controls your metabolism, and exercise is a pretty poor tool for weight loss.

In other words, running more won’t make you lose more weight. But that how can that be when the app on my phone just told me that I burned like seven million calories?

Well, part of the story is that the fitness trackers are lying to you about how much you actually burn, and those calorie counting apps are way off on how many calories food actually contains.

But there is some other pretty interesting things that are happening as well. The sad truth is that up to a certain point, active people are not burning a whole lot more than their sedentary counterparts.

I know, that sounds absolutely ludicrous. But stay with me here. How in the world can an active person burn the same amount of calories as a couch potato?

Moderately active people actually burn more than those glued to the desk or the couch. But bumping your mileage up from moderate to high, in the name of losing weight, won’t provide the same returns it once did when you first started.

Researchers have discovered that energy expenditure or calories burned begins to plateau as you increase your activity. Therefore people with highly active daily lives will burn about the same number of calories each day as those with moderately active lives.

Scientists aren’t exactly sure how it works, but they theorize that as your body becomes fitter and healthier, it spends less time housekeeping. or repairing damaged cells, fighting inflammation – all the sorts of things your body does to keep you running.

In other words, your body becomes more efficient, and will function on fewer calories. But wait; if you go out on a 10 mile run, the average person might burn about 1,000 calories, depending on weight.

Therefore she should be able to eat 1,000 extra calories worth of food to maintain her weight. That makes logical sense, right?

But no.

Just like everything in the human body, it isn’t quite that simple. It all goes back to how humans evolved. What happened when our ancestors didn’t catch the giraffe after spending an entire day hunting? That’s a big, expensive caloric gamble that they sometimes lost.

Why didn’t they starve? Well, of course the answer is fat.

Even the leanest humans carry about twice as much fat as other primates. We are built to store fat to feed our big brains when we don’t catch the giraffe.

Therefore, the most successful human bodies were the ones that were stingy with their calorie reserves, and burned their fat slowly.

What does that mean for your calorie burn on that 10 mile run?

It means that maybe you burned 1,000 calories, but maybe you didn’t. As you become a better runner, running is simply not as hard for your body any more, as you become better at it.

When the work is not as hard, you don’t have to spend as many calories to do it.

But, for argument’s sake, let’s say that you actually did burn 1,000 calories on your run. What we forget is that no matter how long you were out there, that run only took up a small fraction of your day.

What were you doing for the rest of your day? When the body senses higher activity, it starts getting super sneaky. It doesn’t want to lose those precious fats storage that it has been meticulously hoarding all these years.

What it does therefore is not only ramp up your hunger cues, but it also starts to decrease your desire for activity the rest of the day. Sometimes that’s in the obvious form of fatigue – running makes you tired.

But other times, it’s much more incognito than that. For example, instead of fidgeting, you might stay still, or instead of standing, you might sit. Instead of sitting on the couch, you might decide to lie all the way down.

All these seemingly insignificant non-running actions, or lack of action I should say, end up making a huge difference in the total calories you burn in a day.

And the body is doing it without you even noticing it at all.

Therefore, if exercise isn’t the answer to weight loss, what is? It’s what you eat. This is not really news of course; everyone’s heard the phrases “[absolute 00:08:04] in the kitchen, then you can’t outrun a bad diet.”

We all know it’s a lot easier to eat 100 calories of peanut butter in one swallow than it is to burn it off while running a mile or more.

Let’s take a look at what your eating mark is. You said that your diet is about the same. Unfortunately, that is precisely why you’re getting the same results, and not losing much weight.

You haven’t changed the single, most important factor in weight loss – what you eat. You mentioned an extra cookie or two everyday. Well, how many cookies were you eating before you started training?

Having treats is perfectly acceptable in a healthy diet and in a happy life. But it’s important to take a look at what is truly a treat, and what is a habit.

If you do something everyday, whether it’s good or bad, that is a habit. A treat is something that is occasional, not daily.

But again, this is another underhanded way our body tries to deceive us into eating more.

Studies have shown that many people who exercise, especially those who are new to it, tend to overestimate the calories burned during exercise.

They also choose to reward themselves with larger portions and high calorie treats for their efforts. “I just ran 10 miles; I deserve another cookie.” It’s not an uncommon experience.

The next thing that every runner needs to look at is how you fuel your runs because if you believe everything the marketing companies tell you, then it’s no surprise that the weight is not budging.

You do not need a pre-run snack, a gel very 15 minutes to wash down with the sugary sports drink and a 300 calorie recovery smoothie for your daily 30 – 45 minute easy run. For the vast majority of your runs, all you need is water.

If you’re running a really tough or long workout that is over about an hour or so, then yes. Fueling with a couple of hundred calories – depending in your size – before or during the run will improve performance.

But I am talking about a banana, and maybe a few almonds for recovery afterwards. Not an entire, extra meal. The fact is that runners need to pay more attention to our diets than non-runners in order to be in our best shape, both to improve our running and our health.

But when it comes to weight loss or maintenance, nutrition matters far more than how much you run.

Eating whole, nutritious foods that satisfy without being too [clorically 00:10:38] dense is the key to fueling your body with exactly what it needs, without allowing it to store the excess as fat.

Forcing your body to work harder to get the nutrients out of your food could help a little bit too. That means, eat salads instead of drinking smoothies, nuts instead of nut butters, and oranges instead of orange juice.

The more chopping, blending and processing that you do to your food outside of your body, the easier it is for your body to digest and use, which is good. But it’s also stored as fat, which is not so good.

Hopefully that gives you a little more insight Marcus, and you can make some small adjustments that will eventually add up to a big difference.

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That’s it for the Extra Kick for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with another episode, and I am looking forward to having you join me again. Have a great run today.