@disneybruin wrote:
Does anybody have any tips for losing weight while training for a race? I am 5'4'' and currently 135 pounds. Over the past 2 years, I've lost 100 pounds and would like to lose 10 more. I have lost the weight almost exclusively by walking (yay, Fitbit!).
I just signed up for my first half marathon and am wondering how to balance calorie restriction with training. 1400 calories is what Fitbit is recommending for me to lose a pound per week. However, I'm finding that I get winded easily when running 5Ks --- I wonder if it's because of the low calorie intake. As it stands, I average about 20K steps per day. Has anyone here successfully lost weight while training for a half marathon?
The Fitbit is exactly the tool to use for training for something like that which has highly variable calorie burn amounts. It's exactly the reason why I bought one in early spring, to keep a reasonable deficit while doing varied exercise with varied daily activity. But I had to manually log ALL exercise, even running, with a better calorie burn estimate, because Fitbit can't get hills right, and faster speeds it underestimates even if distance was correct. Of course the swimming and biking it had no clue on, so required manual entry anyway.
First though, I sure hope you appreciate that 1400 for 1 lb per week, or 500 cal daily deficit, is based on likely NO exercise being done.
You would never eat only 1400 on a day, unless you happened to be a rest day and just as sedentary as Fitbit predicted. When you exercise, you will burn more than Fitbit predicted, subtract 500 and you'll be eating more than 1400.
Second issue, for only 10 lbs to lose and doing that much exercise, 500 cal deficit or 1 lb weekly is NOT reasonable anymore, unless you feel like fighting for that 1 lb, your body fighting back, and not getting nearly as much out of your workouts. Your body will adapt to the stress of trying to lose more than it wants, and you'll end up losing less than you want anyway, but with a stressed out body.
Don't setup a fight with stress like that, your exercise will be enough stress already.
But no that's not the reason why you are out of breath either, but too big a deficit can sure be the reason why the body will make desired improvements slower than it needs to. So another benefit to reasonable deficit. Faster improvements from exercise.
You've likely been walking since a little kid, you are about as efficient at it as you could be.
If that's all you did while losing weight, you actually became more unfit after awhile - unless you added incline or carried more weight.
Huh?
Which do you think used more energy and was more of a workout - moving 235 lbs at say 3.5 mph, or 135 lbs same 3.5 mph?
If a person was squating say 200 lbs max for so many sets and reps, and they lost 25 lbs, but now they squat 205 lbs max for same sets and reps, did they actually increase the weight they squated? (Think about a squat and what you are doing)
They actually lost strength, and if diet was severe enough for that 25 lbs, lost muscle too.
If walking was all you did during your weight loss, you lost muscle mass along with the fat, sorry to tell you, but you did. Some of it you don't need of course, do you need the same calf muscles that carried 235 lbs to carry 135 lbs? Of course not.
Also, what once required a certain level of oxygen and fitness to carry more weight became less and less as you carried less and less weight around.
If walking is only exercise, and you don't add incline or a weight vest to increase the workout and compensate for lost weight, you can only walk so fast to make up for it, eventually you can't walk fast enough to make up the difference.
A body never keeps what isn't needed, and in a diet it loses unneeded stuff even faster, and if big enough diet it loses least used stuff too.
Despite that discouraging news (which I hope convinces you to keep a reasonable deficit too so you don't lose too much more upper body muscle while only running), it means you can improve, it'll just take time.
You may also be going too fast now that you started running, only training your carb burning high-end aerobic/lactic acid system. There is only so much improvement to that side of the aerobic range.
You likely need to slow down and train the low-end fat burning system for endurance.
You should be able to speak whole sentence while running. Take some breaths to catch up, speak another sentence.
But it should be fast enough that you can't even attempt to sing.
Another suggestion since doing endurance cardio, since you'll be eating more on running days.
If you have another cardio session the next day, within 30 min after the run, have a 200-400 cal snack that has macro gram carb to protein ratio of 4:1. So like the Equate Nutritional Shake (non-high protein version) I just drank, or the Clif bars I enjoy, are 40 g carbs to 9/10 g protein, 250 cal. Perfect. 2% milk with chocolate mix homemade also can hit it (premade chocolate milk misses usually).
That increases the carb intake to the muscles to max amount, making the cardio session for tomorrow be better potentially.
And yes, I lost my final 2 lbs in the 4 weeks of half-marathon training I just did. Of course I wasn't trying to lose anything the last week tapering down.
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