When your body is used to running...

marykaterunsforwine

I love to run! I run at least one marathon a year. Running is my favorite cardio workout, although I occasionally throw some spinning and swimming in there. I lift on avg once a week, although some weeks more. Myfitnesspal tracking has been on point but I havent lost weight in over a year! Suggestions? What do you do when your body gets used to the cardio you have been doing?

ABabilonia

Are you logging your food accurately? The calories in calories out formula is standard and set to work most of the times (I want to say all the time). Perhaps exercising is causing you to eat more calories? The CICO formula is efficient in the long run.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

Dumb question: Are you significantly overweight? It's much harder to lose weight when you are already pretty slim. Also, check this out:

https://www.runnersworld.com/for-beginners-only/why-do-i-gain-weight-during-marathon-training

mabearof6

How much weight are you trying to lose? How are you tracking your intake? Are you weighing all foods, even prepackaged and single serving foods? Runger is very, very real and it is pretty easy to eat more than you are burning when you run a lot.

lorrpb

To respond to the specific question asked: When your body gets used to the cardio workout, such that it is easier, you can up it. You can run farther, faster, change training formats, or add a new form of cardio. Most of this has nothing to do with losing weight, as explained above. If you exercise more and eat more, your weight won't change.

spiriteagle99

That was a good article. It is really easy to outeat your calorie burn. On long run days and the day after, generally I'm starving, so I have to be careful.

I also run and usually my miles and my eating are pretty balanced. I gained weight during a period when I wasn't running as much, due to injury. I managed to lose the weight while marathon training and keep it off for the following year. I'm currently training for another marathon and so far I've kept the weight off. I do it by logging everything I eat, even on those days when I am starving and eat too much. Just the fact of logging helps me make better choices. My mileage is high enough I can eat whatever I want, most of the time, I just can't eat as much as I'd like sometimes. i.e. one cookie, not three, or one beer, not two.

canadianlbs

even further clarification: your body burns the same calories for the same actions, regardless of how hard or easy it feels. so if you were thinking that the calorie burn for your runs has been dropping as you got better at running, then that would be wrong.

you MAY be burning a little bit less if your actual body weighs less than it did at the start. but afaik that would be pretty minimal, unless you've lost a real bunch of weight. and you say your weight has been stable for a year so that probably isn't a factor either. add to that: as your weight drops your calorie requirement drops too, so maybe you've just found your stability point between intake and burn, without knowing it.

another thought: how long have you been lifting, and what kind of lifting is it? i ask because recomp is another possibility. muscle is more dense than fat. [editing here: MARGINALLY, maybe not as much as some sources might lead you to think. i think it's actually something like a 4:5 ratio, so five pounds of muscle will look about the same as four pounds of fat]

so if you've never lifted before there is a possibility that you've gained a little muscle - basically you may have been trading in fat 'for' muscle tissue, which would keep your scale weight stable while the fat-to-muscle ratio continues to drop. but keep in mind that even new lifters who are working on hypertrophy intentionally gain muscle pretty slowly if they're women, so don't think of that as anything too dramatic.

cwolfman13

marykaterunsforwine wrote: »

I love to run! I run at least one marathon a year. Running is my favorite cardio workout, although I occasionally throw some spinning and swimming in there. I lift on avg once a week, although some weeks more. Myfitnesspal tracking has been on point but I havent lost weight in over a year! Suggestions? What do you do when your body gets used to the cardio you have been doing?

It doesn't have anything to do with being used to a particular exercise. Efficiencies have a minimal impact on the energy expenditure of a particular exercise...and generally speaking, the better you are, the faster and further and harder you can go which would burn more calories.

I primarily cycle...I've been cycling for years...I have no problem cutting weight when I need to.

Azdak

In addition to the fact that weight loss stall due to “efficiency” is largely unfounded, the biggest factor in a plateau is usually that your whole lifestyle is “in balance” in terms of energy in vs energy out. Basically, your body has not “adapted” to the exercise as much as your eating habits have “adapted” to the exercise.

apullum

Your body becomes better at exercise that you do often, but it's a myth that it burns significantly fewer calories from exercise that it is "used to." However, as you lose weight, your body needs fewer calories overall, so the number of calories you burned while running a mile at a higher weight is more than the calories it burns running a mile at a lower weight.

PetiteHabanero

Do you need to lose weight? Or are you "skinny fat?" Doing more strength training will firm up any loose bits, but when building muscle be wary of the scale. Focus on body changes.

_mr_b

How are you measuring the calories burned in your run? I find MFP always overestimates when compared to my Garmin with HRM. If I used the MFP values I could easily eat more and stay within range but not lose any weight.

marykaterunsforwine

Hey guys to answer the questions: I haven't changed up my eating habits in the last year. I track and weigh my intake. I don't add back in my exercise calories. I eat 1500 a day and try to make my protein intake over 100g. I am not overweight but geez if I am busting my butt at the gym I think it should show haha. As one of the posts mentioned, I think my body is now used to this! As it is used to my running and lifting. Soo.. any other thoughts? Please and thank you!

sijomial

marykaterunsforwine wrote: »

Hey guys to answer the questions: I haven't changed up my eating habits in the last year. I track and weigh my intake. I don't add back in my exercise calories. I eat 1500 a day and try to make my protein intake over 100g. I am not overweight but geez if I am busting my butt at the gym I think it should show haha. As one of the posts mentioned, I think my body is now used to this! As it is used to my running and lifting. Soo.. any other thoughts? Please and thank you!

Sorry the bold isn't correct and is just wishful thinking. You are in a calorie balance if you are not losing weight over an extended period of time.
Remember what that smart fella Einstein said....
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
Physics not feelings!

If you were truly eating at a sustained deficit you would be losing. Eat a bit less and/or move a bit more are the obvious suggestions.

The other one would be recheck your food logging accuracy - it's really easy to let it become a little sloppy over time and the 1500 you think you are eating may well be higher.
Your diary is private so no-one can help you with any estimates of how good your food tracking is.

katsheare

spiriteagle99 wrote: »

That was a good article. It is really easy to outeat your calorie burn. On long run days and the day after, generally I'm starving, so I have to be careful.

I also run and usually my miles and my eating are pretty balanced. I gained weight during a period when I wasn't running as much, due to injury. I managed to lose the weight while marathon training and keep it off for the following year. I'm currently training for another marathon and so far I've kept the weight off. I do it by logging everything I eat, even on those days when I am starving and eat too much. Just the fact of logging helps me make better choices. My mileage is high enough I can eat whatever I want, most of the time, I just can't eat as much as I'd like sometimes. i.e. one cookie, not three, or one beer, not two.

I absolutely agree re: logging makes me make better choices. I will have some days when I ask myself: do I want to have to look at that in my log? If the answer is 'no', it doesn't get eaten. My miles aren't that high (had a rubbish 5k run yesterday) but I run 3x a week, bodyweight exercises for 30 min or so 3x a week, log log log (yes, I weigh. I live in the UK so we do things by weight here anyway, not by volume, that habit is an easy one to keep) and I'm nearly at my 'what would that weight feel like' goal (pretty close to the lowest part of the range for my height and age, somewhat arbitrarily chosen). But that loss has come from food choices, not how I move. Moving just expands my food choice potential