Calories for distance running

jjakcats

so I’m running 70 miles a week as part of Marathon training and I’ve lost 75 lbs through the process. I started by doing two hours of walking a day and lost my excess weight while doing that. I’m still doing two hours of training split into one hour workouts twice a day, but now I’m running six miles each hour. MyFitness app says I’m burning about 2650 calories a day. I started on 1200 calories, then have moved up in calories as I lost weight and gained intensity during my workouts. Yesterday I raised my calories to 2200 and lost a pound this morning. What’s the best way to find a balance between training and calories?

Lietchi

"Yesterday I raised my calories to 2200 and lost a pound this morning. What’s the best way to find a balance between training and calories?"

Well, what you don't want to do is to judge your calorie goal on a day per day basis. Your weight fluctuates daily, not just from changes in your bodyfat, but also (mostly) changes in water weight and food waste in your digestive tract. To evaluate calorie intake, you need to look at a much longer period, averaging your food intake and looking at your weight trend: 4 to 6 weeks or (if menstruating) 1 to 2 menstrual cycles.

spiriteagle99

Are you trying to maintain your current weight or continue to lose? Generally, it isn't a good idea to try to lose a lot of weight while doing heavy training as you need the calories to maintain or build muscle and for energy to get the best out of your workouts.

I have run 5 marathons. When I was marathon training, I logged all my food and exercise so I knew how much I needed to eat to keep a good balance. My goal was to eat at maintenance or as close as possible. I still ended up losing a few pounds, because i burn more than the average for someone my size, but I tried hard not to lose too much since I needed the calories to keep my energy up. Since I was usually hungry, it wasn't hard to eat enough. I did need to focus on eating healthy foods rather than quick and easy junk food.

AnnPT77

What Lietchi said. It's always best to look at weight trend over a long time, because water weight and waste in the digestive tract change more from day to day than body fat levels. As you get lighter, an increasing fraction of your body weight tends to be water - up to 60%+! - so that alone can be very misleading in short-term scale weight changes.

Also, it may be worth considering what calorie goal you pick as a starting point.

Believing your tracker would be one rational option. They're not perfect, but they can be reasonably close for many people.

If you're trying to go to weight-maintenance calories, there are various ways to estimate that, including by using your own calorie logging and weight change data - that's the best option IMO. There's a post here where various MFPers discuss alternative ways to estimate weight-maintenance calories.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10638211/how-to-find-your-maintenance-calorie-level

If you're still wanting to lose weight, just more predictable, then estimating maintenance calories and subtracting calories to create a deficit is fine. Use the assumption that 500 calories per day is about a pound per week (in weight trend terms!), and use arithmetic for partial pounds. Here again, I'd start with personal history data if you have a fairly careful, accurate base of that over those multi-weeks needed.

Since you mention reacting to the overnight change, I'll add one more thing: If we increase calories, it's possible to see a misleading scale jump right away that isn't body fat. When we eat more food, we'll tend to have more waste in our digestive tract right away, plus we retain extra water to digest/metabolize some foods. If the calorie intake doesn't explain the quick scale jump - since it takes eating around 3500 calories above maintenance calories to gain a pound - then the gain isn't fat, it's some combination of water/waste.

Sometimes people who are stressed by scale jumps may prefer to add more food gradually to minimize seeing that jump.

sarataylor3216

That’s awesome dedication! Apps give you a rough idea, but your body gives the best feedback. Try increasing calories in small steps until your weight stabilizes and you feel fueled for training without constant fatigue.

cmriverside

Do you have a trainer? If you do they can help with calories for running.

Otherwise, you could go to sailrabbit.com to calculate your calories needed for your level of exercise.

There are sites that specifically calculate calories burned by running, too.

Or use myfitnesspal as it is designed. Input your normal daily Activity Level as a baseline Goal then add in the exercise in the Exercise tab on the days you run. Myfitnesspal will calculate an approximation of your running calories, add it to your day's calorie Goal and recommend your Goal calories for that day (including the exercise:)

Myfitnesspal's explanation of how they calculate

AnnPT77

Rethink, rephrase: When I said "Believing your tracker would be one rational option" upthread, I meant believing the all-day estimate, even syncing the tracker to MFP if practical (with negative adjustments turned on in MFP for more realistic adjustments).

Just manually logging the exercise calories from the fitness tracker as exercise in MFP has some issues. Ideally, what you want to log in MFP is just the added calories you burned by the running itself during that time slot, above and beyond the calories you would've burned in that time slot just doing normal daily life stuff. (There are ways to deal with that, but it's detailed.) Even the tracker's "active calories" (vs. total calories) for the exercise won't really catch that.

For people doing average small amounts of exercise, like half an hour to an hour 3-4 times a week or something, that discrepancy isn't usually a big deal in numeric terms, in the big picture. For someone with frequent long-duration exercise like long-run days for someone training hard, it may be a bigger numeric difference.

If manually logging long-duration/frequent walk/run calories in MFP, another option for estimating longer duration walk/run calories - a conservative one, IMO - would be this calculator:

https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

Set the "Energy" box to "Net". That causes it to estimate just the add-on calories from the actual running, above and beyond daily life normal calorie burn, which is what we ideally want when logging exercise manually.

I know there's a lot of opinion and advice above. If you need more info about why I'm saying any of that, I'm happy to type more explanation of the reasoning, I'm just not writing a longer essay right now to speculate what questions you have and answer all the ones I might think of. 😉😆 This is a long enough essay already!