1 Year of Running, results of body composition tests

I've been on MFP, losing weight and exercising for almost 2 years now. I've lost almost 80 lbs. I need to lose at least another 20 lbs. It's going slowly now and winter has been rough for me exercise wise as I prefer to run outside. But it's warming up now, so I can run outside more often!

I started running in March of 2012. I've never been a runner, not even as a kid. I started with C25K and it took me 13 weeks to complete the program, and because I'm slow, another 2 weeks to actually be able to run 5K. I did my first 5K in May 2012, but didn't run the whole thing. My time was around 46 minutes. In June, I did my first 5K where I ran the entire thing. My time was around 41 minutes. I've done many 5Ks since then, and completed my first 10K in November. My time for that was 1 hour 14 minutes (and is still my best 10K time to date). My best 5K time is around 35 minutes now but I'm training for distance so speed is not really my concern. My first half marathon is NEXT MONTH! Yikes. With the bad weather I haven't been doing nearly enough running. I can only seem to get 3 to 4.5 miles on the treadmill. I was up to about 10.7 miles in December but have only done a few long runs since then. I head out tomorrow hoping to hit 11 miles in the nice weather (upper 30s to low 40s and sunny). I still can't believe I'm a 'runner'!

The other thing I wanted to discuss was my take on calorie levels, LBM due to excessive cardio, and progress. I strive to net 1200 calories a day. I've tried EM2WL and while I still lost, it was significantly slower and I'm already a very slow loser (I average .8 lbs a week). For me, it didn't work. To be fair, I aim to net 1200, but am probably closer to netting 1300 because I tend to go over. Last July, I had my RMR and my BF tested at the local university (they use Bod Pod for the BF testing). My RMR ended up being about 200 calories over what most of the calculators predicted. So, I was netting significantly under my RMR of 1662. I have NOT found that eating below my BMR has resulted in drastic LBM loss. I have NOT found that doing cardio only has resulted in drastic LBM loss. Yes, there has been some, but starting out where I did, that's certainly expected. My RMR is 14% higher than expected so netting below my BMR has certainly not harmed my metabolism either. I've also never hit a plateau. Of course there are times when I don't lose weight, or even gain some, but it's directly related to my eating so definitely not a plateau. I had my BF tested again today but will wait until summer to test my RMR again.

So here are my results of all cardio exercise and eating below my BMR:

In the last 7.5 months, I've lost 18 lbs. 16 lbs of that was fat and 2 lbs of that was muscle (so, I lose about 11% of my weight from LBM and 89% from Fat mass - I'm OK with that number). My body fat was reduced by 5.2%. My RMR was likely reduced by 4% due to my weight loss (the Bod Pod estimates your RMR as well, so I took the percent change in that and applied to my known RMR from last July - my RMR should now be about 1601 instead of the 1662 it was last summer).

So, if you're a data geek like me, there you go!