Tell me it's ok -- Running

I've got PCOS, started running 7 weeks ago... and haven't lost a pound. I have, however, lost 6 inches combined (from hips, waist and bust), and my legs on their way to being rock solid. Give it some time, enjoy your runs, and it'll be ok

Good point! OP, the scale is not the only measurment of success. Just focusing on your progession with your running is pretty darn incredible!! Take body measurements and progress pictures, pay attention to how your close are fitting (I bet they're a bit looser) and try not to worry so much about what the scale says for a while. I know it's hard - my weight's been fluctuating quite a bit lately and it can be maddening but you just have to keep reminding yourself that it's part of the process and you're making excellent strides (haha pun intended) in other areas of your "journey".

keep it up!

Thank you guys so much. A few of your comments made me a little teary. It's just so hard because I do NOT run to lose weight. I run to push myself, to test my limits, to forget my day, to feel strong, etc etc etc but I'm so unhappy with my weight that it's frustrating to see the scale just go up and up and up over the last 3 weeks.

I AM eating back my calories from running - all of them but that's still putting me at a net of 1800-1900 calories...so who knows. I'm just going to say it's water for now.

The encouragement is really helpful. Thank you guys.

Hey. You know...you're a runner now. We stick together.

Thank you guys so much. A few of your comments made me a little teary. It's just so hard because I do NOT run to lose weight. I run to push myself, to test my limits, to forget my day, to feel strong, etc etc etc but I'm so unhappy with my weight that it's frustrating to see the scale just go up and up and up over the last 3 weeks.

I AM eating back my calories from running - all of them but that's still putting me at a net of 1800-1900 calories...so who knows. I'm just going to say it's water for now.

The encouragement is really helpful. Thank you guys.

Hey. You know...you're a runner now. We stick together.

We have a secret club and hijack the Fitness and Exercise boards. I'll PM you our secret code.

Thank you guys so much. A few of your comments made me a little teary. It's just so hard because I do NOT run to lose weight. I run to push myself, to test my limits, to forget my day, to feel strong, etc etc etc but I'm so unhappy with my weight that it's frustrating to see the scale just go up and up and up over the last 3 weeks.

I AM eating back my calories from running - all of them but that's still putting me at a net of 1800-1900 calories...so who knows. I'm just going to say it's water for now.

The encouragement is really helpful. Thank you guys.

Hey. You know...you're a runner now. We stick together.

We have a secret club and hijack the Fitness and Exercise boards. I'll PM you our secret code.

Shush. "We don't have a secret club"

Here's the initiate...I mean a great supportive group for new runners:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/groups/home/30-couch-to-5k-running-program-c25k

You're fine. Your body is just holding more water to repair your muscles from running. It will go away soon

This!!!!!

3 lbs in 3 weeks is statistically insignificant. Weigh yourself once a week at most and see how you change over months, not weeks. Be patient and persistent. Weigh all the food that goes in your mouth and log honestly.

And finally...

Keep running!!! You are doing great!

its OK
its temporary!
keep up!
dont give it importance.
workout more in running, bicycling, stairs, swimming,

I know that my body is retaining fluid from my muscles etc.

You know what's up. Keep going, you're awesome,.

I won't tell you it's going to be OK because it's not. It's going to be incredible.

Berry's a smart woman

You will do fine...relax. First it takes time and in three weeks you have already seen some serious changes and done better then most beginners. You will do fine. Keep going with the running adjust the water and food to fit and BTW I don't always eat more on the days I run even though I can. Evaluate the running impact at the end of 3 months but work with the other parts of your lifestyle too.

Looking forward to hearing your update

I got told that if you have PCOS you may have a lack of Magnesium in your diet which prevents weightloss

I didn't read the above posts so I apologize if someone already said this. I never lost weight until I started taking my net cals (I researched the daylights out of this).
Running calculator to help you figure totals.
Running (6-minute mile) .115 x weight x min = cals burned on run
Running (8-minute mile) .095 x weight x min = cals burned on run
Running (9-minute mile) .087 x weight x min = cals burned on run
Walking, normal pace, asphalt road .036 x weight x min = cals burned on run
Walking, normal pace, fields & hills .037 x weight x min = cals burned on run

Then you have to subtract what you would have burned sitting on your butt:
Sitting Still .009 x weight x min = cals burned sitting

Cals burned on run - cals burned sitting = extra cals that may be consumed.

For me (I am anywhere from 125 - 135 lb at any given time so this is an average):
Walking 1 mile: 43 cals
Running slow 1 mile: 65 cals
Running fast 1 mile: 98 cals

Myfitnesspal gives me wwwwaaaayyyy more cals than that.

Also note that the more you are boosting your metabolism with continual exercise the more cals you can eat. Doing small things through the day can keep the metabolism pumping. 10 min in the am, 10 min at lunch, walking down the hall to stretch my legs, etc. I cannot tell you how much it helps if you work at a desk job like I do.

Good luck. Keep going. You are awesome!

A fairly long reponse.

It's ok!

You've gotten some fantastic comments above. So, the thing I want to to "re-mind" (word separation intentional) you of is that this is a long-haul game. And the game is your life. You get to choose how you keep score or if you do at all.

As a practical matter, your weight may briefly climb, but it cannot stay on an upward trend forever if you are staying with the gradual deficit of calories and the physical activity.

Personally, I think the run/walk technique is a fabulous way of getting into running and seeing progress while reducing the chance of injury. I've run three marathons, a half-marathon, and a 10-mile race using run/walk. And while you probably cannot imagine completing mid-to long-distances using this technique, it definitely works.

A bit of my story:
In July 2013, I could run solidly (I would get tired and have to run at a slower pace) or run/walk (3 minutes running and 1 minute walking) nearly the same distance in 30 minutes...2.76 miles. That was on flat ground, not the hills I have where I live. That is not even the distance of a 5K race (3.1069 miles) and at that pace it would have taken me 33:46 to complete a 5K. I used a run/walk training program to train for my first marathon in November 2013 and by September 2013 (a little less than 2 months before my first marathon) my 5K time was down to 28:03. I ran a recent 5K in March (and a half-marathon the next day) and my time was 25:32. In both 5K races, I used a single 1 minute walk in the middle of the race.

I ran my third marathon on April 13th and broke through 5 hours (4:57:09) running 4 minutes and walking 1 minute on a very hilly and fairly warm and sun-exposed course. I trained for a much faster time and was capable of running a much faster time. But here's the deal with that: I wasn't a piece of furniture for the rest of the day (I wasn't attached to the couch, the recliner or the bed). I was up and about having something more like a "normal day" when I returned home. Yes, the muscles were tired but the whole thing works. I just ran a 10-mile race where I pushed a little harder because the weather was favorable and completed the race in 1:36:11 (9:37/mile), again running 4 minutes and walking 1 minute.

Here is the thing about these harder pushes of running. It is not unusual to see my weight swing upwards by as much as 7-8 pounds in the few days after these longer, more challenging runs. I know it is the muscle repari process at work and that within a week or so, my weight will be back to its pre-race value. It's mostly water weight that comes along for the ride in the muscle repair.

So, back to you.

Don't take this as an advocacy to take up running marathons because there are a couple of things that you need to consider (with or without PCOS):


First, your aerobic conditioning response will be the fastest of all body responses to running demands. Your heart and lungs, in particular, will respond to the stress (and it is a stress) of the aerobic and and anaerobic demands to increase your blood circulation. You will, and apparently have, seen that in just a few weeks of consistent activity. So, where you'll naturally want to go with that is to "go faster" and that is accomplished by running longer relative to the walk cycles and running faster during the run cycle. And that is fine up to a point, but I'm going to tell you something that won't seem intuitive....slow down. I know it will feel like a plateau to not keep speeding up as quickly as you can, but there are other systems involved.

As fast as your aerobic system can respond, your muscles are much slower to respond and adapt to the demands. Everytime you step up the demand, it takes you muscles longer to build the "infrastructure" to keep up with the increased demand. Think months instead of weeks or days. Muscle adaptaion is not built on continually stressing, it is built on giving them a stress and letting them recover. While I could walk lots of miles in a day, I found that having rest days were more important in running than I ever thought (when I was younger, I would have done better by throwing in more rest, not less). At its' simplest level, your heart, lungs and brains say "let's go!" and your muscles will start saying "wait a minute, let me rest!"

One of the advantages of run/walk is that the running muscles are given short periods to rest while other muscles are engaged at a slower walingpace. Although not really classified as "interval training" it really is a form of interval training.

But the system that responds the slowest is the skeletal system; the bones, tendons, ligaments and cartilage. Where the muscles take maybe 3-6 months to respond adequately to the stresses of running training, you;ve got to think more on the order of a year or maybe two for the rest to adapt. Run/walk helps lessent the stress on the joints and the skeletal system (the so-called "pounding" that the joints take) but it does not prevent it.

But all of this actually comes down to a matter of blood flow to build the infrastructure. The hear and lungs have the greatest blood flow, muscles less so, and the bones and joints, the least. Its easy for the aeorbic system to "run over" the skeletal system.

So you get some perspective on my running. I had not run (races) or done consistent run training since 1985. Over the late 1990's and early 2000's I put on a lot of weight until I finally said "enough!" I lost a grand total of nearly 90 pounds by walking, hiking with a pack (once I was making some progress) and modifying my food intake fairly nominally to start. I got into serious logging on MFP after losing the first 60 pounds, when I wanted to get off the weight plateau (my size did not plateau as I kept losing inches). I had 3 years of doing nothing but walking and hiking each and every day as my aerobic, muscle and skeletal base when I finally took up running again. I was then able to backpack with a 50-60 pound pack up fairly challenging trails. In essence, I kept my skeletal and muscle systems ability to handle the weight while getting lighter with a different muscle structure. I was "in maintenance" on MFP.

When I took up running (again), I entered a race, not so much to race in it as it was for it's location and picture taking opportunities. But I did take the opportunity to run (not run/walk) when I wasn't taking pictures and I felt pretty good at the end of the 10K. With the capability to run a solid 6 miles, albeit fairly slowly, I took on the challenge of seeing if I could at least prepare for a marathon knowing I could always drop back to one of the shorter races. The technique I used to train and to run was the run/walk (Jeff Galloway).

By the time the training was calling for runs over 10 miles, my weight began to increase.

How was that possible? I was almost always running a deficit in calories. But my body's "happy weight" for running seems to be 169-172 pounds and it pretty much stays in that range except in the few days after a particularly hard and long run (my weight doesn't vary much on the shorter weekday 4-7 mile runs). I ran on Saturday at 169 pounds. This morning I weigh-in at 176. The muscles are just slightly stiff today ,but less so than yesterday. And they have never been so stiff that I couldn't get around.

Such is the nature of running.

Think the long game. It is ok!