Eating less for weight loss Vs enough to sustain long runs

I'm very familiar with trying to do everything at once, and, "I want it all now."

I lost 80ish pounds, and if you had asked me at the time if it was going fast enough, I'd have given you an emphatic, "NO!"

But reality is, I can't have it all and I can't lose faster than my life and body will let me and still maintain my daily go-to-work-take-care-of-stuff health.

I hope you'll find your balance. Running doesn't have to be a race to be won - enjoy the process, lose more slowly, you can do all the things - just maybe not at your prescribed pace!

You're at a healthy weight.

Eat enough to fuel your exercise.

If you aren't happy with how you look at this weight (22.9 BMI) then try weight-lifting or other resistance work alongside your running.

TDEE takes discipline. Missing planned workouts can bite you in more than one way. First it hurts your training and secondly you may be eating more calories than you are burning during the week.

When training, I ran 5-10miles 2x week (8-10 min/miles depending on workout), lifted 2x week (upper/lower split + core), and biked was 20-40 miles 2x week (15-22mph depending on the ride). Some days were brick workouts (run/bike - I couldn't run after biking) Some days I combined lifting with shorter runs or rides. Races/Longer rides were on the weekends and My average workouts were 1-2.5hrs.

I tried TDEE. I'm about your height and 1600 was my intake goal. For me it wasn't enough most days. I always felt drained. In the long run I lost weight, but felt like crap. I needed more calories for the long intense workouts. Eventually, my workouts faltered and my training was less than ideal, I gained weight because I missed scheduled workouts. The built in calorie burn was no longer there.

I suppose the weight loss balanced out, over the long haul. I just got so run down I lost my edge and didn't adjust my calories when my training fell off leading to significant weight gain in a relatively short period of time. CI>CO.

Before trying TDEE, I used the MFP way of base calories from activity level and exercise calories from dedicated exercise. I still only ate back 50 - 75% of calories based on trial and error (even fitness trackers are only estimated burns), but my energy levels were better and I lost weight. My base calories on no exercise days was 1350 (I'm short and loss was set at 1lb/week), but some days I ate upward of 1900 calories. Some weekends it was 2000+, and I still lost weight.

Why did I switch when this was working? Good question. My only answer is that I thought it would be faster. It was, but at a price.

Best of luck, Nikki

I can understand that at that weight/height, you might have some weight you'd like to lose, but I'm thinking it's unlikely to be a large amount. If so, that would suggest to me that a slow loss rate would be a good plan, even ignoring your training goals. 400-ish calories daily isn't all that slow, and you're doing high-stress training right now, and wanting to build back up on the lifting, besides keeping your running performance goals?

So, especially considering the training goals in the mix: It seems like there might be some middle ground in there, or some way to handle this in time-slices. I think that's in line with Riverside's comment about the completely human impulse to want progress on every front at the same time. I get it, but that's . . . ambitious. Maybe even unrealistic?

When mentioning time-slices, I'm speculating about what your overall training plan plays out over a long-ish period of time. (I do a more of a short-endurance or strength-endurance cardiovascular sport, rowing, not running. Different kind of training plan periodization, when doing formal plans.)

If your overall long-term training plan includes phases with less physical stress, maybe phases where you're doing more slow runs even of long-ish duration, maybe it would be easier to run a moderate deficit at those times, then ramp up to maintenance calories when the training plan intensity spikes up?

Some endurance athletes here have reported liking a 5:2 IF pattern, too: 5 days maintenance calories, 2 non-consecutive days at very low calories. That's a way to achieve a weekly deficit, and might be able to be timed around the week's training in a way to minimize the hit on energy for training.

You mention not wanting to pause training. How do you feel about pausing fat loss for a bit? There's more than one way to not try for everything all at once.

I do understand the appeal of TDEE method, eating the same calorie level every day, which you're almost doing (I noticed the comment about maintenance on long-run days, and a small variability other days). Personally, I prefer the MFP method of accounting exercise separately, but in maintenance I also combine that with mild calorie banking, so I have more flexibility. Bit if you really like TDEE method, then maybe the time-slice approaches don't appeal to you.

Before I suggest another possibility, I'm wondering if you've validated the 2000 calorie maintenance goal with at least 4-6 weeks of experiential data. It's unclear to me from your OP how long you've been sticking with that.

Most people are close to the average calorie needs that the calculators spit out, but not everyone. Some people are surprisingly far off those estimates (in either direction), and a rare few may be dramatically far off. My logging experience, going on 10 years now, says my actual calorie needs are several hundred calories different on average daily from what either MFP or my good brand/model fitness tracker estimate. That creates a cognitive bias on my part, one that makes me suggest people not rely on those kinds of estimates without personally testing them over a good-sized batch of weeks.

The other tactical possibility is very slow loss. I had a time when I had around 5kg that had crept on slowly in the first few years of maintenance. I wanted to lose it, but didn't want to deal with a big deficit. What I did was set myself up for half a pound a week loss - based on my personalized calorie needs - but let myself eat up to or even beyond maintenance occasionally, within reason. Really ultra-slowly, the weight crept off . . . like it took around a year, and on a back-calculation my actual deficit was more like 100-150 calories daily. So slow! The beauty of that for me was that it was practically painless: No sense of deprivation, no performance penalty in my rowing, etc. Very low physical or psychological stress. I'd do it that way again, in similar circumstances.

The caveat is that something like that will probably work best for someone who has high confidence about their calorie needs, and about the workable accuracy of their logging habits. There were times in that process when even my weight trending app thought I was maintaining or even losing - up to about 6 weeks in one case! - but I was pretty sure I still had a mild deficit. Eventually, that anticipated deficit showed up on the scale quite suddenly.

Just a few thoughts. Wishing you success in finding a strategy that helps you balance your goals in the best possible personal way!

If it were me, I wouldn't do that. I think you'd still be under-fueling, or risking under-fueling.

If you have at least a month or so of solid logging data, use that, not MFP or a calculator. You can still use TDEE method, just use your TDEE as estimated from experience.

Method:

• Add up the calories you've eating for 4-6 weeks. If you have menstrual cycles, use one full cycle.
• Add up pounds or kilos you've gained or lost over the same period.
• Figure the estimated calories for the total lost or gained pounds or kilos. Assume a pound is about 3500 calories, a kilo 7700 calories.
• If you overall lost weight in that time period, add the weight-loss calories to the eaten calories. If you overall gained weight, subtract the weight-gain calories from the eaten calories.
• Divide the total of eaten/lost calories by the number of days in the time period. That is your TDEE, estimated from experience.

If you've ramped up exercise a lot, add some estimated calories, ballparking the calorie value of the added mileage. A potential good way to figure any extra running calories would be the calculator linked below, with the "energy" box set on "net". If you want TDEE, either consider the daily average exercise increase over a week, or add up a schedule day's extra exercise and divide by 7 days. Close enough.

https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

From the estimated TDEE, the one that includes at least some consideration of planned exercise increase, subtract some number if you still want to lose weight while training.

The above is methodological fact about how to estimate TDEE from your own data, assuming I didn't make any errors in that algorithm. (If I did, betcha someone will correct me, probably @PAV8888 😉.)

Now we're going into opinion from me, not fact:

If it were me, at your current weight in the healthy range and with your athletic goals, I'd eat that full TDEE for a while - maybe all the way up to the next race, even?

If I absolutely couldn't resist max training plus weight loss, I'd subtract at most 250 calories from TDEE, and test drive that for a couple of weeks and see how energy level responds. It won't much show up on the scale, because your workout schedule is full of things that would cause water retention roller-coastering on the scale, but decent odds slow fat loss would be happening and start to be more clear around 4-6 weeks out, looking at your weight's trend line over the whole time, IMO ideally daily consistent-conditions weigh-ins.

If I were you, I absolutely wouldn't try to lose faster than that half a pound a week loss rate while training hard. That's where you're getting the "why are you trying to push everything all at once" push-back from the responders here.

That said, 500 calories a day is roughly a pound a week, or 1100 calories a day is roughly a kilo a week, and you can do arithmetic to target any estimated loss rate you prefer.

Repeat for emphasis: If it were me, I'd go to full TDEE for a few weeks. High energy, low risk. Track calories well, confirm your TDEE estimate. I wouldn't cut anything, but I would strongly recommend not cutting anything more than 250 calories daily. You're at a healthy weight, just a little excess you'd prefer to lose. You have strong athletic goals that require fuel. Wait until a less intense training phase to consider cutting calories. Even then, don't cut them very far.

P.S. When I got as close as you are to goal weight, I cut the loss rate to a very small deficit, just as I'm suggesting you do. I have athletic goals, too, but not as intense/demanding as yours. I still wouldn't - didn't - try to lose very fast at all while at BMI 22-point-something. That has risks on the athletic side, not to mention the health side, and it's not just a risk of under-performing in a few workouts.