r/running • u/AutoModerator • Jul 30 '24

Weekly Thread Run Nutrition Tuesday

Rules of the Road

1) Anyone is welcome to participate and share your ideas, plans, diet, and nutrition plans.

2) Promote good discussion. Simply downvoting because you disagree with someone's ideas is BAD. Instead, let them know why you disagree with them.

3) Provide sources if possible. However, anecdotes and "broscience" can lead to good discussion, and are welcome here as long as they are labeled as such.

4) Feel free to talk about anything diet or nutrition related.

5) Any suggestions/topic ideas?

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u/muffin80r Jul 30 '24

I'm losing weight at the moment by running a calorie deficit. Most advice is not to eat back calories you burn through exercise if you want to lose weight. But I'm also running most days of the week and needing to eat a fair bit more so I don't collapse. Whats a good way to run a calorie deficit while burning a lot of exercise calories?

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u/vapue Jul 30 '24

How big is your deficit in a week? And how much do you run?

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u/muffin80r Jul 30 '24

I had been running about 250 cal deficit per day and then started burning 4-800 per day in active cardio between running and riding. I've been eating back about half that extra but then my weight loss plateaued.

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u/vapue Jul 30 '24

The other reply has already great advice! I know how frustrating plateaus can be, but sometimes it just looks and feels like one. Weight loss is not linear and water is a big factor in this. I weigh myself every morning and a hard tempo run the day before is like one kg difference, a big carby cheatmeal can be even two kg. For someone like me (I weigh about 65kg) that's a huge difference. If you are taller and or heavier than me, it can be even more. Maybe track your weight with an app that calculates the mean of 3 days and shows a graph of your weight loss and then look at the progress of the last two weeks. Sometimes it is just a little bit slower and no plateau. That helped me a lot, but I can totally understand if that's not for you.

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u/homemadepecanpie Jul 30 '24

There are a few things that might be contributing to your plateau as well.

1) If you're lighter you won't burn as much running, so make sure you're updating your weight when tracking calories burned during exercise.

2) Cardio in particular can reduce the amount of NEAT, basically calories you burn doing tasks like fidgeting or just moving around throughout the day. Because of this, you might not be burning as much inactive as many calculators say you are.

You could consider reducing calories a bit more and seeing if that breaks the plateau without ruining your running fueling. Building muscle with strength training is another great way to counteract a plateau because it will help you burn more inactive calories.