Long Distance Running: Why You're Not Losing Weight

Distance running, such as marathon training, seems to many to be a quick way to lose weight. Running burns plenty of calories, and participating in an activity that burns high numbers of calories for extended periods of time seems like a logical choice for weight loss. However, there are several reasons why long-distance training may not lead to weight loss. If you're not losing, or if you're gaining, it may be because of one of these reasons.

Increased calorie intake

If you run, it does not make all foods calorie-free. You still have to watch what you eat, and make good food choices. If you're not sure what your recommended caloric intake is, MayoClinic has a calorie calculator to help. You can add the calories you burned during exercise for your maximum caloric intake to stay at your current weight. If you're eating more than that, you're going to gain weight.

Increased muscle mass

When you increase your mileage, your muscle mass increases. With more muscle, comes more weight. Eventually, this should level out, resulting in your weight loss restarting. If you're increasing your mileage and watching what you eat, increased muscle mass may be your anti-weight loss culprit.

Training calorie intake

Some runners forget to add in their bars, energy drinks, goos and other training nutrition to their calorie intake totals. On long runs, those numbers can add up quickly, and leaving them out could throw off your counts by a significant number. Underestimating calorie intake can lead to eating more later - causing weight gain.

Not eating enough

Confusing, since the other extreme is eating too much. However, when you eat too few calories, your body starts going into starvation mode, hanging onto every calorie for dear life. Make sure you track how many calories you burn and add it to your recommended caloric intake for an estimate of how much you should be eating to stay at your current weight. You should subtract around 200 calories to lose weight safely without overloading your body.

Overestimating calorie burn

If you're just going by estimates, you don't really know how many calories you're burning on a run. The best way to gauge the number of calories you've torched is by wearing a heart rate monitor with a feature to estimate how many calories you've burned. By inputting your current age, sex and weight, and finding your resting heart rate, the watch estimates how many calories you've burned based on your heart rate throughout the workout. This gives you a much more accurate picture of how many calories you've actually burned.

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