There is a tendency, from what I've observed, to use running as a way to have a really bad diet and still stay thin. There is a lot of pressure for people in their 20s and 30s who live in urban areas to both look fit and drink heavily. Not a good recipe for long term health.
It takes hours of running to offset a couple of beers worth of calories. If you're eating unhealthy and drinking a lot, there is no amount of running to undo it.
This is not true. "A study done by researchers at Syracuse found that men burned about 105 kilocalories/mile on average running a mile in 9 minutes and 30 seconds, and about 52 calories when walking the same mile in 19 minutes." [1]
A beer is, say, 150 calories. A mile of running burns about 100 calories. When I ran, cruising speed was 7 minutes per mile. So a light 6 mile (10k) run would be about 45 minutes, 600 calories, or 6 miles.
And that doesn't even take into account the increased metabolism after the run is finished, nor the increased resting burn rate (over time) due to increased muscle mass.
Very true. Again this is anecdata, but when I ran my metabolism was insanely high. Runners are notorious for basically being pigs.
One of the marathons I ran had a "carbo-loading" event. Basically huge vats of spaghetti were cooked, and runners would absolutely gorge. It's totally unnecessary, IMHO. It's good to eat enough and cleanly before a big run, but stuffing yourself just weighs you down. And come mile 20 or so, you're not going to be worried about how much energy you have to burn, but rather how much everything hurts.
Why can't you just admit you were wrong? You said no amount without specifying how much eating/drinking you were talking about. That's a pretty absolute statement, refuted by the facts others have provided.
I said "drinking a lot", someone refuting with evidence of running of a single light beer hardly refutes anything.
There is little to gain by behaving like a smug asshole in comments. What could you possibly expect as a response to your comment that would make for good conversation.
Maybe you should ask yourself that question more often. Saying things that are untrue without even an attempt to back them up, and then being abusive to anyone who calls you on it, is kind of "smug asshole" behavior itself and not conducive to good conversation.
A 1 hour run might burn 500 calories. If you go and eat till you are not hungry, you can easily eat 800 or 900 calories. You are not going to lose much weight at the method.
It's a bit more complex than the commonly spouted calories in/calories out argument.
There is still a lot that we don't know with regards to metabolism. I am usually a higher mileage runner during spring to fall months (70-90km / week) and although I scale my eating to offset my calories burned, I will still lose weight. I will not provide a citation but it's quite widely known that metabolism increases as the body normalizes into a training period or regimen. And increasing with diminutive returns as the training increases. Recovery also burns more calories even while sedentary (as you should be when recovering).
That's the consumer-side of it. The supply-side argument is what's usually 'spouted': if you're gaining weight, its because too many calories in. Full stop.
Of course the body can/will waste calories, burn them at a higher rate depending on other things. That's not most peoples' problem though: unexpectedly losing too much weight. There's not a billion-dollar industry around that issue.
> Weight is won or lost in the kitchen. Full stop.
I think this is disingenuous. Certainly regulating caloric intake has more impact than exercise because it's "easier" to achieve a caloric deficit, but that doesn't mean running isn't great for weight loss all else being equal.
Furthermore, exercise is important for other health reasons. So maintaining the same caloric intake and adding running is much better than simply reducing your caloric intake by the same amount.
Of course it's possible to eat 1000 calories' worth of food in one sitting, especially if you're eating something with tons of carbs in. But if you keep your diet roughly the same and go on a 1 hour run three times a week, you'll definitely start losing weight..
You are not burning 1200 calories in a hour run at 10min/mile. At an average 25% efficiency that is the equivalent of producing 350W on an ergo for a whole hour, which is well beyond the genetic ability of the vast majority of the population.
(The idea that sport can't help you lose weight is still ridiculous of course, even if you are only burning 600 calories per hour. Bad habits make you overweight and establishing good habits (like exercise) is the key to get out of that.)
May I ask how you came to this calculation? I have a relative in my family that regularly touts they are burning 3,000 calories on an elliptical for an hours worth of use.
It'd be nice to have an outlandish comparison to put towards their claim.
You start with gross efficiency, which for humans is going to be 20-30%. So when the tool says you expended 1200 calories and you assume an average efficiency of 25%, that means you produced 1200/4 = 300 kcal of actual work and 1200-300 = 900 kcal in excess heat.
The 300 kcal of work equate to ~349 Watt hours as WolframAlpha will tell you, so if you want to produce that in a single hour you need to continuously put out 349 Watts.
Now we have put lots of humans on scientific ergos which can accurately measure work, and that is a very high number for a single hour for any individual.
There is a chart here that gives you the kind of work rates achievable by category:
It's normalized by weight but it's more accurately height, someone weighing 300lbs isn't suddenly going to produce more power than at a normal weight. The number you're looking for is "FT" or Functional Threshold, which is generally assumed to be around the absolute maximum average power sustainable for an hour. At the end of that you should fall over and puke your guts out. So for someone doing 350 Watts for a hour, that would put them at world class or domestic pro level.
I think that 1000 is also including your base calorie burn. I.e. if you sit in chair you burn 300. if you run 10 minute miles, you burn 700. Some of those calorie estimates are a bit off..
Here's a couple of citations for you. Both are generally exercise vs calorie control, not specific to running. Of course, running lands in the exercise category.
My personal experience of a lifetime of moderate amounts of running has been that it didn't help me lose weight at all, it increased my strength and endurance. But when I run and when I exercise, I eat more to compensate. A decade of regular exercise left me healthy, and just as chubby as when I started.
Finally realizing exercise is a strength plan and not a weight loss plan, and getting myself into the right mental place to count calories -- I lost 40 pounds in 6 months and have kept the weight off for years because I learned how to eat & exercise. I get fat by eating more and skinny by eating less, I get strong by exercising and weak by not exercising.
Presumably this varies a lot person to person. I find it much easier to lose weight with a combination of exercise and calorie restriction than with the latter alone. Yes, I get a bit hungrier when I exercise, but that just helps with focusing on eating when I'm hungry. It also allows me to eat somewhat more, thereby enjoying the experience of eating healthy food more, so it lessens the perceived hardship of calorie restriction. Finally, it's motivational: as I eat healthy food and begin losing weight, I feel stronger and more fit when I exercise, which makes exercising more enjoyable, and gives me more motivation to stick with the diet.
I actually haven't tried counting calories without exercising, but I'm absolutely certain you're right that this varies from person to person.
Exercising does afford me the opportunity to eat a little more after a workout, and I get to reward myself with a treat sometimes. I suspect that makes counting calories a lot easier.
Fully agree on it being motivational, and I'd go further about the benefits. Exercise is mandatory for me personally, it is a higher priority than most things, including weight loss.
Calorie restriction isn't nearly as effective at weight loss as it "should" be for me, which sucks because I find it fairly easy. Aerobic exercise also isn't very effective, which is fine because I find it incredibly boring unless it's part of a sport.
Strength training, on the other hand, is way MORE effective at cutting fat for me than it "should" be. Go figure.
Figure a 100 calories per mile; not exact for every person, but close enough for our purposes. Now let's take the common "imma have a smoothie, I ran today". I've seen people order smoothies that contain a thousand calories, that's what it said on the sign. But that's ridiculous, lets go with half that. 10K run, carry the 2, comes out to 6.2 miles. Your smoothie cancelled all but 120 calories. And you need to burn 3500 calories to lose a pound.
Put another way, if you ran fifty miles and took in no calories (obviously hypothetical), you'd lose ~1.5 pounds. You still have to make dietary changes if you want to lose weight.
Signed,
Skinny, lifelong runner who hasn't the first clue what it's like to try and lose weight
I've walked three miles a day, every weekday this year, and not lost so much as an ounce - I've shed a lot of thigh fat, true, but the increase in calf and thigh muscle mass easily makes up for that.
Same for the situps and pushups I've been doing since August. I'm a hell of a lot more fit than I was, and I move better than I have in years. Hasn't made my gut any smaller. Sure, I've had to put three new holes in my belt, and probably need to go down a waist size next time I buy trousers. But it turns out that improved abdominal muscle tone just means you carry belly fat higher, so even though my waistline's shrunk, I actually look fatter than I did before. (On the other hand, I can move like I did in my twenties, so I'm willing to take the hit to my narcissism here.)
I've twice in the last decade lost fifty pounds or more in under a year. Both times, I did it purely by means of calorie restriction.
Exercise will make you healthier. It will not, by itself, make you lose weight. You do that by making sure that (calories in - calories out) has a negative sign, daily, over a long period of time. Aerobic exercise can help in that you burn more calories that way. But it's an adjunct, and insufficient on its own.
It's not easy, especially when you start out habituated to large meals and highly caloric sugary foods. It is absolutely doable, and the younger you start, the easier it is.
