An overweight runner said to me once how he hoped
to lose 10 pounds and how that might help him
in the upcoming marathon. While I am not sure
about the boost in race performance from
weight lost, I certainly shared his determination
to shed off some unwanted fat.
But trying to lose weight while training for a marathon
at the same time can be very difficult and frustrating
experience. You need to experiment with lot of
variables and try to find a balance in calorie intake
and expense so that you still have enough energy to train
through all those long runs, tempo runs, interval workout, etc.
that will instill progression in performance while at the same
time lose some pounds.
If you try to do the same, I might be able to give some pointers,
but again, I am no expert whatsoever and you are warned to take this
with a grain of salt.
First of all, never ever lose weight fast. A single pounds of weight lost in a week is the absolute upper limit.
I seriously doubt that anybody can still maintain a decent
quality training schedule if he lose weight faster than that.
Honestly, I lost 10 lbs in about 12 weeks, and I personally
find that I was not as energetic as before and the quality of my quality
runs like long run, tempo, interval workouts are usually compromised.
Most importantly, I find myself more prone to injury.
I felt that I seriously need to slow down the weight lost progression,
may be losing a pound in every two or three weeks is the
more appropriate formula.
Secondly, you need to weight
daily regularly and
log it. You can use a spreadsheet software like Excel to log and
graph it. If you don't like to turn on the PC every time after you
weight yourself in the scale, by all means, use that pencil and
log book graph book. The important thing is that
you log the data and be able to plot a graph to see the trend.
You then have a choice whether you want to log the daily
calorie intake and expense. If you decide to be meticulous
about it, then, you need to have a system to estimate the calorie
content of the food you take as well as your calorie expenses.
First let's talk about the easier of the two, which is daily
calorie expense. You need to estimate you
Basal metabolic rate(BMR) as well as
your daily activity calorie expenditure.
You can visit
BMR Calculator to calculate your estimated BMR.
Then you can visit
Calorie Calculatorto calculate your calorie expense for various training that you do, i.e., running.
Now let's look at the more complex part of the two, the calorie intake.
To be able to estimate your daily calorie intake, you need to do a bit
of research and experiment. You can visit the following site
Food calorieto get a rough idea of what the calorie content for various kind of food
to begin with. Don't worry that you don't know how to relate how
much is a cup, how much is a portion, etc. Just get a rough idea of
how much calorie each food carry.
What is important is that you slowly developed a system of estimating
the calorie content of the food that you take daily. It doesn't matter
whether the estimate is accurate or not, what is important is that you
employ the same system in estimating the food calorie content throughout.
With the BMR and calorie burnt information, together with your own way/system
of estimating the food calorie content, you can now log daily calorie intake
and expense. You will keep logging these data for an extensive period of
time, then, you will try to analyse the relationship between calorie
deficit(calorie intake - calorie expense) to your weight change and find
a relationship between the two. For example, from 3 months of
data analysis, you can conclude that with your own system of estimation,
your average daily calorie deficit of 400 will lead to a pound of weight loss in
two weeks or something like that.
Forget about what people tell you that to lose a pound of fat you need to
burn 3500 calories, etc. In addtional to the fact that this requires you
to know the exact calorie content of the food together with the exact amount
(could you tell me how much calorie to count for my mum's secret recipe of
Cantonese fried noodle in oster sauce with black pepper that was served at dinner),
your body chemistry and metabolism is much more complex and
complicated than that, and each individual's mileage may varied.
What is important is that you find your own formula that describe yourself
best. And isn't in that sense
"We are each an experiment of one"?Through an extensive period of data gathering, logging
and analysis, fine tune your calorie intake and expense estimation
system so that it will best correlate with your weight gain or loss.
It took me two years of fine tuning and it is still ongoing, though,
I now already developed a fairy accurate estimation system
that can correlate well between my estimated calorie deficit with my weight change.
Once you found that formula, it seems that you are now totally in charge of
the rate of weight gain/loss. Unfortunately, things doesn't always go that way
and you will find you need to revisit the analysis again and again. I
suspect that there are other influential factors involved, like the intensity/
volume of the training, stress level, sleep pattern, etc., that somehow
affect the metabolism rate of the body.
Lastly, losing weight is not as easy as it is said.
We all need a fair amount of discipline and persistence to carry
out the plan. As always, when we find ourselves wondering
why we live a life resemble a great deal to that of a monk's,
let's treat this as we are doing ourselves great favour by adopting a
healthier lifestyle.
Hope this help.
Crank on.