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Home » Lose Weight » Running to Lose Weight Is a Terrible Idea – The Daily Meal

Its a pitfall of too many dieters: They decide to get healthy by which they mean lose weight so they start eating salads and going on runs.

Ugh.

Experienced runners everywhere hear this and cringe. Running to lose weight is a terrible idea.

Weight loss is not only an appearance-oriented reason to run that likely wont provide enough intrinsic motivation to last, but its also a misguided motivation. Running does not efficiently, if ever, make you lose weight.

Running is what exercise professionals like to call steady-state cardio. This is cardio that lacks the intensity to produce an extreme response by the body; you can tell this because your heart rate remains relatively stable throughout the run.

Your body is smart: It goes first for the stores of energy it saves from intra-muscular stores of fat, circulating free fatty acids, muscle and liver glycogen, and blood glucose, all of which it uses to fuel your daily activities and lower-intensity conditions of exercise.

So youre not actually burning fat with exercise until your body needs more energy much quicker during high-intensity exercise. When your heart rate is at an extreme high, your body recognizes its under extreme conditions, and it dips into its precious, last-resort stores of fat.

If you were to go on interval training runs, where you ran sprints or trudged up hills, you might enter this actual fat-burning zone.

But if were talking normal running, you would have to run for hours and hours to run out of alternative sources of energy (or eat dangerously little, which we do not recommend you do). And even if you do run for hours and hours, it might still not work to dip into your fat stores and lose the weight you want to.

Ive known people who have trained for a marathon with the intention of shedding pounds. During their training, I watched them run mile after mile and become increasingly agitated because they continued to gain weight as the runs got lengthier.

This (understandable) frustration comes from a misunderstanding many people hold about health. The healthier I get, the thinner Ill be! False. Sometimes, the healthier you get, the more weight you put on. Your bodys just trying to survive, after all.

Allow me to explain. When you run, your body expends a great deal of energy especially when youre running long distances. Heres something your body doesnt want to be: tired.

There are a few different places your body searches for its energy: your food, your fat, and your muscle. First, its going to plow through your energy from food. If youre trying to lose weight, its probable that youre eating at a calorie deficit, i.e., expending more energy than you consume. So youre likely not eating the extra calories you would need to support those runs. So when its out of that, it has to choose: Is it going to dip into your fat or your muscle?

It will likely dip into your muscle. Your bodys on preservation mode. What does it need more, the energy stored from fat or the muscle that burns fat?

Try driving a car on just a few droplets of gas at a time. Thats the mechanical equivalent of trying to force your body to function without gathering an energy reserve. Now imagine that a car was smart enough to save gas for later. What do you think itd do?

Your body saves fuel for later. It puts on weight saves some gas. And it plows through the unnecessary muscle (running requires a minimal amount of physical strength). So as you get better at running, as you practice and run longer distances, you might just get heavier. And healthier. Youll gain endurance, build a few key muscles in your legs, improve mental and physical stamina. Youll be more capable, better equipped to outrun an attacker, and have a much stronger heart.

You might just get healthier and heavier. At the same time.

Now, thats not to say you shouldnt run. If you want to run, by all means run! Just dont do it for weight loss.

There are so many more valuable reasons to feel proud of running a marathon or dedicating yourself to training that have nothing to do with fat loss or whether you can fit into those size 4 jeans. Here are a few:

And there are many more. Everyones reason to run is different, but they should all have one thing in common they shouldnt involve running to lose weight.

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Running to Lose Weight Is a Terrible Idea - The Daily Meal

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