Weight loss....or not!
I am running regularly, and I am very strict with my diet. One would think I was losing weight hand over fist...but I am not. So this post will try and explore why....and what I intend doing about it.
The internet is full of advice...most of it contradictory!
Yes! You can lose weight by running, get your shoes on!
No! Chronic cardio makes you gain fat and ruins your joints!
So what is a woman to do?
I have been over and over articles on the internet, and come to no sane conclusion at all. One common problem is eating back the calories you expend running (for calorie counters) or eating carbs more freely (for low carb people). I am not doing this, in fact I am stricter than ever about my diet. This of course leads to another possibility, the 'starvation mode' theory. However I find it had to believe we actually managed to hang around on the planet if our bodies cannot manage to go more than an hour or two without food. So I am not too sure about this one.
Then there is the difference between a young man with 20 pounds to lose, and a 50 year old woman obese and with metabolic syndrome. I get fed up reading about someone who made a minor change or two to their diet, took up jogging or badminton or whatever, and lost 15 pounds and feels so much better. And it only took 3 months!
Us metabolic syndrome types have it very different indeed. And there is very little on the internet about how we may react differently to running than those without metabolic syndrome.
So having got exactly nowhere, I decided to start from another point.
What do I want to do?
Run. I love running, I want to run longer and further. I enjoy it.
So I shall continue to run. Regardless of those who say it makes you fatter.
And I cannot run and only eat one small meal a day, so I shall add in another meal. Yesterday, after a hard run (for me) I was dizzy and faint and nauseous. And it was only 10 am and I don't eat until 6pm! This obviously is not going to work, so I shall try eating another small meal mid morning, after my run. At the moment I am still zero carb, so I shall continue that, just eat slightly more.
I shall report back!
So hang on...you're IF'ing as well? I don't think you mentioned that, except way back BQ (before quakes)...
ReplyDeleteHi Kiwieli, yes I am/was IFing as well. I was basically doing fast 5...except instead of only having water during the day I had cups of tea with cream as well. Only I found that having eaten my supper, I wasn't hungry for anything else during the 5 eating hours. In my case eating was from 5-10pm. So it worked out as one meal a day.
ReplyDeleteHowever....since I have upped the running distance a bit, I need to eat more. I was happy and all was well with the IFing, but feeling sick and dizzy with hunger is not my idea of fun, so as of yesterday I had a meal at 1pm and 6pm. This is still the 5 hour window, but I have brought it forward. I will see how this goes.
I will blog about IFing at some point.
Yes, do...and how you got back to IFing from 'The End of Overeating' (which I think you almost but not quite touched on, and which is important), rules and/or mindfulness... And then the rest of us who haven't managed to lose the weight of a 6yo can work out what we want to do ourselves :)
ReplyDeleteOK, will do!
DeleteThere is so much to talk about, I am not sure where to start! There have been so many new starts, false alleys, useful hints and so on that this journey is proving fascinating!