How To Run To Lose Weight
Running is one of the best exercises for losing weight. It burns the most calories per hour compared to other exercises. It’s also the most easily accessible form of exercise since it doesn’t require any special equipment or a gym membership.
I’ve always been someone who’s struggled with my weight. Even as a kid I was always heavier than the other kids at school. As an adult, my weight has constantly yo-yo'ed.
I always tried new workouts and new diets, but nothing would ever stick. Or after reaching my goal weight I’d eventually gain everything back because I’d go back to the same habits I had before losing weight. I’d go back to eating the same things I did before losing weight because the diets I went on weren’t sustainable.
It wasn’t until I started running consistently that I finally started to have consistent weight loss and kept the weight off. I still go through periods of time where my weight will fluctuate. That’s normal for everyone. However, these days it doesn’t fluctuate as much as it use to and I always keep my weight within a healthy range.
What really helped me manage my weight was sticking to a consistent running routine. While running more consistently, I also started to consistently do some strength training and cleaned up my diet.
Once I decided to train for a marathon, the weight really started to come off. Below is a picture of me from February 2017. At this time I was at one of my heaviest weights yet. I wasn’t sticking to a consistent workout schedule and wasn’t eating healthy.
Fast forward to April 2018 when I’m gearing up to run my first marathon. This picture was taken after several months of consistent training and eating a healthier and more balanced diet.
It took a lot of time and a lot of work to lose the weight. But once I got there, I felt amazing. Since then, I’ve been able to keep most of that weight off.
If you’re reading this post, you most likely also struggle with losing weight and are looking for guidance to lose the weight for good and keep it off. You’ve come to the right place!
Using running to lose weight is a great strategy! But there's more to the process than just running alone. You'll also need to count calories, clean up your diet and incorporate other exercise to prevent injuries.
Below I’ll guide you through the steps I took on my weight loss journey and teach you how to run to lose weight.
1. Calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) will show you how many calories your body burns at rest. In other words, your BMR is how many calories your body burns without any exercise. If you were to sit around all day, this is the amount of calories your body needs just to carry out it’s daily functions (breathing, digesting, etc).
There are many free calculators online you can use to find out what your BMR is. There are also calculators that will take your BMR and show you how many calories your body burns depending on your activity level.
These calculations will show you how many calories your body needs per day just to maintain your weight.
2. Calculate the Calories You Need Per Day
Once you know how many calories your body needs to maintain weight, we can then determine how many calories you should be eating per day to reach your weight loss goal.
When setting a weight loss goal, it’s best to aim to lose 1-2 lbs per week. This will ensure that you’re losing mostly fat instead of water weight or muscle if you cut your calorie intake too low. Losing weight at a slow and steady pace will also be easier to keep off than losing weight quickly. That’s why if you’ve ever followed a crash diet, you tend to gain all of the weight back.
If you have a lot of fat to lose, you can set a goal of losing 2 lbs per week. To do this, once you’ve calculated how many calories your body burns and take into consideration your activity level, you’ll want to reduce that calorie amount by 1,000 calories in order to lose 2 lbs per week. You’ll also want to make sure that your calorie count isn’t below 1,200 calories per day for women or 1,400 calories per day for men.
Going below these calorie counts will negatively impact your metabolism and trigger your body into going into starvation mode. This means your body will think you don’t have enough food available to survive and will slow your metabolism down to conserve energy and keep weight on your body.
If you calculate a calorie count that’s below 1,200 calories it means you may not have as much fat to lose and should aim to lose just 1 lb per week instead.
To lose 1 lb per week, you’ll only need to reduce your daily caloric intake by 500 calories.
3. Put Together a Balanced Diet Plan
After you’ve determined how many calories you need to eat to reach your weight loss goals, it’s time to put together a balanced diet plan. Beyond just your calorie intake, it’s also important to figure out where those calories will come from. It’s important to find a balance between healthy carbs, protein and fat to help you reach your body composition goals.
While there are a lot of fad diets that encourage you to cut out fat or carbs to lose fat, they’re just fads. What’s going to help you lose fat and keep it off is finding a balance between carbs, protein and fat. If you’re not sure how much of each macro nutrient you need, you can use this calculator to give you a range of how many grams of each you’ll need for a balanced diet.
If you’re looking for a very specific diet plan or if you have any ailments (diabetes, heart disease etc.) you need to factor into your diet, it’s best to reach out to a Registered Dietitian (RD) for a diet plan if needed.
Otherwise, you can create your own plan. When putting your own plan together, keep these tips in mind:
Get plenty of fruits and vegetables (if choosing frozen or canned produce, make sure there are no added sugars or syrups)
Avoid processed foods and junk foods (this includes protein bars. It’s best to get your protein from whole food sources than from processed protein bars. Or you can even make your own protein bars for convenience)
Lean towards herbs and spices to flavor foods rather than high calorie sauces. When using salad dressing, you can use lower calorie vinaigrettes or make your own instead of using creamy dressings like ranch, blue cheese or Catalina dressing
Limit red meat and stick to lean proteins such as poultry and seafood
4. Put a Running Plan Together
Now that you've updated your diet and you know the calorie deficit you need to lose weight, it's time to incorporate running to the plan. If you already have a running base, you may not need to alter your routine too much to lose weight. If you're running and struggling with weight you may just need to tweak your diet as discussed above. However, if you're new to running or want to add it to your weight loss plan you can use the information below.
When putting an exercise plan together, it’s best to start slow. If you’re typically sedentary, you’ll want to aim to run 3-4 days per week. During the days you’re not running, you can walk for 30 minutes. This will help you to stay consistently active without pushing yourself to run every day.
I put together a couch to 5K plan to helps guide runners from being sedentary to running a full 3.1 miles in 6 weeks. This plan will show you how to incorporate running in intervals to build up your running stamina.
I also recommend using an app like Strava or using a fitness watch to track your activity. Most apps or watches will also allow you to enter your age, height and weight and will estimate the calories burned while running. If you choose not to use an app or watch to track your calorie burn, as a general rule of thumb each mile you run burns about 100 calories. You can use that number to estimate calories burned if needed.
You can use these estimations to calculate a more accurate calorie burn if you add it to your BMR. You can compare this with the daily calories you calculated in step 2 to make sure your estimations were correct and you're at the right calorie deficit to achieve your weight loss goal.
You can also use the tips in the article here if you want to create your own training plan. The key takeaways are to start slow and build on your fitness. This will help prevent any injury and will also build your comfort and confidence with exercise so you can stick to your plan and goals.
5. Add Strength Training
Running on it’s own is a great way to lose weight. It’s also important to incorporate strength training into your fitness regimen. Strength training will help you prevent injury, gain muscle and burn more calories.
Strength training itself doesn’t burn a lot of calories during exercise, but it does increase your metabolism so you’ll burn more calories at rest after exercise than if you ran or did some other aerobic activity on it’s own. Also, as you gain more muscle mass, you’ll naturally burn more calories since muscle burns more calories than fat.
6. Don’t Fall Prey to Fads
There are so many fad diets and workouts out there that it becomes overwhelming to keep up with them all. They all promise quick results in the easiest way possible. However, they’re not sustainable for weight loss in the long run. Most of them promise quick weight loss (and may deliver) but usually the weight lost is water weight and not fat. More often than not, you’ll gain all of that weight back once you finish with the initial 10 day, 14 day whatever time frame they promised you.
Here I want to dispel some common fad diets that people follow:
Cleanses: If you’re eating a balanced diet and not binge drinking or putting anything else into your body that you shouldn’t, your body does not need to cleanse! That’s what your liver is for! If you fuel your body with healthy foods and stay hydrated, your liver cleanses your body for you. So save your money, ignore the hype and let your liver do it’s job.
Keto: This extremely low carb diet does have some scientific backing in that your body goes into a state of ketosis while fasting for long periods of time and restricting carb intake. However, the problem here is that many people go on low-carb diets thinking they’re body is going to start burning fat immediately. However, what they don’t realize is that it takes a few days of eating less than 50 grams of carbs per day for ketosis to kick in. 50 grams of carbs is VERY little!
Carbohydrates are your body’s main source of fuel. You won’t have the energy you need to get through your workouts or recover properly. You also may not have enough energy to focus at work or school or do any of your normal daily activities. By the time the ketosis kicks in (IF you eat few enough carbs for it to kick in) you’ll be so tired and hungry that you’ll likely go back to your normal way of eating before seeing any results. It’s best for you physically and mentally to just stick to a balanced diet to keep your energy steady.
Any Diet That Restricts What Types of Food to Eat: I’m talking about the cabbage soup diet, raw diet, paleo diet etc. While some of these diets do encourage you to eat more produce (which is great!) they tend to be too restrictive in what foods you can eat. When a diet is too restrictive, that means it’s hard to stick to and hard to maintain the weight lost. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, it’s best to stick to a balanced way of eating instead of following any fads.
7. Limit Cheat Meals
I know I’ve talked a lot about balance throughout this post. Occasionally indulging in dessert or your favorite comfort meal is part of that balance. BUT we need to keep our cheat meals in check. That means not going overboard when it comes to portion sizes and calories.
You worked hard during the week, stuck to your meal plan, stuck to your training and you absolutely deserve a treat! I want you to enjoy your treat too! However, if you over-indulge you may wipe out your calorie burn for the whole day or even past few days.
When indulging in cheat meals, limit it to 1-2 meals per week. Make them part of your meal plan and track the calories. It’s ok to go over your daily calorie limit once or twice per week. This actually helps prevent your metabolism from slowing down by varying your caloric intake.
In order to stay on track with your weight loss goals you still need to track the calories and keep your caloric intake within reason. Say you need 2,000 calories to maintain your weight, make sure your caloric intake for the day stays between 2,000-2,500 calories at the most when including a cheat meal. This way you can enjoy your treat without wiping out all the hard work you put in for the week.
8. Re-Adjust Calories and Diet As You Go Along
As you begin to lose weight, you’ll need to re-adjust your daily calorie needs. As the weight comes off, you’ll have less to lose and may want to start getting closer to eating what you need to maintain your weight. For example, if you were reducing your calories by 1,000 calories per day to lose 2 lbs per week, you may want to adjust it to just a 500 calorie reduction when you’re within a few pounds of your goal weight.
It may be frustrating to see those last few pounds take more time to come off, but this gradual increase to your maintenance calorie level will help you keep the weight off and prevent you from gaining back the weight you just lost.
Also, as you get more fit you may start to increase your activity level. Or maybe you fell in love with running and want to start racing and push yourself to run farther and/or faster. As you start increasing the calories you burn, you’ll need more food to fuel your workouts. This is a great time to revisit the BMR calculator and re-calculate the calories you’ll need to maintain or lose weight while taking on more strenuous workouts.
Conclusion
I know we just covered a lot of info and maybe some of it is stuff you’ve heard before. But I hope I’ve also helped break things down to where they seem simple enough to implement in your plan and feel doable. One last thing I want you to keep in mind is to be patient.
Be patient with yourself, be patient with the scale, be patient with adapting to these changes. Losing weight at a pace that allows you to keep the weight off takes time. Lifestyle changes are not a quick fix, but they’ll be more beneficial to you in the long run. Just stick to the basics and find the balance that works best for you.