Not losing weight?

[K8nno]

For those of you questioning why you don’t appear to be losing weight. This is a picture of an MRI scan through the quads of three different people, a 40 year old triathlete, a 74 year old sedentary man and a 70 year old triathlete. Makes sense now eh?

[damienair Graduate]

Wow that’s very impressive. Unbelievable to have such differences between sedentary lifestyle and a lean fit and healthy ultra athlete.

But I do think that the weight loss is separate to running for us mere mortals. I was running on and off for about 18 months and was a regular at my local Parkrun. However I was still 2-3 stone overweight despite running. Last November I made a conscious decision to change my lifestyle. Weight loss is 80-90% related to food intake. Exercise is just 10-20% related. Because of the changes I made I have lost just over 2 stone in weight and have another 5-6 lbs to go. Also because of the weight loss I have found running to be way more enjoyable and easier allowing me to increase my pace and increase distance. The more weight I lost the more I wanted to run, and the more I ran the less likely I was to make poor food choices and undo all the good work and as a result it turned into a healthy positive cycle.

No doubt about it, running alone has huge benefits to health, pulse rate, blood pressure, mental health and many many more and fat does turn to muscle. But not all of it. But I can promise that weight loss is the best thing I have done from a running point of view and it has allowed me to properly fall in love with running.

Damien

[Elisabeth3 Graduate in reply to damienair]

Very nice and sensible testimony.

Keep the good lifestyle.

[Debston Graduate]

I was reading an article about % body fat earlier and it was saying that just going by scales and bmi is no good because athletes can be "obese" according to weight because muscle weighs almost twice as much as fat. So your percentage of body fat is much more important. It also told me that my % is way off what it should be, which I already knew but now I know what I should be aiming for...

[Debston Graduate]

oxygenmag.com/fat-loss/the-... This is the article if anyone is interested.

[RunRunRun13 Graduate in reply to Debston]

What a great read ! Thank you for the link...

[NewRunner4 Graduate]

Wow, that’s amazing. I’ve not been running long (week 8 in the programme) and have stayed a constant weight. It wasn’t the reason I started this as my motivation has always been fitness, which has improved vastly since I started. I did kind of assume some weight loss would automatically follow when going from nothing to running 3 times a week. This explains perfectly why this hasn’t happened!

[Debston Graduate in reply to NewRunner4]

I'm finding now that I have graduated and I am running long runs x 3 per week, the weight is slowly going down again. It really plateaued during C25K BUT my clothes started feeling looser despite scales staying almost exactly the same.

[Couchpotato2 Graduate]

Wow!