I Ran More and Got Fat (How I Fixed It)

[00:00:00] You started running, putting in the time out on the road, doing the thing everyone said to do, but you gain weight, not water weight, but you actually gain fat. Waistband is tighter. The photo’s looking different and the brain going, weight, am I broken? What is going on? You’re not broken because you’re probably making the same mistake that I made.

[00:00:18] I cranked my volume from 40 miles to 60 miles a week. That’s 60 to a hundred K for metric people, and I was chasing a fast 5K. I got my fast 5K, but I also. Was eating like crazy and I started getting heavier. What was going on? This is the guide I wish I had before I made that mistake. In this episode, I’ll be covering why running more can actually work against your body’s composition with a certified dietician and pro running coach told me when I showed them my data and the seasonal eating framework I use now to.

[00:00:48] Fast, stay lean and work with how my body is because everyone’s body’s different and they change as we get older. One thing before we go, I’m not a dietician or nutritionist. This is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I’m a certified coach and a runner of 30 years who got this wrong for about two or three years, and I document it all.

[00:01:08] So take what’s useful, ignore what’s not, and go seek professional help if you need it. Dope. Cool. Let’s get into it. So I’ve read all the magazines and listened to the pros and coaches and they all say, if you wanna run a fast to 5K, you need to run a hundred to 115 kilometers a week for you metrically sensitive people at 60 to 70 miles.

[00:01:28] And then I said to myself, well hold up. I’m already doing 60 to 80 kilometers a week, which is uh, 40 to 50 miles. What’s another 30 to 40 kilometers? Slash you 20 to 15 to 25 miles gonna do. So I ran a bunch more and this was about two years ago. And with running a bunch more meant eating a lot more. And I eat too hunger.

[00:01:52] ’cause you gotta fuel yourself. And when you’re hungry, you’re hungry. And then I got fat and I didn’t like it, but I got faster. But, but, but calories in and calories out, you might say. Right? I mean, it’s just simple science when it comes to that. Here’s Jordan again on the importance of calorie deficit and carb cutting.

[00:02:08] When we’re talking about fat loss, we don’t need cut carbs like it’s a thing, like you can, but we need to cut calories. And I’m not saying calorie cals either. Like I’m saying, like what we need to do is get you into deficit and it doesn’t really matter what you eat. I would say yes in terms of whole foods like flow, carb, diet plus those whole grains and plus fruit and stuff is what I would recommend.

[00:02:31] Ideally, keep the carbs in there, drop in the calories, drop the portions, drop the portion drop, like maybe one little meal in the day or one snack or whatever it is. As long as you’re feeling fueled and as long as you’re feeling like you are never starving and your training’s going well and you’re not like bonking at the end of training back in the day, that is an ideal situation for fat loss and to maintain.

[00:02:51] I was torn because I was like, yo, I’m getting faster. But I also knew that this getting fit thing and getting faster wasn’t healthy in the long term. I’m a big believer in the long term, so I did something about it and I figured out the right training and eating balance to maintain healthy body fat while running as fast as possible and playing to my strengths.

[00:03:13] You are naturally. Built for those short, shorter distances of speed work, you know that mentally and you know that you would be pushing yourself and not really enjoying the whole experience of training for those longer distances. So I feel like that in itself would be a barrier for you. That’s like a hard slogan, and you would need to be very motivated.

[00:03:31] All the time to be keeping up with that if it’s not coming naturally to you. Part two, what does eating a lot look like? The problem, so I started the slow carb diet, um, a while back about four or five years ago. It was the best diet. I tried keto, I tried intermittent fasting and slow carb was the best, which, uh, have links below and in the show notes for you.

[00:03:50] Description and it ended up helping me lose a whole bunch of body fat. And then I also lost some muscle with it, uh, which happens with runners. Uh, so then I found out how to gain muscle on top of AF actually after losing it. And I really liked where I were. I worked great and it started working not so great when I started running a lot, which was two years ago.

[00:04:13] Um, I didn’t feel good. I felt like absolutely. And I never really felt like I had any energy or zest, uh, or I didn’t feel spry as I said earlier. So I went in for a DEXA scan and that’s when I met Jordan, who did my DEXA scan and she’s now my personal dietician. And she told me I was under eating and she was like, yo, you not in these words.

[00:04:32] She was like, yo, you need to eat more simple carbs and you just need to eat more calories and stop eating the slow carb diet. The nuts, the protein, the, the eggs and all that is great. It’s healthy, but what you’re doing with the running, you need to eat a different way to be healthy and to fuel you. I misinterpreted what Jordan said and I was like, cool, I’m gonna eat whatever I want.

[00:04:56] And uh, I ended up eating too much. Was eating a lot of. Carbs. Quick side note, I don’t like eating carbs. Personally. I’m sugar sensitive and I have, um, sugar sensitive issues with things that are high glycemic, um, on the high glycemic index chart. So this makes me feel jittery and kind of bloated and I just don’t feel good.

[00:05:17] I’d rather. Either eat, you know, again, the slow crop diet or just intermittent fast personally. But I knew that I needed to run a lot. So again, I was torn. I gained muscle mass, which was good after, you know, eating this way, which was eat whatever I want. ’cause I was extremely hungry all the time, but also ended up gaining weight and also ended up gaining fat over the course of the next, let’s just say, two years.

[00:05:37] To make this simple, I just gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted when I was running a lot and I was running hard. I combined the slow carb diet. Which is a lot of fats and proteins with the, the high carb diet together. Doing both of those things is the worst thing. Absolutely. No bueno, high carb, high fat, not good at all.

[00:05:56] Okay, so you’re probably wondering what did I do about it? Everything I learned about running, eating, and staying lean, the seasonal approach went to fuel the hydration thing most runners miss. I put it all into a free guide. It’s simple. It works, and it’s made for runners who actually train. Hard. Get out the QR code here or the link in the description or their show notes below.

[00:06:15] Wherever you’re listening or watching. Then comment, if running helped you lose weight. Gain weight will just stay the same. Alright, let’s get into the next section, our resident dietician Jordan, explaining what exactly fat burning is, the idea of burning fat. Is basically coming down to a calorie deficit, no matter how you get into that calorie deficit and how you can sustain that calorie deficit over a period of four to six weeks or more.

[00:06:41] That’s really where the, the crunch is like, you can do this diet, you can do keto, you can do high carb, low fat, like, it doesn’t really matter unless, like there’s a huge thing that, that show all these different kinds of diets with like controlled calories. And they show that if you’re in a. Like, you’re gonna lose that.

[00:06:59] So like, just that burning kind of idea isn’t really a thing. Like we’ll get into the fat when we are lower in, in calories than our body needs because it’s gonna start like pulling at them. Um, if we go too low, that’s when we can, that’s when we can get a bit dangerous and we start pulling ’em off and stuff like that as well.

[00:07:15] But I think we’re confusing. Fat burning with being a car deficit. Even if you’re using like all these supplements and trying to get into fat burning mode, you still eating the amount of calories that your body is like at maintenance, you’re not gonna lose fat. You’re gonna burn fat. Part three, here’s what I did to solve the running Too much problem.

[00:07:30] I went back and looked at what worked. Over the previous years, I looked at my Strava history. I looked at my journaling, looked at my comments, what was I running? How far was I running? How long, what did I like doing running as far as, you know, what workouts did I like doing? Uh, what times was I doing, you know, like how, how well was I performing in these workouts?

[00:07:53] What strength training was I doing? Times was I actually doing the strength training? I found out that I liked strength training after doing hard sessions, so I only did two strength training sessions in that week, but it was right after a hard workout and it worked extremely well. And I’m like, okay, putting it all together, cross training.

[00:08:09] I was swimming, I was riding a lot, I something there was working. Let me try to implement that too. Making that work now for me, because if it worked in the past, it, it should usually work in the future. How I felt, and that was a big one. How did I feel during, I felt really, really good. I never felt like I was bonking and really tired.

[00:08:27] And then I came to the conclusion that I’m a sprinter. I have, you know, the power gene did some DNA testing and I found that out. Um, long distance running. Is it really right for me from a lot of evidence that I’m seeing, and a big piece of evidence that I saw was when I run more, I don’t lose body fat and overall weight.

[00:08:48] Like some distance runners that’s like a proper red flag. And I was like, all right, you know this, this isn’t all adding up. If, if that happens when I do this. But that happens when people do that, then that’s not right. So to help me explain that, here’s exercise sports scientist and co-host of this video podcast, Mike Trees.

[00:09:06] Yeah, well, uh, gaining weight and training is a simple one. You do more running, your metabolism goes up. So when the metabolism goes up, you want to eat more, uh, and so your appetite goes up. The trouble is we often don’t run as far as we think we do, so people actually eat more. They eat. Taking more calories than they burn it running and they put on weight part four.

[00:09:26] Here’s what I did to solve the eating too much problem. Now the solution for my eating problem, I went straight to Jordan Kain, the dietician I’d be recommending in terms of waking up and eating, um, before going to training, trying to have some form of even like the love carb in that meal. You’re gonna burn carb, whether it comes from a carb, whether it comes from a fat sauce that’s turn is turning into a carb, you still are gonna be burning.

[00:09:51] Like carbohydrates for energy, right? So like the body’s basically gonna be like either working hard to try and like translate like a fat or a protein into your carbohydrate to use it, or it can just get some carbohydrates from the small amount of carbohydrate you’re gonna be having in your diet. So like, that’s what I’d be recommending.

[00:10:07] Um, like try not strain faster and let’s you like doing a really chill session session like weights or like doing something that’s really not gonna be burning too much. Um, post workout, try and get something in that’s like within 60 minutes. Every workout and you’re aiming for like getting at least 30 grams of protein and you know, add that meal.

[00:10:25] And then Mike put it best with what he thinks actually happened and solution to that right here. So you still need to, uh, watch what you’re eating when you are training, if you want to keep the weight down. Unfortunately, it’s not a license to eat as much as you want. And again, while I did say this is about my anecdotal evidence around, you know, my whole weight loss, fat loss journey, let’s talk some hard science and facts and physics.

[00:10:49] Most of you folks out there probably know about a calorie, but do you know exactly what it is? Calories are a way of keeping track of the body’s energy budget. A healthy balance occurs when we put in about as much energy as we lose. If we consistently put more energy into our bodies than we burn, the excess will gradually be stored as fat in our cells and we’ll gain weight.

[00:11:14] If we burn off more energy than we replenish, we’ll lose weight. So we have to be able to measure the energy we consume and use, and we do so with a unit called the calorie. One calorie, the kind we measure in food, also called a large calorie, is defined as the amount of energy it would take to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.

[00:11:38] That was what is a calorie by Emma Bri for TED Education. So now that we know what calories are, that’s fine and all. But our bodies are not perfectly optimized machines. We, we all know that humans, we do not operate in this one in one out perfect mathematical equations. What? The calories that are burned on your smartwatch or Strava says might not be telling you the whole picture.

[00:11:58] So what about the calories that you burn after certain types of workout? You know, you’re not gonna burn as many calories after doing a short, 10 minute easy walk than if you would do 10 minutes lifting weights or 10 minutes of sprints, or three hours of running at a moderate pace. And what about your metabolic rate based on hormones?

[00:12:14] So your age, how fit you are, your sex, you know, all these different things, what you’re actually eating. So the bioavailability of all the different foods, what you’re eating at different times. So many questions and I looked to answer them for myself. I looked at my previous journal entries again, from when I lost body fat and body weight, and when I gained muscle mass.

[00:12:34] So this is specific to eating, not just training. And I liked that feeling and I wanted it back. I didn’t want that bloating around my stomach. I was like, nah, I’m not feeling this. I want that, that fat around my chin. I really liked when I felt, you know. Uh, I just felt fit and, and, and muscular, and I won’t even say thin, but felt like I can cut through the air, if that makes sense.

[00:12:51] And the problem and the duality of it all is that I love the slow carb diet, and I also love a little bit of intermittent fasting that doesn’t work with running and higher mileage running. I know you can do it, but is it the best thing to do? Is it the best thing for performance gains? Feel free to disagree with me.

[00:13:07] The comments below, or if you’re listening to podcasts, hit me up on socials, Instagram, TikTok, uh, email me talk@latecreates.com. ’cause I know this is a contentious topic where it’s like, no, no, no, I can do low carb and you know, I can still run my best times. I’m not saying you can’t, it doesn’t work for me.

[00:13:24] A lot of the science out there says it doesn’t work. Uh, overall in the long term, it’s probably not the healthiest thing to do. I found the best thing to do, and the solution to this whole eating when I’m running a lot is to approach it with a seasonal. Angle In the off season I do less carbs ’cause I’m not doing as much overall load, which is volume and intensity.

[00:13:41] And I can eat more good fats and protein and even intermittent fast. And again, the slow carb diet is great for this. And if I’ve gained weight, which happens during my race specific block of four to six weeks, when I’m tuning it up, I’m running a lot, a lot of mileage, a lot of volume, a lot of intensity, a lot of overall load.

[00:13:57] I will be fine with the weight gain. Please note that gaining a little bit of weight during this race specific phase is absolutely normal for most people. I give myself some leeway and some grace. Um, just, you know, know that I’ll lose that basically in the off season, anywhere from two to eight week off season, where I then will go back to the slow carb diet paired with intermittent fasting and I’ll lose that body fat and, and that weight that I’ve gained.

[00:14:20] The reason why you end up gaining the weight is ’cause you need to be in a calorie surplus for recovery. So you want that fat around your organs. To make sure that you recover well once you like, like I said, if you start getting into that 9, 8, 7, 6% body fat range, which is really hard to get to in general, it’s not easy to get into.

[00:14:38] Um, I know a lot of pro runners around seven, 8% anyway, but when you get there, you are also balancing, not recovering well and again. I give myself that leeway, that grace to gain the weight. ’cause I’m not pro and I just like doing this and I wanna make sure that I don’t get sick. ’cause that’s what happens when you have low body fat.

[00:14:57] Also, you’re susceptible to all types of sicknesses, um, over training syndrome, all these other things that I can talk about in depth in a whole other podcast. So, yeah. Can you outrun a bad diet? Mostly? No, but the real question was never that. It’s why are you gaining weight when you’re doing everything right?

[00:15:14] And now you know the seasonal approach? Run more, eat to match the load off season, pull back, let the body reset. And if you haven’t already, get my free nutrition and hydration training guide. It’s the practical, uh, companion support guide to everything in this episode. Fueling, timing, hydration, all of it.

[00:15:31] And yeah, it’s free. And as a bonus, you’ll get signed up. To the One Better Run Injury Method email course six lessons in your inbox over 18 days to help you get 1% better each day, week, month, season, year, life decade in this whole running thing. And if you want more information about nutrition pre and post running, I did a deep dive on that at the video right here on YouTube, or get it in the episode description or show notes if you’re watching or listening somewhere else.

[00:16:01] Peace.