Gaining weight while doing more running?!... How & why I see this happen!

Today we're looking at something that's more common than people would think... Gaining weight during a marathon (or running event) prep!

This is something that people often come to me after experiencing, and there's some really common reasons that we can see this happen 👀🏃🏼‍♀️

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The Eat Like Ruby podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

G'day gals, welcome back to the pod. Today we're gonna talk about something that's like a little bit niche, but I think it's a cool thing to talk about. What we're gonna look at today is how and why runners can gain weight during prep for a running event. So if we look at someone going into a running event like half Mara, full Mara, Ultra, even like triathon or different things like that. But if somebody goes into a really intentional, let's say 12-week give or take training block into an event, it can actually be more common than people think for people to gain weight during this time. And that's the very first thing I want to talk about. Actually, the first thing I want to talk about is even if you're not someone who's planning on doing a marathon prep or doing anything like this, I think there can still be some cool stuff in this episode because we can see, like what I'm gonna talk about, we can see this play out in different ways, but we see it play out here, and that's why I thought it'd be cool to hone in on this one. So even if you're not a runner or you're not planning on becoming a runner or an endurance athlete, you might still hear some cool stuff here. And then, like I said, the first thing I really want to look at is this is more common than people think. I think to people who aren't part of the running world or like don't spend too much time in this space, you would think like, surely people don't gain weight in a marathon prep, like you're doing all this marathon training. So that can make so much sense when we think about it. Like we kind of think about people doing these big long runs and doing all this training, and it's like, how could we gain weight? And then coming into my next point, I think athletes themselves can find themselves in that position where you're just like, How the hell am I gaining weight if I'm doing all this training and like I'm training more than I've ever trained in my life, I've got this big goal, this big training volume. Like I would expect to be losing weight, if anything, right now, or at least maintaining how the hell have I ended up gaining weight during this time? So I wanted to really point out, first of all, that this is very common. And therefore, if you're someone who's found yourself in this position, you are definitely not alone. And I think for some people, it can come with a bit of shame or you know, a bit of guilt, or I don't I don't know exactly what the word is, but I just want to say, like, first of all, I'm not saying you should feel those things, and secondly, I think that kind of just comes from the confusion and then sort of having this mentality of like, I'm doing this big, awesome sporting thing, like I shouldn't be gaining weight or feeling like I'm getting in worse shape while I'm doing it. So I just really want to acknowledge that feeling because this is a very common thing I see. And what I typically see is that people go through their first prep or maybe a couple of preps or whatever, but they do this by themselves for a while, and then they come to me or someone like me, and they're essentially saying, like, I want to go into another event, I want to do another run, but the last one didn't go that well for me. Like, I ended up in a position where I gained a bit of weight, don't really understand what was happening there, didn't feel my best. And you kind of have like two potential air quote problems going on there. The reason I say air quote is because like I'm not saying this is a problem, but athletes tend to see this as a problem, and sometimes rightly so. But what I'm talking about is you've sort of got this one element of like, I'm doing this big endurance event. I don't want to physically carry extra weight into that event. Like, that wasn't in my plan. Obviously, the more weight that I carry from a certain point is gonna start to cause a bit of discomfort, it's gonna make things harder. So you've got the actual like physical difficulty that can come with weight gain during something like this, but then you also can just have more of like the aesthetic, body composition, just that feeling of like I said, I should be a fitness person, like I'm doing a fitness thing, I'm busting my ass. And if anything, I feel like I'm looking the opposite. So it kind of has those two problems going on, and then people are just like, what the hell is going on here? And then, like I said, I often see these people come to me and they're like, I want to do another event, but I don't want to end up in that position. And what I'm gonna talk about today is the main common reason I see this happen with women, especially. And I just want to point out like this could be happening with guys. I don't work with a lot of guys, and I definitely haven't worked with a lot of guys who have experienced this. So I'm gonna speak today predominantly as a woman, two women who works with women. And honestly, like there could be a lot of reasons that this happens for someone. If we think about weight gain, it's just an excess of calories accumulating over time. And so that can happen in a lot of different ways. You might be someone who's busting your ass in a marathon prep and then literally just living off takeaway and really high calorie foods all the time. So it's just adding up more than the training is. So there is different things that could be playing out here, but like I said, there's one very common one that I see, and I thought it'd be worth really digging into that today. And what this is, is almost like a combination of so many things we've spoken about on the podcast before. I feel like everything I touch on here, you're going to have heard me talk about at some point if you're a regular listener. But I don't feel like we've ever really compiled them in one episode to have people in this position piece it all together and be like, oh my God, yeah, that is how it played out for me. So we're not going to hear any brand new revolutionary information today that you haven't heard from me before. But I think when we look at it as a whole, you're going to understand how this could happen for somebody. So the most common thing I see, like I said, often people will come to me in their lap rooms. I did an event, ended up gaining a bit of weight, didn't feel that great doing the event, definitely want to do another one, but want to feel a lot better. And as I start to like dig into this person's history and their nutrition history, dieting, body image, scale weight, progress that they've made with gaining weight, losing weight, et cetera, you can start to see like it's a very common trajectory for women, especially at the moment. Like so many people have gotten into these endurance events, which is awesome. But this is commonly where we see it is when women have spent a large part of their life dieting or trying to lose weight, trying to eat low calorie, trying to follow like really typical advice that is targeted and marketed towards women. And commonly this can just be things that's like 1500 calories, 1200 calories back in the day. Even, you know, these days we see like 1600, 1700. And first of all, like side note, there's a massive problem there. Like everybody has different nutrition requirements. So if we think back to, you know, 10, 20 years ago, where there was just that big message of like women should eat 1500 calories, women should eat 1200 calories. It's like every woman is so different. We can't just put one number on an entire gender like that. Like, it just does not make sense. And I know we've, well, I'd like to think we've kind of moved away from that over the last few years, but I think people have a lot of history and a lot of conditioning to that stuff. We also have a lot of history and conditioning just to women shouldn't eat too much, women should try and lose weight, low calorie, low fat, low carb, cut this out, cut this out, say no to this, this is bad, this is good, this is right, this is wrong, this is healthy, this is unhealthy. Again, we've spoken about all this stuff on the podcast before. But if we think about someone who has spent most of their life thinking like that and having that sort of a mindset towards their nutrition, that does form a pretty strong belief system. It does form pretty strong conditioning where we're just kind of hardwired to think, well, that's what I should be doing. And often we can see this happening for people in quite a negative way, where it's like we are just really conditioned to think like we should always be losing weight, we should always be eating low calories. So that can obviously come with all of its own problems. But even if someone has had quite a positive dieting experience, like maybe you've gone through some flexible dieting phases, maybe you've done a bit of a deficit, maybe a bit of maintenance and different things like that over the years. Even if you have gone through some really positive dieting over the last few years, if during that time you weren't doing things like endurance events and running blocks and prepping for big things, what those actual numbers probably looked like is probably a lot lower than what your numbers should look like now. And rightly so. The amount of calories your body needs when you're not training for a marathon versus how many it needs when you are, I think we can all understand how there's a difference in those numbers, right? So what I'm getting at here is whether you've got a lot of negative dieting history or positive dieting history or a combo of both, but if your dieting history as a whole was based around certain numbers. And if we think about, I'm just gonna kind of generalize for a second here, but think about your own numbers when I talk about this. But if we think about a little women who aren't doing big endurance events, maybe they're just on like a bit of normal training, couple of hours throughout the week, right? And just getting normal steps, very quote, normal. Usually we might see someone do a deficit around, say, 15 to 1900 calors, depending on their size and their lifestyle and stuff. And then we see their maintenance come up into those like low to mid 2000s. Again, give or take on a few factors. But what I'm getting at here is if you're so conditioned to seeing those numbers for yourself, for other people on the internet, from your family, from your friends, from your coworkers, if you have just had nonstop exposure to those numbers being quote, right or good for women, it can create a lot of apprehension and a lot of confusion when you start to look at bigger numbers for something like fueling a marathon. And what I'm talking about here, I'll put some really basic numbers on it just to help it make sense. Let's say you're someone who has dabbled in a bit of flexible dieting, you've done a nice deficit in the past, lost a couple of kilos, felt really good, and maybe your deficit was 1700 cal. And at that time you were doing a bit of gym, getting 10,000 steps a day, and just hanging in like moderate activity levels, right? Awesome. Then maybe you went up to maintenance and that maintenance looked like 22 or 2300. Awesome. Happy days, you hung there, flexible dieting, life's good. If you then decide to take up a marathon prep and you add that to the equation, the all of those numbers are gonna come up. And so your maintenance now might be 2,800, just as an example. Can't stress enough, don't take these numbers and run with them, literally. But just to give an example, if we bring this back to what I was saying, for a lot of females who have had this nonstop exposure to 1200, 1500, and then 2000 is a lot of food, you know, how many times have we heard people say 2000 calories is a lot of food? For all the shit chicks are doing these days, no, it's not. Like, no, it's just not. But if for your whole life you've seen women hang around on 1200 calories, 1500 calories, and then have that mindset of like, wow, she's on 2000, of course, when you start seeing numbers like 2800, you're gonna think like, holy shit, that's too much. I shouldn't do that. And then, like I said, it can create a lot of confusion and a lot of apprehension. And this is something I see hugely. And then the note that I had on this, literally the note that I had on this, says, aiming too low in brackets due to history, conditioning, etc., then uses Google or Chat GPT to run new numbers. They seem high and scary, so we're apprehensive, and we either hang on our low numbers that we're used to just for safety, or we hover somewhere in the middle with no real plan. These are the two most common scenarios that I see play out. Where we have someone who spent a lot of time on 1700 or 1800 cals, maybe they've bumped that up into the low 2000s at times, but then they do use something like a Google or a calorie calculator or ChatGPT or something like that to run their numbers. It spits out something like 2800, and then you think, holy shit, that's scary. Is it right? Should I do it? And I mean, side note, this is one of the things where it's like run all your numbers through ChatGPT all you want, but the amount of people, the amount of people that run their shit through ChatGPT and then come to me and go, I didn't know whether to trust it. So I had to ask you. So it's not taking my job just yet, but this is a really common thing that I see, and it makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. If we're so used to certain numbers and then whatever we use to like run the new ones spits out this big number, people are just like, what if that has got it wrong? What if that's overshot? What if I start doing that and I do gain weight, or it is too much and it just moves me in a direction I don't want to go or whatever? And so they're just too apprehensive to do it, and again, rightly so, no judgment. But then what I tend to see from here is people then either just think, stuff it, I'll just stay on my lower targets that I'm used to because they do feel safe, they do feel good, I've had good success there, so that's just like a big safety net for me. Or they kind of just hang in the middle ground because they're like, oh, those numbers do feel safe, but they do seem a little bit low for what I'm doing now. But that other number, that's definitely too high. And then what can happen here is you just kind of have no plan. And so you kind of go through your days where you're like, oh, I'll eat my normal meals, but like maybe should I eat a little bit more because I am running a little bit more, but I don't want to eat too much because I don't want to gain weight, but I probably should eat a little bit more. And it's like just so back and forth, so confusing because there's no plan. Like we haven't settled on anything. So everything is just very up in the air. And that uncertainty creates a pretty shitty feeling for people. Like you just feel like you don't have a lot of control and you're not sure what's gonna happen, which is a shitty feeling when you're trying to prepare for a bloody marathon. And then, like I said, the alternative thing that we see is people just try and stay on those low numbers. And then, regardless of which one of them you've chosen, like whether you've chosen to just try and stay on your low numbers or whether you are just kind of hanging in this weird uncertainty or just kind of eat as I go kind of energy, usually what I see, and I cannot stress to you guys enough, this is the most common thing that I've seen lately. If I had a dollar for every woman that had said this to me, like, so if you can relate to this, you are just so not alone. It's so common. But what I'm seeing is that people are either hanging on those locales, hanging in this weird middle ground, and just trying to do that and just constantly, pretty much on a daily basis, if not like every second day, just getting hit with the hunger and the energy dips so much that by the afternoon they're just snacking on random crap. And again, I'm not saying that to judge, but I am just seeing this so commonly. And what tends to happen is if we have a person who has been trying to aim for those low calories, let's say, like, I'm not joking, guys, the amount of people that come to me prepping for a marathon on like 1700 calories or trying to be on 1700 calories, right? Crazy. And I'm not saying that's particularly right or wrong, but for 99.9% of people that come to me, it is wrong. It's too low. And so what's happening is that they're trying to do that. And then, like I said, nearly every afternoon, if not every second afternoon, just literally hitting a point where it's like, I am starving. And side note, rightly frigging so. You actually are starving, right? And they have this big energy dip, and everything just kind of accumulates, and then they just go like stuff it, I need to eat. So they snack on random things. And I mean, we've spoken about this in so many ways on the podcast over the years, where so many people just do this when they put themselves on too much of a restrictive diet. And we see it heaps here with the girls with the big training volume, where it's like that diet is just too low and too restrictive for what you're doing. You are just continuously hitting a point where you can't stick to it. Again, rightly so. And then usually when people get to that point, they're just like, stuff it. I'm gonna eat whatever because I'm starving. Like I'm just going for it and it's quite uncontrolled. And then we end up usually like hugely overconsuming calories, and then we just get stuck in that cycle. The next day is like, oh my god, no, like I can't believe how much I ate yesterday. I should go back to my 1700. I'm gonna try again, and we just get stuck in that loop. And again, even if you're not prepping for a marathon, we've spoken about so many times how those restrictive diets can just create those loops, and we just see it here so much as well. And then even if we come over to the people that haven't tried to put that really low intake in place, but they've just kind of hung in that middle ground of thinking, like, oh, that intake might be a bit low, other one seems too high, so I kind of can't decide what to do. That can usually cause the same thing because again, you probably are still underfueling to an extent. But also when we find ourselves in that position of not really having a plan, then if you get to the afternoon and you are hungry, low energy, cravings, snacky, all of the above, it's very easy to sway from the plan when there isn't one. Right? Like if you don't really have a plan, then you can just be like, oh, well, I'll have a bit of this, I'll have a bit of this, have a bit of this, have a bit of this, have a bit of this. And that's not particularly wrong. But if we come back to the point of the episode, how people are finding themselves going through these marathon preps and gaining a bit of weight is if we think about these scenario here. We've either gone into the day with a really restrictive plan in relation to what we're doing, or we've gone into it with no plan at all. So then when things like energy, hunger, cravings, etc. kick in, which they are gonna kick in, you are training for a marathon, we give in pretty quickly because it's like I'm either struggling a lot or I don't have a plan in place. So it's hard to remind myself during this time of what I should stick to and what I shouldn't, because I haven't decided what to stick to. So it's very easy to say, oh, well, I'll just have a few things because I don't have a plan to follow. And then come back to the point of the episode. In both of these scenarios, we usually then see people overconsume past the point of just their maintenance and what would be a decent intake for them. And that's what I'm about to talk about in a second. And so then again, we find ourselves doing this daily, if not a few times a week, over the course of 12 weeks, and that weight gain slowly accumulates, even though training volume is going up, I'm prepping for a marathon, I'm doing all these things. I've either got a really restrictive diet in place or I've got no diet in place, and as a result of both of them, all of this random extra stuff is creeping into my day and adding up in a way that I don't want it to. And then there was something in there that I said I was gonna get to next. And what that is, and what I think the solution to this is and what I do, like I said, people are coming to me with this on a daily basis. And what I say to these people is essentially, if we want to put some numbers on it, let's say you're aiming for 1700 calories every day. And we actually think with all the training and everything you're doing at the moment, your maintenance is more like 2,500. And as a little bit of a side note, let's remember that maintenance is the amount of energy slash calories that the body needs at the moment. So we would calculate what is the maintenance intake with the training that you're doing, right? So that's going to be higher, like I said at the start of the episode, than what your maintenance intake would be if you weren't doing that training. So if we come back to the numbers, if we were to calculate that, and again, this is just an example, but if that was to calculate at 2500, what we're then commonly seeing is people are trying to aim for less than that. Like I said, if you're aiming for 1700 or 1900, whatever it is, and then that's so hard to stick to that you end up essentially like quote, giving in for lack of a better term, but you are trying to stick to a lower calorie diet. You hit a point in the day and in the week that you can't stick to it. So you do give in on that plan. We bring in all these extra things, and what tends to happen is we overconsume well past that 2,500. We go up like into the 3000s. So now we're in a surplus. And if we look at this here, if you're watching on YouTube, I'm like mapping all of this out. We've essentially got three points here. First point is the low calories people aim for. Middle point is the actual maintenance calories we should be aiming for. And then the third point is the amount people end up eating when they look at that middle number and go, no, I'm not gonna eat that. That's too high. I'm gonna keep aiming for the low one. So think about that. I think this middle number is too high. So I'm gonna aim for the lower one. That's so hard for me to stick to that I regularly give in and over-consume well past the point of that middle number and end up consuming this higher number, which is leaving me in a calorie surplus. So we really want to think about that and everything we know about like deficit maintenance surplus. If you're prepping for a big event like marathon or half triathlon, whatever you're doing, we want to have that maintenance intake coming in because we want to be fueling that training. We want to fuel your body, we want to fuel your training, and we want to fuel your recovery. But we don't want to overconsume unless you're someone who actually does need to gain weight, right? But most people in this position that come to me don't want or need to gain weight. So we want to find that sweet spot where we are fueling the training, but we're not overconsuming. And it's almost like the irony of a person who's scared to eat maintenance, aims for the deficit, but then ends up hitting the surplus. It's like if we had of just aimed for maintenance in the middle, we could have avoided all of this. And I was literally explaining this to Shaq the other day because I had a call with someone and it came out and I was just like, this is what I'm seeing so often. And then that's what prompted this whole episode. Because after I explained it to him, I'm like, well, I may as well explain it to everybody. But I was saying to him, like, it is so common. And if people can understand all of this and realize that your numbers are going to be higher because you are training for something that's more demanding. So your energetic demand is higher. So you need to give your body more energy. So those numbers are going to be higher. If we can really understand that and we can run the numbers and then do a little bit of trial and error and find where that is for you. And this is exactly what I do with my girls is like we want to find that sweet spot where we're fueling you, but we're not overfeeding you or underfueling you. And sometimes you might have to play around with the intake a little bit. You know, it's just like anyone else. We hit an intake for a few weeks, maybe we lost a little bit of weight. Do we need to crank it up? Maybe it's a little bit high. Do we need to bring it down? We're never gonna get it so wrong that we're gonna send you really far in a direction you don't want to go. We're always gonna be pretty close to it, and then we can play around with it as the weeks go by. But so many people are so scared to do that. Like I said, so many people are so scared to eat two and a half thousand calories. But when they get so adamant on not doing that, they end up eating three thousand calories. Like it's crazy. And so I cannot stress enough, guys, if you can relate to this, you're so not alone. Alone and it makes so much sense. Like all of this makes so much sense. If you were just literally not giving your body enough energy to prepare for this big endurance event that you want to do, and then you're finding yourself in a position most days where you're hungry, low energy cravings, etc., that literally makes so much sense. And I think we find people in that position where they're kind of beating themselves up and being like, why am I so hungry? Or why can't I just stick to this or whatever? Like any of those old narratives. And I think my number one piece of advice to people in that position is to open your mind and understand that you are doing something different now. If you haven't done these events before, or if you haven't done them for a while, you are doing something different now compared to what you might have done in the past. And you're also doing something different compared to typical numbers we can see thrown around on the internet. Again, numbers shouldn't really be thrown around on the internet like that. Like women should eat this, women should do that, because everyone's gonna be different. But I'm not gonna go off on that tangent too much. But I just really want people who are in this position to understand why you are in this position. And I think if we can understand it, we can have a bit of acceptance and we can acknowledge it and then we can go, yeah, okay, cool. What do I need to do differently? Am I underfueling for the training that I'm doing? And is that leaving me in a position when they end up overconsuming? Has that led me to weight gain? And even if it hasn't led you to weight gain, we can even just commonly see this with people then not really training that well, not recovering that well, maybe getting injured, and just not prepping very well for that event, not doing very well at that event, the whole thing just feels like such a hard slog. And again, rightly so, because we just have not matched nutrition to the training that we're doing. And then I did have one more little note here. I think it's just worth touching on. If we think about the very episode, actually, maybe not the very last episode, maybe two episodes ago, we spoke about flexibility, like controlled flexibility and kind of hanging at your maintenance intake, but having a bit of wiggle room with that. People in this position can do the same thing. I don't want to get into this too much today, but when we are prepping for something like this, I would say nearly all of my girls that are prepping for a run at the moment, we don't put them on an exact intake. Because, first of all, you're gonna have different training volumes day to day. So sometimes we'll adjust nutrition for that. That usually depends on how different they are, how big, our big runs are, how long our long runs are. So that is very dependent on the individual. But even if we have someone just aiming for their maintenance intake to fuel the training that they're doing and prep for their event, if we know that their maintenance intake is, let's say, 2,700 calz, usually I say to this person, really similar to what we said in that other episode, we're gonna aim for like between two six and two nine. Give yourself a little bit of wiggle room. We don't want to be under two six because we know you're doing a lot. We know we want to fuel that, we know we want to recover well. Like we know that going below two six is just gonna start to move into underfueling for you. We don't want to go above two nine too much or too often because we don't want to move into a surplus and have you start gaining weight that you don't want to gain, but we can have that wiggle room day today. And I feel like there's a side note I really want to mention here. If somebody does a very clear big run or a long run in their week, usually we will give a totally different intake for this day. Because we've got people doing like 35k runs compared to every other day where they do like a 10K run, right? So I'm not talking about that. If you do like big sessions in your week that require different intakes, that's a whole nother topic. But if someone is, say if someone's trainer for like a half Mara and most of their runs are between like 10 to 18Ks, sometimes we'll still do some high and low days for them, but sometimes we will just find one intake to settle into and fuel all of that. And so coming back to my point here, this person doesn't need to hit an exact calorie number every day. But exactly like I said in that last episode, we want to consistently fall in the range that is required to keep us in the position that we want to be in. So, like I said with that example, this might mean that a person who we think needs 2,700 calories could aim between like two six and two nine. So that is just like a cool thing to think about with this. I think it's kind of irrelevant to the main point of this episode though, because I think the real main point of this episode is catching that habit and that mindset that you're in of trying to keep calories low or trying to keep calories in a place where you might have had success in the past, but now your training and your goals and everything will look really different and you haven't adjusted those calories accordingly. And then coming back to like the name and the point of this episode of how we can end up gaining weight when we do these endurance preps. I am just so commonly seeing people in that position of aiming for that low intake, not being able to stick to it, ending up overconsuming, and then therefore moving into a surplus when we could have actually just settled at that sweet spot of maintenance in the middle. I don't know if you guys can hear Natella snoring. He has been snoring for this entire episode. So he's had enough for the day. I've actually recorded three episodes in a row. So he's done. I think I'm done as well. I might listen to this one back and then have a few more things to say. We might do a QA soon. So I think a few things will come up off the back of this episode. But just really, if nothing else, I would love anyone. I think this is going to be one of those episodes where some people will listen and go, oh, interesting topic, but not that relatable to me. But the girls who know, know. You know if this is relatable to you. You know if you need to listen up to this one a little bit more. So if nothing else, just start to get the wheels turning. Just start to think about this stuff and just know that it is very common and it makes a lot of sense. But there is absolutely a good place you can get to with this. That is all from me today. I will be back very soon.