Nutrition help

How tall are you?

I think even girls should be getting at least 2500 calories, but you are running a little less. I would still shoot for a little more in calories. but it depends on how you feel. Do you feel tired or hungry?

As always added calories should be as healthy as possible. Also, stop counting calories.

Wednesday wrote:

Any college girls out there with advice on how much they actually eat? Running about 40 mpw, lower than your typical college athlete, but still pretty active outside of running. Cross train and lift weights a couple of times a week also. If I average 6 miles a day, how much should I be eating? I usually eat around 1700-1800 calories and I've gained quite a bit of weight, relatively, over the last year. Any input?

It seems counterintuitive but you should be eating more. At 40 miles a week and only 1,700-1,800 calories, your body's metabolism has likely slowed down significantly. Essentially, you're sending it signals that say "Store fat, because I'm putting you under a heavy workload and not giving you a lot of food."

If you eat more, your metabolism will rev up, you'll have more energy, and you'll likely become leaner naturally. Just avoid oils (even olive oil), dairy and meat, and processed junk, and you can really eat as much as you want.

This is true...until the last word. At least depending on how you take that. Even at the most extreme circumstances (months at a time on a VLCD of 800 kcal/day) metabolism dropped by about 15%. So for a girl gaining weight on 1,800 kcal/day, probably 400-500 of those coming from running we are talking about somewhere between 1000-1200 kcal coming from "metabolism". Assuming this was dropped by the full 15% she 'could' be burning 200kcal extra per day.

Which means that in order for this to work, and not encourage even more weight gain she would need to eat about 100-200 more calories per day, any more than that and she would just be gaining more weight than she is currently. And of course that's likely a high estimate as she is not eating 800 kcal/day as she starves to limits of leanness.

Equally important, the idea that her metabolism is slowed in the first place is highly suspect. She has GAINED weight on 1,800 kcal. In order to gain weight you must be in a surplus of calories, which means that she actually has more energy than she needs and a down-regulation of metabolism is highly unlikely in a well fed state.

Also, let's keep in mind that the OP reported eating 1,800 kcal/day. In all likelihood, unless she is meticulously using a food scale, she is probably eating 10-30% above this number. It's very reasonable to think a smaller woman, say 5'2" and 120lbs, would be gaining weight slowly running 6 miles a day on 2000-2200 kcal.

Takeaway for the OP: You're probably eating more than you think. It would be interesting to know your diet, if that can be cleaned up removing majority of classic 'empty' calories, that alone ought to take care of the continued slow weight gain. Drastically, or even moderately, cutting calories wouldn't be something I'd recommend by any means in your situation.

br0ski wrote:

How tall are you?

I think even girls should be getting at least 2500 calories, but you are running a little less. I would still shoot for a little more in calories. but it depends on how you feel. Do you feel tired or hungry?

As always added calories should be as healthy as possible. Also, stop counting calories.

Let me caveat this by saying that we don't know height/weight/BF %. If she comes back to us and has a BMI of 17 with 12% BF, then what I'm going to write does not apply. But from the tone of the post I'm guessing she isn't as lean as she wants to be. So with that in mind:

She is GAINING weight. This means she is an a caloric surplus, otherwise known as eating too much food. And you're response is that she should eat more food? That will lead to...even faster weight gain. Which is not exactly optimal for being a good runner. She doesn't need to go cut calories, but telling her to eat well over her version of 2,000 kcal when she is gaining on her own version of 1,800 kcal is asking for her to balloon in weight.

2,500 kcal is a TON of food for a smaller woman running less than 6 miles a day, especially if she is otherwise fairly sedentary.

readrun wrote:

It seems counterintuitive but you should be eating more.

I know you add in some caveats about having "more energy", etc, but please, don't go down the absurd road I see so many internet nutrition "experts" do by saying: when you eat less and lose weight, your metabolism slows down and you stop losing weight (which is true), SOOO..... to lose more weight, you need to reverse that metabolism loss and...EAT MORE.

no. no. no.

If activity is kept constant, eating more has never, and will never, result in more weight loss. Now sure, one could add in more protein as the additional calories (instead of carbs of fat), and gain a bit of muscle, and *possibly* even lose a touch of body fat under such circumstances,...but that still doesn't equal "lost weight."

If you wish to prove me wrong, please to link results of peer reviewed study (not some bro's blog) demonstrating weight loss under conditions of increased energy intake while activity levels remain constant. In all seriousness, I'd be happy to be wrong and learn, but....not holding my breath.

Oh, and there's absolutely no proof that "avoid(ing) oils (even olive oil), dairy and meat" compared to avoiding other foods of equal calories will improve weight loss results. In fact, as high protein foods, meat and milk can be advantageous for metabolism. Furthermore, dairy has been shown to, to a small degree, be useful in weight/fat loss.

LM wrote:

She is GAINING weight. This means she is an a caloric surplus, otherwise known as eating too much food. And you're response is that she should eat more food? That will lead to...even faster weight gain. .

oh, you beat me to it. But for a second there (on your first post) I actually thought you were agreeing with the guy.

I'm 5'7 and weigh about 130 pounds. I'm fairly active even outside of running. I walk around my campus everyday, which is a lot of exercise in itself to the avg person. I tend to limit what I eat early in the day and eat more at night. (trying to work on that) But all the numbers round at the same at the end of the day. I've had past issues with eating, and sometimes wonder if my body is meant to be a little heavier now to balance everything out again.

please stop wrote:

readrun wrote:

It seems counterintuitive but you should be eating more.

If activity is kept constant, eating more has never, and will never, result in more weight loss. Now sure, one could add in more protein as the additional calories (instead of carbs of fat), and gain a bit of muscle, and *possibly* even lose a touch of body fat under such circumstances,...but that still doesn't equal "lost weight."

Yep.

There could be some rare cases where if someone eats just a little bit more that causes them to bring up NEAT sufficiently to offset that and then some...but that's speculation, and honestly seems like a pretty questionable premise in the first place. Of course, if we are being honest NEAT is also activity and doesn't technically qualify as keeping activity constant; but it does fall into the category of a situation where I could see a person saying:

"I started eating 500 more kcal/day and only gained 1lb over 6 weeks and didn't change my activity at all".

That might seem true to them, but comes down to variation in NEAT, which in some people goes up significantly (500+ kcal/day) in cases of overfeeding.

Reasonable weight. Certainly not a weight that, in and of itself puts up any red flags.

Honestly, that could be anything, from a mile of a walking a day to 10+ so not much to comment on from that alone.

Not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be worked on. This is a cousin of IF, which works very well for many people, and studies haven't given any reason to suggest it's an unhealthy way to eat.

Honestly, assuming you're getting a reasonably varied diet around with around 90-120g of protein per day, and are keeping calories from true junk foods reasonably in check I think you're in pretty good shape.

Hey. I know that I am late in providing you a solution, but I hope my suggestion helps you out in the future. I would suggest you to take a healthy diet. Avoid sugary drinks and fast food. While checking for healthy food guide, I found about the guide minceur at https://www.cellublue.com/fr/product/fit-food-guide/. This will help you to know about healthy and nutritious diet. You can also take the detox tea to shed weight.

No need to count calories. Just eat less if you weight too much.