You’re trying to lose weight or maintain your current weight, trying to stick to a calorie total… but then you go wild and over-eat. Literally all of us have done this countless times. And it doesn’t have to trigger a disastrous slide into terrible long-term eating, or to a lesser extent another eating binge.
Here’s some tips for what to do in the moment after you’ve done it, and what to do the next day to mitigate what you did.
Yesterday with the day off I did nothing, in terms of training. No running, no strength work, nothing particularly strenuous. I actually drove to get coffee, since I had vehicle-related errands to run that day. I did a minimum of walking… not easy to do in Chicago when you live in Wrigleyville and you do most of your business on foot.
Okay, big deal, just a rest day, right? Well….
… it had been a while since I’ve taken stock of my working basal metabolic rate (BMR). Your BMR is the rate at which you would burn calories in a day if you did nothing but lay or sit there. For men my size and age, this is somewhere around 1650-1700 calories.
You do more than sit around all day, so to find your baseline calorie burn you multiply that BMR by a standard multiplier.
Of course, I can’t just set my baseline at 1700 calories multiplied by a standard multiplier. My daily activity can vary widely, as a Chicago local who gets around on foot and runs a lot. Even if I don’t run, I may walk anywhere from 20ish minutes a day to several miles, and there’s no rhyme or reason relative to my training as to how much walking I do. Plus, this completely ignores strength training and any other physical activity.
I’ve had days where, with identical training (or lack thereof), I’ve burned anywhere from 2100 calories to over 4000. So, plugging my estimated general activity into a BMR tool and spitting out a number isn’t necessarily going to help me.
I still want to get enough to eat, while not overeating. I still do have tracker data that shows an average weekly calorie burn, which is around 3000 calories per day during training. But there’s more to it than that:
When I first got my Fitbit tracker, back when I first began seriously training as an endurance runner, it initially showed my resting heart rate’s (RHR) beats per minute (BPM) in the high 60’s.
As I continued training, my resting heart rate came down and settled around the high 50’s. Sometimes it would drift up, but often it came back down to around that number.
I noticed that generally it would increase during times of substantial stress, and that it would decrease with proper rest and exercise.
Suddenly, during the late summer and early fall, my resting heart rate started slowly climbing. Suddenly it settled into the mid 60’s and nothing I thought to do could bring it down. Resting more didn’t help. Eating more or less or better didn’t help. Exercising more or less didn’t seem to help.
At some point, not at the same time as last year, it began to come down again and settled around the high 50’s, low 60’s.
And then it came back up again. It was in exploring a variety of factors that finally taught me what elevates an athlete’s heart rate, and it turns out often times there’s nothing random about it.
There’s all sorts of general reasons experts and amateurs alike will give for elevated heart rates that are so tone deaf that their advice might as well have come out of an old library book.
From experience, myself and others who also seriously train, from the track records of all involved… here are the likely reasons your resting heart rate is going up, in an arguable but roughly accurate order of importance:
I may or may not have touched on the folly of carb loading, that your diet and glycogen stores are a body of work, and not something you can fix in the 48 hours before your race (though your glycogen stores and physical condition are certainly something you can break in the preceding 48 hours).
Still, the Race Eve Pasta Gorge is a favorite runner ritual, and while you may not substantially improve your glycogen reserves, you at least won’t go to bed hungry.
This leads me to two questions.
I’ve referenced this a few times. Jonathan Savage crafted an equation, out of 1993 research from Dutch professor JA Romijn, that estimates the percentage of energy you use from glycogen, vs fat, based on your effort relative to your VO2max.
y = .0021x² + .7896x – 21.031
… where X is the percentage of your VO2max and y is the percentage of caloric energy that comes from glycogen.
So, for a simple example, if I do a run at an effort equal to 70% of my VO2max:
(.0021 * 70 * 70) + (.7896 * 70) – 21.031
10.290 + 55.272 – 21.031
44.531 % from glycogen
Note: Yes, this is a massively reductionist estimate, ignoring all sorts of factors, not to mention the VO2max percentage is itself a guesstimated assumption based on what you believe is your VO2max, with your given x-percentage probably based solely on your running pace and/or heart rate. But correlative observation and evidence indicates that it’s more accurate than other methods, so here we are.
Anyway… at 70% effort, if I burn 123 calories per mile, then 54.8 of those calories will come from glycogen, with the rest coming from fat.
If (based on other quantitative assumptions) we can say I have 1208 calories of glycogen stored in my lower body, I can run about 22.0 miles at this effort before my lower body runs out of glycogen.
Now, this number probably seems low to many experts, who are used to assuming that the glycogen rate is closer to 65-70%.
At the same time, most coaches and runners are used to pushing harder on regular runs (even recovery runs) than they should. Many run their marathons harder than their bodies probably should, and it figures they burn out of glycogen before mile 20. So it would figure that most would assume a 65ish% glycogen burn rate.
Even Daniels‘ metrics flattens the slide on his similar VDOT metric, where as you drop below an 80% effort it flattens the change in the percentage of max until it assumes a rough minimum of about 80%. I would posit you can (and many do) their comfortable easy runs at far less than 80% of VO2max.
More than anything the Romijn/Savage Equation, while counterintuitive, is probably closer to an accurate estimate of glycogen use than other estimates. It’s one I go by.
Where am I going with this? Basically, this equation has some uses.
There are I’m sure other examples. I’ll leave it to you to find possible ways to utilize this data.
The Loyola Ramblers men’s basketball team begins their season tonight with an exhibition game. I have season tickets and I go to pretty much every single game I can for both the men’s and women’s teams.
Over the last couple months I had found a rhythm with cooking dinner on weeknights that suited me fairly well. I’d often return home from work and running either around 6:00-7:00 pm, or after a racing team workout a bit after 8:00pm. I would spend an hour preparing my typical meal, usually baked chicken with either baked/boiled potatoes, or boiled pasta.
However, the start of Loyola’s season poses a clear problem on weeknights. With these games starting at 7-8pm, lasting around a couple hours, followed by a not terribly long train commute home… I walk in the door sometime around 9-10pm.
I like to get to bed before 11pm at the latest, and obviously coming home at 9-10pm doesn’t allow much time to cook dinner before 11pm. Staying up late just to cook a decent meal is not workable. The conventional meal plan isn’t going to work.
I don’t want to buy a ready-to-eat or easy-to-bake $7-12 meal on the way home after every game, because that gets expensive in a hurry, and most workable options are not the most nutritious. Plus, it’s likely I’m already going to need to buy something to eat after leaving work, before the games. I can’t go 8-10 hours without a meal.
Of course, I also don’t want to rely on eating arena food during the game for the same reasons.
I also don’t want to rely on some sort of snack food, which in my experience doesn’t really satisfy, which poses a huge problem overnight as I tend to wake up overnight when hungry.
I also don’t want to prepare a meal in advance and then re-heat it in the microwave when getting home. Never minding the lacking quality of such a meal, microwaving can sap or zap various nutrients, plus materials from the plating can leech into the food. I avoid microwaving food in general.
So… what to do? Going entirely without is not a workable option while running regularly. I’m not going to just miss games to get my meals in, of course. There has to be a way to make this work.
And it turns out there is.
Recently I bought an egg cooker device at Target. I once had a Cuisinart Egg Cooker in Seattle (that I had to dump once I moved to Chicago), and it worked quite well with making steam-poached eggs. It turns out this cheaper Copper Plate model does just as well, steaming two eggs at a time in a few minutes.
I had been eating steam-poached eggs as a snack, but it’s entirely possible to steam them and eat them as the protein portion of a dinner.
While I could prepare rice in my Aroma Automated Cooker to be ready when I return home… a more nutritious solution would be to boil about 400 calories of pasta, and also heat some marinara sauce to eat with it. Combine the eggs, the pasta and the sauce, and that’s a decent post-game meal, in less than 20 minutes.
It certainly beats paying for a sandwich or a burrito every time I come home for a game.
This is one of many possible examples of the meal planning my training requires. You can’t cut corners with nutrition any more than you can cut corners with your training
A lot of people, when life intervenes, elect to either cut life and focus too much on their training, or to skimp on meal planning only for their development and health to suffer in kind.
But with some advance effort you can totally find workable solutions that avoid having to cut corners in any way.
Given I currently have some extra time on my hands, I’m reviewing my upcoming schedule in preparation for winter training. I want to work towards 60-70 miles a week this next training cycle, which may sound scary to the uninitiated until I mention that I was topping 50 miles per week without much trouble during Chicago Marathon training.
While I’m open to staying with a training load around 40-50 miles per week, I do want to stretch out and give 60+ a shot by extending my weekday runs, making sure I go 120-150 minutes on Saturday long runs, and mixing in some brief morning or lunchtime weekday runs in addition to my typical postwork runs. If it turns out to be too physically demanding, I can always scale back to a more regular workload, but for all sorts of reasons I’ll get into someday I believe I can now handle the larger workload.
That said, the biggest obstacle to running more miles isn’t whether my body can handle it, or even the wear on my shoes (my budget is tighter than it was a year ago, but I can always buy another 1-2 pairs of training shoes if I need it).
The problem is whether or not I can eat enough to compensate for all the extra calories I would burn.
I’m looking to get my diet super clean going into this next training cycle, as well as make it more affordable and simplified. An optimal diet that served all of the above only fed me about 2400 calories. That is well and good for weight loss, if I’m not running more than a couple miles every day. I would obviously be running much more than a couple miles per day.
Again, every mile I walk or run burns about 125 calories. I have actually been walking more the last few days, and have hit 3000 calories burned the last couple days despite no running. It’s fairly easy for me to burn calories when I’m active, and during my 30ish miles per week training days I would easily burn 3300-3500 calories.
If I’m running closer to 9 miles per day, that’s an extra 600-650 calories per day I’d burn, and even if I make the extra effort to take it easy in the rest of my life, I’ll easily burn 3500-3600 calories per day.
Okay, you may say… you’re looking to cut fat anyway, and this would be a great opportunity to shed some more of it, right? What’s the harm?
One of the reasons you don’t want to run a huge calorie deficit is the risk of muscle wasting. While it’s in general considered a cardio exercise, running requires substantial lower body strength, and along with depleting glycogen stores you break down lower body muscle. Proper nutrition allows you to rebuild those damaged muscles as well as restore your glycogen stores.
You’re already playing with fire when you run a calorie deficit, and being able to do so safely during training requires some mindful planning and execution. Even then, you should not run a deficit of greater than 500 calories a day. If I’m going to burn 3500 calories a day, I need to take in about 3000 calories to prevent myself from burning out or getting hurt.
And I probably should not take in as much fat as I have. I’m not looking to go low-fat with my diet revisions, because again the body absolutely needs dietary fat. But I do want to work on staying within 80-85g of fat per day, which means the answer to my dilemma is not as simple as committing to pounding a frozen pizza every day.
And as much as I’d like to go paleo or similar, I don’t want to compromise my performance or development by avoiding carbs and the needed glycogen.
Okay, so just eat a bunch of carbohydrates, right? Well, easy to say sure, since I’m going to burn them every day.
But there’s only so many carbs I can stomach. Most healthy carb-rich foods can be very dense and contain a lot of insoluble fiber. I found during my “sure, I’ll carb load” diet phases in previous years that the most carbs I could handle in a day is about 400-500g. And I could only hit that mark now and again: On a daily basis I can’t consistently consume more than 350g of carbohydrate.
Right now I’m eating about 300-400 calories of potatoes with dinner. I can probably handle about 3-4 bananas at most, and eating all of the above means taking in an uncomfortably large amount of insoluble fiber. Either way, I don’t think I can stomach much more than that.
Plus, your stomach can only process so many nutrients before just passing the rest or storing the difference as fat. Carbs do get stored as fat once the window closes on your body’s absorption capabilities. So eating a ton of carbs isn’t really an easy solution.
So, looking at my diet, after factoring in the foods I do and can consistently eat… I realized I had a deficit of about 600 calories if I want to train at a higher volume. How to cover it?
One answer is to swap out potatoes (at least on some days) with semolina-based pasta. I mentioned fusilli as a pasta of choice, though organic elbow macaroni is an option as well thanks to its density. Both provide more carbs in a meal (as many as 60g extra, plus some extra protein) than potatoes do overall.
However, potatoes provide a ton of potassium that pasta does not. It can be possible to supplement the traditional way: By making pasta with marinara sauce. I eat my pasta plain with salt, broth and coconut oil for seasoning. But a cup of marinara sauce adds about 800mg of potassium, which would cover most of the gap.
While it’s not totally my cup of tea, I’m not opposed to quickly heating a cup of marinara or similar pasta sauce and dumping that onto the pasta for dinner with my chicken. And, while not as much, pasta sauce also comes with a few extra carbohydrates.
I also find that sometimes at work I need an afternoon snack. If I commit to quick-prep oatmeal, that can provide some extra carbohydrate on key days.
All of these options of course have a common problem: They’re processed foods. And while inexpensive, it gets away from the whole food philosophy I’ve been working to follow and maintain with my diet. I wouldn’t want to eat these items exclusively, let alone every day.
None of this is to say I’ve found the solution. These are mostly just the options I’m considering ahead of 2019. The good news is I don’t have to find an answer now. Go-Time for this plan would be about 2.5 months down the road.
But it does present an interesting dilemma: If you want to train high-mileage, how do you make sure you get enough energy to eat to maintain that workload?