How to Lose Weight With Running

Using a very gently, gently approach, you can start to gradually improve your running ability and introduce it as a part of your regular routine. But of course you will eventually probably want to start increasing the amount of running you’re going to do so that you can start to lose weight. So this is then where you need to calculate how much running you need to do and how you can gradually progress.

Once you have eased yourself into running then, the next step is to start increasing the amount you’re doing. Aim to increase to 5 or 6 miles once a week, which you’ll find is more than enough to start seeing some changes in your body composition over time. After a while, you should start to find that this is enough to begin seeing significant improvements in your overall fitness.

What you’ll likely see specifically, is that your heart rate stays lower while you’re running and that your VO2 max improves (if you have a fitness tracker that is capable of working this out). That means you can now start to push your pace a little and see if you can go faster and longer without becoming exhausted. See if you can start hitting personal bests for your pace and doing the same distance in less time.

Don’t go crazy with it – stick with what is comfortable and listen to your body. As you improve with that, you can then start to introduce a second session. It can take as much as 3 days in order to recover from a 40-minute run, so don’t try and fit more than two of these in a week. But if you run on Sunday and Wednesday for example, you should find you have time to recover and that you can start pumping out more strides.

At this point, you’re now going to be seeing a calorie burn of an additional 1,500-2,000 a week. For many people, that’s actually the same as having a whole extra day of burning calories! What’s more, is that you’ll feel a lot more energetic and as you keep pushing yourself to get slightly better times, you’ll find that you also have more energy the rest of the time and can start being more active in your day to day life.

This is where having a fitness tracker (which you wear all the time) can actually be superior to a running watch (which you wear just during runs). In this way, you can now start to try and increase your overall step count and calorie burn in order to gradually keep improving. If your main goal is to lose weight, then this should be more than enough.

Combining Your Running With the Right Diet

Exercise is one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is your diet. More specifically, it is how many calories you are consuming and how many you are burning. So if you want to be very safe about your weight loss and very meticulous, then you can start to track your calories as they go in and out.

To do this, you first need to work out your BMR and your AMR. BMR stands for ‘Basal Metabolic Rate and it is an indicator of the calories that you should burn every day before moving. So in other words, these are the calories you burn simply to stay alive – the calories you burn to breathe, to maintain your immune system and to digest food.

The basal metabolic rate can be calculated like so:

BMR = 370 + (9.79759519 x LBM(lbs))

Or

BMR = 370 + (21.6 x LBM(kg))

If that’s a little confusing, it’s probably because you’re not sure what your LBM is. Well, that would be your ‘lean body mass, which is your body mass before fat (because fat isn’t metabolically active, muscle is). To work this out, you just need to take your weight, minus your body fat percentage.