It's been a while, but the newspapers wrote about it: scientists of the University of California conducted a large research about diet, running and losing weight. Conclusion: follow a strict diet is NOT the healthiest way to lose weight. More then 2/3 of the persons that follow a diet, regain their old weight after a short period of success or get even heavier. The only way to success is to adapt the eating habits permanently and…to have a lot of exercise. In short, the best diet is one with a lot of physical activity.
That's why it's important that people that want to lose weight by running understand what happens in their body when they move (or diet). The basic principle is known: if your calorie intake (from food) is higher than the calories you "burn" in your muscles (by doing exercise), your body stocks this surplus as fat. In the prehistory, our body has learnt to stock this surplus as a provision for bad times, when famine was current in our countries. It even gets worse. If you start to diet, your body still thinks that there will be a new famine. It switches to "alert" and uses the available calories in a more efficient way. The fat reserves try to keep it up as long as possible, just in case the scarcity will even be bigger. The weight that you lose consists mainly in water loss and decomposition of the carbohydrate reserves in the muscles and the liver. But when you stop the diet, your body stocks all calories that it can get at top speed, to weapon itself against new famines…So even without exaggerating, you'll quickly gain the lost kilos. Yo-yo effect!
The only solution is a balance between a permanent healthy eating pattern (calories "in") and your daily portion of physical activity (calories "out").
But still, it's quiet hard for a lot of people to lose weight by running. The reason is that the calories you took during the day are used or burnt in your body. Even when you sleep, your organs continue to work, your hart still beats, etc. We call this the "use in rest" (basal metabolism). When you have a normal lifestyle, the basal metabolism represents more than half of your calorie use. But the basal metabolism is different for everyone and depends on different factors: age, sex, height and certainly the type of the body. This means that some people have a low metabolism (they burn their calories slowly) and tend more to get heavy. Others burn quickly and can eat a lot more. It's important to accept that you cannot change your type of body. But you can make the best of it.
What you can change is your "use in movement" (lifestyle metabolism). These are the calories you burn for your daily activities. If you move more, you use extra calories. A person of 70kg in rest burns 1,2 kcal per minute. During a slight effort that person burns to 4 kcal per minute and to 10 kcal per minute during a heavy effort. Moreover, even after exercise your metabolism will still be a lot higher.
Let's calculate. Suppose you use 200 kcal during a good walk. To burn one kilo of fat, that's 9000 calories, you should walk…45 hours. Disappointed? The secret lays in repetition. By walking a bit every day, you'll get there. 100kcal per day means half a kilo per month or six kilo per year. And by running, you'll burn even more calories. Only when you run on a regular basis you will lose weight!
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