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Originally Posted by Val02
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I am in constant battle with myself and how many calories a day I should be eating. I am on my feet all day as a teacher, and I train at night and on weekends. For example, I have a tendancy to think I need to eat less on my day off of running (Friday) but then I think my fuel tank is a little low on Sat. morning. .  |
hey val. one of the things that helped me a lot with this issue is my gowearfit.com gadget. it is like a body bugg, and now it has software to track your calories too. being on your feet all day, you might be surprised at your burn rate just from your job. add marathon training on top of that, and your burn might get substantial at times. you didnt mention your mileage, but if you run 6 days a week, your burn might be very high.
as for the saturday long runs, yeah, fridays are not the day to cut calories. I eat at maintenance on fridays, and tend to shift my macros a little closer to 50-55 percent carbs just to top off the glycogen tank so I am prepared to run long on saturday. go check out this same thread by me in the fat loss troubleshoot section--powermanDL wrote a great article on fat loss and running.
as far as the slow weight gain, not sure what is going on. many people on the forum put down calipers as a way to test body fat, but I have found that monthly calipers with an exercise physiologist who is experienced in this method, and utilizing the same person everytime, has been INVALUABLE to me during training, to determine how much of my scale weight is fat versus lean.
bottom line, marathon training is a huge stress to the body. if you are not adequately recovering, getting adequate sleep, managing stress, eating enough on recovery days and enough nutrient dense food, your body may not let go of those couple of pounds that you MIGHT have gained. I said might, because marathon training itself causes a lot of fluid retention.
I learned the hard way that trying to focus on any kind of deficit while training hard is NOT the way to go.
track your intake in something like fitday.com or thedailyplate.com , log your exercise and see if they match over the course of a couple of weeks. the gowearfit gadget would really help you if it is in your budget. happy running! let us know how it goes.