Running To Lose Weight – How Well Does It Work?
Want to lose some weight? One of the first ideas that comes to mind is running to lose weight. It is after all a very popular method to stay fit and healthy. But is it the best way to go for someone who just wants to drop a few (or quite a few) pounds? The answer may surprise you!
A while ago I remember reading an article on this subject that came to a conclusion that running is bad for weight loss. The reason for such an interesting conclusion was the fact that running (like any exercise) makes one more hungry than usual, and these caused people to eat more, so much more in fact that they would not only make up for the calories lost during a run, but even go over that – in effect making them gain weight compared to if they did not run.
The problem with that conclusion is of course that it’s based on a silly factor – that people who exercise don’t follow a diet. Well, as I mentioned in Weight Loss Is Simple But Not Easy exercising without a good diet is most often a total waste of time – No matter how many calories you burn, you can always eat more. This study however does highlight the importance of a diet when it comes to losing weight.
But back to the topic at hand, how well does running to lose weight work? Assuming your diet is in order and you aren’t going to eat a box of donuts just because you ran a few miles, it works pretty well. How well? Depends on your level of fitness. If you haven’t worked out in years then running will be an awesome weight loss exercise. You’ll burn lots of calories and it won’t take too much time (10-30 minutes should make for a nice work out.)
However as your fitness improves you will find that running for the same 30 minutes no longer produces the same results it used (read: Why Do I Lose Weight So Slowly?) What happened is that your body adapted and you now need to either increase the time spent running or increase speed at which you run, or a combination of both. Which is why I can’t help but be amused by the people at a gym who run on a treadmill for an hour five days a week for years and then wonder why they aren’t losing weight. Doing that might’ve been a great way to burn fat when they first started, but by now their body has adapted and hardly burns any calories.
So if you like running but find that you aren’t getting the kind of weight loss results you used to in the past, it doesn’t mean that you have to quit running to lose weight. It just means you need to increase your speed and/or run for longer periods of time. Although as your fitness gets better and betters you might come to a point where doing other exercise will give you better results than running.
It still works though and should be used as it is a great exercise to keep one self fit and healthy, but you would likely want to reduce the frequency down to about once or twice a week for longer runs.
