Diet advice on Dublin City Marathon website

Micilin Muc

Nutritional advice from the website states that a male training for a marathon should consume up to 2500 calories a day.


As part of my goal to run this year's DCM, I plan to lose at least a stone. My current diet doesn't even come close to 1500 calories. Is 2500 a high number of calories / a lot of food, or am I missing something?

hunnymonster

1500 is very low. Could you tell us a typical day's diet (including amounts).

tunney

1500 calories? thats a snack!!

estariol

that's barely a decent breakfast!
might seem counter intuitive but you actually have to eat more to properly lose weight, the important thing is to get enough protein and carbs to fuel and recover when training. I've found a 40:40:10:10 protein:carb:fibre:fat ratio to work best! a 10k run alone requires 700 calories! so you are def. under eating and will end up injured. Most competitive runners would be eating in excess of 4000 calories a day. you should read the stickies in the fitness forum on diet.

hunnymonster

Here is an earlier post that might help.

Hunnymonster wrote:

There is a nutrition and diet forum for people who want more information but some of the basics include

1. Energy needs
know how many calories you need by following the steps below (taken from the complete guide to sports nutrition and summarised by g'em)
step A
Figure out your resting metabolic rate (RMR) or the calories your body requires just to exist if you were lying down for 24 hours:
Age Men
10-18 (body weight (kg) * 17.5) + 651
19-30 (bw (kg) * 15.3) + 679
31-60 (bw (kg) * 11.6) + 879
Age Women
10-18 (bw (kg) * 12.2) + 746
19-30 (bw (kg) * 14.7) + 496
31-60 (bw (kg) * 8.7) + 829

Step B:
Then calculate your lifestyle daily energy needs (LDEN):
Activity level
mostly seated or standing RMR * 1.4
regular walking or equivalent RMR * 1.7
generally physically active RMR * 2.0

Step C:
Then estimate your daily exercise expenditure (DEE). I never quite trust the tables of calorie experditures but they get you in the right ball park. One example is
http://www.nutribase.com/exercala.htm
The common approach is to calculate a week's exercise and divide by 7 but personally, I prefer to have people eat the extra calories around about when they exercise not averaged out. This helps fuel the exersise better and aids recovery.

The calories you need to eat are
LDEN + DEE
For weight loss: reduce calories by about 15% a day:
For weight gain: Increase your calorie intake by 20%:


2. When to eat
divide your LDEN calories throughout the day (ideally 5-6 small meals). See point 4 for when you should eat your DEE calories


3. eat clean - The easiest way to explain this is that food should not need 20 processes to be eaten, yes some foods need to be cooked, yes some foods need processing (e.g. pasteurisation of milk) but you don't need 20 chemicals! The more food you can obtain in it's raw state and cook yourself the better (and cheaper) your diet will be. I don't ever accept the excuse that I don't have time or I don't have money. Fresh food is cheaper and faster to prepare but it does involve some thinking and forward planning.

4. composition of your food: runners tend to think they need endless carbohydrates. not true! Yes you will need more carbs than a sedentary person, running does not give you carte blanche to eat endless starch and sugar.
Your food is made up of macronutrients: carbohydrates, protein and fat.
Carbohydrates are classified acording to the the complexity of the sugar units and how rapidly they are digested. Carbs are useful for a range of functions (energy storage, structure, immunity, fertility etc) but most of us eat too much carbohydrate material. Protein is used for growth and repair. Fat can be used for energy and is important for fat soluble vitamins. Fats are divided into saturated and unsaturated. Most of us eat too much saturated fat. Roughly speaking you want your food to be 50% carb. 30 % fat and 20 % protein. These figures will vary a little depending on your exact goals.
Apart from these macronutrients food contains micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals (that's a whole other post on it's own). These play many vital roles in keeping us healthy.
Don'tforget water and fibre in your diet.

There are loads of food composition tables out there (e.g. http://www.brianmac.co.uk/food.htm)

Very important is that you need most of the carbohydrate just before, during and just after prolonged exercise. Little point having a hash brown roll at 9m when you ran at 7am.

5. Don't become a slave to your diet. eat according to the above rules 90 % of the time. Allow yourself a treat sometimes. Despite what Mr Wilde said, moderation is not fatal!

Micilin Muc

Thanks for that, it's very detailed, just what I want.

It recommends to have a breakdown of 50% carbs, 30% fat and 20% protein. Is that just for full-time athletes, or does that hold true for someone like me who'd like to lose weight (one stone in my case)?

HardyEustace

MM, I'm currently reading Anita Bean's Food for fitness

I think that's where HM got some of the info from (correct me if I'm wrong HM).

Anyway, while I know that it's true that you could glean a lot of information here, I just find it extremely handy to have it in a book. I'm reading a few pages every night and then marking out the important bits with page markers. It's absolutely brilliant and very informative.

I've about a stone and a half to lose myself but between the book mentioned above, tracking my food on fitday.com and being able to finally train again I'm going to have it off by DCM if not sooner.

Maybe we should start a DCM weight loss tracker?

Or should that be in nutrition & diet?

Or do people feel that it would be the wrong focus for DCM?