The Dangerous Lie of the Perfect Running Weight

To run stronger, happier, and healthier, stop chasing an arbitrary number on the scale.

Paige Roberts knows exactly where her toxic relationship with weight began. As a high school sophomore, she qualified for the one- and two-mile races at the Colorado state track championships. Based on her performance, her coach, a math teacher with no formal training in exercise physiology or sports nutrition, decided that she was at her “optimal running weight” and cautioned her against getting heavier. He even discouraged her and other teammates from joining the swim team in the off-season, she recalls, telling them that it would make their thighs too big.

Although weight gain is typically part of healthy physical development at that age, her coach’s words left her terrified of it. Over the next months, Roberts drastically restricted her food intake and was ultimately diagnosed with an eating disorder. She cut out all but a few foods and ran 10 to 15 miles a day. When she developed painful shin splints, she pushed through them. During a race later in her sophomore year, a stress fracture in her fibula turned into a full break. She wore a cast for six weeks, but that wasn’t the wake-up call it should have been. Her leg healed in time for the next season, and she jumped right back into high-volume training, weighing herself at least twice a day and purging after meals if she ever crept above her so-called “optimal running weight.” Her shin splints became so painful that she ended up sitting out her senior year in an effort to fully recover before competing in college. She also began seeing an eating disorder counselor, although her fixation on weight remained.

When she joined the cross-country team at Colorado Mesa University, she mentioned her weight goals to her coach, who had an exercise physiology background. He was confused. “He was, like, ‘Running weight? There’s no running weight.’” She was surprised—no coach had ever told her this before.

Roberts continued seeing an eating disorder counselor and learned about nutrition and recovery from her coach. Eventually her weight settled to about 15 pounds higher than what she had viewed as her running weight, and she was able to maintain her best times. She still gets angry when she thinks about how her high school coach talked to her about her body. “It was brainwashing, essentially, and it started this eating disorder that I have had to live with my whole life,” she says. Although Roberts considers herself recovered, an eating disorder never goes away completely. Twenty years later, she goes to therapy twice a month, in part to make sure she doesn’t revert to disordered eating behaviors when she feels stressed or out of control.

For many runners, an intense focus on achieving or maintaining a certain weight can cause immense mental and physical damage. As more evidence shows that weight is not a reliable indicator of health, and that a focus on body weight is harmful, it’s clear that we—the running community, and society at large—need to change the conversation on weight, performance, and well-being.

Underfueling Has Serious Consequences

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Paige Roberts was experiencing Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), a disorder that occurs when someone doesn’t have enough energy available to support their activity level. Dennis Cardone, MD, a sports medicine doctor at NYU Langone Medical Center, explains that RED-S has three main characteristics: disordered eating, hormonal changes, and decreased bone density. Women with RED-S often lose their periods, which can lead to irreversible bone loss after just a few months. In the short term, that increases the risk of stress fractures; over time, it can lead to brittle bones and osteoporosis.

Once referred to as the female athlete triad, it’s now understood that men can also suffer from RED-S. In that case, it’s primarily a decrease in testosterone that leads to bone loss. Other symptoms, like fatigue and irritability, also occur in
athletes of both sexes.

While significant weight loss or weight fluctuation is one criterion in screening for RED-S, it can happen regardless of a person’s body size. Anyone who is not consuming enough calories to support their training is at risk of RED-S, which is why Cardone does not recommend weight loss as a way to get faster or increase endurance.

Even with the threat of RED-S, many athletes still believe that losing weight will make them faster. This is complicated by the fact that, very broadly speaking, body size can be correlated to running performance. It takes less energy to move a lighter body, so naturally smaller people who maintain a low body weight without overtraining and underfueling have an advantage, particularly over longer distances. But being in a calorie deficit, where someone consumes fewer calories than they’re burning, decreases energy levels and increases the risk of RED-S, which will likely negate any long-term performance benefit that might come with weight loss, Cardone says. “Whether it’s running or any other sport that we know, the key [to performance] is proper nutrition and proper training.”

Read More at RUNNER'S WORLD

The Dangerous Lie of the Perfect Running Weight
BY CHRISTINE BYRNE FEB 3, 2022
www.runnersworld.com