I just broke a personal record today – I went to the canal and ran for ten miles straight . I stepped on the scale and found that I weigh 190 lbs. When I regain my fluids, that’ll probably go up to 195 or 197. ('Scuse me while I suck on this gallon jug of water…) Since I’m 6’3", I’m as slim as I really need to be.
Anyway, here’s the deal: I eat total crap. Once I regain my strength, I’m probably going to go out and pick up a burger and fries at McDonalds, and a tall coke to slake my thirst. I eat lots of other junk food as well (though not as often as I once did). Whenever I catch myself thinking “maybe I should be eating a nice salad instead”, I soon find myself thinking “Dammit, I’m paying for the right to eat garbage with brute force exercise, so shut up!”
I run about 25 miles per week and work out three days at the gym, with total disregard for the amount of soda and other junk I consume.
I am abut the same as you, 6’3", 190 lbs (blonde hair, blue eyes, hello ladies). I also run about the same. I will do 5 min at 4.0 mph, then 5 at 4.7 then 40 min at 7.0 mph. in the end it coe out to about 5.6 miles every day. However, I am really starting to pay for it with foot pain and after about three months there has not been much difference in my appereance. I still have a bit of tummy flab that I would like to work off before I start doing weights to try and build muscle mass.
I drink a lot (I play music in bars several nights a week), and I try to counteract the affects through a very good diet and really hard exercise.
I typically eat lots of fruit for breakfast, followed by a shot of extra-virgin olive oil. For lunch I usually have a large grilled-chicken salad, with more olive oil. Dinner is usually grilled veggies and chicken, fixed different ways, once in a while a 10-oz. steak. I occasionally have a turkey sub for lunch or dinner. Plenty of vitamin and mineral supplements with every meal (especially calcium, since dairy products don’t agree with me).
In the gym, I lift weights (pretty much the same routine I used as a competitive bodybuilder, a 4-day split) and afterwards, run three miles in under twenty minutes (I clocked 19:38 on Saturday). I do this five or six days a week, unless I’m traveling for work (in which case I skip the lifting).
I’m 5’7", 170, and around 10% bodyfat last I checked. I’ve worn the same size pants since college (I’m 45). On the other hand, I know that alcohol takes its toll on the liver, even if it doesn’t show on the outside.
Doesn’t work for me. Maybe if you can run 10 miles fast you can burn enough calories to make a difference, but that’s a hell of a lot of running. A standard 3-5 miles is only 400 calories or so and that just isn’t much to offset the fatty foods.
I work out about an hour and a half a day, 6 days a week…and really, eat whatever I want with no adverse affects whatsoever. Granted, I’m a vegetarian, so I’m not big on the fast food, but sit me down near a party-size bag of cheese doodles and they’re gone. Or ice cream (chocolate peanut butter cup, mmm.) Or really, anything salty and/or sugary.
I haven’t really not worked out regularly since, like, before I hit puberty, so I have no idea what the effect of stopping would be.
According to the horribly inaccurate numbers of the treadmills at the gym, I typically burn around 1000 in a 5 mile run. (BTW, I’m impressed with Shakespeare’s ~20min 5k time. I’m lucky if I can do 5k in less than 24min).
Of course, I’m not talking about trading gym calories one-for-one for junk food calories. I’m simply relying on the basic fact that if I eat X pounds of crap during the week and burn a few thousand calories on the road, I should be better off than if I eat the same X pounds of crap during the week with no exercise.
Before I began running and working out, a year and a half ago, I did weigh more: 230. That really doesn’t show on a 6’3" fellow, though – it’s like being sheathed in a thin layer of fat, with a slight concentration in the love handle region. Nevertheless, folks who haven’t seen me for awhile ask about the weight since my face is thinner.
I guess that I also have made some basic diet changes: fast food only a day or two a week instead of three or four; no two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms for a long time; much less ice cream around the house. But I have this nagging feeling that if I could ever find the self control to eat a proper balanced diet, with the exercise I do, I would look like those guys at the gym who have paper-thin skin that shows the individual fibers of their ab muscles. Oh well. It ain’t going to happen unless my doctor laughs at me and says “Who are you kidding? Cut eating garbage or you’ll have a heart attack by 45”.
Oh HELL no!! I’m over 40 and female. No way that even the amount of exercise i do could counterract that sort of diet.
I have one 'free day" a week and have “munchies” only on that day. Other than that, I make sure I eat several small “minimeals” with equal portions of protein and complex carbs a day.
So long as it keeps working for you, I say go for it. Of course, one day nature may begin to catch up with you and you may decide that it’ll be easier to clean up the diet a bit. But until then, I say enjoy yourself. You’ve earned it.
Upon reading this thread I realized that I had better a) start eating better, or b)start working out. I eat horribly. I don’t eat a lot of fast food, but I do snack and eat a lot of junk food. From the time I get home from work till I go to bed I am almost constantly eating, and usually chips, crackers, and sugary things, not good things, like fruit, or veggies, or even a mildly OK thing like yogurt.
The only thing saving me from total fat-ass-ness is that fact that I eat almost nothing between 10 AM and 6 PM. I have a small bowl of cereal for breakfast, then usually a sandwich for lunch. I also sometimes don’t have dinner…of course, that’s sometimes bad as it could result in just more snacking. I also have a “fast metabolism,” cause I’m still a young guy. FTR, I’m 21, ~6’, ~165 lbs, and have a 32" waist. In my prime in HS, when I was active in sports, I was still almost 6’, between a 30 and 32" waist, and as low as 130 lbs. Most of my weight was put on my sophomore and junior years of college (I never got a freshman fifteen…but I put on almost 40 pounds in the next two years to make up for it.)
. I stepped on the scale and found that I weigh 190 lbs. When I regain my fluids, that’ll probably go up to 195 or 197. ('Scuse me while I suck on this gallon jug of water…) Since I’m 6’3", I’m as slim as I really need to be.