Frequently asked question #2

Q: So do you lose a lot of weight when you train for a marathon?

A: I get asked this question often. We are a culture obsessed with weight and weight loss, after all. I don’t know what other people experience, but for me the answer is no.

I was raised on a diet of macaroni and cheese and sugar corn pop cereal by parents who didn’t have any kind of regular exercise regime in their own lives. I wriggled out of PE classes anyway I could while I was growing up (mononucleosis in Jr. High, driver’s education in high school) and started to see the scale creeping ever closer to the two-hundred mark by the time I was twenty.

Since there is a lot of obesity in my family, I was getting scared – certainly by the way I thought I looked, but mostly by what I saw were the effects of the struggle in my family. I’d watched my grandmother go through a gastric bypass surgery so she could drop a hundred pounds only to suffer from numerous other physical ailments I’m convinced were due to lack of nutrition. I’d watched my sweet aunt suspend aspects of her life because the person she was on the inside was weighed down by obesity and constant physical pain. I didn’t want this for my life, but I didn’t know how to stop it from happening. In those early years, I had made only a vague connection between food, exercise and body weight. I mostly connected food with comfort and ate to fill up empty spaces inside of my heart, not so much to nourish my body.

Then, in community college, I took an aerobics dance class because I needed a PE credit for my associate’s degree. In one quarter, I watched myself shrink by ten pounds without changing my eating habits in the least. I also felt my energy and joy increase. The next quarter I took another class. It turned out that I liked to dance and I liked to move my body. During this second quarter of aerobics, I added a meal schedule to my efforts. As opposed to skipping meals all day and binging before bed, I began eating exactly four times a day: morning, noon and evening, plus a snack. Fifteen more pounds disappeared without any suffering or hunger on my part. By the time I graduated, I had dropped from 175 pounds to 133 pounds.

And that is where I have stayed for more than twenty years. Some of those years I’ve been more fit than other years, but my weight has remained the same (with a brief increase in grad school and a brief decrease during my divorce).

I am five foot six inches tall. I wear a size six or eight – depending on what time of the month it is or where I buy my clothes. Occasionally, I gain or lose one or two pounds, but always bounce back to 133. I’m as average as they come.

At times, I admit, it has actually felt discouraging to work as hard as I have worked to train for these long races and scarcely lose an ounce. Everyone says, “Muscle weighs more than fat.” Yes, but I’m sure I still have enough fat to lose to displace the weight gain due to muscle increase. I’m not immune to thinking that being skinnier and skinnier is what the goal should be. I’m no different than all the other women I know who wish their butts were less jiggly or that their thighs were more shapely. In my case, it’s my stomach I wish were flatter.

Still, in this running process, I’m working toward being content with my body as it is. I don’t want to eat less than I do. And I don’t want to run so I will LOOK better. I run for a hundred complex reasons that have to do with who I AM and how it makes me FEEL. If I lost ten or even twenty pounds I might be lighter on my feet – maybe even increase my running pace a bit. But I’d also have to cut back on my calories, not eat when I’m hungry or cut out some of the things that make my taste buds feel happy. Instead, I want to work toward striking a balance between using food as a comfort to my heart and as a way of nourishing my body. I believe that our bodies rather than fashion magazines should guide us as to what is healthy for each of us. This is where my body wants to be – at 133 pounds.

Now, there’s no doubt that I could add more grains and fresh veggies to my diet. My digestive process loves it when I get my roughage. I’m not giving myself an excuse here not to continue to improve the way I care for my body with nutrition. In fact, a few weeks ago, I visited my naturopath and was advised to cut cheese out of my diet altogether for a while as an experiment to see if dairy is clogging me up (and I’m thinking about it). I’m only saying that, as I get older and as I run more miles, the weight loss isn’t my measure for health and well-being.

A lot of people do lose weight when they train for a marathon. I applaud them if that’s their goal (as long as it’s healthy and not obsessive). I stay the same – and tentatively, a little more every day, I applaud that, too. I want to run because running is power – an invitation to dream and breathe and feel alive with visceral knowledge of self – not so I can look better in my swimming suit or have a smaller waistline. I want this for everyone. So if you can run, just run and let your body find its happy place. If you can’t run do whatever makes you feel alive and let your body find its happy place.