Fitness/Health Questions

[jumbopackage]

I think the concept is to eat often, so you don't feel hungry. I've been fortunate that I can do 3 meals and not feel too bad that way. Sometimes I have to have a mid afternoon snack(apple or banana), but other then that haven't had too many cravings. A 1/4 cup of oat meal with flax seed for breakfast does an amazing job of keeping you full until dinner.

There's a school of thought that says that eating often increases your metabolism. I haven't seen much scientific evidence to support that, however.

The other group that does it often are serious weightlifters. They are trying to gain weight, though, and they mostly do it because it's hard to eat 3 meals a day with 1500-2000 calories each in them.

I agree on the actual practical "eat often so you don't get hungry" advice, though. I've found it also helps to have healthy snacks around in case you do. Keeping yourself from getting too hungry keeps you from eating too much when you do eat meals.

[dualthreat]

Squatting:

A 30 meter race is the optimal distance for your training to include squats. Less optimal for a 100m runner. Even less and less the further you go. Squatting adds too much mass, strength, bulk and weight.

Best advice (to you and to ALL runners):

Run. Run. And Run some more.

If you want to work on total body: do some upper body weight training and include hill sprints/runs into your training. Nearly guarunteed to work wonders!

[acrozier22]

Jumbopackage has some great advice in this thread. I recommend you track your calories. I use mynetdiary.com. I can enter data on my iPad, iPhone, or straight from the web. I believe they have a blackberry app as well. The biggest benefit to that site is that it pulls from a large database. Most foods you eat are already listed so you don't have to look everything up.

Secondly, measure out your food. Get a food scale, and get use to knowing how big serving sizes are. I was surprised how full i felt when i just turned my portions down a notch or two. I didn't need that extra food.

Weigh in twice a week. I do it on Monday morning and then set my weekly calorie goal and then again on Thursday morning to see how much i can get away with on the weekend.

The lifting will help as my running improved a ton when i started to lift consistently. Lots of reps!!!