"That's not a fun run, that's a shit run!" - How eating helped me to run

Dr Breanne Kunstler (BBiomedSci, BHealthSci, MPhysio, PhD). 

Physiotherapist, behaviour change scientist and run coach.

"That's not a fun run, that's a shit run!" is what I told my dietician when she asked how I feel when I run on a carb-restricted diet. This was just after I told her that I am training to achieve a sub-90min half marathon, and about 6 months after I walked into her office asking for help to prevent the worsening of disordered eating behaviours.

I came a long way in 2020. I not only re-gained 20% of my pre-baby weight, and almost 100% of my self respect, but I also came a long way in my recovery from a 10 year battle with a disordered eating. I have made significant improvements in my mental and physical health while learning more about myself than I could ever imagine. 

How has my running changed?

I always identified as a long distance endurance runner. I defined that as a being a 'plodder', where I'd just plod along until I happened to complete a marathon. I would run at a pace of about 6min/km for as far as my legs would take me. I did this for years and never wanted to run faster. I was content and achieved all that I wanted to.

After running the Melbourne Marathon in 2014

Then I had Abby and suddenly I didn't have the freedom to spend hours plodding along the Yarra, despite wanting to! I decided to change my focus. Instead of doing long distance endurance runs, I chose to run shorter distances and faster to make sure I could get a run in between feeds. I suddenly had a different and exciting new activity that I could fit around raising a newborn. Since September 2019, I have gone from a gentle jog around the block to see what I could do within a few weeks of giving birth to running a half marathon in just over 90 minutes in October 2020.  

One of many sweaty selfies post-virtual fun run in 2020

What did I do to improve my running?

Well, initially, I lost a heap of weight. I had very little appetite and felt like I couldn't fit much food in my stomach during pregnancy. I was lighter on the day I gave birth than the day I conceived. Naturally, carrying less weight was going to help me to run faster as there was less weight to move. Please don't take this as me saying you should lose a stupid amount of weight to run faster, because this isn't good advice. I'm just telling you what happened to me.

Then the pandemic reached Melbourne. Lockdowns started in about March-ish 2020. Gyms closed. I started working from home so no more cycling to work. Many people, including me, thought that these changes would negatively affect their fitness. However, for me, lockdown was what I needed for my running to really improve. 

I used to go to the gym every day and do the same thing while expecting different results. I enjoyed my classes for the social aspect and never really cared that I wasn't seeing the improvements I'd like to see. Getting out of that "rutt" of doing the same thing all the time allowed me to try some new things, including designing my own training plan with the one goal of improving my running speed. This plan included not just running-specific training (e.g. fartlek, tempo, hills etc.) but also strength training and some cycling.

Following my plan was going well until I plateaued. My running speed wasn't improving much. I stopped enjoying exercise and it started to feel like a chore. I knew this wasn't normal. Exercise, contrary to popular belief, should be enjoyable. 

I have written about intuitive exercise and eating in a two-part blog series before (see part 1 and part 2) so I knew that what I was feeling wasn't right. My dietician said I was possibly experiencing Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S, a syndrome of energy imbalance) and/or low energy availability. Given I weighed only 50kg, which is not normal for me (I usually weigh about 75kg), I knew she was right. If I wanted my running to improve, and didn't want to damage my health in the long term, then I needed to eat better.

What does 'eat better' mean?

I needed to listen to my body and treat food as fuel.

I have lived most of my life hating my body. I was never thin enough and treated food like the enemy, and exercise and dieting like my weapon to defeat it. 

I often told myself that the more food I ate, the further away I'd be from being thin. 

Why the fuck did I want to be thin? I thank society in general for pushing this stupid fucking obsession with thin being "ideal", but also the people around me who think it's OK to judge other people's size and comment on their weight. Fuck you. Sorry. Rant over.

I needed to learn how to listen to my body, rather than the dickheads around me, because it was telling me what I needed to do (and eat). This was a hard thing to learn. I don't feel or hear grumbles in my tummy when I'm hungry. I needed to learn that fatigue, mental fogginess and irritability are my hunger signs and to act on them when they appear. 

I also needed to learn to feed my body what it needed and wanted. If I was craving chocolate then I probably didn't have enough glucose in my blood. This meant that I should have some bread with my lunch that day. I caught myself, on a few too many occasions, eating slabs of butter on bread. This was my body telling me that I wanted fats! That was an easy one, although I still didn't pick up on it. I also learnt that getting excited at night about the idea of eating porridge for breakfast the next morning meant that I didn't eat enough carbs that day. These signs were always there, I just needed to learn how to interpret them and act on them. My running started improving once I started listening to my body and acting on it's instructions!

What's the main message here?

Listen to your body. 

Your body tells you what and when you need to eat ('intuitive eating'), as well as when you need to pull back on the exercise. However, be ready to learn it's language. My body was always telling me what I needed to do (remember when I was eating slabs of butter?) but I didn't know how to interpret the message. It's like expecting a blind person to be able to read a stop sign.

Instead of running to eat, I need to eat to run. This meant treating food as a fuel for my body and not some kind of reward for burning calories. Instead of thinking 'I went for a 10km run today so I can have some bread' I now think 'I went for a 10km run today, which used up my glycogen stores, so I need to have some bread with my lunch to replace those stores so that I can run again in a couple of days'. 

Making these small changes, and learning my body's language, has made running a lot more fun!

Make running fun by treating your body well!

Stay well, fellow humans.

Check out my other blog posts on intuitive eating and exercise if you want to learn more about effectively fuelling your body for exercise and ditching 'diet culture' (part 1 and part 2)