Pretty sure there have been studies positively correlating running a certain amount with dying younger. I can't imagine sucking in city pollution can be that healthy either.
Anecdotally, it helps my anxiety.
There are also some serious methodological questions about the studies involved. The best analysis I've seen is here:
http://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/will-running-too-m...
So no, there's no solid evidence that any amount of running is harmful. Maybe if someone did a study in a place where pollution was extra bad (e.g. Beijing) they would find such an effect, but I'm not aware of any such efforts.
[1]http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/training/many-calories...
One of the marathons I ran had a "carbo-loading" event. Basically huge vats of spaghetti were cooked, and runners would absolutely gorge. It's totally unnecessary, IMHO. It's good to eat enough and cleanly before a big run, but stuffing yourself just weighs you down. And come mile 20 or so, you're not going to be worried about how much energy you have to burn, but rather how much everything hurts.
"SAMHSA defines heavy drinking as drinking 5 or more drinks on the same occasion"
So you're right that heavy drinking of beer could be undone with running, but it's going to take a 10-11 mile run every day.
There is little to gain by behaving like a smug asshole in comments. What could you possibly expect as a response to your comment that would make for good conversation.
Emphasis mine.
Since when? I'd like a citation on that.
Weight is won or lost in the kitchen. Full stop.
A 1 hour run might burn 500 calories. If you go and eat till you are not hungry, you can easily eat 800 or 900 calories. You are not going to lose much weight at the method.
There is still a lot that we don't know with regards to metabolism. I am usually a higher mileage runner during spring to fall months (70-90km / week) and although I scale my eating to offset my calories burned, I will still lose weight. I will not provide a citation but it's quite widely known that metabolism increases as the body normalizes into a training period or regimen. And increasing with diminutive returns as the training increases. Recovery also burns more calories even while sedentary (as you should be when recovering).
Of course the body can/will waste calories, burn them at a higher rate depending on other things. That's not most peoples' problem though: unexpectedly losing too much weight. There's not a billion-dollar industry around that issue.
I think this is disingenuous. Certainly regulating caloric intake has more impact than exercise because it's "easier" to achieve a caloric deficit, but that doesn't mean running isn't great for weight loss all else being equal.
Furthermore, exercise is important for other health reasons. So maintaining the same caloric intake and adding running is much better than simply reducing your caloric intake by the same amount.
Of course it's possible to eat 1000 calories' worth of food in one sitting, especially if you're eating something with tons of carbs in. But if you keep your diet roughly the same and go on a 1 hour run three times a week, you'll definitely start losing weight..
(The idea that sport can't help you lose weight is still ridiculous of course, even if you are only burning 600 calories per hour. Bad habits make you overweight and establishing good habits (like exercise) is the key to get out of that.)
It'd be nice to have an outlandish comparison to put towards their claim.
The 300 kcal of work equate to ~349 Watt hours as WolframAlpha will tell you, so if you want to produce that in a single hour you need to continuously put out 349 Watts.
Now we have put lots of humans on scientific ergos which can accurately measure work, and that is a very high number for a single hour for any individual. There is a chart here that gives you the kind of work rates achievable by category:
http://d4nuk0dd6nrma.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/...
It's normalized by weight but it's more accurately height, someone weighing 300lbs isn't suddenly going to produce more power than at a normal weight. The number you're looking for is "FT" or Functional Threshold, which is generally assumed to be around the absolute maximum average power sustainable for an hour. At the end of that you should fall over and puke your guts out. So for someone doing 350 Watts for a hour, that would put them at world class or domestic pro level.
[1] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/walking-vs-elliptic...
https://youtu.be/ztiHRiFXtoc https://youtu.be/eXTiiz99p9o
My personal experience of a lifetime of moderate amounts of running has been that it didn't help me lose weight at all, it increased my strength and endurance. But when I run and when I exercise, I eat more to compensate. A decade of regular exercise left me healthy, and just as chubby as when I started.
Finally realizing exercise is a strength plan and not a weight loss plan, and getting myself into the right mental place to count calories -- I lost 40 pounds in 6 months and have kept the weight off for years because I learned how to eat & exercise. I get fat by eating more and skinny by eating less, I get strong by exercising and weak by not exercising.
Exercising does afford me the opportunity to eat a little more after a workout, and I get to reward myself with a treat sometimes. I suspect that makes counting calories a lot easier.
Fully agree on it being motivational, and I'd go further about the benefits. Exercise is mandatory for me personally, it is a higher priority than most things, including weight loss.
Strength training, on the other hand, is way MORE effective at cutting fat for me than it "should" be. Go figure.
Put another way, if you ran fifty miles and took in no calories (obviously hypothetical), you'd lose ~1.5 pounds. You still have to make dietary changes if you want to lose weight.
Signed, Skinny, lifelong runner who hasn't the first clue what it's like to try and lose weight
Same for the situps and pushups I've been doing since August. I'm a hell of a lot more fit than I was, and I move better than I have in years. Hasn't made my gut any smaller. Sure, I've had to put three new holes in my belt, and probably need to go down a waist size next time I buy trousers. But it turns out that improved abdominal muscle tone just means you carry belly fat higher, so even though my waistline's shrunk, I actually look fatter than I did before. (On the other hand, I can move like I did in my twenties, so I'm willing to take the hit to my narcissism here.)
I've twice in the last decade lost fifty pounds or more in under a year. Both times, I did it purely by means of calorie restriction.
Exercise will make you healthier. It will not, by itself, make you lose weight. You do that by making sure that (calories in - calories out) has a negative sign, daily, over a long period of time. Aerobic exercise can help in that you burn more calories that way. But it's an adjunct, and insufficient on its own.
It's not easy, especially when you start out habituated to large meals and highly caloric sugary foods. It is absolutely doable, and the younger you start, the easier it is.
You have to run about 1 mile to burn 100 calories. Skipping a 1000 calorie lunch is the equivalent of running 10 miles when it comes to weight loss.
Put another way, without a diet change, you would have to run about 35 miles to lose just 1 pound of fat.
Running is good for the heart and lungs. For weight loss, not so much.