Do You Really Want to Eat That?

By Rick Morris

As an active athlete and runner you need to fuel your body with enough high quality nutrients to provide the energy, muscle repair and muscle growth that your running demands. But, you also need to maintain your optimal running weight. Any excess weight, in the form of body fat, can have a detrimental effect on your running. Many experts suggest that each pound of excess body fat can cause a 1% decrease in your running performance.

You need to maintain a healthy diet with sufficient quantities of complex carbohydrates, lean proteins and healthy fats, but you should always avoid eating snack and junk foods that have low nutrient content. Do those tasty but non-nutritious, empty calorie foods really cause an active runner problems? Yep – they do! Junk foods are full of sugars and fats that do very little to properly fuel your body and do a lot for adding unnecessary body fat weight.

Some runner’s think that they can easily run off those extra junk food pounds, but that may not be as easy as you think.  Here is a list of how many miles you would need to run to work off the calories of some common junk foods.

Plain Doughnut – 2 miles
Jelly Filled Doughnut – 3 miles
Medium Pretzel – 4 miles
10 small coated chocolate pieces – 1.5 miles
1 cup of chocolate ice cream – 3 miles
Double Cheeseburger – 5 miles
1 chocolate chip cookie – 2.5 miles
Large order of French fries – 6 miles
16 oz chocolate shake – 4.5 miles

If you had a doughnut for breakfast; a double cheeseburger, large fries and shake for lunch, 10 coated candies as a snack, a medium pretzel for an evening snack and a cup of ice cream before bed you would need to run 26 miles to burn off those junk calories! That’s right; you would need to run a marathon to get rid of those unnecessary, low nutrient calories. Maybe it’s time to rethink your snacking and eating habits!