The lesson for today

Something has always haunted me. I remember it first when I was in grad school. I would wake up, first thing in the morning and weigh myself, go for a run and weigh myself again, in order to replace the fluids that I would supposedly lose. But every time I came back, I weighed more when I came back than when I had left, and no, I was not stopping at the donut shop and throwing back a few during my run. I was working out every day, eating smoothies for breakfast, had a vegetarian diet, but still the weight persisted. I asked a trainer about it casually and they indicated I was working out the wrong muscles in the gym and eating too much fruit.
I pretty much let it slide until recently. I was going on a few casual runs with my daughter, having dreams of 5ks in my future but then the scale started to inch back up. I'm talking 2% weight gain. And it was persistent. And scary, because the only thing that had changed was my increase in eating vegetables and the occasional run.
This morning I googled and discovered that some of us run in an anaerobic state. We don't notice it, consciously, we're still running like everyone else, but the heart rate is so far increased that the body is not able to burn calories as efficiently and forget about fat burning. What I read this morning indicated that fat burning heart rates are even lower than aerobic or heart healthy heart rates. And I did happen to notice, that when I stopped running for a week, the weight did go away that had been there mocking me while I was running.
Now I can interpret this a couple ways. I take it to mean that I should get a heart rate monitor if I want to know for sure, but given my previous history, I think I'm going to start walking more and give up my 5k dreams.

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