Forums >Running 101>Question about weight/calories
Interesting thread. A few comments.
The suggestion to see a dietitian, while theoretically a good idea, is probably impossible for the OP. Most high school students don't have the money to pay for a dietitian.
Losing weight can make you faster, but only if you have excess weight. If you lose essential weight you'll get slower, sick, or injured. Six pounds might be too much. If you do this, do it gradually, try a pound or two lighter each season as you approach the key competitions for the season. Give yourself a break and gain the weight back during the off season.
Lots of runners lose weight approaching key competitions and then gain it back during the off-season.
It might take months, even years, to figure out your optimal racing weight, and that weight may also change as you age.
Take a look at the book "Racing Weight" by Matt Fitzgerald which dives deeper into this topic.
FWIW none of those apps work for me, because they don't support the most basic thing in the world, carrying over today's surplus or deficit to the next day. Boggles my mind. Maybe it's changed since I last looked, but I doubt it. When I lost 50 pounds 16 years ago I used my own spreadsheets to record and track stuff. Not too hard to do.
bhearn - I'm curious about your comment about carrying over today's surplus/deficit to the next day. I don't think any of the apps I've seen so far deal with this. Could you please elaborate on what you did? You've obviously kept the 50 off, so whatever you did, worked.
My understanding is that the mfp app allows you to track calories on a weekly basis as well as a daily basis, so you can essentially carry over excess calories - either too many or too few. Instead of worrying as much about your daily total, you focus on the weekly goal. I use MFP on my laptop and it doesn't have that feature, but the phone app does.