Can You Outrun A Bad Diet?

IF YOU THINK A DAILY EXERCISE HABIT GIVES YOU CARTE BLANCHE TO EAT WHATEVER YOU WANT, THINK AGAIN.

- Daniel Kunitz

YOU HIT THE TAKEAWAYS a couple of times a week, and your shopping trolley is regularly filled with biscuits, doughnuts, ice cream, chips (and dip). But you’re thin. You run – a lot – and you’re not gaining any weight, so all’s good, right?

Sorry, but no. Put down the chocolate cupcake and hear us out. 

While runners tend to be healthier than the general population, with lower rates of diabetes and heart disease, that’s largely due to a healthy diet rather than running regularly, says Sara Mahoney, PhD, of the department of exercise science at Bellarmine University. In general, because runners run, they take care of their bodies by also eating well and resting.

But not all of them. Some of them – and we all know one – subsist on doughnuts and burgers. In the short term, running can mitigate the negative health effects of that lifestyle. But over decades, exercise loses its protective abilities.

Longtime Boston Marathon director Dave McGillivray, 63, learned this the hard way. McGillivray, who’s run the Boston course every year since 1973, logged 150 to 200km a week in his heyday, and every year on his birthday he runs his age in miles (that’s 101km last birthday!).