What to Eat Before and After Running: A Beginner’s Guide to Fuelling Your Runs
When I first started running, I was also very used to thinking about food in terms of weight loss. That created a slightly strange situation where I wanted my body to run further and get fitter while part of my brain was still telling me that eating less must always be better.
It isn’t quite that simple.
You don’t need a special runner’s diet just because you’ve downloaded Couch to 5K or started jogging around the local park, and you certainly don’t need a cupboard full of gels, powders and sports drinks. You do, however, need enough energy to actually do the running you’re asking your body to do.
I learned quite quickly that running when I’d eaten reasonably was a very different experience from trying to drag myself around when I hadn’t. Running can be difficult enough when you’re starting without deliberately making your legs feel like they’re running through treacle.
If you’re also trying to lose weight, that can make fuelling feel even more confusing. How much should you eat before running? Should you eat afterwards if you’ve just burned calories? Do you need extra carbohydrates? What about protein?
Thankfully, for most beginner runners, it’s much less complicated than it sounds.
Do you need to eat before running?
It depends mainly on when you last ate, how long you’re going to run for and how you personally feel when exercising.
If you’re going for a fairly short, easy run and you’ve eaten normally during the day, you may not need anything extra at all. Your body already stores energy that it can use during exercise, so you don’t have to eat a banana ceremonially before every 20-minute jog.
Equally, there’s no prize for running hungry.
If you haven’t eaten for several hours or you know you feel weak, light-headed or completely devoid of energy when exercising without food, having something beforehand makes sense. I have a guide on what to eat before a morning workout, which may be helpful if you like to run before breakfast.
For a larger meal, leaving a couple of hours before running generally gives your body some time to digest it. If you’re eating closer to your run, something smaller and relatively easy to digest may feel much more comfortable.
This is one of those areas where your digestive system gets a vote too. I could give you the theoretically perfect pre-run meal, but if it spends the entire run bouncing around your stomach and making you regret leaving the house, it wasn’t perfect for you.
Experiment during ordinary training runs rather than immediately before an important event.
Carbohydrates aren’t the enemy when you’re running
I spent years around diet culture where carbohydrates were regularly treated as something we ought to reduce, avoid or somehow earn. Running gives you a rather different perspective on them.
Carbohydrates are the body’s main energy source for exercise because they’re broken down into glucose, which can be used for energy or stored as glycogen in the muscles and liver. That doesn’t mean runners should eat enormous bowls of pasta at every opportunity, but it does mean deliberately trying to run on very little carbohydrate isn’t necessary for most of us.
Foods such as bread, oats, rice, pasta, potatoes, fruit and cereals can all contribute carbohydrate to your diet.
What works before a run will depend partly on timing. A normal balanced meal containing carbohydrate may be perfectly suitable several hours beforehand, whereas closer to running you might prefer something smaller and easier to digest.
A banana, toast, a crumpet, a small bowl of cereal or another familiar carbohydrate-containing snack can all be perfectly ordinary choices.
You don’t need to categorise every carbohydrate as good or bad either. When you’re doing longer endurance exercise, foods containing more quickly available carbohydrate can actually become useful. Context matters considerably more than whether somebody on Instagram has decided a particular food is “clean”.
Check this guide from Newcastle hospitals for fuelling advice; they wrote it for the Great North Run, but I think it is useful information for any run.
What should you eat after running?
After running, your body has two fairly obvious jobs to do: replenish some of the energy you’ve used and repair the muscles you’ve been exercising.
This is where carbohydrates and protein make a useful combination.
That could be something as ordinary as yoghurt with fruit and cereal, eggs on toast, beans on toast, a sandwich, porridge made with milk, a smoothie containing yoghurt and fruit, or simply your normal meal if you’re going to eat fairly soon.
As a vegetarian, I’m certainly not short of options. Eggs, yoghurt, cottage cheese, tofu, beans, lentils and other pulses can all contribute protein, and I’ve become much less convinced over the years that everybody who exercises needs to immediately reach for a protein shake.
Protein is important, but the amount you’re eating across your whole day matters more than desperately getting something into your mouth within seconds of stopping your watch.
If you’ve only been out for a short jog and you’re having dinner shortly afterwards, dinner can be your recovery food.
You haven’t missed a magical window because you didn’t drink a shake in the car park.
Read my protein and exercise guide for more information about the amount of protein that is advised for exercise.
What about eating while you’re running?
For most beginner runs, you don’t need to.
If you’re doing Couch to 5K or running for 20, 30 or perhaps 45 minutes, there’s generally no reason to start carrying gels and sweets simply because you’ve seen marathon runners using them.
Once runs become longer, fuelling during them becomes more relevant.
For endurance exercise lasting beyond around an hour, taking in carbohydrate during the activity can help maintain energy, particularly as the duration and intensity increase. This might come from sports drinks, gels, chews or ordinary easy-to-carry carbohydrate foods.
When I trained for the Great North Run, this became much more relevant than it had been during my short beginner runs. A half marathon is a very different nutritional proposition from jogging around the block.
If you’re building towards a 10K, half marathon or marathon, practise your fuelling strategy during training. Don’t buy a new gel at the race expo, swallow it at mile eight and discover your digestive system has extremely strong opinions about raspberry-flavoured sports nutrition. Race day is not the day for nutritional surprises.
Do runners need sports drinks and electrolytes?
Again, not necessarily. For shorter runs in ordinary conditions, water is usually perfectly adequate. You don’t automatically need an electrolyte drink because you’ve exercised.
As your runs become longer, you’re exercising in hot weather, or you’re sweating heavily, fluid and electrolyte requirements become more relevant. How much fluid you need varies considerably between people because sweat rates, temperature, intensity, body size and running duration all affect fluid losses.
That’s why I wouldn’t give everybody a target such as “drink ten glasses of water a day” and pretend we’ve solved hydration.
Think about hydration across the day rather than trying to drink an enormous amount immediately before running. Turning up for a run having barely drunk anything since breakfast isn’t ideal, but neither is downing a litre of water five minutes before leaving and spending the next hour desperately searching for a toilet.
Your urine being a light straw colour can be a useful everyday indication that you’re reasonably hydrated.
Can you fuel properly for running and still lose weight?
Losing weight ultimately requires an energy deficit over time, but that doesn’t mean the biggest deficit you can tolerate is automatically the best one.
If you’re simultaneously trying to increase how much you run while dramatically reducing how much you eat, you may find that you’re tired, hungry, struggling to recover and unable to make the progress you expected.
I’ve experienced weight loss and exercise at very different weights and stages of my life, and one thing I’ve become much more aware of is how easy it is to treat food and exercise as opposing sides of an equation.
Eat something: calories in.
Go running: calories out.
That way of thinking can become quite unhelpful.
Food isn’t simply something running helps you compensate for. It’s also where your body gets the carbohydrate, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals it needs to do the running in the first place.
If you’re trying to lose weight, you don’t necessarily need to “eat back” every calorie your watch claims you’ve burned. Fitness trackers and exercise machines aren’t precise enough for that sort of accounting anyway. You could try my exercise calorie calculator, but again, it will always be an estimate, since everyone’s body works slightly differently!
At the same time, I wouldn’t deliberately skip meals after running because you want to preserve the calorie deficit.
Look at the bigger picture. Are you eating regular balanced meals? Are you getting enough protein? Do you have carbohydrates available to fuel your training? Are you recovering between runs? Do you have enough energy to get through ordinary life as well as exercise?
Weight loss shouldn’t require every run to be performed on an empty tank.
Running fasted isn’t a shortcut to weight loss
Running before breakfast works perfectly well for some people, particularly if it’s a short morning run and they don’t enjoy eating beforehand. That doesn’t mean fasted running automatically leads to greater weight loss.
Your body may use a different mixture of fuels during fasted exercise, but losing body fat is determined by the bigger picture over time rather than whether you ate a banana before Tuesday’s 5K.
If you enjoy running before breakfast and feel well doing it, fine. If you spend the whole run feeling dreadful and then come home ravenously hungry, there’s no particular virtue in forcing yourself to continue because you’ve heard fasted cardio burns more fat.
I would much rather find a routine that makes running feel sustainable. Whilst running can help with weight loss, the phrase “you can’t outrun your fork” is also very true.
What should you eat before a race?
Once you’re preparing for a race, familiarity becomes particularly important. The morning of your first 10K or half marathon isn’t the time to suddenly decide that “proper runners eat porridge” if you’ve never eaten porridge before running.
Use your longer training sessions to find out what agrees with you.
For an event later in the morning, you may have time for a normal carbohydrate-rich breakfast a few hours beforehand and perhaps something smaller closer to the start if you need it. For a very early event, you might prefer something lighter that you know you can digest comfortably.
The same applies to food and drink during longer races. Practise with whatever you’re planning to carry or whatever the event organisers will provide. Your legs have enough to worry about without introducing an experimental breakfast.
You don’t need to eat like an athlete to become a runner
This is probably the biggest thing I’d tell anyone who’s just starting. You don’t need a runner’s body, a runner’s diet or a kitchen shelf full of specialist sports nutrition before you’re allowed to call yourself a runner.
When I started, I wasn’t someone who had always been sporty. Running at school certainly hadn’t left me desperate to do more of it, and my previous attempts as an adult hadn’t lasted particularly long either.
Eventually I went from that to signing up for the Great North Run. Learning to fuel running was part of learning to listen to what my body needed rather than seeing food purely through the lens of weight loss.
For most of us, the basics will take us a surprisingly long way: eat a reasonably varied diet, include carbohydrates rather than fearing them, get enough protein, drink enough, eat something before running when you need it and have a decent meal afterwards.
As your distances increase, your fuelling strategy can become more sophisticated. Until then, don’t make running harder than it already is. Your first kilometre is quite capable of doing that all by itself.
