100. The Best of the Running Lean Podcast

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 100 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. Holy wow. 100 episodes of the podcast. This is so awesome. In this next edition of the Running Lean podcast, I feature a dozen or so of your favorite moments and mine from the first 100 episodes.

And if you want to know which episodes each of these little clips come from, I’ve linked to all the episodes featured in this podcast in the show notes. So you can just go to runningleanpodcast.com to access the show notes for this episode.

And the timing of this particular episode, my 100th episode could not have been better. It was set to be released on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, but I decided I was going to release it a day early. Because I wanted this episode this 100th episode to be my way of saying thank you to all of you for listening and for allowing me to be a part of your health and fitness journey.

I received a comment in the Running Lean Facebook group today from Michelle and she just said, thank you, you have made such a positive impact in my life. This is why I do what I do. And I’m just beyond grateful for all the love support and encouragement that I’ve received from you since I started doing this podcast back in January of 2020. And I can’t wait to share the next 100 episodes with each and every one of you. Love you all, keep on running lean. And enjoy the best of the Running Lean podcast so far.

So what’s the alternative? What’s the alternative to this, like a temporary diet mentality? You know, the alternative is the way of life mentality, right? You’ve got to change your whole mindset around healthy eating. You have to let go of that whole old diet mentality, idea, that temporary idea. And you have to adopt this new way of life mentality.

Why does this work? Well, when you make healthy eating a way of life, you’re no longer in this temporary mindset, okay, you have a mindset of permanence, right? Healthy eating becomes who you are, it becomes what you do, you’ll have a much easier time sticking to it. Because in your mind, you’re never going back to eating that way that you used to eat again.

You’ll never quit. Because quitting isn’t an option. You have this deep desire at the core of your being to be as healthy as possible. And it’s a for life kind of a deal. So you develop this unshakable determination.

Think about it this way, like it’s very similar to when you’re training for a marathon. Right? There’s something very powerful and deep inside you that when you’re dry when you’re training for a marathon, it drives you there’s something inside you that drives you to train to do all those long, hard runs.

To get up early on the Saturday mornings to run in the rain in the cold and the snow and all that other stuff, right? You’ll do it because there’s something like visceral that’s driving you right? No matter what I’m sticking to my marathon training schedule.

That’s what I mean by unshakable determination. We want to apply that same unshakable determination to healthy eating. No matter what happens. I’m sticking to my healthy eating plan. No matter what happens, I’m going to make this work for the long haul. I’m in this 100% I’m committed. That’s where we want to get to. Okay.

So how do we do that? Like, how do you develop that unshakable determination? Well, really, it involves not just changing what you do, because when you just change what you do, you’re changing your actions, your behaviors, kind of your habits, right? This is just this is surface-level stuff, right? You have to go deeper than that, you have to like, get to the core of who you are right? You have to make healthy eating part of your identity. Okay? You got to make healthy eating just a way of life. Right? It’s just what you do. It’s just who you are.

Tony Robbins says quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions. And as a result, they get better answers. Love Tony Robbins. So blaming people ask terrible questions, blaming people ask questions like, Why does this always happen to me?

Have you ever found yourself asking your yourself something like this? Or how come everybody else can do this, but not me? Or how come I can never get ahead? Why isn’t life fair? These are the kinds of questions that blaming people, that people who are living in the effect of everyone and everything around them, they ask questions like that.

People who take radical responsibility for everything in their life – they ask questions like, How can I get this done? Like what do I need to do to change? What do I need to change in this situation in order to get better results? You know, what internal resources can I tap into to make this better? How can I figure this out? What can I do better next time? What do I need to learn to make this happen for me now?

Those kinds of questions are empowering those kinds of questions will help you to take radical responsibility for everything that’s happening in your life. So what happens when you take radical responsibility for everything, you take back your control, you know, you, you regain agency over your own results, you take back your power, okay, you are empowered, you control your thinking.

And if you want to, you can change it, you control your emotions, you get to choose your feelings, somebody isn’t bestowing them upon you, okay. You control what you do, you control the actions that you take. And if you want to, you can always do something different, you can always take different actions.

The best part though, is you control your results. And results are not determined by others, you are in charge, your results are determined by you alone, okay? And you have no excuses, all the excuses are gone. Okay? That’s the good and the bad news.

So, think about this, you don’t need anyone else to change anything. They don’t need to change what they’re doing at all. You have the power within you right now. To get whatever you want in your life, stop living in the effect of what others are doing or saying or thinking, stop blaming others start taking radical responsibility, and you’re gonna see some amazing changes happening in your life.

Cool. Here’s the thing, if all you’re focused on is your weight, how many pounds your body weighs? You’re kind of missing the point. And the big secret is that listen, weight loss is really not the goal. Getting to some arbitrary number on the scale is not what you should be after, fitting into those jeans you rocked 10 years ago is not your only objective. Although that’s pretty awesome if you could do that.

So what are we talking about here? What’s the real goal, Patrick? Well, here it is. The real goal is to become the healthiest version of yourself losing weight, you know, getting back to your natural weight, whatever that is for you. That’s a side effect of becoming healthy. It’s secondary.

But most people have this backward. They think that you know, they need to lose weight to get healthy, but it’s the other way around. You become healthy, and then the weight comes off. You stop putting a bunch of crap into your body and your body responds. Inflammation disappears, your hormones get back in line. blood sugar and insulin levels become normal.

You start feeling better. You’re not hungry all the time. You start sleeping better. You no longer feel stressed out about everything and you have tons of energy. Running becomes easier, your cravings for sugar go away. And you seem to be able to think more clearly when all of these changes in your body start happening.

And then, as a result of all these good changes happening in your body becoming healthier, then you start burning fat like crazy, then the weight starts to drop off. Alright. And remember, we store body fat when we have when we’re taking in all this extra energy, usually in the form of sugar.

And our body can only use so much of that energy and the rest of it gets stored away to be used later. But later never comes where we’re always storing fat, we’re really good at storing fat, we’re just not really good at burning the fat, okay?

So we’re really good at storing and storing and storing fat, we want to be good at burning the fat, right, but all these other things have to happen in order for you get your body into that fat-burning mode, in order for the weight to start coming off.

Okay, so you get your body healthy first. And then you start losing the weight making sense. So it’s less about the number on the scale. And it’s more about becoming the healthiest human being possible.

The difference between people who succeed at stuff and those who don’t, a lot of times just comes down to a commitment. Successful people decide that they are going to succeed, they make a commitment to reach their goal. No matter how long it takes, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how many challenges they face, they are committed to making that happen.

So they don’t necessarily have some superpower, they don’t have more drive than you or more determination, more willpower, or anything like that. They just early on in the process, they made a decision that they were going all in on this, no matter what you have to make the decision that you are going to go all in that you are going to succeed, no matter what. No matter what challenges come up, no matter how uncomfortable you might get, no matter how hard it might seem in the moment.

Most people don’t do this though. Most people, you know, dabble in these concepts and principles. When we talk about losing weight and changing your diet and what you’re eating, and how much you’re eating. And when you’re eating the kinds of foods you’re eating, people do it kind of sort of, but they don’t make that commitment, they don’t go out there.

And because they’re afraid, they’re afraid of how they might feel because they might feel sluggish, they might have cravings, they might get an urge to eat some pizza or ice cream. And guess what, those people that kind of dabble, the kind of go, not all in, they go sort of a little bit in they get some little results.

I want you to see how complicated our relationship with food has become. And that this is not easy. This topic is controversial. It’s complicated, it’s complex. There are a lot of nuances here a lot of gray areas, I want you to be able to make informed decisions about your own health.

And I want you to feel good about what you choose to eat and choose not to eat, you got to do what feels good for you. I also want you to be open to different ideas. So maybe not the ideas that are pushed down from the big food companies, but maybe some more grassroots kinds of ideas.

You know, we are all an experiment of one. So you need to figure out what works best for you. Take control of your own health and your own fitness and your own diet and do what feels best for you. If you want to be a vegetarian or a vegan or do the Mediterranean diet or Weight Watchers, whatever you want to do is completely fine. I have no judgments about any of that stuff.

But if what you’re doing isn’t working, I want you to be open-minded to try something else. But if you think life is going to be good all the time; if you expect that you are going to be very disappointed and very miserable a lot of the time because you’re going to be rejecting and resisting the idea of reality of what it is, you have to accept it all, you have to embrace the suck.

Because without the pain, we don’t get to experience the pleasure. Without agony, we don’t know what joy is. Without feeling sadness, we don’t know what happiness feels like. Without frustration, we don’t learn patience. Without feeling anxiety, we don’t experience peace. Without failing, we don’t know what accomplishment feels like.

You know, without uncertainty, we don’t know what confidence is. When you can embrace all of it and when you become willing to experience all of these emotions, we’re talking about a lot of emotions here fear, anxiety, frustration, anger, pain, when you’re willing to experience these emotions, when you’re willing to embrace the suck; here’s nothing you can’t do.

Most people are afraid to feel uncomfortable. They are so afraid of the suck that they never do anything hard, they’re not going to try. They don’t even get up off the couch. Because they know that to put on their running shoes and go start running when they haven’t been running in forever.

And they want to run a 5k, they want to do that. But they know it’s gonna be hard. And so they just stay on the couch. They don’t embrace the suck. So they never do anything hard. And guess what? They never accomplish anything. They stay comfortable. Yeah. They don’t have to experience the sucky things. Yeah. They stay in their comfort zone.

But what does that do for you? What does that get you? Is that what you want for your life? I don’t think so. If you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re listening to me, then I’m pretty sure that’s not you. That does not sound like you.

Everything you want, but don’t already have, lies outside your comfort zone. So if you never embrace the suck, you never embrace the discomfort you never grow. You never become more than what you are today, right here. Now. You’ve never accomplished anything bigger than what you’ve already done in your life. The purpose of your life is not to be happy all the time, the purpose of your life is to become more.

Becoming more requires you to be somewhat unhappy and somewhat discontented with how things are and somewhat uncomfortable. Right, for yourself or others for your community for the world. Like there needs to be some level of discontentment with the way things are, in order for you to want to grow and become more to change to evolve.

Becoming more means experiencing some amount of discomfort, some amount of pain or hardness or suffering. We don’t grow and evolve by sitting around on our butts in our comfort zone all the time. If I could grow and become more by just sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day long, I would absolutely do that. But it doesn’t work that way. It does not work that way.

Becoming more means and I want to break this down for you because I talk about this idea of becoming more what does that mean? Becoming more means becoming more of who you are not becoming someone else. But just becoming more of you. More of who you want to be.

There’s this version of you that’s inside you that’s lurking inside you that maybe you’ve always been afraid to let out. That’s what I’m talking about. I want that for you. I want you to be more authentically you.

And I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you guys before this quote from Dr. Seuss. And it’s from one of the Dr. Seuss books. I can’t remember which book it’s from. But the quote is this: “Today you are you that is truer than true.”

There is no one alive who is you-er than you at anytime. I talk about like becoming more you. This quote always comes to mind, like there’s no one alive who’s you-er than you. Becoming more means living up to your true potential becoming the best you can be right, most of us are living up to about 40% of our potential.

This is below average, I want more for myself, I want to become more, I want more than that for myself, I want you to want more than that for yourself. I don’t want to be below average, I want to be well above average, 40% is not cool with me, shouldn’t be cool with you either. We need to tap into more of who we are more of what we are capable of.

You cannot hate yourself thin, you have to love yourself through all of this. You have to have your own back. I talk about this concept a lot with my clients; having your own back. And I’m going to explain what this means to you. So you understand this too because this is a cool concept.

So what does it mean to have your own back? So imagine you’re out running with a friend. And you could be in a race, maybe you’re helping a friend get through their first half marathon, right? And you’ve done this a million times. And so you feel pretty confident you’re just out there to support them. You’re helping them get through the tough part of this run.

How would you show up for that friend? What would you say to them? I think you’d say things like, hey, I’m here for you, you got this, you can do it, you are a badass, come on, keep going, you’re doing great, you look great. You can do hard things, you are crushing it out here you are almost there. Come on, let’s go.

Right, you’d be there to support them to encourage them to keep them motivated. You point out all the positive things you can about them, you’d push them, you make sure that they finished strong. So this is what it looks like to have someone’s back.

And when you do this for someone else that feels really good, right? It feels good to be the one that’s doing the encouraging the one that’s doling out all that love all that positive mojo, it feels good to be that person, right?

Because you’re helping them do something big, you’re helping them get through something that’s uncomfortable. And it feels good to do this. It’s very invigorating. I love doing this. I love helping people.

That’s why I love coaching so much. You know, it’s such a big part of coaching is to give people encouragement and motivation and all that positive mojo doling out the love, right. So you can dig deep within yourself when you need to help someone else, right?

You can dig deep within yourself and find that love and that encouragement to help push someone further even when it’s very challenging for them even when things are going very tough for them. Right. So it’s very easy for us to do for others.

But it’s very hard for us to do for ourselves. Why is that? You know, it’s interesting, isn’t it? That it’s hard for us to do that for ourselves, even though we can do it so easily for others. You know, if you can do this for someone else, which you can I know you can, you’ve done this before, then you can do it for yourself. It just takes a little practice. So some of the things you can practice are instead of practicing negative self-talk, practice, positive self-talk.

You know, instead of practicing, feeling discouraged all the time, practice encouraging yourself. Instead of practicing thinking about all the ways that you’re going to fail, or all the ways that you suck, practice thinking about all the ways you’re going to succeed and all the ways that you are awesome.

We get to choose how we respond to every circumstance in our life. We can respond like a toddler, lay on the ground and kick our legs and scream and cry about it. Or we can respond like an emotional adults.

Here’s an example from my life. Speaking of challenges, 14 years ago, I decided I’d had enough drinking alcohol just wasn’t working for me, okay. And so I quit drinking. And during the last 14 years, I have had all kinds of challenges in my life. I’ve gone through breakups and divorce. I’ve changed careers. I’ve lost jobs. Both my parents passed away.

I’ve started businesses and then failed businesses. And through all of these 14 years there were all kinds of reasons and excuses that I could have turned to alcohol as a solution, like, oh, yeah, my, my parents just died like I could choose that as an excuse to drink. And most people would probably say, Yeah, I’d probably drink over a lot of that stuff too.

But I never did, I never felt the need to take a drink. I’ve never felt the need to revert to being an emotional toddler because of what’s happening in my life. I don’t blame the outside world, for how I feel, or for what I’m doing or not doing. I’m staying true to myself through all of it.

In fact, staying true to myself is why I’ve been able to handle these big challenges in my life. Because I’m not afraid to experience the emotions. Not afraid to feel my feelings. I don’t have to numb my emotions with alcohol or food anymore. And numbing out is a way of being an emotional toddler.

This is the way we sort of practice emotional childhood, okay. So when you go through something that challenges you, and you’re absolutely going to feel some emotions, right. You’re going to feel fear, you’re going to feel frustration, you’re going to feel stress, you’re going to feel sadness, or, or loneliness, or failure, or shame, or whatever it is, you’re going to feel some emotions.

So when you go through these big things in your life, the most people the way most people deal with these difficult emotions is they, they drink something, or they eat something, they turn to some sort of external thing to make them feel better inside it temporarily anyway, like, it just feels good to eat some cake, right, it feels good to drink some alcohol.

The problem with this approach, though, is that it comes with negative consequences, right? And maybe you drink too much, or you wake up with a hangover, you know, or maybe you eat too much. And you end up gaining weight, and you feel terrible.

This is what it means to approach the challenges in your life, like an emotional toddler, or you’re just like, I don’t want to feel this way. So you just like drink yourself numb or eat yourself numb? No. So when I talk about all or nothing, it’s different from when I talk about going all-in on yourself.

Okay, so I talk a lot about this concept of, you know, when you have a big goal, you need to go all-in on yourself for that goal, okay? You need to approach these big things in your life with this attitude that you’re committed to making it work, right no matter what.

So let’s say you want to lose weight, you have this big weight loss goal, going all in on yourself means that you’re going to keep going, that you’re, you know, it may take a while you may have some slip-ups, you may have some failures along the way. You may not stick to your plan or whatever, but you keep moving forward, you don’t quit on yourself.

Okay, maybe you want to change your relationship with alcohol going all-in on that means you use the power of your thoughts and feelings about alcohol to change the habit, it means you create a drinking plan, maybe you just want to moderate, you create a drinking plan and you stick to it no matter what.

Going all in on yourself means you’re committed to your health, you’re committed to success you’re committed to, you know, maybe going after this PR and your marathon. It does not mean you’re never allowed to drink again. It does not mean you’re never allowed to eat a cupcake again. It does not mean like you can never, you know, run a half marathon or 5k or something like that, you know.

I would just want to make sure that we understand the difference between the all or nothing mentality and like going all-in on yourself. Okay.

There’s a big difference between swearing off something forever like sugar alcohol and changing the habit and changing your relationship with it. Okay. So going all-in on yourself does not equate to all or nothing it just means you aren’t half-assing it, you know. You’re not half-assing your efforts towards this goal you’re full-assing it with whatever it is you’re doing. Okay.

So an example of what this looks like. So a lot of people live their life in the past. And here’s what I mean by that. People wake up and they start thinking about their problems. Right, your problems are just memories of past situations, past issues past stressors, past trauma.

So you start each day living in the past you thinking about, Oh, this thing that happened to me a while back, you know. And we call these things problems, or memories, whatever it is, you’re consciously back there in the past. So you start each day just like living in the past.

And each one of these past memories has an emotion tied to it. So you immediately begin your day feeling. Maybe you’re really feeling the unhappiness or the hurt, or the unworthiness or the stress or the anger that you experienced in the past, just by thinking about that situation now brings up the same emotional response, right?

How you think and feel, creates your present state of being who you are, at this moment, is a result of how you’re thinking and feeling right now. And most people start their day feeling all these negative emotions from the past.

And so they’re just living in the past, your familiar past, the thing that you know, that you keep repeating over and over and over again, in your mind becomes who you are today. And it just goes on and on. And your familiar past becomes your predictable future.

So who you were in the past, you’re just going to continue to create more and more of that you just become more and more of who you already are. You can’t go beyond who you used to be. You can’t get beyond who you are up to this point. Because that’s all you know. And that’s what you’re ruminating on.

And that’s what you’re thinking about. And that’s the emotions that you’re experiencing right now. So your emotional state right now is the past. And all you can think about is the future for your future is how you’re feeling right now.

When all your feelings and all of your thoughts and your whole being is is focused on who you used to be in the past like that’s who you are right now, that’s just going to be what you keep creating more and more and more for yourself, okay? This is what it looks like to be stuck in the habit of being you.

Now listen, there’s nothing wrong with this, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or you’re doing something wrong, this is the way most of us have just kind of conditioned ourselves to operate in, it’s okay.

But if you want something more for yourself, if you want to continue to learn and grow and evolve and become that badass version of yourself that I always like to say that phrase, I love it, becoming the most badass version of yourself. If that’s what you want for yourself, then you got to break this habit of being who you are today, you’ve got to get out of being who you are so that you can become more.

This is probably the biggest key if you want to create self-motivation, you’ve got to do hard things when you don’t feel like it. Because when you do some little thing that’s hard, and you didn’t feel like doing it, you know, it’s going to move you a little closer to your goal, you know. It’s good for you, you know, it’s like helping you, you know, it’s going to keep you heading in the right direction.

And that little bit of, of doing that hard thing, that little feeling that you get after you do that little bit of satisfaction you get after doing that is going to give you a little bit of motivation to do it again. And do it again, and do it again. And you can just keep going.

In order to create self-motivation you have to do the things you don’t feel like doing. And then you have to just keep repeating those things, you have to get your reps in. Again, this is something I talked about in last week’s podcast. Repetition causes motivation because you begin to make the hard stuff easier, the hard stuff becomes easier. Okay.

So the first thing I want you to focus on is like doing the hard thing, even though you don’t feel like it. So I’m going to be sharing my experience of the Goggins 4x4x48 challenge this weekend in the Running Lean community on Facebook.

So join us over there and I’ll be like, kind of documenting that my experience as I go, do some lives and stuff like that and share kind of what it’s like to try to get out there at like 3am to get motivated to run.

So I’m doing this because it’s hard. And this is like my number one tip for creating self-motivation is like, do the hard thing, especially if you don’t feel like it.

The second tip I have for you is this always focus on making slow and steady progress, or fast and steady progress. doesn’t matter. But always focus on making incremental progress. Just making a little bit of progress will help you to get a little bit more motivation to keep you going.

Because when you make a little bit of progress, you tell yourself a story about what that means. And that thought is, hey, this is working, right? So many people don’t see any progress. Or maybe they’re not tracking their progress. Or they’re not seeing progress fast enough. And they just quit, they give up.

They’re like, hey, this, this way of eating isn’t, is I’m not losing weight fast enough. I’m just gonna quit and go back to doing what I was doing before, which doesn’t work, either. But that’s a whole other story.

But little by little, you want to be making incremental progress, because when you do, you get this little hidden motivation every single time you see the, you know, one pound a week drop off, or something like that, you’re like, oh, my gosh, that’s awesome.

Or an inch off your waist. Oh, my gosh, that feels so good. Or, hey, you know what, I ran a longer mile this week, my longer than my longest run. And these little things just start to stack up. And you and you begin to feel more and more motivated. It’s like you keep your motivation tank topped off each time you do something like this.

And you keep increasing the amount of motivation that you create, you keep stacking these little, little bits of motivation, one on top of the other. So you know, like, for me lately, I’ve been I’m lifting more weights, I’m tracking my weightlifting, and I’m able to do more reps or lift more weights.

So maybe you’re like, oh, I was able to do five more pounds this week. You know, or one more rep, than the last week. Or one more, I ran that one more mile, whatever it is. All these little signs point to progress, and that it’s working. And they will help to keep you motivated to keep showing up and continue doing the hard thing that you don’t want to do.

I have this mantra this is like my mantra for life. It’s relentless forward progress, no matter what. Always moving forward, no matter what. Always moving forward, no matter how slow. No matter how you know, zigzaggy the courses or whatever, we’re always moving in the direction of our goals. This is my motto for life.

This is like this got me through ultramarathons has got me through, you know. Tough things that happen in my life like divorce and loss of jobs. This is how I build my business. Relentless forward progress, little by little we make progress and it feels good to just look back and say like, oh, I’m actually I’m making progress here.

It doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but I can see these little hitsof progress. And that gets me motivated. Okay, I hope you all have an amazing day. Lots of love, keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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