116. The One Big Mindset Shift You Have to Make

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 116 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, the one big mindset shift you have to make. If you want to lose weight and be able to keep it off for good, you have to shift your mindset. I think you probably know this by now since I talk about it all the time here on the podcast.

But there’s a reason why I spend so much time on this subject. It’s because it’s one of the most important factors in whether or not you keep the weight off permanently, getting leaner and stronger. It’s mostly an inside job, right? So today I’m going to share with you perhaps the biggest mindset shift you have to make if you want to create healthy new habits that last for life.

But first, I want to give you guys a quick little FYI. So you may have heard a short little podcast episode that I released accidentally. A couple of days ago, this was a message I was sending to my private coaching clients. So I have another private podcast feed that’s just for my private coaching clients.

And I record trainings and I record group coaching calls, and I released those on a private podcast so that my coaching clients can listen to those things after the fact. You know, maybe they weren’t able to make a group coaching call live. And so they can listen to the replays.

Well, the way that I do my podcasts is I have this program that I use that basically has two boxes that are right next to each other and one of them is for this live public podcast that goes out to the whole world. And then right next to it, there’s another box that’s like for just my private coaching clients.

And every time I put out an episode for my private clients, I’m always like, Okay, did I do this right? Am I in the right box? Because I know one of these days, I’m going to make a mistake. And sure enough, I was just in a hurry yesterday, or whatever I did this couple of days ago. And I was like, cool. it’s all good, publish it.

And I started getting these emails from people like, Hey, I hear you’re, you’re going away with this podcast like you’re not going to be doing it anymore. Where’s it going to be? I didn’t get an email. Because in this in this message I send out I’m changing my platform for the private podcast because I don’t want to make these kinds of mistakes in the future, right?

Anyway, I totally screwed up, I put it out in the wrong place. So if you received that podcast where I was like, hey, this is going away, you got to check your email to find out where to get the new podcast. That was all just a mistake, it was intended to just go out to my coaching clients, so you can just disregard it.

Nothing’s changing here on the Running Lean podcast at all. It’s still gonna be right here while you normally listen, you don’t have to do anything differently. Nothing’s changing. And I apologize for any of the confusion. But technology, am I right?

And then I wanted to give you guys a quick heads up that I’ve got a live workshop coming up again next week. So it’s five simple steps to becoming a leaner, stronger runner. And listen, you may have already tried everything to lose weight. But what you’ve already tried probably doesn’t work. And it’s not that you’re a bad person or you lack willpower. You’ve just been given a lot of bad advice, right? So using willpower doesn’t work. Fad diets don’t work. Counting calories doesn’t work.

You’ve heard me talk about all this stuff before, right? Deprivation and starvation don’t work, running more miles doesn’t work. So what does work well? Understanding how habits actually work in the science of making habit change permanent that works.

A personalized approach to support both your weight loss and your running goals – that works. And what you need is a comprehensive plan of action that works on the mental emotional and physical changes required so you can absolutely lose weight and keep it off for good. You just need the right information.

And that’s exactly what you’re going to learn in this free workshop. You’re going to learn how to get leaner become stronger and transform yourself into the healthiest and most badass version of yourself yet. To sign up for this free workshop just go to runningleancoaching.com/workshop.

And I’m going to give you guys a couple more opportunities, I’m doing this three times. So the first one was March 17. And that would be yesterday if you’re listening to this podcast today, the day that it comes out. The next one is going to be Thursday, March 24. And then I’ll do another one the following Thursday. So if you can’t make it, this one time, that’s fine. Look, go for the next one.

And listen, we’re gonna have fun together, okay, it’s live. It’s interactive, you get to ask questions. And we’re going to try to have some fun doing this stuff. This, this topic of like, getting healthier and getting stronger and losing weight. It doesn’t have to be like suffer-fest. We don’t have to take ourselves too seriously. We can have fun doing this. Right? Cool. All right.

So today, the one big mindset shift that you have to make. So let me ask you this question. How is your mindset different? Think about that. Do you ever spend any time thinking about how your mindset is actually determining everything that you get in your life? No. Okay, that’s cool. That’s why I’m talking about this here today.

The truth is, most people do not spend any time thinking about this. Most people just think that the way that they think is like their thoughts, the way they feel their emotional state, all this stuff is just fixed. And it cannot be changed. Like you’ve been programmed like an android, to have certain thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about yourself, and that they are just permanently fixed. And there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s it. This is who you are. This is what you think. These are the things that you believe, good luck with your semi-human existence robot.

You are not a robot, your mindset is not fixed. You can absolutely change your mindset at any time, then this is the first thing I want you to understand here today, that your mindset is not fixed, it is changeable. Now, it may feel like it’s not changeable. Because you’ve been thinking the same thoughts, your whole life, maybe over and over again. For decades, you’ve been believing the same things. For those decades, you’ve been feeling the same way.

And so in a way, I mean, you’ve sort of programmed yourself with this current mindset that you have.

And just a little like sidebar here, like what if we are actually all just androids and we’ve programmed ourselves? Hmm. This is like, eerily close to a Philip K. Dick sci-fi story. And if you’re not familiar with Philip K, Dick and who he is, and his work, check out, Blade Runner, The Man in the High Castle, Total Recall, Minority Report, and so on. Awesome, awesome sci-fi writer right here. He talks a lot about androids.

And whether or not, you know, androids can think, and are they actually humans? Are we actually androids? Hmm? Of course, we’re not androids, right? We’re not robots, but we can get ourselves stuck in a fixed mindset. And I want you to know this, that you have the power to change your mindset, always. It may not feel like it, but you do. We have to understand this thing.

Okay, so first of all got to understand that your mindset, the way you think and feel about yourself is changeable. And listen, the reason I talk so much about mindset here on the podcast is that if you want to make big changes in your life like if you want to lose weight and keep it off for good, it’s all about your mindset, right? I’ve talked about this before, what you do, you know, your diet and exercise and things like that. It’s like 20% of the equation, the other 80% is your mindset.

Losing weight, initially is mostly about what you do, like you’ve got to change your diet, right? Keeping it off for good. That’s almost entirely about your mindset because you’ve already figured out what to do you know what to do. It’s all about mindset. And this word, mindset. It’s a huge, huge word. It means so much.

It’s like, all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, all of the things you believe about yourself in the world. It’s your values. It’s your whole attitude, and outlook on life. It’s really how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other people, and how you feel about society. And like it’s huge, right? It’s a huge, huge topic.

And this is why I talked so much about it here on the podcast because there’s so much to it. And I can’t possibly tell you in one podcast episode like everything you need to know about mindset. Okay, so, you know, it would be a really long podcast episode. Maybe I’ll do it someday. Be fun with you guys like that would be fun.

So today, what I want to do is I want to focus on one specific part of your mindset. And this is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful parts of your mindset. And it’s the one part of your mindset that basically drives everything else. Okay? And this one part of your mindset, we call this your identity.

So your identity is who you are, at your core. It’s everything you say, after the words, I am. Like, for me, here are some parts of my identity – I am a man, I am a runner, I am a coach. These are all parts of my identity. This is all part of who I am at my core, how I see myself.

When Darth Vader says to Luke, “I am your father.” He’s speaking from his identity, right? This is who he is at his core, Darth Vader is a father. You know, we think of him as just this evil, you know, villain with no feelings at all. But we have to acknowledge this because his identity is driving his behavior.

And later on, right, he defies the emperor, he saves his son, because, at his core, he’s a father, he can’t kill his own son. You know, and we have, like, empathy for him at the end, sorry, if that’s a spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the Star Wars series already, whatever. And I hope you don’t mind my sci-fi references today. I’m just feeling very sci-fi-ey this morning for some reason.

But listen, your identity, it’s like the root of who you are. Okay. But here’s the thing. And this is the part I mean, that you got to understand, like, you can still change it, you can still change it, even though it’s your identity, and you feel like it’s like fixed and unchangeable, you can still change it.

Think about this, if you’re a mother, and you have kids, like being a mother is part of your identity, right? And it’s probably always going to be part of your identity. And you, you probably wouldn’t want to change that you would want to always be a mother. But even this, which seems like something that is completely fixed can be changed.

So there are some women who, you know, have kids and they give them up for adoption, because they don’t want to be mothers, okay, or whatever reason, right? And that’s okay. So this is even this, like deep-seated part of your identity of like, being a mother can be changed, okay. I just want you to understand this, that your identity is very, very powerful, and changeable, you can change it. And if you want things to be different in your life, then you need to step into a new identity to get there.

You need to assume the identity of someone who is leaner, stronger, and faster, if that’s what you want for yourself. You have to let go of the parts of your identity that are holding you back and keeping you overweight and keeping you stuck there.

So here’s a little bit of a story about me and a big shift that I had to make in my identity. So for a long time there for many years, part of my identity was I am a vegan. And nothing could change that for me.

I had programmed myself with this identity. So everything I did was filtered through the lens of I am a vegan I eat a plant-based diet. Like how I fueled you know how I ate, you know, obviously, but how I feel about running, how I felt about eating animals, what I thought of other people who ate me what restaurants I ate at. The people I spent time with books, I read blogs, I read podcasts, I listened to movies I watched where I shop for food, what kinds of food about everything in my life was driven by this huge part of my identity.

You can see how, what a powerful part of my mindset this was, right? This was who I was at my core, I’m a vegan, this is who I was okay. And I held on to this identity for dear life. For like 10 years, I held on to this part of my identity. I did not waver.

Now, even though at that time, I was not super healthy. I was steadily gaining weight. You know, I couldn’t put muscle on no matter how much I was lifting weights. And this identity that I had and I didn’t realize it at the time. I can see it now but I didn’t realize at the time this identity that I was holding onto so tightly was kind of keeping me stuck. It was keeping me from getting healthier and getting stronger.

That identity was not serving me, it was actually detrimental to my health and my athletic performance, but I would not let go of it. Because at my core, I was like, this is who I am.

So you can see how powerful your identity is how it drives your thoughts, it drives your beliefs, it drives your feelings, it drives your behavior. And ultimately, it drives and determines all the results that you get in your life.

So for me, I had to make a big change. I was getting overweight, I gained like 40 pounds during this process, right. But I just held on to this identity with a death grip, I was like not letting go of it.

And at some point a few years ago, I had to let go of that identity, I had to change my identity from I’m a vegan to I’m a meat-eater. And this was not an easy thing for me to do, you can imagine the internal struggle that I had with this decision. And if you want to learn more about this, I did a whole podcast on this. It’s episode number 32. It’s called Why I Changed My Mind About Eating Meat.

And I want to say this, I have to say this because I know that I’m going to get emails from people about this. But there’s nothing wrong with being vegan. There’s nothing wrong with being plant-based.

If this is you, and you identify this way, and this is part of your identity, and it’s working for you, that’s amazing. It did not work for me, my experience was I was eating a ton of sugar, I was eating a ton of refined carbohydrates, I wasn’t getting enough protein, I wasn’t doing it right.

And today, I have a different attitude about all this, I work with a lot of people who are vegan or vegetarian, and they do amazing, they lose weight, they get stronger, they get healthier. So I know how to do this differently now. But I’ve sort of just let go of that identity of being plant-based and being a vegan, right.

But today, I can help people that have this as part of their identity and as part of their beliefs. And as part of like what they feel is right for them. And that’s totally awesome. I love it. Like whatever diet you choose is fine, as long as it’s working for you.

If you’re slowly gaining weight and becoming unhealthy, and you know, you can’t get strong and things like that we got to change some things, we can still do it, you know, plant-based or vegan, vegetarian, whatever you’d like to do, okay, but what I was doing was not working for me. So I had to make that decision to change for myself and I decided to start eating meat again. And I started to change. And it made a big difference for me, and I got off to sugar and the refined carbs and all that other junk, okay.

But I want you to understand the incredible power of this one mindset to shift your identity, it’s driving all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, it’s driving your values and your beliefs. It’s driving, how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, and how you think and feel about the world around you.

Your identity is driving your actions, your behaviors, what you do each day is largely determined by who you are at your core. And all the results that you’re getting in your life are not getting determined by your identity. So everything you say after the words “I am” is going to help to determine what you get in your life. The results you’re getting in your life are mostly determined by your identity, we have to understand this.

So I want to challenge you, I want to challenge you to change those parts of your identity that are not serving you. I want to challenge you to take a look at all the different parts of your identity. And ask yourself, Is this really something that I want to hang on to or not?

Look at who you are and all the deep-seated thoughts and beliefs that you have about yourself? Which of these do you want to keep? Which do you think you want to change? So you might have this deeply held belief that you cannot lose weight? No matter what you do?

Your identity might be “I’m hopeless”, and that’s who you see yourself. And that’s who you are at your core. But is that working for you? Is that serving you? Is this helping you or hurting you? Is it helping you to make progress? Or is it keeping you stuck? “I’m hopeless.” This is probably going to just keep you stuck.

Other identities that you have that you might want to change. “I’m a failure. I never stick to a diet. I’m weak. I have no discipline. I’m not a real runner. I’m too old. I’m too slow. I’m too weak.”

What if all of this was just BS? Like what if all the things you’ve always thought about yourself are wrong? Think about this. The truth is you’re deciding what you believe about yourself. Nobody’s programming you from the outside like you’re doing it yourself.

You get to decide who you are. You get to decide what identity you take on for yourself. So your challenge is to get honest with yourself. And really take a hard look at those identities and how they’re affecting every area of your life. And then be willing to change them be willing to make different decisions.

Changing our identity, it’s not easy. It takes courage, takes determination, it takes some time. But mostly it takes you making the decision that you want to change, that you want something more for yourself, that you’re no longer going to be driven by an old identity that’s just keeping you stuck, and miserable. Okay, that’s your challenge. Look at all of this stuff, the core of who you are, and challenge all of it.

Okay, you can do this, you’ve got this, my friends. And remember, if you’re ready to step into your new identity and make healthy habits last for good, then you have to check out my free live workshop. It’s coming up Thursday, March 24.

To sign up just go to runningleancoaching.com/workshop, I would love to see you there. You’re gonna learn a lot. We’re gonna have some fun together. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.