210. Common Weight Loss Myths Debunked

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 210 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, and today, Common Weight Loss Myths Debunked. So it’s a new year. And it’s a time when a lot of people become ultra-focused on their health, fitness and losing weight.

It’s also a time when a lot of people will try some new fad diet, or some new exercise routine that promises instant weight loss with minimal effort. I’m definitely not going to do that here today because I’m a big fan of the slow and steady approach to losing weight and being able to keep it off for good.

So in this episode, Common Weight Loss Myths Debunked, I’m going to clear up some of the most prevalent misconceptions about weight loss and offer up some helpful tips on what you should do instead.

But first, I share a lot of information here on the podcast about proper nutrition, losing weight, improving your running and building strength. If you’re new to the podcast, it might seem a little overwhelming. And you might not know where to even start with all this stuff.

And if that sounds like you, no worries, I’ve got you covered, I created a free hour long training video that you can check out at any time it’s called Five Simple Steps to Becoming a Leaner Stronger Runner.

You’re gonna learn the basics of proper nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset all geared towards you the runner. So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger and become the most badass version of yourself yet, then this free training is exactly what you need to get started, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started on your weight loss journey today.

All right, let’s get into today’s topic, Common Weight Loss Myths Debunked. I was thinking about this as we start the new year here it is now January of 2024, Happy New Year to all of you. And I was thinking about what people tend to do at the beginning of the year like this, they tend to jump on to some fad diet, or or do something they read about on social media to lose weight and maybe improve their exercise or start running or something like that.

And it usually ends up being something that is very short-lived. That’s why the gyms are full in January, and they’re empty again in March. So we need to take a different approach, okay? And some of the things that are spread out there in the world, some of the conceptions that people have around weight loss are confusing, and they’re not always correct.

And I want to clear up some of these common myths, you know, some of these common principles that people tend to think are the truth that really aren’t. So just sit back and enjoy this episode today, because I’m going to debunk some of these common weight loss myths.

Now, the first one is going to be that it’s all about calories. And this is one of the most common weight loss myths out there where it’s just all about calories, you just have to eat less, and you will lose weight. That’s it that is the one principle that most diets out there adhere to whatever the diet is, they typically are trying to get you to eat fewer calories like that is the principle of most diets.

Also with weight loss drugs, weight loss surgeries, these are all getting you to not eat as much. And the issue with this is that yes, you can lose weight by reducing your calories, it is a very effective way to lose weight. Look at shows like The Biggest Loser, they restrict calories for these very obese people. They have them exercise like crazy, and they do lose a lot of weight.

The problem with this approach is that it is not sustainable. They have done many, many studies. In fact, there was a big meta-study that was done that looked at all these other studies that showed that calorie restriction diets are the most effective at short-term weight loss.

They are also and this is the important part, the least effective long-term weight loss approaches So when you restrict calories for a period of time, what happens is your body goes into starvation mode. So your body will think that you are starving, basically, you’re not getting enough calories to satisfy your energetic needs throughout the day.

And so your body will actually slow down your metabolism over time to match the calories that are coming in. So let’s say you’re somebody that normally eats 2000 calories a day, and you restrict your caloric intake to 1000 calories a day, that’s gonna be fine for the short term, but over time, your body will slow down your metabolism to match the amount of energy that’s coming in.

So now, instead of burning 2000 calories a day at rest, that’s your resting metabolic rate, your body’s like, nope, we’re only going to burn 1000 calories a day, because that’s all we have ever coming in. So what happens is now the 1000 calories a day is not a deficit anymore.

And so the weight loss stops, and actually, you start gaining weight, because you’re still eating the, you know, the 1000 calories a day, and maybe your metabolic rate drops even more. And you can’t lower your caloric intake, you can’t keep lowering your caloric intake to match your slowdown in metabolism.

So this is a very bad approach to weight loss, like just cutting calories and thinking that that is the answer. Again, it does work in the short term. And that’s why so many people promote this type of diet where you know, just don’t eat as much. The problem with is not sustainable, it is not something that you can do long term because your body will go into that starvation mode.

And as a runner especially, you do not want to reduce your caloric intake, especially long term, this can dramatically affect your running performance, because as you ramp up your mileage, you ramp up your intensity levels, and your caloric intake needs to match that.

So you actually need to a lot of times you need to increase your caloric intake as a runner, especially as you’re getting toward the late stages of a training cycle. Another thing to consider is caloric restriction, a lot of the caloric restriction diets will cause you to lose weight, but that weight is in the form of fat and muscle and connective tissue and bone density. This is not good.

As a runner, you do not want to lose muscle, you don’t want to lose bone density. A little bit of a
side note here, there are a lot of new weight loss drugs out there and people are talking about drugs like Ozempic, right? And they’re showing oh, these are so effective at people losing weight.

What they’re not telling you though, is about 40% of the weight that people are losing, you know using drugs Ozempic is muscle, bone, and connective tissue. You know, connective tissues are ligaments and tendons. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to sacrifice muscle, bone and connective tissues just so I can lose weight.

It’s not about weight loss where we want to focus on fat loss, right? It’s not about just restricting calories, there’s a lot more going on that you really have to consider here. Okay. Instead of focusing on just restricting calories, try focusing instead on eating real food eating nutritionally dense foods, foods that are satiating foods that when you eat them, you feel satisfied.

A lot of the calorically dense or I’m sorry, the the foods that are not calorically dense, or the the empty calorie type of foods that are a lot of the processed foods, a lot of the foods that are full of sugar and refined grains and things like that will actually hijack your hunger signals and make you feel super hungry even though you’re eating a ton of food.

You can feel super hungry in between meals, and they actually cause you to overeat. So we want to be eating foods that are satiating that fill us up and that don’t mess up our hunger signals.

So what I recommend is eating food, real food that still looks like food, meat, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, dairy, all the stuff that is just the normal stuff you see on the outside of the grocery store.

Stay away from processed foods. Stay away from sugar, stay away from refined grains. These foods make you feel super hungry. It’s hard to lose weight when you’re eating mostly processed foods and sugars.

Those things will mess up your hunger signals. They won’t make you feel full and satisfied when you do eat. And if you’re trying to lose weight, and you’re hungry all the time, that’s a bad combination right there. That’s where you start to get hangry right? Angry and hungry at the same time.

So there’s a lot more going on here. And it’s not just about calories. In fact, just reducing calories is not a really good way to lose weight. And it’s really not a long term, definitely not a long term approach that’s going to work for most people. Okay. So that’s number one. It’s all about calories. I think we busted that myth right there.

The next one is that we just need to exercise more. So exercise more, that’s all you need to do. It really doesn’t matter what you eat. As long as you’re burning it off, you’re fine. It’s okay to overeat. It’s okay to eat whatever junk food you want. Just run more, just exercise more, get your cardio in every day, and you’ll be fine.

Here’s the thing, right now we are exercising more in this time in human history than we ever have as human beings. And we are more overweight, more obese, and have more metabolic dysfunction than any other time in human history.

Clearly exercising more is not the answer. I talk to people literally every single day who tell me, Patrick, I gain weight, I’m running more and I keep gaining weight. I’m training for a marathon and I’m gaining weight. Every time I increase my exercise, I end up gaining weight.

And I’m like, yeah, I know, this was me, too. For years there, I was running at least two marathons a year, I was running several ultra-marathons every year. And in that process, I was gaining weight consistently.

And over a few years, I gained something like 40 pounds. And this was you know, when I was doing that pretty typical training for me at the time, which was running a few marathons and a few ultra marathons every single year.

So I was training a lot, I was running a lot and I was doing other types of cardio and cross training and strength training and things like that. So this concept of exercising more, it just doesn’t hold up. Okay.

Never in human history, have we needed to, quote-unquote, like exercise to maintain a healthy weight, to maintain a healthy metabolism, to maintain good health and fitness. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they did not like intentionally exercise, they weren’t out there, you know, doing calisthenics every day.

They actually were focused on energy conservation, they did not exert themselves excessively, they rested whenever they didn’t have to go out there and, and walk distances, you know, and hunt prey or gather, you know, fruits and vegetables and things like that.

So they were actually focused on conserving energy, you know, they probably walked a few miles every day. At times, they may have done more than that, but they weren’t like running consistently all the time. They did some running. But it wasn’t something they were doing, like running ultra marathons for fun. Like, you know, they just didn’t do that. It was stupid to like, you know, use that much energy, you don’t see any animal ever, you know, just exercising for the heck of it. You know what I mean?

We actually see this today in modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes like the Hadza in Tanzania, they have been a well-studied group of people. They are super fit, they’re healthy, they’re lean, they’re strong. They don’t have all the metabolic diseases that we have in the Western world here.

They don’t have diabetes, they’re not obese, they don’t have heart disease. So all that stuff is really not present with these people. And they are a hunter-gatherer triad, very similar to our ancient ancestors. So, you know, humans have evolved over two and a half million years.

And for the vast majority of that time, we were hunter-gatherers, and living in tribes, and we were super fit healthy, lean, and strong people. The only time we started to experience all this metabolic dysfunction and disease is, is within the last few 100 years, really, you know, maybe 500 years, 1000 years, even like 2000 years.

You can go back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, when we started to see them using more grains and eating a lot more refined grains in the form of flowers and things like that. So they started to you know, perfect agriculture and they were eating a lot more grains and you can see that the distended bellies of the mummies because they actually have the actual whole person preserved as a mummy.

And their teeth are all messed up. You know, they have a lot of tooth decay from the sugar and the grains they were eating and they have lives distended bellies, which means they were starting to gain weight, even that was 2000 years ago.

So in the long span of human history, there’s only a short amount of time, where we actually are starting to experience all these metabolic diseases. And they’re all really based off of our diet, you know, so we see tribes like the Hadza. And we can kind of look at them and say, like, yeah, they’re pretty close to what our ancestors used to be like.

And what’s interesting about the Hadza, is that their metabolic rate, so how many calories they burn at rest is about the same as the rest of us in the Western world here. For men, it’s like 2500 calories a day. For women, it’s 1900 calories a day, that’s pretty similar to where we are here in the Western world.

So you can’t say like, oh, well, they just exercise more, they don’t, they’re doing about the same amount of exercise we’re doing, they get in some steps every day they walk in, they might be getting in 10 to 15,000 steps a day, which is, you know, what we’re supposed to be getting anyway, you know, it’s kind of recommended.

And for the vast majority of us, you know, we’re getting around 3 or 5000 steps a day, without any intentional exercise. So we’re just in our daily lives, you know, we’re getting about a third, you know, half to a third of that, in the amount of steps we take on a daily basis anyway.

And if you’re a runner, you’re definitely getting that 10,000 steps a day, you know, so these people who are really about the same as us in most aspects, they, they don’t exercise exceedingly. They are extremely healthy, fit, lean, and strong, and their metabolic rate is about the same as ours.

So it doesn’t mean, like you need to exercise more, you know, so please understand this, like the answer is not doing a ton of cardio and trying to burn off the food, you can eat a bunch of junk food, and then think that you’re gonna burn it off. It just doesn’t work that way. Okay. So let’s just put that one to rest.

The next weight loss myth that I want to debunk is that the XYZ diet is all you need. So whatever that one diet is, right? There are so many crazy diets out there, there’s literally thousands of diets. And in doing a little bit of research for this episode, I started looking at some of the weirder diets that are out there. And I cannot make this stuff up.

But there’s a diet called the cotton ball diet, which is where you soak cotton balls in different liquids, you know, like, cabbage juice, or fruit juice, and then you eat that, right? And you actually, it’s supposed to make you feel more full because you’re eating these cotton balls, and it gets you past the cotton balls or whatever. And you’re getting a little bit of nutrition from the juice or whatever the soak in there, but don’t do that. That’s crazy.

Another one is called the werewolf diet. And I was like, oh, what is that, where they eat people? Like what? What is the werewolf diet? And no, it has to do with like fasting around the lunar cycles. Okay, great. I love that one, actually.

And then there’s one that I cannot make this up, this is called the breatharian diet. And these are people that believe that you can subsist on spirituality in sunlight that you only need air to get all the nutrients that you need, that you don’t really need to eat or drink anything, including water. And obviously, if you try this, you will die.

Okay, so the people that are saying they’re practicing breatharians they’ve actually shown them sneaking liquids and food and stuff because you can’t do this, this is not sustainable. I know it sounds crazy. It sounds like I’m like making this up or reading these out of some sort of like, you know, comedy show or something like that. But no, they are things that people have actually done in the past. Okay.

Every diet out there claims to be the answer for everyone. And listen, I’ve tried them all, not the cotton ball or the breatharian diet, although the werewolf diet sounds interesting, I might have to give that one a try. But I’ve tried like most of the diets that are out there, the big popular ones, right?

And to some extent, they all worked. The problem is that nothing I ever did was ever sustainable for me. For example, I started reading about vegetarianism and veganism. And for about five years or so I went and I started cutting out my meat and I started cutting out more and more meat and then fish and then eventually so I went vegetarian then eventually I went plant-based and I did that for like 10 years, so about 15 years I was like vegetarian and vegan essentially.

You know, I stayed away from meat, stayed away from dairy, that stuff is bad for you. And at the beginning, it was okay, like I did lose some weight. But I have to tell you, for me, I gained a lot of weight eating that kind of a diet. Because if you think about it, that diet is mostly almost all 100% carbs, fruits, and vegetables, and that’s 100% carbs.

So for me, that did not work. For me, over 10 years, I steadily gained weight, I gained like 40 pounds in that process of eating a plant-based diet. For me, this was not healthy, and it was not sustainable, gaining weight on any kind of diet, that shouldn’t be the case that’s not good for you, whatever you’re doing.

And I know a lot of people who do really well on a plant-based diet or vegetarian diet, and they love it. And they do it for ethical reasons. Or they do it for reasons that work for them as individuals. And I’m not saying it’s a bad choice for you, I’m just saying that it didn’t work for me.

If I kept doing that, I’d probably be like 300 pounds by now. All right. And I have clients and I work with people who are vegetarians and vegans, and they do well, we can make it work, okay, but we have to stay away from some of the refined foods, and the processed foods and things like that, okay.

The truth is, here’s what I’m trying to get to here, there isn’t one diet that works for everyone, you need to figure out the right formula that works for you. Because you are an individual, you have your own metabolism, your own genetics, your own lifestyle, your own family, your culture of origin, your own food preferences, your own likes and dislikes, you have your own health and fitness goals.

Maybe you’re training for ultra marathons, maybe you want to run your first 5k, or maybe you don’t exercise at all, all these factors, put together mean that you are an individual, and you need to approach nutrition and exercise with this important principle in mind.

That is, you have to figure out what works for you as an individual. And it’s going to look different from what everybody else is doing. And it probably isn’t going to be some preconceived diet that, you know, it’s published in the New York Times or whatever, all right.

This is why I do coaching. And I don’t just prescribe a diet for everyone that I work with. Coaching is a process of figuring out the best approach for you, of figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. And then modify it as needed until you get the results that you want. It’s simple. It’s a feedback system. Let’s see what’s working, let’s see what’s not.

And we’ll adjust accordingly. But honestly, most people are not willing to put in the time and effort to do it this way. Sorry, but there’s no quick fix here. It takes time to figure these things out. And you have to be willing to invest the time in yourself because that’s what’s required to get the results that you’re going after here. Okay.

So the right diet is not the one that’s out there, it’s the one that works for you, the one that is sustainable for you. Because if it’s not sustainable for you, you’re not going to stick with it, and it’s not going to work long term for you, you’re gonna go back to doing what feels comfortable, and that’s probably eating the junk food because, hey, that’s what feels comfortable, right?

So don’t think that there’s some diet out there, that’s going to work for you that, you know, everybody is talking about these days, because there just isn’t such a thing. Okay. All right. I think that weight loss myth is debunked.

Here’s another one, your metabolism slows down as you get older, so why even bother? And I hear people say this all the time, they’re like, hey, I’m just getting older. So I’m not even going to try to lose weight, you know, I’m not even going to worry about it, because it’s just, it’s not going to work for me because my metabolism just is getting slower and my metabolism slowed down now, and we losing weight is too hard.

And people use this as an excuse to not start or to not change their diet or not to eat healthy foods or whatever. There was a study published a couple of years ago, that suggests that this is just really not true at all. So, your metabolism the rate at which your body burns energy, has long been thought to decline during middle age and then to keep declining as you get older. So for this particular study, researchers looked at metabolism by measuring the total energy expenditure, which includes energy burned at rest, you know, and you know, in order to perform basic functions, like digesting food and energy burned during physical activity as well.

So they looked at exercise and you know, your resting metabolic rate. And they did this study on like 6400 people, ranging from eight days old to 95 years old, along with their height, weight, their body fat percentage. They looked at their average metabolic rates for men, women, and people in different age groups. And they found some very interesting results here based on four distinct periods in people’s lives.

So from infancy to one year old, the metabolic rate surged until it was about 50% higher than it will be during adulthood. So that’s pretty common you like your metabolic rate is going to increase a lot at the beginning of your life, right? And then from the ages of one to 20, the metabolism decreased by 3% per year. Okay, again, very normal.

The one big surprising thing is that from 20 to 60 years old, people’s metabolism doesn’t really change at all. And then after age 60, your metabolism does decrease slightly, but only by about .7% a year, so not as much as people think it does. And definitely not in that middle age. So people think that you know, once you turn 40 like this, it’s all over. Like no, it’s not true at all, like your metabolism really doesn’t start to decrease until you get to about age 60.

So, studies like this are showing us that our metabolism doesn’t have to slow down as we get older, and that it’s much more likely that changes in our behavior are causing us to gain weight as we get older.

Changes in our diet are what can help us to prevent the slowing down of our metabolism. So people want to use this as an excuse as to why they can’t gain weight, but they don’t want to look at their actual diet, you know, their lifestyle choices.

So your lifestyle choices are going to go a lot further in helping you to maintain a healthy weight and even lose weight as you get older. And you can’t use the metabolism as an excuse anymore. Okay, so that myth is totally busted.

Another one that I’ve been hearing a lot about lately is cleanses and detox diets, like that’s all you need to do. You just need to do a cleanse every now and then and you’ll be fine. And listen, almost none of the cleanses and detox diets that are out there today have been proven to be effective on short or long-term metabolic health.

This is another case where people are trying to justify a crappy diet with some sort of a detox or a cleanse. Yes, it is true that today we are exposed to more toxins than probably ever before. But what you need to understand is that most of these toxins you are choosing because of your poor diet, you’re eating processed foods loaded with chemicals, industrial seed oils, deep-fried foods, foods loaded with sugar, and refined grains, all these things are contributing to health problems, all these things are making it harder to lose weight.

So the idea of a cleanse, it’s a good idea. And we should absolutely cleanse our systems of these toxic ingredients. Okay, but you can’t just do it like once a year, the best way to cleanse your body of toxins is to stop eating the toxins. The best cleanse is actually a diet that just eliminates all these terrible ingredients from your life permanently.

So people think that they can eat whatever they want for months, and then just drink a bunch of detox tea or take a bunch of supplements and pull the toxins out of your system. And these things might work. For the short term, they might have some short-term benefits, they might make you feel a little better in the interim, but it’s not a long-term solution.

I was talking to some friends recently, this couple and they’re taking all these expensive supplements to pull all these toxins out of their system. And they were telling me about this whole system of things that, you know, use all these different ingredients. I can’t remember the names of all this stuff, but they, you know, grab the toxins and they pull them out and it takes like six months of this protocol in order to do this.

Meanwhile, they’re taking all these expensive supplements every single day. Okay, that’s great. And I applaud you for trying to get healthier. But what happens after the six months? What do you do? Like do the toxins just come back? Like wouldn’t it be wiser to just eat clean and healthy foods void of all the toxic ingredients in the first place and just keep doing that?

Anyway, never in human history have we needed to go on a cleanse. For two and a half million years as humans, we’ve thrived simply by eating real food. We haven’t had to drink a bunch of detox tea or like you know, eat all these crazy supplements and things like that just to read our bodies of the garbage just stop eating the garbage.

Your body is really good at cleansing itself. Your body is really good at detoxing itself. We have an incredibly complex system to remove toxins from our bodies, let your body do what it’s supposed to do naturally just stop eating the junk food. Okay. So that’s another myth busted, by the way.

So the biggest takeaways here that I want you to have a look at here is like looking at our ancestor years, ancient human civilizations were incredibly healthy, lean, strong and disease free, much like that Hadza tribe today, okay.

They did not count calories. They did not restrict the caloric intake. They didn’t need to exercise like mad every day to stay lean and healthy. They actually were trying to conserve energy. They didn’t have to go on some crazy fad diet. They weren’t eating cotton balls soaked in cabbage juice to lose weight. Their metabolism didn’t suddenly stop working when they hit a certain age. And they didn’t do some weird juice cleanses or take a bunch of detox supplements, right?

What did they do? They ate real food. They ate food that today still looks like food, food that our ancestors would recognize, that their ancestors recognize that’s just food, just eat food. Stay away from the processed foods stay away from the Frankenfoods.

Try to eliminate sugar and refined grains. Those things have only been around for a short period of time in the course of human history. Stay away from seed oil. Stay away from toxic ingredients. Stay away from fried foods. Yes, exercise, and keep on running, but don’t do it to try to lose weight.

Do it because it’s good for you. It’s good for your mental health and emotional health. It’s good for your heart. It’s great at helping you to manage stress, just don’t run a bunch to try to lose weight because that doesn’t work. Okay, so those are the common weight loss myths debunked.

I hope you got something good out of this episode today. If you did shoot me a message and tell me what you liked about it. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.