27. There’s Sugar in EVERYTHING!

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 27 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about sugar. In fact, there’s sugar in everything. And I think we can all agree that sugar is not good for us, right? And yet, there seems to be sugar hidden in just about everything we eat.

And I’m not talking about the sugary cereals and the soft drinks, because we all know about that stuff. We all know there’s sugar added to all that right. The real problem, I think, is all the sugar hidden and foods that normally we wouldn’t think would have added sugar. From crackers to coffee drinks, pasta sauce to peanut butter, salad dressing, and salsa, you can find sugar virtually everywhere you look.

So why is this? Why do they have to add sugar to everything? And why is this such a big problem? In this episode, I’ll be answering all of those questions, and offer a few tips on how to avoid all that added sugar in your life. So this whole month we’re going to be talking about sugar is like sugar month, okay, or maybe we should call no sugar month.

But over the next few episodes, I’m going to be talking about the addictive nature of sugar, how to make the switch from sugar to fat as fuel for running, which is amazing, by the way, how you can possibly have a life without sugar like, oh, we’re gonna answer that question. A lot of people are like, how can I live my life without all the sugar?

So we just started the July, no sugar challenge over in the Facebook group. So the Facebook group is the Running Lean community on Facebook. And if you haven’t already checked it out, go to Facebook, just search for Running Lean community. And click the button that says join, ask to join, or whatever. It says join the group.

And then you can join us for the no sugar challenge if this is something that you’re interested in. So for the whole month of July, we’re kind of doing some extensive training on the topic around sugar, how to give up sugar, how to eat less of it. I’m answering questions like what am I supposed to eat now that I’m not eating blank, questions about fruit, about grains, and about alcohol. So we’re answering all those questions.

The best part is the community aspect of it. So when you do something like this, like when you take on a challenge, like stopping eating sugar, it is challenging, but it’s more fun and more supportive, and a lot easier to do with an encouraging group of people to do it with you. So when we’re all doing it together, we all support each other, it’s a lot easier.

In fact, here’s a comment from Tammy in the group. She said, “It feels great to have support and doing this with a group that makes me feel like this time I can make cutting sugar happen, which has felt like an impossible feat in the past. I’m thankful to have connected with Patrick and his group, we’ve got this.” Absolutely, Tammy.

And by the way, she’s a little bundle of positive energy. And I love that. But there’s lots of amazing people, just like Tammy in the group. So come check it out. So if you’re ready to get off the sugar wagon, and actually by the end of this episode you might be. Please join us in the Facebook group.

Remember, just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community. And it’s not too late, you haven’t missed anything we’ve just started. It’s the beginning of the month. So jump in, you can jump in any time seriously and join us and you’ll get a lot of great information. Okay. So we’ll see you over there in the Facebook group.

Okay, so today’s topic is all around how there’s sugar in everything. And I want to just kind of lay out why this is a problem. So what’s the problem with sugar? Like why are we so concerned about sugar? So here’s a few things that you might know already but I’m just going to go over kind of some of the issues around sugar.

Okay, so the way sugar works in our body is that sugar raises our blood, our blood sugar, okay, so anytime you eat sugar that gets turned into glucose on our body which raises As our blood sugar, and then insulin gets produced to bring the blood sugar down, anytime insulin goes up in our body, we start storing fat. So when insulin is consistently high, in our body, when our insulin levels are always really high, we are always storing fat, we can’t burn fat. Okay?

That is, that’s the biggest problem right there. In order to burn fat, or I’m sorry, in order to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And you can’t do that when insulin is high. So basically, if you want to lose weight, you got to stop eating sugar. It’s very hard to lose weight when you’re eating sugar in all its forms and I’m talking about, you know, sugar, fruit added sugar.

You know, a lot of fruits that are really high in sugar, and a lot of grains that turn into sugar and starchy vegetables, like white potatoes, or rice, those kinds of things will get turned into glucose and spike your blood sugar quite a bit. And so when that happens, you’re going to produce a lot of insulin. And you’re going to be in that fat storage mode.

And it’s really hard to get out of that, while you keep eating those kinds of foods. And here’s the thing. Obesity is up in this country over 30% in the last 30 or 40 years, like since the early 80s. And a lot of that has to do with how much sugar we’re consuming. Type Two Diabetes is up. High blood pressure, obesity, excess body fat around the waist, heart disease, stroke, even cancer.

In fact, according to the World Health Organization, as much as a 40% of cancer is diet related. 40% of cancer is related to diet. So, all of these things are kind of tied back to consuming sugar. Okay, so other side effects of eating sugar, other negative consequences of eating sugar. So when you consume sugar, your appetite actually increases.

You know, it releases these chemicals into your body, it produces certain hormones that block certain hormones, but it increases your appetite and you feel hungry all the time. And you never really quite feel full. Your body doesn’t really process sugar calories the same way it does, you know fat calories for instance, or protein.

So you feel full or you never feel full, you feel hungry all the time. And you end up craving more sugar. So you have this like sugar rush where you feel some energy but then you kind of crash from that you’ve all experienced this. I’m sure a lot of people do this in the afternoon, they’ll have lunch maybe you know some kappa Frappuccino, whatever they call it at Starbucks, you know, with all the, you know, sugar and the whipped cream and the caramel sauce and everything.

I mean, it’s amazing in the caffeine and it gives you this amazing rush but then you’re going to like crash hard after that you need a nap. I used to do that. So I’d be like, oh my I need to take a nap now. So and what happens is when you crash like that, the only thing it’s gonna bring you back up is what? Yeah, eat more sugar, because then you’ll have more energy again, right?

So anyway, you get these sugar cravings, these very powerful, uncontrollable cravings for more sugar. There’s mood swings that happen, you know that you can get very irritable from eating a lot of sugar. There’s lethargy, you know, you just feel a lack of motivation. And people say they feel more of a lack of motivation to exercise when they’re eating a lot of sugar.

And which actually kind of compounds the whole issue, right? So there’s all these negative side effects and all these negative consequences of eating sugar. And these should alone like what I just mentioned, should be enough for you to just say like, okay, maybe I should probably just stop eating sugar altogether, pretty much right?

But as a runner here, here’s a couple things I want to mention that really directly have to do with us as runners. So in general, runners carry around too much body fat. And the reason for this is that runners, most runners, are pretty much addicted to carbs and sugar. So, I mean, we rely on this for fuel. I’ve done it for years, you know, I just carved up all the time. Tons and tons of carbs, tons and tons of sugar.

The issue though is that that puts you into fat storage mode. And you’ll actually gain weight as a runner. And you think running is going to be the cure all for that and like counterbalance it, but it really doesn’t work. Because when you run a lot, you increase your appetite. When you run a lot and you increase your appetite, you tend to overcompensate by eating way more calories than you would had you had not been running all the time. So that actually kind of works against you.

And because we’re so addicted to carbs, we know we’re relying on this for fuel, especially if we’re doing any kind of long distance running, right? And when we do that, we have to have the carbs and we have to have the sugar all the time. And we can’t do a five mile run without a couple of energy gels, we can’t do a 15 mile run without a whole bunch of you know, energy gels and sports drinks and all this stuff, right.

And this causes a lot of GI issues for people I know a lot of people have a really hard time ingesting all these carbs, but they kind of forced themselves to do it, which causes a lot of GI distress call causes a lot of difficulty running actually, it’s kind of counterproductive for you actually, you tend to hit the wall faster, when you’re doing all these carbs, you kind of get burned out faster.

And so you can only burn so much sugar, so you only have so much sugar in your system that you can use for fuel at a time for a couple of hours, maybe at most, and then you have to keep resupplying that sugar. And when you do this, you’re constantly filling your belly with something that your body has to digest and something that you have to process.

And so all the blood and all the energy that you would want to be in your muscles and your legs, is being used to digest all this sugar, basically. So the alternative, though, is that you can use fat for fuel, all that body fat we have carrying around with us, you can run for days and days on your own body fat, okay, you don’t need to kind of replenish it the way you do sugar. You can run easier and farther when you become fat-adapted.

And so you can use your own body fat as fuel. And you know, one of the things that’s kind of cool about this is when you can get to the point where you become fat adapted and you are accessing your own body fat for fuel. Fat is a better fuel source than sugar. It’s not as easily accessible.

And that’s why you’ve got to get all the sugar out of your system first in order for your body to start using the fat because it’s not used to using fat as fuel. Especially if you’re carrying around a little extra weight. If you’re 20, 30, 50 pounds overweight, your body is definitely not used to burning fat.

And so in order to access that fat, we got to get all the sugar out of our system first. But granted, yeah, a gram of sugar can produce four calories of energy. Whereas a gram of fat can produce nine calories of energy. Now what’s awesome about that is that you’re gonna get basically twice as much fuel from fat than you would from sugar.

And you have hundreds of thousands of calories of fat just hanging around on your body. Even if you’re a pretty lean runner, you have so much fuel on board that you really don’t need to even like bring fuel with you on long runs I’ve done.

I did a 50K a couple of years ago, I did a couple of 50Ks, where I just brought some almond butter as fuel, so just some fat little protein and was doing some electrolyte drinks. So you definitely want to keep your salt and your electrolytes in. But you don’t need all this sugar and stuff. And I gotta tell you, those were a couple of the best really long runs I’ve ever done. I just felt amazing the whole time. Tons of energy.

I mean, it’s still hard, you know, running 30 miles is still hard, but it was way easier than the ones I did when I was sucking down all the energy gels and stuff like that. Okay. So those are some reasons why as runners, we might want to consider just getting rid of the sugar and becoming fat adapted.

Okay, so just think about that as I’m going through some of the stuff we’re talking about here and sugar, you know, and I get it the hard part is when we say like stop eating sugar in his runners. We’re like, nope, not doing that. It’s too hard. It’s too hard to give up. I love it. I love my sugar, and I get it 100%. I was a huge sugar addict completely addicted to sugar, grew up on carbs. And I’ve, I’ve changed my habits. And you can do it too.

But we’ve like been conditioned to love sugar, we’ve been conditioned to crave sugar. And that conditioning, it all kind of started back in the late 70s, early 80s, with the whole low fat diet craze, you know, they decided that fat was bad. And we needed to start eating a low fat diet, which is weird because we had survived as a human beings for a couple thousand years, just fine eating lots of saturated fat and animal products and butter, you know, and meat, and, you know, lard and then all of a sudden they’re like, nope, this does not good for us.

And it’s like, huh, nobody really questioned it. And the science they had to back it up was marginal. There was very, it was, it wasn’t really good science. Alright, we know that now we know that the science was not good. We believed it. I mean, we’re doing the best we could with what we had available to us. But now we know that science was not very good.

And we know better now. So anyway, they were like stop eating fat. You know, start making foods lower and fat. And everybody’s like, cool. Well, we’ll get on board with the no fat thing. We’ll make everything low fat or no fat or nonfat. But what do we use instead? Because when we take all the fat out, the food doesn’t taste good anymore.

And the USDA was like sugar, just put sugar into sugars, fine, sugar’s not a problem, just start using that. And so the food industry was like, Cool, man, we can put sugar in everything. And so they started putting food in all kinds of herbs, starting putting sugar in all kinds of food to make it taste better. You remove the fat, the food tastes terrible. So they just started putting sugar in everything.

So they would start putting sugar in things like pasta sauce, and yogurt, and crackers, and granola and like healthy cereals, oatmeal and salsa and potato chips and processed meats and cheeses, juice, salad dressings, non dairy, milk, bread, all these things they started adding sugar to they never had put sugar in bread.

You know, prior to this vitamin water, hey, lots of sugar in their iced tea, beef jerky, sports drinks, energy bars, protein powder, even vitamins themselves are loaded with sugar. And these are all products that we normally wouldn’t assume would have any kind of added sugar. You know, we know about cookies, we know about ice cream, we know about the sugary cereals. But when it comes to like bread or crackers or yogurt, we think we’re eating something healthy.

And we’re not, a lot of times we’re not. And they hide the sugar because they know, you know, over the last 10-20 years, things have started to shift a little bit. Food labeling laws have changed. They have to list added sugar. And they have to list the ingredients. And then if you notice something they put the ingredients in the order of like how much of a certain substances in things. So if you look at a thing of salad dressing, let’s say let’s say it’s like olive oil based or something like that, which they really don’t make much olive oil based salad dressing, which is a crime, I’d pay for that. But they don’t. They use these cheap seed oils that are just toxic for us. Anyway, different topic. That’s a topic for another day.

But the labels have to list the ingredients and kind of the order. So if you had a salad dressing those olive oil based the first ingredient basically should be olive oil, right? And then they go from, you know, the most prominent to the least prominent. Well, sugar is very prominent in a lot of foods, but they don’t want you to know that.

So what they do is they call sugar, a bunch of different names and they listed in there six or seven times. So it kind of confuses us as to how much sugar is actually in a product. So instead of listing just sugar one time at the very beginning, and we would all look at that and go oh my gosh, there’s a lot of sugar in this thing.

They’ll use names like agave nectar, or maltodextrin or fruit juice. Hey, it’s got fruit juice in it sounds healthy, right? It’s just another name for sugar, or dextrose or barley malt. Barley malt, that sounds delicious. That sounds like what is that oatmeal? No, it’s just sugar.

All of these things sound innocent. They don’t they don’t sound anything like they would be sugar but they are. They’re just sugar. There’s actually something like 98 different names for sugar that they include in food labels. So you gotta be you got to know what you’re looking for. Have, you got to be an informed consumer? Okay.

Here’s the crazy thing though, if you went into the grocery store, and you removed all the products that contained added sugar, you’d be left with only around 20% of the products in the grocery store. 20%. So 80% of every food product, everything that you could possibly buy at the grocery store contains added sugar.

And most of it is highly processed, and most of it is hidden. You know, what you’re left with is things like meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, cheese, eggs, some full fat dairy products, like there’s, you know, there’s quite a bit left, but 20% of the store is what you’re left with. That’s crazy.

So here’s a here’s a good example. Like, let’s say you’re, you’re trying to eat healthy, right, and so you sit down, you have a breakfast, you’re like, I’m just gonna have a nice healthy breakfast, I’m gonna have a glass of apple juice and some granola and some fat free yogurt because this is healthy, right?

Well, in that little simple little breakfast that I just mentioned, there’s more than 20 teaspoons of sugar. Now, if I said to you, here, I just put 20 teaspoons of sugar in this glass, just drink this down just like, eat the sugar, you’d be like, no way. No way am I gonna eat that much sugar. But when we sit down with some apple juice and some low fat for yogurt, that’s exactly what we’re doing. If you want to good, if you want a really eye opening look into this, there’s a movie that I would recommend you watch. It’s called That Sugar Film. And you can watch it free on YouTube. Or if you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it there too. But he lays out just how much sugar is hidden in foods at the grocery store. And it is very, very eye opening. You’ll get some good visuals on exactly what I’m talking about here.

Here’s another issue. You know, I talked about the kind of addictive nature of sugar or how we’ve been conditioned to crave sugar. And one of the reasons is that scientists like food scientists over the last few decades have worked really hard to produce the food that creates the biggest desire and the biggest, like, feel good sensations within us that produces the best, like dopamine hit.

So when you eat some sugar, you get a little hit of dopamine, you get a little serotonin release, you know it feels good, right, you get all these chemicals going through your body, much like somebody gets when they do drugs, or drinks alcohol, it’s very similar kind of thing and effects the same area of the brain. So food scientists have created this thing they called the bliss point.

And they work really, really hard to combine the right kinds of ingredients to make our food hyper palatable, and to produce this incredibly unnatural high within us. So they’ve been doing this for decades. And we have consumers who are, you know, now conditioned to want that rush.

We kind of crave it and we kind of need it there’s a psychological addiction and there’s a physical addiction I’m gonna get into more of the addictive nature of of sugar in a in a upcoming episode here, but I just want you to understand that they’re doing this they know that this is a highly addictive substance and they’re kind of doing this on purpose. So it’s a little insidious, if you ask me, it’s a problem.

I was reading a book recently, and there was a quote in this book from a guy named Howard Moscowitz. And he’s an expert on consumer behavior and studies. The way the food industry creates these highly, hyper palatable foods and stuff like that and, and of the, of the science of creating foods. He said that, as he’s said, “If you can find that optimal point in a set of ingredients, you may be well on your way to converting that array of chemicals and physical substrates into a successful product.” Wow, an array of chemicals and physical substrates.

This is the way that the food industry looks at creating these hyper palatable foods for us. Yay. You know, they’ll just look at it as like how can we make this as addictive as possible? This pile of garbage we have here, how can we, like combine these ingredients in such a way that make people crave it like a drug. And they’re very successful at doing this. The food industry is very successful at this.

Okay, so here’s something I really want you to understand. And this is an important point, we actually really don’t need sugar to survive. We, as humans have lived without sugar without eating, you know, pasta sauce with added sugar and yogurt with that, and sugar. And even with a lot of fruit, you know, because the fruit we have today, here’s just so you understand, like, the fruit we have today is so different from the fruit that was available to us a couple thousand years ago, even a couple of hundred years ago, you know.

We’ve genetically modified our fruits, and made them super sweet, like a banana today is not what it was a couple hundred years ago. Apples, watermelon, all these things have been, you know, the sweetness factor has increased a thousand times over the years, you know, so the fruit we’re eating, that we are eating for centuries for millennia, was very different and did not contain the kind of sugar it does today.

But we’ve lived for you know, thousands of years without all this sugar, okay? Our bodies actually produces our own sugar, we produce all the sugar we need in our liver through a process called gluconeogenesis. And this is a process where our liver produces glucose, because we need some glucose to survive, but we don’t need to get it from externally. Okay.

There are some cultures out there that still today they don’t eat sugar at all. They don’t eat carbohydrates at all. They don’t even eat vegetables. You know, there’s like the Maasai tribe in Kenya, who, you know, subsist on mostly high, high fat, raw dairy, like milk and blood, animal blood. And they don’t eat vegetables or carbohydrates.

There’s the Inuit Eskimos that eat nothing but fish and you know, seal meat and blubber. So they survive on protein and fat mostly. And they don’t see vegetables. They don’t eat bread, they don’t eat pasta. You know, they don’t drink frappuccinos from Starbucks or whatever. And they’re fine. They’ve lived for thousands of years like this.

And here’s a couple of facts that I thought kind of blew my mind. So just a few 100 years ago, let’s go back to like, the 1700s. So not even like caveman days, just 1700s you know, Americans were consuming something like four pounds of sugar per year. And that’s naturally occurring sugar and fruits and grains and added sugar as well. Four pounds a year. It’s not bad, right?

Today, though. We as Americans consume over 150 pounds of sugar per year. This is mind blowing. That’s like three pounds of sugar a week. Again, this is total sugar. This includes naturally occurring sugar and fruits and grains and starches and things like that. But a lot of this is added sugar as well.

There’s some we consume something like 66 pounds of added sugar a year, which is a pound and a quarter a week of added sugar. But that is a lot, a lot of sugar. Okay. And here’s something else we have to understand that sugar is sugar, your body kind of treats sugar, all the same, they all raise insulin. They all put you into fat storage mode.

So if you’re if you’re eating grains, if you’re eating starchy vegetables, like you know, white potatoes, if you’re eating sugary fruits like bananas and apples, you know, your body is just like, Oh, they’re sugar and they kind of treat kind of treats that the same way. And I tell people like you know, if you have to choose between eating a chocolate chip cookie, and an apple, I would say, you know, obviously choose the apple, you know, you’re gonna get some good fiber.

There’s a little bit of you know, there’s about a 15-16 grams of sugar in there. And you know, it’ll, it’ll spike your blood sugar a little bit. You’ll get a little bit of an insulin rush and if you’re eating apples all day long, that would be a problem but every now and then, eat an apple. It’s totally fine.

You know, and if you’re one of those people that likes to have oatmeal with bananas, like I used this used to be my favorite morning thing. I used to eat oatmeal and bananas all the time, I loved a huge bowl of oatmeal. I even put some granola on there because granola is all healthy, right? This is all very healthy right? This was causing me a lot of issues, though, like I was just gaining weight, I could not lose the weight, I just couldn’t understand why either. Because sugar is kind of sugar.

And so just know that if you want to do the oatmeal, and bananas, if you want to keep eating all the fruit, it will kind of slow down your weight loss progress. More than likely, it’s gonna put you in a fat storage mode. And you might start gaining weight. And so it’s just something to be careful of, you know, you know, once you get to where you want to be when you get to your goal weight, you can always add in more fruits and some grains and things like that.

But at the beginning, like if you’re trying to get off sugar, just get off sugar, just stop eating it altogether. Okay, so how do you do that? Like, what is the answer here. And this is where I got a really easy tip for you. Are you ready? Here it is.

Eat real food. That’s it. I’m just like, so passionate about eating real food and kind of going back to eating the way our kind of recent ancestors ate. So this is eating just a lot of whole food, with saturated fats with good fatty meats and fish and fresh vegetables, and very little sugar and very little refined grains and not much fruit.

You know, so this is like my main focus of my programs. And the main focus of the work that I do with my clients is teaching them how to just go back to eating real food. One way you can do that is the simple first step is just kind of eliminate the packaged and processed food from your life.

You know, it actually makes your life much easier when you just get rid of all this packaged and processed food, you know, you got to get into a routine and you may have to prep a little bit ahead of time. But once you do this, life becomes easier for you actually.

So just stop buying food in packages. Okay, now I get it, there’s going to be some exceptions to that rule. And I have exceptions to that. I love my riced cauliflower. Because I use this as a substitute for rice, I make pizza crust out of it. It comes in a bag, it’s pre riced, all it contains is one ingredient: cauliflower. But it’s just simple. Like I don’t want to my half my day shredding cauliflower into rice, you know what I mean? But, so there’s, there’s obviously exceptions, you know, I want life to be easy for me for you to, but pretty much stay away from packaged food.

You know, if you do buy packaged food, though, read the labels carefully. Know what you’re looking at, you know, look for the hidden sugar, I’m actually posting a picture that I found that lists all these like 98 different terms for sugars, that would be something helpful for you to check out.

And I’ll put that in the show notes for this episode. So you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/27. Or I’ll post it in the Facebook groups, just join the Facebook group, the Running Lean community. So watch out for all that hidden sugar. So read your labels carefully. And then just shop the perimeter of the grocery store. You know, avoid those aisles with all the packaged foods in them, right just you know shop in the produce section.

Eat tons of edge, you know, shop in the meat and fish department, you know shop in the dairy section, get some real butter, like just go back to eating the way that our grandparents and their grandparents ate. And I guarantee you’re going to start to see a lot of significant changes in your weight in your mood, in your energy levels. And we just got to get off all these refined pseudo foods with all the added sugar in them, okay.

So I’m going to be continuing this conversation in the Facebook group over the Running Lean community on Facebook. Remember, we’re doing the July no sugar challenge we just got started. It’s not too late. Come join us grab a few friends to do it with you. It’s more fun with friends. And let’s do this. Let’s just, let’s stop eating sugar.

And let’s start using our own body fat for fuel. We can survive for days and days and days on our own body fat. And we’ll lose a bunch of weight and we’ll become those lean running machines that we want to want to be right. Awesome. All right, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of my friends and keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.