40. Eat Real Food

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner Ultra runner, Master life coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 40 of Running Lean, my name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners 40 episodes. Oh my gosh, this is so awesome. Today, I am talking about eating real food. So the gist of it is this: the diet that most of us have been eating for like the last 40 years or so is just wrong. It doesn’t work.

Instead of getting leaner and healthier, which is what it promised it would do for us, we have been getting fatter, and sicker. Something has to change. In this episode of the podcast, I’m talking about one of the most important principles that you should adopt, if you want to stop struggling with your weight and start living a healthier, happier life.

And that principle is this: eat real food. It’s that simple. I’m gonna explain exactly what I mean when I say eat real food, don’t worry, and why this is such a crucial principle for you to incorporate into your daily life starting right now, especially if you are a runner.

But first, if you liked this podcast, please come check us out on Facebook. We’ve got this growing, thriving community called the Running Lean community. It’s a bunch of energetic positive runners that like to talk about running. And it’s a place where I share more information.

So I share more trainings and interact with you, I help answer questions as much as I can. And we’re all like minded runners sharing goals. You know, we’re trying to lose weight, we’re trying to run better. And it’s a lot of fun. So come check us out.

Here’s a comment from one of our community members, Philip and Philip said, “Patrick, I appreciate you more than you know, you help so many people, including myself, I listened to you every run that I go on. I think I made it to Episode 32 just today.”

That’s a lot of episodes. If you did 32 in one day, but hey, more power to your brother. And he goes on he says, “I have a different mindset since one of your listeners mentioned your podcast and how it changed her life. At that very moment, I was looking for something and I found it when I saw her comment on Facebook. Ever since then I’ve been hooked. I’m in the beginning stages of my life change thanks to all the valuable information you give. Congratulations on your crazy 2020 success, wellness, especially after all your stressors.”

Phillip, thank you so, so much for sharing these comments, it really means a lot when I hear that my message is resonating with you guys. So Phillip, thank you for being a part of the community. Phillip is just one of the many positive, energetic, fun, warm hearted people that we have in the Running Lean community on Facebook.

So come check us out, we always, we also do monthly challenges, we just finished up the September intermittent fasting challenge, which is a lot of fun. A lot of people have been trying intermittent fasting for the first time and having great results. So we do stuff like that, and I got a big challenge coming up for you guys in a few weeks.

We’re not going to start it just yet. It’ll be later maybe next month, you know, maybe in November timeframe, but just know we got a lot of fun stuff going on over there. Also, just in case, you’re the kind of person that wants a little extra help with all this stuff with losing weight with becoming a fat-adapted runner.

With changing habits if you’re the kind of person that just wants someone to walk them through the whole process, step by step and you want somebody that can hold you accountable. If that sounds like something that you want, because listen, making changes like this is hard to do on your own. Wouldn’t it be great if you just had somebody that could kind of hold your hand and walk you through it step by step and help you every step of the way? Yeah, that’s me.

I can do that for you. I do one-on-one coaching with people to help them make these changes last, you know, I can help you figure out the exact nutrition plan that you need. That’s gonna work for you to get you to your goals. I will hold you accountable. I will keep you on track.

I will encourage you to do things that you don’t want to do so that you can be the person that you ultimately want to be And, most importantly, I will help you develop the mindset that you need to make these changes last. If you’re ready to stop screwing around with all this, if you’re ready to stop screwing around with your weight, if you’re ready to make some big changes and ready to start eating real food, then apply for a one on one coaching with me.

Just go to innerfiretribe.com/coaching. That’s one word. Do it now it will change your life, I promise you. Okay, let’s get into talking about eating real food. So several months ago, I gotta give you guys a little backstory, because I’m starting a little series of podcasts episodes that I want you guys to understand what I’m doing with this.

Okay, so here’s kind of the backstory, several months ago, I sat down, and I wrote out something that I’m calling the Running Lean Manifesto. No, this is not like the Unabomber, you know, list of crazy, you know, ideas or whatever. This is a simple list of things that I stand for, that we stand for, as a community. It’s a list of things that are important to me.

And I’ve been wanting to share this with you guys for a while. And the timing just hasn’t been right. And now I’m like, you know what, this is perfect. Let’s start doing this. You know, we’ve got a good opportunity right now, especially with the holidays coming up, that I want to start sharing these principles with you guys and get you on board with this set of principles, this set of guidelines.

So what is a manifesto in the way that I’m talking about it here? So a manifesto is this: it is a list of guiding principles. Okay? A manifesto is a set of values that you can use to live your life by a manifesto. Think of it as your North Star that guides you to where you want to go. Okay? Why? Why would we want to have a list of values? Why do we need a North Star? Why do we want guiding principles?

Here’s why. When you have this set of guiding principles, when you have a manifesto, this provides a simple blueprint that you can live by. For me, it helps keep me on track, it helps keep me moving toward my goals. It’s very easy for me to know exactly where I am with my health and fitness goals with my mindset goals with my, you know, emotional goals with my business goals, all that stuff, it’s very easy to know where I am.

If I have a set of principles that I can use as kind of checkmarks, right, I can just say like, am I living by this principle? Yes or no, it’s very simple. So it’s like, following this set of guiding principles, it helps to give my life purpose, it helps drive me forward, I believe that we should all have some sort of list of guiding principles.

So I’m sharing this with you guys here because this is our collective list of guiding principles. Okay, this is everything that I teach is based on these principles that I’m going to share with you. You are free to adopt these principles as your own and I promise you, if you do adopt these, your life will get better in so many ways. I promise you.

Okay, so let me list out what the Running Lean Manifesto is here. There’s just there’s like eight principles, this isn’t very long. Very short, actually. And so here’s what the eight principles are of the Running Lean Manifesto. Number one, eat real food. Number two, live vibrantly. Number three, thrive in your body. Number four, embrace discomfort. Number five, run because you love it. Number six, love yourself unconditionally. Number seven, think, feel and act with purpose. And number eight, be an example of what’s possible. Over the next several episodes of the podcast, I’m going to take a deep dive into each one of these principles, okay, but I wanted to kind of lay them all out for you.

And today I’m going to be talking about the first one which is to eat real food. So we’ll get into all of these over the next several episodes. Okay? But I’ve already been sharing with you bits and pieces of these principles because these principles as a guide.

Everything that I do from these podcasts or what I teach in my Facebook group, to how I coach my, my one-on-one clients to the programs that I offer, the courses that I’m creating, everything I do in my life is guided by these eight principles.

I’m sharing these with you, because I’m hoping that these will become your guiding principles to the Running Lean community is a vibrant and growing community of passionate runners. And we all share common goals. So this manifesto was really our collective Northstar. Alright, these are the principles that bind our tribe together. Right?

This is what’s going to help propel us forward together. This is a blueprint and we can all use to become the best version of ourselves together. Cool. Cool, awesome. So let’s get into the first principle, which is, in my opinion, the most important one, and that’s why I’m talking about it first. And the principle is this: eat real food. Why is this so important? Well, I believe that your health is the most important aspect of your life. Because without it, what do you have? You have nothing.

The problem though, and this is crazy. Most people, especially in the United States, but most people in the world are not healthy. There’s a stat that I came across recently, and this is crazy, but 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. That means they have some sort of illness related to their their diet, which would be they are overweight or obese.

They’re insulin resistant. They have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, all these things. 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. That means 12% of us are considered healthy. Wow. I know which 12%, which percentage I want to be in, I want to be in that 12%. Right.

So I work very hard on my health and my fitness. It’s very important to me. The problem though, and the reason why 88% of us are unhealthy is because this diet that we’ve adopted and we’ve been implementing, and we’ve been following since the late 70s, early 80s. It’s just wrong. It does not work.

So you know, the dietary guidelines came out in like 1980, and said, we need to be eating a lot more carbohydrates, a lot less fat. And so we’ve been doing that. We’ve been very compliant with that, we need to also cut our calories and we need to exercise more. We’ve been doing all these things, right.

And you know what? It’s not working. We’re fatter, and we’re sicker than we ever have been. Since 1980, the obesity rates in the United States have more than tripled. And that’s just because we’ve been following those guidelines. You know, we have an epidemic of diseases like diabetes, like cancer.

You know, there are 14, I think 14 types of cancer that have been related to diet. According to the World Health Organization. Those include the number two and three cancers, which is breast cancer and colorectal cancer. So there’s no doubt that diet plays a huge role in disease. Alzheimer’s has been called a type three diabetes, because it’s so clearly related to diet now and to a high carbohydrate diet.

Especially polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS, diet related, all of these issues are most mostly caused by this problem of hyperinsulinemia, which is just too much insulin in the blood. How do you get your insulin super high? Well eat a lot of carbohydrates, eat a lot of sugar. This is what’s going to drive up blood glucose levels is what’s going to drive up insulin levels.

And this is what’s going to create a state in your body where all these diseases just happen. And and so, you know, I’ve talked about this a lot, and we all kind of understand that this is a problem. This diet is just wrong. It doesn’t work, okay. It’s making us fat. It’s making us sick.

And the other thing we have to understand is that exercise is not going to fix the problem, you know, cutting calories and running more isn’t going to fix the problem. All right? No amount of exercise can fix this terrible diet. All right.

Couple of examples of this. And there’s many, many examples. I mean, just in our Facebook group alone, there are many, many people that share stories about how they have been running, you know, marathons for years and years and gaining weight, you know, they just cannot seem to lose weight.

But a couple of examples that kind of stand out, Professor Tim Noakes. So this is the guy who wrote the book, The Law Of Running, right, famous book on running, you know, became like the runner’s Bible, so to speak.

And this guy ran like 70 marathons, you know, coaches, people, all this stuff, he ends up getting type two diabetes, because he’s following this high carbohydrate diet that he was actually teaching people. And so getting type two diabetes, and being a long distance runner, he was like, there’s a serious problem going on what is happening here.

So he switched to a low carb diet. He now coaches like world class class athletes on the low carb approach, and they’re having amazing success. And he’s awesome. He actually was doing a book signing sometime after he switched to the low carb diet.

And he actually took that book, The Law Of Running, and he stood up, and he ripped out the chapter on nutrition from that book, and he says, I no longer can tell people to follow this high carb diet. It just, it’s terrible. It does not work. So that’s one example of someone who was following the advice of exercising more, and ended up with type two diabetes, which is just terrible.

Another example, I recently had this conversation with someone who is on this running streak. And this guy, he’s awesome. He’s a cool dude. He’s been running every day. On this running streak. He does an average of around three miles or so three, four miles a day, right? But he’s been doing this running streak since 2007, right?

This guy has been running three, four miles a day on average, for like, almost 5000 straight days. Okay. And in the process, he’s gained like over 50 pounds, right? And if you’re thinking, well, what you need to do is just run a little bit more. Honestly, I don’t I don’t think that is the answer. That is not the answer.

The exercising more thing just does not work. Okay. You can’t outrun a bad diet, we have to change the diet that we are eating. Okay, we have to stop all this high carbohydrate nonsense, it just does not work. So what’s the answer?

The answer is that we just need to eat real food. So what do we mean when we say eat real food? It’s not complicated. It’s this: eat whole food. Food that is as close to nature as possible food that our ancestors used to eat. That’s it. So when I say whole foods as close to nature as possible, what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is, like, no refined food or processed food, food that still looks like food. Okay, not food that’s been ground up into powders, or liquids or smashed into, you know, patties or, or bars or anything like that.

Like not, not things that have been extracted from whole food, and then injected over here, like just the whole food. Okay. So most packaged food that we get is processed food. It’s highly refined and highly processed. So if you kind of stay away from packaged food in general, you’re going to be solving most of the problems.

Now, I’m not anti-packaged food. I mean, I do buy food that comes in packages. That’s not what I mean. I’m not saying you have to eat, just you know, celery and, and turnips, like it’s this is not what I’m talking about at all. But you’ve just got to be careful because most of this packaged food is just highly processed, you can’t eat.

Most processed foods that you buy in the middle parts of the grocery store contain the three worst things you can eat which is sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. And I call this the Vile Triumvirate. So these things are in most packaged processed foods, sugar, refined grains, vegetable oil, terrible combination.

So instead what I’m suggesting is that we eat whole foods. Foods that are very close to nature foods that still look like foods, okay? For example, a whole food that are close to nature would be something like bacon and eggs, right?

Bacon, you know, it’s, you know, been, you know, trimmed, it’s got a little bit of curing or whatever, but a really simple thing bacon and eggs very, very simple, very close to nature, whole food, tons of nutritional value, amazing.

A processed food equivalent, not not equivalent at all, but a processed food would be Jimmy Dean’s bacon egg and cheese biscuit with over 60 ingredients. So I did a little research on some foods and I gotta tell you, it’s horrifying what they put in this food.

But here’s the, I’m not going to list all 60 ingredients, but I just want to tell you like the grilled egg patty is one of the sections of the ingredients on this package that I looked at. And here’s what the grilled egg Patty alone has in it. So in my mind, it should be one ingredient right? It should be egg. Okay, but here’s what the grilled egg patty has. It has: egg, nonfat milk, soybean oil, modified corn starch, salt, xanthan gum, natural and artificial butter flavor, which contains soybean oil, butter, lipolyzed butter, oil, natural and artificial flavors. And then also citric acid, soy lecithin as a release agent.

So in my opinion, this is not real food. This is not real food. What is all that stuff? Why are we putting soybean oil and modified corn starch and xanthan gum and lipolyzed butter oil into this thing, right? We don’t need to be eating all this garbage. Okay, so bacon and eggs, whole foods, close to nature.

Jimmy Dean’s bacon egg and cheese biscuit. Processed highly refined garbage. If you liked the Jimmy Dean’s bacon egg and cheese biscuit I apologize right now, but no, I don’t apologize. I stand my ground. Here’s another example.

Whole foods close to nature. Chicken. Right, that’s easy. Chicken. Here’s an example of a processed food, frozen chicken nuggets that are shaped like dinosaurs. Right? You know, I looked up these won’t bore you with all the ingredients. They’re all terrible. But there’s like over 20 ingredients in these things. Right? Not real food.

So what I’m trying to say here is this stick with whole food. Things like meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, veggies, natural fats, like olive oil, butter, avocados, and stay away from all the highly refined, highly processed foods made with a million unpronounceable and unnatural ingredients like that stuff is not real.

The you know, kind of a rule of thumb that I share with people is to shop the perimeter of the grocery store. That’s where you have the meat section, and the dairy section and the produce section. And very limited stuff in the middle. Now I buy some you know salad dressing, I buy some frozen broccoli, you know, there are a few things that I get that have a few ingredients in there.

I’m not saying never buy food with ingredients but just be really mindful of this. Okay, so when we talk about eating real food, whole foods, as close to nature as possible. This is what we’re talking about right food that has not been highly refined and not highly processed. Now, it’s a little more work to eat food this way.

Yeah, it can be, it takes a little bit more work to prepare something than it does to take something out of the freezer like a frozen dinner or whatever and throw it in the microwave. Yeah, it does take a little bit of extra effort to make something but you know, what, is it worth it?

Is it worth it for your health? In your overall well being? 100% yes 100%. I love eating this way. I never have to think to myself like I wonder what’s in this. I’m wondering if this is okay to eat like, I don’t have to do that anymore. I eat a ton of nutrient dense, vibrant healthy food, and I love it.

You know, I eat this big salad every night I call it my kitchen sink salad, because I just throw a bunch of different stuff in there that I have around. But it’s loaded with fresh colorful greens and veggies and, and then I eat a big piece of quality protein like wild caught sockeye salmon or a local grass fed steak. And it’s so satisfying to eat whole foods this way.

That’s like very close to natural. And I feel super healthy. Because I’m just focused on eating real food. And when you first start eating whole foods this way, it is a little bit more work. Yes. But over time, it gets easier, you’ll grow to love it. And you’ll never go back. I promise you, you’ll love it. So that’s kind of what I mean when I say whole food as close to nature as possible.

Now, food our ancestors used to eat. So what do I mean by this? Well, here’s the thing. Two and a half million years, Homo sapiens have been evolving. We’ve evolved for the last two and a half million years as hunter gatherers, right? The most significant period of our human development was during that Paleolithic era.

So two and a half million to something around 10,000 years ago. We evolved, we were doing really well as humans, you know, we became, you know, Homo sapiens, we became these thinking, these amazing people that we are basically now okay. And then a few 1000 years ago, we started shifting more to agriculture, we started processing, growing like cereal grains and processing them.

And we started relying more on farming than we did on hunting and gathering. But here’s the thing, 99.5% of our evolution, we’ve been eating this very low carbohydrate, almost zero carbohydrate, diet, high in fat, high in quality protein, and very low in carbohydrate. And then, for the last .5% of our existence, you know, we’ve been farming and processing our food.

If you think about the entirety of human existence as a football field, 99 and a half yards, you know, we’ve evolved and have been perfecting our health, and evolving and surviving and thriving as hunter gatherers. And then for that last half yard of the football field, just that tiny little slice, we’ve been farming and processing.

So our genetics haven’t changed much. It takes 15,000 years or so for genetics to change significantly, right? And so we are just genetically predisposed to eat this way, this way that we’ve been eating for the last two and a half million years, right, we just are. We’re not genetically disposed to eating the cereal grains and the carbohydrates, we’re just not, we’re not.

And especially the concentrated forms of carbohydrates like sugar, and all the fruit that’s super high in sugar, sugary drinks and desserts, all this stuff. We are not designed to eat that stuff. And if you think about what’s available in the grocery store, every meal is basically dessert.

You know, for breakfast, oh, eat some yogurt and some cereal and some granola, sugar, sugar, sugar, oh, for lunch, have this, you know, sandwich with you know, this white bread, sugar, you know, and for snack, have some pretzels and some of these nuts that are sweetened with you know, sugar, it’s just sugar, sugar, sugar, you know, for dinner, you know, eat all this pasta.

And you know everything just and then dessert. You know, here’s some brownies like whatever. You get the just like we’re just eating sugar at every meal. And it’s not working for us. The more we eat grains, the more we eat the processed foods, the more we eat carbohydrates, the sicker and fatter we become.

And this is not something that is just in the last 50 years or so that this has become a problem. This just started happening a couple of 1000 years ago. So this is really fascinating. They did this study where they looked at like 3000 preserved mummies from ancient Egypt. And they were looking at them and they can do these scans of them and they have their bodies. Which are pretty well intact so they can see a lot of what’s going on in their bodies. And at the time of when they were alive, you know, these people their diet was very rich with grains and bread and cereals and they weren’t eating a lot of fat other than olives, olive oil.

It’s kind of like the modern version of the Mediterranean diet, right? What now a lot of people think of as a very healthy diet, right? Low fat, very high carbohydrate. At the time, the banks of the Nile were fertile, and they would grow a lot of fruit and vegetables. And one of the primary staples that they ate the ancient Egyptians was this like coarse bread that they made from stone ground wheat, right.

So they started like, they were like processing and refining grains. And they weren’t eating much meat at the time, because animals at the time were more beasts of burden, and they were more valued for their work than for their food. So they weren’t eating the animal products. They were eating more of these grains and lots of vegetables, fruit, especially.

And, you know, today, if we were to say, well, this is a really good diet and a lot of nutritionists, and it kind of follows along with the dietary guidelines, you would think these people must have been super healthy, right? The Mediterranean diet. Yeah, man do it. The Egyptians should be super healthy.

But you know what, they were not healthy. They were very pretty they ever like in miserable health. Okay, so they were looking at these mummies they have like, they study like 3000 preserved mummies from the time. And a large percentage of them showed a nightmarish array of dental diseases.

So any dentist will tell you what causes dental diseases, what causes tooth decay, and dental problems is sugar, it’s eating sugar and grains, that causes the tooth problems. They studied them. And they could see that many of them had heart disease, they had high blood pressure, they had diabetes, they had obesity, all of the same disorders that we experienced today in this, you know, quote, unquote, civilized Western world.

Why in God’s name, would anyone recommend this diet today to everyone? These people, clearly, by just looking at them, you can see they’re in miserable health. All right.

In contrast, when you look at the skeletal remains of Paleolithic man, who consumed mostly a meat and fat based diet, very high in fat, very high in protein, very low in carbohydrate, you have to understand that, at the time, like two and a half million years is a long period of time, there was a couple of ice ages in there.

And people on the planet, were not all living in tropical zones, where they had access to fruit and vegetables everywhere. There was a lot of the earth, it was very, the fruit and vegetables were very scarce. Some of the veggies they would eat would be like, tubers that were grown underground, you know, yams, for example. The fruit that they ate was very, very low in sugar. It’s not like the stuff that we have today, and only available very seasonally. And only in certain parts of the world.

They didn’t you know, they couldn’t go to Whole Foods and just grab, you know, bananas and stuff like that. They couldn’t get their banana smoothie from Whole Foods, right? So their diet subsisted on, you know, mostly meat and fat, and some berries and some things that they could forage for. But anyway, they looked at the skeletal remains of Paleolithic man, and they show that they have very strong perfect teeth.

Now they don’t have access to the internal organs and all that other stuff that we could see in the mummies, but they can see that these people had amazing perfect teeth, which means that they were not consuming a lot of carbohydrates, because bad teeth are the hallmark of carbohydrate consumption.

So we can make a pretty good assumption that their health was very good. You know, here’s the thing when it comes to like carbohydrates, because people tend to think, well, we gotta have carbs, you gotta eat some carbs. And you know what, there’s no essential carbs.

Essential nutrients are those things that our body cannot manufacture on its own. They have to be obtained in the diet. There are two essential nutrients that we have to get in our diet. The one is essential fatty acids, and we get that by eating fat. And then we need essential amino acids, and we get that from eating protein, but there are no essential carbohydrates.

In other words, if you eat a zero protein diet, you will eventually die. If you eat a zero fat diet, you will eventually die. If you eat a zero carbohydrate diet, you’re probably going to do just fine and live a very happy, healthy life. You know, your body actually produces the glucose that you need, your liver will produce glucose in this process.

It’s called gluconeogenesis, which just means making new glucose. And your brain needs a certain amount of fuel in the form of glucose and your liver makes everything that you need, you don’t need to eat it. Okay. And then going back to this whole paleolithic diet thing, and people ask me, so what are you talking about here? Is this just the Paleo diet?

And I’m like, not really, I don’t like using labels like that, other than to say, what I’m suggesting is that we go back to eating real food. Yes, it’s low carb. And yes, it’s high fat. And it’s not necessarily Atkins, or paleo or keto or anything like that. Although it can be. It’s whatever works for you. I don’t care what you call it.

Honestly, what I’m focusing on and what I teach people is to eat real food. And the way that I eat is probably pretty close to paleo, because I think it’s the food, pretty close to what we’ve been eating and what our ancestors have been eating for millions of years. And I think it’s probably the best diet for us.

But even go back to our more recent ancestors. So when I talk about eat food our ancestors would have eaten I’m talking about even just a few generations ago, like our grandparents, for example, they didn’t eat all the processed junk we eat today, they didn’t have all the refined foods that we have today.

They ate meat and eggs and butter and full fat dairy and loads of fresh, seasonal vegetables. They didn’t eat a lot of fruit. And it wasn’t the kind of fruit that we have now. It wasn’t super available. It was very seasonal. They didn’t eat a ton of refined carbs, they didn’t eat a ton of sugar. They ate foods that were very close to nature, they ate foods their ancestors ate, right? So that’s what I’m suggesting here. It’s not a radical concept. It really isn’t. It’s just let’s just go back to eating the way we used to eat.

Here’s the thing. When you switch to eating real food, this is freaking awesome. I absolutely love eating this way. My clients love eating this way. It’s very satisfying. It is delicious. It is diverse. And people think, oh, well, it’s so restricting. I can’t eat this, and I can’t eat that. But I think it’s the opposite.

There’s tons of freedom in eating this way. There’s like never ending ideas for what you can eat. If you buy 10 packaged food items, you know, buy 10 packaged frozen food items, take them home, what do you get, you get like 10 meals. Right? That’s it. If you buy 10 whole food ingredients and bring them home, I guarantee you you can find 10s of 1000s of meal options that you could put together with the right set of ingredients.

Just go on any website and find something, I guarantee you’ll find 1000s and 1000s of ideas for those 10 ingredients. And you know, you don’t have to be like a carnivore to do this. You don’t have to eat meat. You know, eating real food doesn’t mean you have to eat animals. It really doesn’t.

You can do this as a vegetarian as a vegan as a pescatarian as a ovo lacto vegetarian or whatever. You can do this eating plant based you can do this as a carnivore. You can do it eating all plants or eating all meat or anything in between and most people fall somewhere in the middle. This is the first principle: eat real food.

This is the first principle of the Running Lean Manifesto for a reason. Because I believe that eating real food is probably the most important thing that you can do for yourself. What is more important than your health, nothing. You know, if you feed your body, a bunch of processed garbage, you become a fat, sick and unhealthy human, then everything else in your life becomes a constant struggle.

But if you’re feeding your body properly, when you eat real food, you become the healthiest human being that you can be. And everything else in your life begins to fall into place beautifully. You lose weight, you feel better, you have more energy, you’re happier running becomes easier. So my suggestion to you is to follow this principle starting now go out there and eat real food.

Alright, so I’ll be diving into All of the other principles I mentioned from the manifesto in upcoming episodes, I am so excited to share all this with you. And then I will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Join us and start applying these principles to your life. Challenge yourself. Begin, start today like start eating real food, get healthier, lose weight, become a better runner, become the best damn version of yourself yet.

All right, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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