79. Demystifying Desire

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 79 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today I’ve got a fun topic for you. Yes, it’s fun demystifying desire. So desire is one of those things that a lot of people struggle with. And I think a lot of people struggle with desire because they just don’t understand what it really is.

So desire can feel very strong, it can feel very powerful. And desire can lead you to do things that may not be in alignment with who you want to be, they may not desire can cause you to do things that aren’t in alignment with your goals like eating or drinking. You may think that having an intense desire for something like alcohol is normal, it’s just the way it is. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

The truth is, it doesn’t have to be this way, you can absolutely change your desire, even for things like food and alcohol. Desire does not have to be so ominous and so powerful and so mysterious. Okay, so in this episode, I want to break it all down, I’m going to go over what desire really is, hopefully, remove the mystery from desire. Talk about why desire is such a powerful force in your life and offer some things that you can do to change it.

So if you like this podcast, you got to come check out the Facebook group, we have this amazing group of like-minded runners over on Facebook. And we talk about all kinds of topics in there. You know, we do goal setting, we’re doing a challenge right now. And it’s July, and we’re doing the dry July challenge. And we’re just getting started with that. So definitely come and check us out just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, join the group.

And if you’re interested in doing the dry July challenge with us, it’s basically just we’re taking a break from alcohol for the month of July and see how that goes for us and see how it feels to do that. There are a lot of positive benefits from taking a break from alcohol.

And if it’s something you’ve thought about doing in the past, but you just feel like it might be too hard. Well, we’re going to be talking about it in the Facebook group. I’m going to be talking about it here on the podcast.

In fact, this episode today kind of has a lot to do with alcohol and our desire for alcohol. And how we can diminish that desire if that’s something we want for ourselves. So definitely come check us out. It’s fun, we have a lot of fun over in the Facebook group. It’s just you know, you get the support, the encouragement, the inspiration from a bunch of other people that are just like you.

And then here’s a message I received a while back that I was going through some folders on my computer. And I found this message from Melissa. And I just wanted to share, share part of this with you guys. Because I thought this was really cool. And she just wrote, “Patrick, your podcasts and posts have helped me so much. So much already. It’s so awesome to find a group of like-minded people who understand the passion behind what makes us run. I feel fortunate to have this strong, amazing running family that I’m always adding to with groups like yours. With COVID I’ve been mostly running solo and feeling more connected through your online resources, and social media posts. And this has meant the world to me. Thank you. I can’t wait for more emails and podcasts.”

Thank you, Melissa. That was super sweet. And I don’t think I’ve shared this before on the podcast, but I wanted to make sure that I did. Obviously, she sent this when you know we were kind of going through some lockdown stuff and COVID and social distancing and running groups weren’t meeting and things like that.

I know a lot of that has changed. But it’s really cool that she reached out and shared that. And it would mean a lot to me if you could take a moment and leave a quick review of the podcast. You can do that in Apple podcasts. Just scroll down where it says leave a review, tap the stars and write a few words. It’s just a way of saying thank you for what I’m providing here on the show.

And then if you ever want a little help with any of this stuff with, you know, sports nutrition with getting your mindset right around, you know, not drinking or changing your eating habits, maybe losing some weight, you can work with me as a one on one coach, this is what I do. And I work with runners every day who are trying to improve themselves and want to become the most badass version of themselves, whatever that looks like for you.

Listen, I want you to love yourself, exactly as you are right now. Whether you’re, you know, whether you feel like you’re you have some weight to lose, or you feel like you’re, you know, you need to get faster as a runner, or you want to become healthier. None of that stuff really matters. And wherever you are right now, is perfect.

And you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. And you should love yourself exactly as you are right here in this moment. But if you want to improve where you are, that’s okay to like you can love yourself exactly as you are and still want to lose some weight. It doesn’t There’s nothing bad about that. It’s not fat-shaming, it’s not, you know, body negativity, this is all, I want to encourage you to love yourself where you are.

And if you want to improve something in your life, then I’m here to help you. Okay? There’s no, you know, there’s no shame in where you are, in this moment, we got to love ourselves exactly as we are. And sometimes we just need a little help getting to where we want to be.

I know, that was where I was, I was, you know, finding myself feeling very unhealthy, and continuing to gain weight. And I was not happy where I was, I still loved myself. You know, I still loved myself where I was, but I wanted to improve, you know, I could look at myself in the mirror and go like, Come on, dude, you got to change something here, you know.

And so I made some decisions. And I made some choices that led me to becoming healthier and losing weight and feeling great in the process. And you can do the same thing too.

So if you ever want to talk about coaching and just see what coaching looks like, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply, you and I’ll jump on a quick zoom call, we’ll have a short conversation, we’ll see if this is something you’re interested in. That’s it. No obligation, it can’t hurt to have a conversation. Okay, cool.

So demystifying desire, I’ve been excited about talking about this, because desire is one of those things that I think we get in our heads that it’s some big, complicated, ominous, mysterious thing. And it can really keep us stuck, whether it’s a desire for sugar, you know, or junk food, or scrolling through social media or alcohol, or, you know, whatever your desire is, whatever this strong desire that you have, it can seem overwhelming, and it can feel so big and overpowering.

And just feel like there’s nothing you can do about it, right. And if you want to make a change, like let’s say you want to stop drinking, you just have to like grit your teeth and white knuckle your way through it, right. And that’s not really the case. And we’re gonna talk about all this today. And one of the reasons I’m bringing this up, and especially talking about alcohol is because we’re doing that challenge in the Facebook group, the dry July challenge.

Alcohol is a big crutch for a lot of people. Lots of people use alcohol as a way of feeling better as a way of soothing themselves. Just like we use food. You know, we have talked about sugar in the past and how sugar can feel very addictive, it can be very hard to stop eating sugar, right.

So just I wanted to preface this was just saying like this conversation today is about we’re going to talk a lot about alcohol. I’m just using this as our vehicle because we’re talking about this in the Facebook group. Okay, so today’s focus is going to kind of be on you know, not drinking and alcohol and our desire for alcohol.

And, and maybe you don’t drink. Maybe you’re somebody who’s like, well, I don’t drink already. So this isn’t really an issue for me. And that’s totally fine. Just substitute, you know, your desire for something else sugar, junk food, shopping, whatever your thing is, you can just substitute because it’s all the same. The work is the same for whatever the desire is that you have, okay?

It’s just like, we just need to preface I just wanted to preface this by just talking about how I’m going to be talking about alcohol in this episode. Okay, so what is desire? Exactly? So if you look up the definition of desire, it says desire is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen, a strong feeling, in other words, desire is a feeling desire is not something that’s out there external to you.

Desire is inside you. It’s a feeling it’s an emotion. Desire is just a feeling. And this is kind of cool because when you look at it this way it right away, we’ve, you know, kind of eliminated a lot of the mystery around this right? So desires are just a feeling. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that all of your feelings, all of your emotions are always created by your thoughts.

So there’s this thought feeling action cycle, you have a thought about something that thought creates an emotional experience inside of you, that creates a feeling inside of you. And those emotions, those feelings that you have drive your actions, thought feeling action.

And it always happens in that order, you have a thought, that creates an emotion or a feeling. And that feeling will drive your action. This is the way it works all the time you think you’re doing something automatically, like you just doing it because, you know, you see a glass of wine and you just drink it.

But there’s a thought and a feeling in there before you take that action. Always, always always. Alright. So knowing this really helps a lot. This helped me a lot, for sure. And the other thing that’s kind of cool, is that desire is just something that is learned. It’s something that you learn over time, you’re not born with a desire to drink alcohol, right, I didn’t have a desire to drink alcohol until I started drinking alcohol.

So when I was in high school, I was a very shy kid, I was introverted, nerdy, awkward, full of fear, couldn’t talk to girls, very uncomfortable in my own skin. And, you know, I just I, no matter what I did, I could not change this, okay. And I just felt very uncomfortable and very awkward all the time.

Until I drank alcohol for the first time. And all of that kind of changed for me, right? All of a sudden, I felt more outgoing, more confident, the fear went away. I was funny, I was the life of the party. I’m talking to girls like I felt comfortable. All that stuff shifted for me because I drank alcohol.

So right away, I started to want more of what I wanted, I wanted that feeling. Right, I wanted to. I wanted to feel outgoing and confident. I didn’t want to feel fearful and uncomfortable anymore. I wanted that. That feeling that alcohol gaming. So all of a sudden, I had created a desire, I learned that alcohol could help me.

And it was actually a lot of what was happening, it was dampening those feelings I had. So I felt uncomfortable, awkward fearful. And the alcohol actually just squashed those feelings down. It diminished those feelings. And so that’s where the desire started to grow for me. And I learned that you know, alcohol kind of helped with this issue here.

So I learned the desire for alcohol. Right? It wasn’t actually the alcohol that was desiring. It was the feeling that I got from drinking. That’s what I was craving. That’s what I wanted. That was a strong feeling that I wanted, okay, my desire was very strong. But it wasn’t for the alcohol. It was what alcohol did for me. It made me feel better.

I was the life of the party, it was a lot of fun, felt more, more comfortable. So my desire was really to just feel less fearful, more comfortable, I want to feel safer. And alcohol made me feel more comfortable. So the real desire boils down for a lot of us the real desire boils down to comfort, it boils down to safety, I just want to feel more comfortable, I want to feel safer.

I don’t want to feel this fear. I don’t want to feel this anxiety. I don’t want to feel this stress, whatever I can do to feel more comfortable. And alcohol did that. For me, it made me feel more comfortable, at least I thought it did. So another way of saying this is like the desire was not the desire was to not feel the fear. The desire was to not feel the anxiety and the awkwardness.

And alcohol kind of numbed those feelings for me. So I didn’t have to feel those things, right. And I developed this. I learned this process, I learned that if I drink alcohol, I’m not going to feel that way. Right? So it was something that I learned which is this is good news, in my opinion, because if the desire is something that you learn, it’s something that you can unlearn.

If desire is something you learn, it’s something that you can change. And you’ve already done this in other places in your life, right? You’ve already had a strong desire for something, and then it’s gone away. Because desire is just a feeling and feelings come and go, right.

So, you know, think back to maybe, you know, when you were in high school, and maybe you were dating someone, and you had this obsession with this other person, you know, you had this intense desire to be with this person for the rest of your life, like you couldn’t imagine not being with this person. And now think of where you are today, you probably haven’t thought about that person until just now. And I started saying this, right?

I know, as I was writing some notes for this episode, I started thinking about those old girlfriends that I had back in high school, and I’m like, well, I have not thought about her in many years, like, you know, 40 years almost. And so it’s crazy. So we have these people that we think are, you know, we can’t live without, and we have this super strong desire for this other person, we can, you know, we want to be with them forever.

And then, you know, some years go by, and then you just stop thinking about them, and that desire is gone. So that’s something that you’ve already experienced in your life, you know, desire, comes and goes, it’s a feeling, Feelings come and go.

And so why would you want to change your desire? Why would you no longer want to have a strong desire? And the reason you would want to change it, or, you know, kind of get rid of that desire is because when you no longer desire, things like sugar, or junk food, or alcohol, there’s like so much freedom in that.

Because when you’re chained to this desire when you have this over desire for alcohol or food, you’re going to have a very hard time losing weight, you’re going to have a hard time, you know, improving your running performance, you’re going to have a hard time getting healthier.

And you know, you’re just going to be constantly in this cycle of kind of beating yourself up and engaging in bad behaviors and then beating yourself up again. And so it’s just like this vicious cycle, right? But when you no longer have the desire. You just don’t crave that anymore. And that’s where the freedom comes in.

And I hear people say, Well, I’m going to miss drinking. And I just, I can’t imagine not drinking, and I’m just going to miss it way too much. And here’s the thing, you’re thinking that now because you have this strong desire right now. And you can’t imagine not feeling that desire for alcohol. You can’t imagine not wanting it you can imagine not wanting to drink.

But it’s just like that old boyfriend and girlfriend that you had, you couldn’t imagine living without them. And now you’re like, yeah, whatever. That was interesting. That whole situation. But this is what freedom looks like, it looks like you’re not emotionally charged with this desire to have, you know, the sugar or the alcohol. This is what freedom looks like. Okay.

So one of the things we can do to change our desire is we have to understand, like what change looks like, okay, so you will learn over time that alcohol can dampen those difficult emotions that can dull the difficult emotions that you’re experiencing, right. And so you keep using alcohol in that way, and you keep getting better at it, right, you get better at what you practice.

So every time you feel stressed out, or you feel like you just need to take the edge off. You know, you just want to unwind, you go for a drink. And you keep practicing this and for years and years, and maybe decades, and you get really good at it, it becomes a very unconscious automatic habit, you do it automatically.

But really, it’s always a thought, that’s creating a feeling that’s driving an action. It always works that way. It’s just you’ve gotten so good at it, you’ve created this pattern, this thought pattern. That’s really an unconscious habit. It’s just super easy and effortless. It seems like it’s automatic. But really, it’s always a thought feeling action that’s happening, right.

And so one of the things I’m going to have you do here we’ll talk about this in just a minute is identifying those pieces and identifying, you know what’s really going on in that moment and interrupting that pattern.

Because that’s the work that we have to do is we have to change the pattern. If you want to change the habit. We’ve got to interrupt the pattern and then change the pattern, okay? But it’s just something you’ve learned to desire, something you’ve just been practicing. It’s something that you’ve learned. And it’s something that’s very habitual, automatic, and unconscious for you

We just want to bring up the awareness, we want to bring it into our consciousness. Right. So, in order to change the desire, dampen it or make it go away, you have to interrupt the pattern, you have to notice when the desire comes up for you. So you’re gonna think you know what? A drink sounds really good, right by now, I, you know, I said, I’m not going to drink, but I’m, there’s a bottle of wine in the fridge. And I just, you know, it just sounds really good. Right now, I just want to take the edge off, I just want to relax, I want to unwind destress, I just want to feel good.

So when you notice this is coming up for you when you notice that you have that desire, that’s when you need to stop, you need to interrupt the pattern in that moment, while it is happening, do not take a drink. This is not easy, I get it, it’s hard. It’s an uncomfortable thing to do. But this is how you’re going to break the habit. And this is how you’re going to diminish the desire.

So you can’t skip this part, you have to stop you, you got to just like nod, take the drink, okay. And then you have to identify the emotion or the feeling that you’re having at that moment. Right, you have to stop and be present with yourself. Now, when you stop and you don’t take the drink, you’re going to start to feel something.

And your first reaction is going to be I want to make this feeling go away. And if you’re choosing not to drink, you might choose to do something else like to distract yourself in some other way. I’m just going to go for a run, I’m going to do some laundry, I’m going to wash the dog, I’m going to do something just to like, take my mind off of this.

And I don’t want you to do that. In fact, it’s not going to help you’re not going to be you’re not going to become better at changing the desire if you do that. All you’re going to do is just you know you’re replacing the drink with some other way of distracting yourself. And we don’t want to do that.

You have to create awareness about what is really going on inside you inside your brain inside your body. So what I want you to do is when you notice that urge comes and that desire is there to drink. You just have to stop, stop right there, interrupt the pattern, do not take the drink, sit down, close your eyes, and feel whatever’s coming up for you just feel the emotion is the part where you’re like you had me up until this point.

But you just have to do this part. It’s so important. What is this thing you’re feeling? Is it stress? Is it anger? Like, name it. Is it boredom? Is it frustration? Is it anxiety? Describe the feeling, name it, and describe it. What is this feeling like inside your body? We feel our emotions in our body, our thoughts we experience in our brains in our heads, our emotions, our feelings we experience in our body.

And they manifest in ways like a tightness in your shoulders, stiffness in your neck, turning in your stomach, a heaviness in your chest, things like that. Describe the way it feels. And you only have to take a few minutes to do this, like five minutes.

Sit down, close your eyes, name that thing you’re feeling. Name the emotion. Feel it in your body describe the way you’re feeling it in your body. Because what emotion really is, is a sensation in your body. That’s it. It’s a sensation in your body. But we’re so afraid to feel these things, we’re so afraid to feel an emotion that we’re drinking instead. And we’re eating instead.

Because when we drink or we eat, it just stuffs that emotion down and it makes it kind of go away. It doesn’t really go away, by the way. It’s still there. But you’re dampening it. And you’re like pushing it down. And I heard you describe it this way. It’s kind of like holding a beach ball underwater. Like if you’re in a pool or in the ocean, you’re trying to hold that ball underwater.

And the more you push it down, the more it wants to just shoot up. And it’s just like you can’t hold it down forever. At some point, it’s going to come exploding out through the water. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with our emotions. When we drink over them when we eat over them.

So this process is so important. You have to understand what it is you’re feeling and you just have to feel it. So, identify what it is you’re feeling. Name the emotion and then feel it in your body. That’s it. Take five minutes to be present with yourself, with exactly what you’re feeling.

And I would encourage you to write it down, this is really helpful through this process is just to write down what you’re feeling and how it feels in your body, you’re going to be creating so much awareness around while you’re drinking, that that desire will start to immediately just diminish, I promise you.

And the key part of this is like, we don’t want to try to make the feelings go away. And this is going to be your natural inclination, you’re going to be like, I just want to make this go away. I don’t like to feel the stress, I don’t like to feel the anxiety or the boredom, I just want to make this go away.

But the key thing here, and the key habit we’re trying to change is not dampening our emotions, not avoiding our emotions, not trying to numb out to our emotions, the key thing we’re trying to change is we want to feel them, we want to be present with them, we want to acknowledge them, and it may not feel good. And that’s okay, you can do this, you can do this for five minutes, you can feel a little bit of stress for five minutes, you will not die, I promise you. Don’t do anything to try to change how you feel. This is kind of a radical concept, right?

Just feeling your feelings, it seems so simple. And it is simple. It’s not easy. It’s uncomfortable. But the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more comfortable it becomes. In order to change that thought feeling action habit that you’re in, and change the desire that you’re feeling, you’ve got to get good at feeling stuff, you just got to get good at feeling what you’re feeling, and not giving in to it.

And here’s something that’s kind of interesting. This is not just true for negative emotions. So we talk about stress and fear and anxiety and anger and all this stuff, right. But sometimes you might be feeling a lot of joy or happiness or excitement. And those emotions can be very strong and feel very uncomfortable for a lot of people because we’re not, we’re not used to feeling those things. So they feel weird to us, right?

Happiness can feel very uncomfortable for us because it’s not our norm. So we often feel like I just want to drink because you know, I’m feeling a little too good. I want to like, dampen that emotion, you don’t even know you’re doing this, I promise you, you think you’re just drinking to celebrate or have fun. And a lot of times we’re drinking to just feel comfortable. We’re not wired as humans to seek happiness, we’re wired to seek comfort. We’re not wired to experience our emotions, we’re wired to, you know, numb out and try to avoid our emotions.

This is not something we’re used to doing at all, just sending with our feelings and feeling them good, bad, whatever we want to whatever, however you want to label them. And these are just labels, right? There’s no good or bad emotion. They’re all just emotions. And as humans, it’s cool, we get to experience all the emotions, right?

So we got to feel what we’re feeling, we just have to be present with that, we have to create the awareness that internal that self-awareness, it’s so key, right. And in order to make any kind of change, it’s not enough, just know this or think about it, you have to take action. And I know a lot of you that are listening to this right now will never do this, you will never take the time to just sit with your feelings and write them down. And that’s okay, that’s fine.

But the solution to lessening your desire for alcohol or food or whatever your strong desire is, the solution is to get good at experiencing your feelings. Now, I’ve been practicing this for a long time. And I’ve changed a lot of habits, I’ve changed a lot of bad habits. I’ve replaced those habits with new ones, habits that helped me to grow and helped me to evolve, and helped me to become more of who I want to be.

And these new habits, are now in alignment with that future version of myself that I’m always working towards. I’m not superhuman, there’s nothing really special about me. I’m just willing to feel my emotions, all of them. And you can get good at this too. When you do you can become an emotional badass. I love this little phrase, the becoming an emotional badass. I think this is something we can all strive for.

And I was talking to a client recently who she and I were talking about this exact topic about you know, just sitting with your feelings and feeling them instead of trying to eat over them or instead of trying to drink over them. And she said that she was going over this with her 12-year-old daughter, she was explaining how to do this with her daughter and explaining her that it was okay for her to not feel good and to just feel her feelings.

And that was okay. And I was like, Well, what a radical concept that must be. For kids especially like to be taught this at an early age, I’m really hoping that this kind of stuff catches on with kids. And that we can learn how to do this early on in our life, and we can get good at it and we can become emotional badass is at an early age, and the rest of our lives can be, it’s not going to be without struggles or challenges.

But I think we can just be so much better and engage in less of the kind of behavior that we don’t want to be engaged in, you know, like drinking too much or, or eating over our feelings, you know. So I think this is cool stuff that we can teach our kids, you know.

So I want to encourage you, even though you might think it’s weird, even though you may probably not want to do it, I want to encourage you to do this work to take action because it’s only by taking action that you’re going to make any kind of change, okay?

I want to encourage you to stop giving in to every desire that you have. You know, I want you to stop giving in to seeking comfort and safety all the time and seeking more of the known I want you to seek discomfort I want you to seek, you know, the unknown. I want you to do the harder thing, which is to just feel whatever it is that’s coming up for you without doing anything to make it go away.

And then over time, as you get good at this, a lot of times that the desire, once you understand and you’ve demystified desire and you understand what’s really going on inside you, you can begin to change this so easily and so quickly, and it’ll become a habit for you, it’ll become an unconscious automatic habit for you where you have, you know, you experience a desire for something, and it just sort of like you can instantly just kind of make it change, you can make it go away and lessen it, and then you don’t need it anymore.

And you can actually over time, you can learn how to change your thoughts and feelings. But the first step is you have to create the awareness that your thoughts are causing your feelings, your thoughts are causing your desire. It’s not the alcohol that’s causing your desire, the alcohol sitting over there is not causing you to feel this way. It’s your thoughts about it that are causing you to feel this way.

And over time, you can learn how to change those thoughts. And when you get good at this, you can go anywhere you can be around people who are drinking and go hang out at bars with people, you can have alcohol in your house and not desire it at all. And that’s what I want for you.

I want you to be able to just live your life and hang out with people who are drinking and not be you know, having to white knuckle it. Through all of that, I want you to experience the freedom that comes with understanding desire and eliminating that desire for things that aren’t serving you.

Alright, so I hope you got something out of this episode today. If you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. Come join us over in the Facebook group for our dry July challenge. We’re gonna be talking more about this kind of stuff all month long. Love you all keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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