Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
There are a lot of dieticians and weight loss coaches out there who preach the benefits of tracking your food. They suggest tracking every bite you eat, entering all of your food into an app each …
Continue Reading about 211. Should You Be Tracking Your Food? →
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 211 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, should you be tracking your food? There are a lot of dietitians out there and weight loss coaches who preach the benefits of tracking your food, they suggest tracking every bite to eat, and drink all your food into an app every day. And then sticking to this routine for basically, forever.
And honestly, I’m not a big fan of this particular approach for many reasons, which I will share with you here on today’s podcast. So today on the Running Lean podcast, I answer the big burning question, should you be tracking your food? If no, why not? If yes, how should you do it?
But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about nutrition, weight loss, improving your running, getting stronger. And if you’re new, if you’re just listening to the podcast, you might be like, oh my gosh, this is very overwhelming. I don’t even know where to start with all this.
If that sounds like you, totally fine, I got you covered, I created a free hour-long training just for you to kind of get you started with all of this. And you can check it out anytime just go to my website, runningleancoaching.com and click on the link that says Free Training.
I created this hour-long training, it’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner, you’re going to learn all the basics of nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset; all geared towards you the runner and everything that I teach here on the podcast, everything that I work on with my clients.
So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger and become the most badass version of yourself here in 2024, then this free training is exactly what you need. runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training and get started on your weight loss journey today.
Okay, let’s get into this episode here, should you be tracking your food? So, I’ve had a lot of people that I’ve been talking to lately, and they’ve told me that they have worked with dieticians in the past, or coaches in the past, who have suggested that they track their food and do this very meticulously, and they have to track every single bite that they eat.
And they have to enter everything into an app, and they have to hit certain macro numbers and calorie numbers. And if they don’t do everything exactly perfectly, then they’re not going to lose weight, they’re not going to be healthy things are not going to work for them, okay.
And I understand sort of the concepts behind that and that they want to, you know, get people to this place where they’re eating exactly what they’re supposed to, quote, unquote, supposed to be eating. The amount of food they’re supposed to eat, eating the number of calories they’re supposed to be eating, the right percentage of macros, the right macro breakdown that they’re supposed to be eating.
And, and I understand that part of it, you know, you gotta be getting 1500 calories a day. And if you don’t, you know, you got to make up for it somewhere, so you got to make sure you’re getting exactly the right amount of calories every single day. Okay. So I understand that part of it.
The problem I have with this is that this is a very new concept in the history of human beings. You know, we have been around as some form of human being for around two and a half million years. And they’ve tracked us back to two and a half million years ago. And we’ve been growing and evolving in that span of time.
That’s a large span of time, think about that. Two and a half million years. For the 2.4999 million years, we did not need the Food Track. And we didn’t have all the obesity and overweight issues and the diseases, and the metabolic dysfunction and diabetes and all that stuff that we have today.
We’ve only been tracking food for how long, you know, maybe a few decades? We’ve only been using an app since we started using apps on phones, so maybe 15 years, 12 years, something like that. So in the grand scheme of things, I look at this and I kind of shake my head a little bit because I’m like do we really need to be logging everything into an app, and counting all of our calories?
And, you know, making sure we’re getting this exact right breakdown of macros every single day. And if we don’t do it perfectly, then we’re going to basically die. You know, and I just think this is a kind of a silly concept. I’m a big fan of going back to our ancestors and trying to mimic what they did.
What did they eat? How often did they eat? What kinds of foods did they eat? How much did they eat, I want to go back to that, I think that is a much better way of approaching your health and your fitness than, you know, looking at an app on your phone, and making sure you get a bunch of numbers, right? I just don’t think it is necessary.
Number one, I really don’t think it works for most people. Because is this something that you can do sustainably? Is this something you’re going to do forever? Do you have to now track all your food forever, or else you’re gonna like all of a sudden balloon up and gain a bunch of weight?
Because if so, there’s something very wrong with what you’re doing. Because we shouldn’t have to do that. So my initial take on this is that I think tracking your food, there are some benefits to it. And I’ll get into some of that in a minute here.
But I think tracking your food and logging all your calories, and making sure you hit all these numbers and stuff. I really don’t think it’s a sustainable practice. And remember, whatever you do has to be sustainable for you.
The right diet for you is the one that you can sustain. The right method for you when it comes to your nutrition and how much you eat and the kinds of foods you eat and what you eat, all that has to be something that you can do forever.
If it’s just something you’re going to do for a short period of time, and it has some benefits to it, and you can learn some things great, that’s fine. And just know it’s going to be a short-term fix.
But I’ve been hearing from a lot of people lately, who’ve been telling me that they’ve worked with other dieticians or coaches who expect them to track all their food and hit all these numbers every single day forever. And the other thing about this is that it’s not really teaching you much in the way of like, oh, these are the foods that are healthy for me, these are the foods that keep me full, these are the foods that work for me, you know, I feel better when I’m eating less often, or I want to get in tune with my natural body. And my body’s natural senses.
Like there are satiety sensors that we have in our body that tell us hey, we’re done eating, we’re full, don’t need to put any more food in us here. We want to get in touch with that. We want to get in touch with our hunger signals to understand, hey, you know what, I’m actually hungry right now.
Not just like, you know, I’m kind of bored. I’m like rifling through the pantry to see what crunchy salty stuff I can eat that will just satisfy my boredom or something like that. So anyway, I know I went off on a little bit of a tangent there.
But listen, the way we have been trained to like focus on calories and numbers and macros and all that stuff. I think there’s some benefits to that for a short period of time just to get some ballpark numbers and to get some awareness of what you’re doing.
But the real key here is that whatever you do has to be sustainable. And I don’t think logging all your food, every single bite you eat every time you you know, lick or taste something that you need to track and I think that is not a sustainable practice, okay?
Now, there are some benefits to keeping track of what you’re eating. And you don’t have to be super detailed about it. But if you’re keeping track of the foods you’re eating, let’s say you’re just keeping a food journal. I think this is a great first step for everybody. To start keeping a food journal just write down the foods that you’re eating as you go through your day, and you eat something you write it down.
If you have a snack in the afternoon, you write that down. If you have a bite of your kid’s cookie, you write that down, you just write down everything you’re eating for the day. If you do this for a short period of time, a few days a week, you are going to start to have a lot of self-awareness about what it is you are actually eating and not eating.
Because so many people are like yeah, I eat pretty healthy. I’m like okay, what does that mean exactly? Oh, you know, I eat healthy foods. I eat lots of fruits and vegetables and stuff. I’m like, okay, you don’t ever eat chips or crackers or cookies or french fries. No, I really don’t eat that stuff. Okay, well keep a food log and then you tell me what is really going on?
And then it’s like, oh, yeah, well, I did eat, you know, some ice cream from my kids. And then oh, yeah, we went to pizza. And then oh, yeah, I did eat a couple of large fries this week or whatever, it just starts to create a lot of awareness about what you really are doing.
And you’ve got to be honest with yourself, if you’re doing this food logging, this journaling. And people who journal their food, people who write down what they’re eating every day, they tend to make better choices, they tend to eat healthier, they tend to not overeat as much, they eat less often. And they tend to lose more weight.
So if you want to get started on a weight loss journey, I think one of the best things you can do is start keeping a food journal, and just writing down what you’re doing. So just create that self-awareness, that one little step right there will start moving you in the right direction, towards making better choices.
Because you’re starting to have this awareness of what it is you’re actually doing, as opposed to just thinking about it. Because when we think about it, and we’re disassociated with it, you know, we’re not writing it down in the moment, we can just remember the good stuff that we do, we don’t remember all those times we sneak the french fries, you know, from our kid’s plate, or the you know, dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets or whatever it is we’re eating.
And I suggest you do this in the easiest way possible. And easiest way for me would be to just write it down using a piece of paper and a pen, or a pencil in a diary or a journal or, you know, some sort of a notebook or something simple like that. Don’t make it more complicated, we don’t want our method of logging or journaling to get in the way of making it easy, it has to be something that is very simple for you to do.
So I used to keep this little tiny notebook, I would carry it around with me if I went out. And it was something that was very small. And then I would just write down what I was eating each day. And I did this for a long time.
And it really worked, it really helped me to begin to create better habits and make better choices around what I was eating and stuff like that. So it doesn’t have to be anything complicated, it can be as simple as just getting a little tiny notebook. And then write down what you’re doing every day as you do it.
You’ve got to do it like sort of in the moment, that’s the best way to do it. So keeping a food journal is great. But there’s even a better way of doing this.
So when you are logging your food after the fact, you are basically saying, here’s what I did five minutes ago, here’s what I did an hour ago, here’s what I did earlier today. And that is fine. And again, you’re starting to create a lot of awareness about what you are doing throughout the day, or what you have done throughout the day.
But there is a much more powerful approach, what we want to do is we want to set ourselves up for success ahead of time. And so I’m a huge fan of pre-planning your food, and writing down what you’re going to do ahead of time.
And one of the big reasons why this works is because you are making decisions in advance, you are making a decision about what you’re eating, but you’re doing it for tomorrow. So you’re you’re deciding today, what you’re going to be eating tomorrow.
And why this works is because when you make decisions ahead of time, you’re using a completely different part of your brain than when you’re making decisions in the moment. When you make decisions in the moment, you’re using that little tiny almond-sized part of your brain called the amygdala, which is one of the most primal parts of our brain. It is responsible for our fight or flight, our fear center.
It’s what’s responsible for our primal urges, like, you know, just like food, sex. You know, whatever feels good in the moment, those kinds of primal decisions, those kinds of primal choices that we have to make in the moment.
So we don’t want to be making decisions using that part of our brain because typically we’re going to choose whatever just feels good right now, we’re going to choose the thing that is the most pleasurable.
We’re going to think, you know, we’re going to choose the pizza if that’s what when we decide that we’re going to have if we don’t decide ahead of time and we have a pizza sitting in front of us, we’re going to decide to eat the pizza because oh my gosh, it’s pizza. It’s amazing. There it is. It smells good. I want that I’m going to eat it right now. Okay.
The other way of doing this is making decisions in advance. And when you do that you’re using your pre-frontal cortex, your pre-frontal cortex that is a modern thinking part of our brain. It’s the part of our brain we use to make good decisions. It’s our planning brain.
And when we use our pre-frontal cortex to make decisions, we tend to make good decisions, we’re going to decide ahead of time, we’re going to use our prefrontal cortex to say, I’m eating, you know, a salad and chicken for dinner tomorrow night, even though I know the kids are probably going to want pizza. And my husband will probably bring home a pizza, but I’m going to eat what I’ve planned to eat today.
When you make that decision ahead of time, you are much, much more likely to stick to that decision. In the moment, you’ve decided you’ve made a little promise to yourself ahead of time. And then when tomorrow comes, and that pizza is sitting there, you’re going to remember that you’ve made this other choice. And that’s what your choice is going to use, you’re going to stick to that plan.
This is where things really can start to come together for you. Because you’re planning ahead, you’re making good decisions ahead of time, you’re making this promise to yourself that you want to keep, because you don’t want to break a promise that you make to yourself, you do this all the time; you break promises to yourself, but it never feels good, right?
You plan ahead, you make a good decision, you make this promise to yourself that this is what you’re doing tomorrow. And then when tomorrow comes the day is so much easier, you don’t have to think about anything, you just do what you said you’re gonna do. You’ve got it all planned out, you know, when you’re eating, you know how much you’re eating, you know, the foods you’re eating, and then you just stick to that plan.
This is how you build any new habit. If you want to create a new habit, you have to change your thinking patterns, you’ve got to change your daily activities, you’ve got to change your actions and changing your actions is hard. This is hard work to do. And when it comes to food, this seems to be the hardest area for people to make, change and make change last. So creating new habits around food is a lot harder than say going to the gym every day.
If you’re somebody who’s like, okay, it’s a new year, I’m going to the gym every day, you might stick to that pretty religiously for a while. I know a lot of people, who end up quitting the gym after February or whatever the gyms are crowded in January, and they’re empty again in March.
But for some of you, you’re like, I’m going to stick to this new running plan, I’m going to stick to this new workout plan and you do it and you’re really good about that. Because it’s important to you and you do it, you make that plan ahead of time you write out your training schedule for the week, and then you stick to it.
Do the same thing with food. That’s all I’m asking you to do here. Do the same thing to food with your food. Just make sure that you are planning ahead. Know what you’re doing tomorrow, or the rest of the week, you can plan a week in advance, you don’t have to.
But when you do this, when you make this plan ahead of time, you’re gonna stick with a plan, you’re gonna start to develop a good habit around that you already have done it for running, you’ve already done it around your workouts at the gym.
And this approach works in all these different areas. It works for planning your workouts, it works for planning your strength session, you know, just decide ahead of time, what muscle groups am I going to work tomorrow, what exercises am I going to do? How many sets and reps write that stuff down?
You already plan your runs, you know what days you’re working out, you know what your runs are going to be like, you know when your long run is this weekend, right? You know what the workouts are, and you know the goal for each of these workouts, just do the same thing with food.
Okay, if there’s any area of your life where you need to create healthy patterns, better habits, or make better choices consistently, then plan them ahead of time until you get the hang of it. And those habits are formed. Once those habits are formed, it becomes so much easier.
And you don’t have to do this forever. You don’t have to make this plan ahead of time and stick to it forever. When I first started out on this last, you know journey of losing weight improving my body composition and developing these good habits, I was very very religious about planning and tracking my food every single day.
I did this consistently for like eight months straight every day. I don’t think I missed a day in there. Maybe I did here and there but I pretty much never missed a day because I was afraid that if I stopped doing it, I would like just fall apart and I would fail.
I was kind of paranoid that I was going to slip up and just go back into my old habits, if I didn’t continue to make this plan and stick to it every single day, and listen to it doesn’t typically take eight months to train your brain and develop good habits. But I was a little bit paranoid, I kind of tend to do things to the extreme.
So I was like, I’m just going to do this until I know without a doubt that I can live my life without it. And then I eventually gave it up, I eventually quit tracking. And those first few days, I was like, oh, my gosh, what am I going to do, but I figured it out. And it works that my point with all this is that it did work for me.
And it doesn’t take that long, you know, I usually say if you can be religious and track consistently every day for like 30 days, or 60 days, somewhere in that range, you typically can start to, you know, create those new neural pathways in your brain create good habits, and this becomes kind of effortless for you, it becomes your new normal.
And if it’s your new normal, then you don’t have to effort your way through the day, you can just you just know what you’re doing. And you can do it. Okay. So make a 24-hour plan. This is the way I’ve worked with people who have planned a day in advance.
And that works really, really well just make sure you’re doing this at least one day in advance. I did have somebody who wanted to plan a month ahead of time, and she wrote out an entire month’s schedule of every meal she was eating for a month. Now that was awesome for her, but I don’t think we need to go to that extreme.
If you want to plan a few days ahead of time or a week ahead of time, I think that’s great. A lot of people love to do meal prepping. And so they’ll prep once a week for the week. And they’ll do their shopping for the week. And if that’s you, and that works for you, I think that’s great.
But a few days is plenty of time a day in advance is really that’s all that’s required. But we have to be making these decisions ahead of time. Don’t wait until the day of or it’s like lunchtime, and you’re like, I wonder what I should eat today. No. Decide in advance.
And you don’t have to use some app. And you don’t have to, you know, track every calorie and every macro and all that I love just using a notebook or a journal or a diary. And just write down what you’re doing tomorrow, just write it down, use a pen, when you use a pen or a pencil and you write it down by hand, it kind of cements that into your brain better than like typing into an app, there’s sort of a disconnect when you do that.
But when you write it down on a piece of paper, it tends to cement that decision into your brain. So now you’ve made the decision, you’ve made it in advance, you’ve made this promise to yourself.
Now you just have to keep that promise to yourself tomorrow. Because when you do that, when you keep the promises that you make to yourself every single day, you start to build this immense amount of trust in yourself.
You start to build integrity with yourself, you start to build confidence. And you know that you can do this, you know that you can stay consistent with this. And you’ll start making progress. I promise you that if you make this plan every day, and you stick to the plan every day.
That is how you make progress. That is how you lose weight. And that is how you keep it off. Because now you’re training your brain that this is how I do things now. Okay, everyone I’m working with right now, this is January of 2024. Everybody I’m working with this month, we are making this 24-hour plan every day. And we are committing to do it for the month of January.
So we’re challenging ourselves to do this. And everybody’s being super consistent with this with this. And they’re setting themselves up for success not only for this month or the next few months but for the year.
They’re like restarting the year on this really positive vibe of like, I’m being consistent, I’m making good choices. And I’m promising these things to myself. And I’m keeping these promises to myself, and they’re making great progress too.
Several people that I’m working with have said their weight loss has been a little bit slow. Or maybe they went out you know, took a few steps back during the holidays, you know, things have stalled out a little bit.
But lately, they have been planning every single day they’ve been planning ahead and now they’re starting to see their weight go down again. And all they have changed is this one little thing of making a plan every day making an advance and then sticking to that plan.
This is how powerful this little daily habit can be. So this is the work that you need to start doing for January. Should you be tracking your food? I think there’s some benefit to pre-planning your food. I think there are benefits to journaling your food if you’re just getting started with all this. Really, the most powerful way of doing it though, is planning ahead of time. Okay.
If you want help with all this I always got you covered you can go to my website runningleancoaching.com, click on Work With Me and we can talk about working together.
Cool, all right, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
Probably the number one issue people struggle with when it comes to healthy eating is sticking with it! They do great for a few weeks or a few months but then eventually find themselves elbow-deep …
Continue Reading about 57. How to Make Healthy Eating a Way of Life →
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 57 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. Today, I’m going to be talking about how to make healthy eating a way of life. Probably the biggest issue that people struggle with when it comes to healthy eating is sticking with it.
They do great for a few weeks or maybe a few months. But then eventually they find themselves elbow-deep in the edible cookie dough and they have no idea how they got there. Well, here’s the thing. We all have the ability to make healthy eating a way of life. For some people, it’s no problem for others, it seems virtually impossible.
So today I’m going to talk about what’s going on here. Why it’s easy for some people to make healthy eating a way of life and why for others, it’s really hard. I’m also going to offer some practical tips to help you start making that shift that mental shift from the temporary diet mentality to the permanent way of life mentality. Cool. All right, I’m gonna get into all that in just a minute.
If you haven’t already, come check us out on Facebook, we have this awesome Running Lean community on Facebook. And next month, this is February 2021, we’re going to be doing a 28-day low carb challenge. So our focus for the month will be on reducing problematic carbs. So we’re talking about sugar and refined grains.
Mostly, this is not a no carbs deal here. You know, this isn’t like keto month or anything like that. What we’re trying to do is just see what it feels like to ditch the really problematic carbs for a couple of weeks or four weeks if you decide to do that. So I’m going to be offering some training each week in the Facebook group, during the challenge period here, tell you how to do this simply and safely.
And we’ll also be offering encouragement for one another. We’ll support each other through this whole month. Okay, so join us in the Facebook group. And this Sunday, this will be the 31st of January, I’m going to do a kickoff call. So our weekly coaching calls that I normally do on Sundays, this one will be all about kicking off our 28 day low-carb challenge, cool.
It’s gonna be fun. It might open your eyes to some different ways of doing things and I think it could change your life for the better. So if you’re interested, just come check us out on Facebook, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook.
Here’s a recent five-star review of the Running Lean podcast from Rudy Root. Love the name by the way. And Rudy Root says, “Five stars. Super awesome podcast. I’ve been listening since last summer and find so much inspiration from this podcast. I’ve actually listened to many of the podcasts twice. Because there aren’t many great podcasts out there. So many of them sound monotone and rehearsed, but not this one. Patrick’s passion comes through and his sincerity. I’ve learned so much about journaling, mindset, food fasting, and of course running. I’m impressed that Patrick shares so much knowledge for free. The Facebook group is also worth checking out. I enjoy the Sunday live videos too. Again, so much you can learn from on this podcast.”
Thank you, Rudy wrote for that awesome review. And if you feel moved, you can share the love as well. If you enjoy the podcast, it would mean so much to me. If you would just take a moment and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It’s just a nice way for you to say thank you. Cool, awesome.
Alright, let’s get into this topic today. I’m excited about this. Because this is something that is very near and dear to my heart and this is how to make healthy eating a way of life. So the problem that most people face is that you know, they have this issue, they’re like overweight, okay, or they don’t feel good.
Maybe they have inflammation, bloating, gas, health problems, all kinds of, you know, metabolic issues, right. And so, the answer is just to change how you’re eating right? Change your diet, do something different. You know, for most people just switching from the standard American diet to literally anything else is going to be is going to, you know, help you to improve in some ways, okay?
But whatever it is that you adopt, whatever healthy eating plan that you get on – vegetarian pescatarian, Paleo, the South Beach diet, whatever it is. I mean, you know that you need to do these things, right, you know what you need to do, okay, and so you do it.
So you start just taking some action, you start changing how you eat, you’re changing the types of foods you’re eating, and maybe how often you’re eating, okay. And for most people, it starts out pretty good, like a few weeks go by, you might be able to stick with it, you start to feel better, and you might even lose some weight.
But then something happens, something always happens by the way, and you find yourself you know, gorging on cupcakes, or whatever your bingeable food of choice is. The edible cookie dough is so hilarious, I think it’s funny that they even make such a thing. It’s like, we know you guys like to eat raw cookie dough. So we’re just going to make that just eat that, okay.
But what happens is, you’re able to stick to it, most people are able to stick to some sort of healthy eating plan for a few weeks or a couple of months. But then they quit, they can’t do it anymore. Okay. And a lot of times, they blame that diet or that diet doesn’t work.
And they’re not really taking responsibility for their own actions. Okay. And I’m gonna get into why it’s hard to take responsibility for our own actions and why we don’t do that very well, especially when it comes to sticking with a nutrition or exercise plan. But the core problem, though, is that after a few weeks, or a few months, most people quit.
Now, I have to say this, like not all diets are the same. When it comes to changing your diet changing what you’re eating, some diets are, are much harder to stick to, in particular, like caloric restriction diets. So any diet that reduces calories is going to put your body into this kind of starvation mode, and you end up being most people end up being very hungry all the time, like overly hungry, and they end up getting to a point where they just start binging on junk food again.
Also, these caloric restriction diets tend to slow your metabolism down. So you’ll end up burning fewer calories. So not only are you hungry all the time, but your metabolism actually starts to slow down to match what you’re taking in. And so the weight loss tends to stall and kind of just plateau after a little bit.
So any diet that makes you super hungry, though, is going to be very hard to stick to, okay, it’s almost impossible to stick to a diet and expect to lose weight if you’re like voraciously, hungry all the time. And most diets work on some principle, some version of a caloric restriction.
Okay, so this is why most typical diets are so hard to make a way of life, right? For most people, it’s not impossible, just it’s very difficult to stick to a caloric restriction type of diet for any long period of time. It’s very hard to make this a way of life for sure.
Okay, well, the type of diet does matter. There’s bigger issues at play here. Some people do well with caloric restriction, and they can do that for their whole life. And that’s fine. And most people have an issue with that, though. So the things I want to talk about here are the so the first thing is this idea of the diet mentality.
The diet mentality is this underlying principle that what you’re doing is temporary. I’m going on a diet, that that just sounds like you’re doing something very short-term, right? You know, I’m going on a diet, and then I’ll go off the diet. You know, it’s it doesn’t sound permanent, right?
Whether you consciously are even aware of this or not, when you say I’m going on a diet, it kind of implies that you’re making changes for a short period of time, and then you’ll be able to go at some point and to go back to doing things the way you used to do. Right. This is sort of the unspoken rule, I guess you could say, or principle behind most diets. It’s this mentality that it’s temporary, okay?
There’s also the mentality that it has to be hard. And then it has to be uncomfortable, and you have to suffer your way through it. You know, and once you suffer long enough, you know, maybe you get to your goal weight, then you can go back to not suffering anymore and eating comfortably again.
So eating all the sugar, all the refined grains, all the comfort, food, all this stuff that got you overweight in the first place. Yeah, just go back to eating that stuff. Again, this is the mentality of a diet, right? It’s temporary, it’s super hard, you’re going to suffer. And then at some point, you can just go back to doing things the way you used to do and get back to being comfortable.
Again, you know, those things that you used to do that got you 40 or 50 pounds overweight in the first place. Do you see the kind of ridiculousness of this way of thinking, the way that I do? Good, I hope you do. This mentality, it just does not work and never has worked. And it never will.
To think you can go back to your old ways, the stuff that got you, you know, metabolically unhealthy, overweight, whatever it is, to think you can go back to doing that, and not like gain all the weight back and be become unhealthy, again, is bananas. It just is totally bananas. I don’t understand it.
But a lot of people think this, even people I work with sometimes, you know, we change their diet, we get them where they’re starting to get healthy. And they have this thought that like it’s temporary, they can go back to doing the old things. Again, I missed that way of eating. Of course, you do. That way of eating is amazing.
It feels great to eat pasta, bread, and sugar all the time. Like that stuff is amazing. But it got you sick, and it got you super overweight and unhealthy. You can’t expect to go back to doing that and not suffer the consequences. Okay. So remember, nothing changes if nothing changes, you can’t expect different results by doing the same things over and over again.
Trust me, I’ve tried this. I tried this for years and years, and it kept gaining weight. I was like, maybe if I just try this harder. If I just eat more carbs and more fruit and exercise more, it’ll finally work for me. And it just was never working. Maybe if I count my calories harder, maybe if I kept three apps that were tracking and a spreadsheet for tracking all of my macros that would help, and like no, this stuff was working right.
And I just kept gaining weight. I finally had to throw my hands in the air at some point and just say, okay, I’m going to try anything, whatever I need to do, it’s whatever I’m doing is not working, I need to try something different. Okay. So my point here is that you, you can’t get into this mentality of diet, this is like temporary, and you can go back to doing what you used to do, that is not going to work. All right?
What happens though, when you’re entrenched in this temporary diet mentality, you’re just bound to fail, right? Your chances of quitting are so much higher. Why? Because you’re not in it for the long haul, you’re thinking in terms of a few weeks or a few months. And guess what, that’s exactly what you get, you can do it for a few weeks, or a few months, and then you quit.
So this thought that you have whether it’s conscious or not, this thoughts that you have is going to lead to that outcome of quitting in a few weeks or a few months. Even though you’re not really aware of it. And you may blame the diet, you may just say, Oh, that diet doesn’t work. No, this is what you’re thinking about it. Okay.
So what’s the alternative? What’s the alternative to this, like, temporary diet mentality? You know, the alternative is the way of life mentality, right? You’ve got to change your whole mindset around healthy eating. You have to let go of that whole old diet mentality, idea, that temporary idea, and you have to adopt this new way of life mentality.
Why does this work? Well, when you make healthy eating a way of life you’re no longer in this temporary mindset. Okay, you have a mindset of permanence, right? Healthy eating becomes who you are, it becomes what you do. You’ll have a much easier time sticking to it because in your mind, you’re never going back to eating the way that you used to eat again.
You’ll never quit because quitting isn’t an option, you have this deep desire at the core of your being to be as healthy as possible. And it’s a for life kind of a deal. So you develop this unshakable determination.
Think about it this way, like, it’s very similar to when you’re training for a marathon, right? There’s something very powerful, and deep inside you that when you’re training for a marathon, it drives you, there’s something inside you that drives you to train, to do all those long, hard runs to get up early on the Saturday mornings to run in the rain and the cold and the snow and all that other stuff, right?
You’ll do it because there’s something like visceral that’s driving you, right? No matter what I’m sticking to my marathon training schedule. That’s what I mean by unshakable determination. We want to apply that same unshakable determination to healthy eating, no matter what happens,
I’m sticking to my healthy eating plan. No matter what happens, I’m going to make this work. For the long haul. I’m in this 100% I’m committed. That’s where we want to get to. Okay. So how do we do that? Like, how do you develop that unshakable determination? Well, really, it involves not just changing what you do, because when you just change what you do, you’re changing your actions, your behaviors, kind of your habits, right?
This is just surface level stuff, right? You have to go deeper than that. You have to like, get to the core of who you are, right? You have to make healthy eating part of your identity. Okay? You got to make healthy eating just a way of life. Right? It’s just what you do. It’s just who you are. It’s part of your identity.
So when we talk about identity, what do we mean by that? Identity is everything that comes after the words I am. So your identity is who you are at the deepest core layer of your being. And we all have identities, we all have several identities. Some of the identities I have are I’m a man, I’m a father, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a coach. I’m a hopeless romantic. I’m a personal trainer. I’m an expert in sports nutrition. I’m a runner, I am a runner, this is part of my identity. You can probably relate to this one, you probably have that same identity. I am a runner.
Now, this has not always been the case. For me. I didn’t always use to be a runner. I used to be the fat guy. I was sick. I smoked cigarettes, I drank alcohol, I was super unhealthy. That was my identity. I was a smoker, drinker, and eater of junk food. You know, at one point, I’m a smoker. That was my identity. You know, and I couldn’t imagine not being a smoker.
And honestly, I tried to quit a million times. And that never worked. My identity was even when I was trying to quit my identity was tied around this idea of like, I’m a smoker who’s trying to quit. That was like who I was. It wasn’t until I shifted my identity to I’m a nonsmoker then I was able to quit for good.
I decided that I was going to be a different person. I was going to be a nonsmoker. In fact, I had to be I had to feel that at my core that had to be part of my identity in order for me to quit for good. I am a runner was not part of my identity until I was like almost 40 years old. Now, I can’t imagine not being a runner.
Honestly, I cannot imagine having the identity of someone who’s a non-runner. Being a runner is just deeply ingrained into who I am. I’ve made running and helping runners figure out their diet, their nutrition, I’ve helped runners take control of their health I help runners adopt a more powerful mindset. My whole career is built upon this core identity of mine that I am a runner.
This is just such an ingrained part of who I am. Same thing with I am a healthy eater, and I didn’t used to be, you know, junk food. I was overweight. I was obese. I was sick. I had cancer. And all these things were part of who I was, I was like this, I didn’t care what I ate was a human garbage can just eat anything, just throw it all in there, whatever.
And again, I didn’t really take control of my eating around until I was around 40 years old. And then it got better, you know, and it got out of hand again, and I had to take control again about a year ago. But today, I’m, I have this identity of someone who is a healthy eater.
This is really, really ingrained in who I am. And it kind of colors, everything that I do and how I go through my day, and who I interact with, and the things I do for my work and everything else. Today, healthy eating is not just what I do, it’s who I am, I can’t imagine being someone who doesn’t eat healthy.
So this is deeply rooted in the core of my being this is a deeply rooted core identity of mine being a healthy eater, right. It’s the foundation of like all this work that I do, it’s what Running Lean is based on. Okay.
So when I talk about identity, I’m really talking about those things that are just part of who you are at your core. All right. Now, you might have an identity, that’s kind of keeping you stuck, you might be carrying around this identity of someone who can never lose weight, you might have the identity of someone who can never stick to a diet, you might have the identity of someone who always struggles.
I hear this all the time, oh, I’m, you know, I just always struggle with my weight, I’ve always struggled, this is just who I am. That’s like so deeply part of your core, that trying to lose the weight or changing how you’re eating is going to be extremely difficult.
And these thoughts that you have these beliefs that you have about yourself, they may be buried in your subconscious, you may not even be aware that you have this identity, but it’s like the ultimate form of self-sabotage, you’re never going to make progress, you’re never going to be able to stick to anything, any healthy way of eating.
If you have this identity of like, I always struggle, I can never lose weight. I’m someone who just this never works for me, you have to make a shift at the identity level, if you want to get different results. And that identity level, this is where your beliefs are this is your worldview, your self image or self worth your values, your judgments about yourself and others.
That’s where all of these things reside, this is all these things kind of makeup who you are at your core. Okay? In order for you to make healthy eating a way of life, it has to become a part of your identity. And I love this. I was talking to a client last night, Autumn, and she shared with me that she has been journaling lately.
And she wrote that, you know, healthy eating is what I do. This is who I am. And she shared that with me. And I was like, yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. This is what I do. This is who I am. When you have that mentality, there’s no question of sticking to it or not. It’s just what you do. It’s just who you are.
I’ve just been reading this amazing book, by James Clear, called Atomic Habits. And people have been recommending that I read this book for years. And I’m like, yeah, I’ll get to it. I’ll get to it. And finally, I’m like, okay, let’s start reading this book. And really, the stuff he talks about in there is amazing. And it really lines up with a lot of stuff that I teach here, too.
But he says, “The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.” It’s one thing to say, I’m the type of person who wants this. And it’s something very different to say, I’m the type of person who is this. So, again, in order to make healthy eating a way of life, it has to become part of your core identity.
So how do you do that? Good question. How do you make healthy eating part of your identity? So I’m going to give you a couple of practical steps that you can actually take care of. Okay. The first is this, the first thing you have to do is you have to commit. You have to go all in on this idea that I’m just going to make healthy eating part of who I am. You have to make that commitment to yourself. You have to go all-in on yourself.
I am now a healthy eater, period. This is who I am, period, make the commitment that you’re going to stick with, this doesn’t matter what happens, you’re sticking with this. It’s like making an unwavering promise to yourself, right? This is who I am, this is what I do. So that’s number one. You have to make that commitment and you have to really feel it.
What a lot of people do is they say, yeah, I want to eat healthy for the rest of my life. Yeah, sure. And they kind of half-ass that commitment. Well, guess what, you’re gonna get half-assed results from that. Okay, so you got to be you got to full ask this commitment. why don’t why isn’t that a phrase? I want to full-ass this thing? Anyway, things that make you go, that’s weird. Okay, step one, make the commitment has to be like, you have to go all in on yourself.
Number two, you got to spend some time visualizing this new identity. All right. If part of your identity if you want part of your identity to be I am a healthy eater. What does that look like for you? You have to spend some time thinking about it, visualizing it. What does your life look like? What do you look like? What does your typical day look like? What do you do? What do you eat? When do you eat? How much do you eat? What’s now important to you? Now that you’re a healthy eater? This is a lifestyle for you what’s important to you? Maybe the most important thing to ask yourself is how do you feel? How does it feel to have this identity?
I am a healthy eater. How does it feel to be a healthy eater? When you visualize who you want to be when you visualize this identity, it’s like a mental rehearsal for the reality that you want for yourself. Right? So you mentally rehearse the reality that you want. And when you do that, you create that reality for yourself.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, amazing, amazing guy. By the way, if you’re not familiar with his work, definitely read, Breaking The Habit Of Being Yourself. This is an amazing book. But anyway, he says, “According to research on mental rehearsal visualization, once we immerse ourselves in that scene, changes begin to take place in our brain. Therefore, each time we do this, we’re laying down new neurological tracks in the present moment, that literally change our brain to look like the brain of our future.”
In other words, the brain starts to look like the future we want to create has already happened. This is such a powerful, powerful thing, okay, visualization changes your brain to basically look like the future that you want to create. And when you do that, that future that you want to create for yourself begins to take shape for you. Okay.
Elite athletes do this all the time they rehearse the race, they’re about to run in their mind first, and then when they go to do it, it’s like it’s already happened. Basketball players do this, they rehearse, shooting free throws, and then they get out there and they can do it more effectively. Visualize your new identity. That’s step number two.
Step number three is to start paying attention to yourdaily thoughts, your feelings, and your actions, right. These are only things that you can control in this world are your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, right? So start paying attention to them.
A great way to do this is to do some daily journaling. We’ve been talking about this all month in the Running Lean community on Facebook. We’ve done this journal challenge for January, people have been getting some great results. You start paying attention to what you’re thinking about, you start paying attention to your emotions, and you start paying attention to the actions you’re taking.
Right because you’re the things you think about all the time, you’re your constant thoughts. They create your feelings, they create your emotional state, and then you take action based on your emotional state. So your thoughts lead directly to the actions that you take and the results that you get right.
For example, if you feel motivated, you might go for a run. If you feel motivated and excited, and you feel like oh, I’m sticking to my meal plan here. You might eat a nice kale salad and a piece of salmon. Okay? Now if you’re feeling crappy if you feel sad, you might sit on the couch. You might binge-watch some Netflix you might eat a whole large pizza by yourself and cry. I may have done that. Right.
So your emotional state kind of drives your actions. So pay attention to what you’re constantly thinking because your thoughts really create that emotional state. And one great way of doing that is just doing some journaling each day, write down what you’re thinking about, just get all your thoughts out of your head and onto the page.
And so pay attention to what you’re thinking about, then pay attention to how you’re feeling. And it really helps to just give your emotions a name, instead of just like, oh, I’m depressed, I’m down, I’m blue. I don’t know, I’m overwhelmed, whatever, whatever state you’re in, try to name it, I’m, I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m lonely, I’m sad. I’m bored. I’m stressed. Try to name those emotions and try to find out, like, what thoughts are causing those feelings, okay.
And then look at the actions that you’re taking right in and start paying attention. I’m not talking like you don’t have to change all this stuff. But start paying attention to your thoughts, start paying attention to how you feel. And then really start paying attack attention to the actions you’re taking.
Start taking aligned actions, like is eating a large pizza by yourself moving you closer to or further away from your goals? I’m gonna say probably moving further away. That’s just something you can say, oh, that’s interesting. I wonder why I’m doing that. Right. So just make sure that the things you’re doing or not doing are in alignment with this identity that you want for yourself.
Like, if your identity if you want your identity to be I am a healthy eater, then you know, just sitting around watching Netflix and eating a large pizza by herself, is probably not going to be in alignment with that identity that you want for yourself, okay? So make sure you’re taking aligned action.
What you do should be moving you closer to who you want to be. When being healthy, becomes part of your identity, you gain confidence in yourself, you build trust with yourself, and sticking to it becomes natural. It’s just it’s what you do. Remember, being healthy is not a destination you’re trying to get to this isn’t a temporary deal. Being healthy is a way of life.
Being healthy has to become part of the very essence of who you are. Like Adam said, This is what I do. This is who I am. That’s what we want. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you got something out of it, please consider sharing it with a friend. You guys totally got this. Lots of love. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or 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 lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
Today, I have a cool little brain hack to teach you. It’s all about the power of making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique, but it’s not always easy to do. It requires a little bit of …
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.
Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the life coach for runners. And today, I’m going to be talking about a cool little brain hack that you can do. I’m going to teach you this today. It’s all about making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique. It’s not always easy to do. It’s not easy to do at first, but it gets easier. We’ll talk all about that in just a minute.
But when you commit to doing this, you kind of trick your brain, okay? You can, it’s a cool way to build confidence, confidence in yourself, build trust in yourself, create momentum towards your goals, keep you motivated, get more done. All of that in just a minute.
First, let me ask you a question. Have you tried using running as a way to lose weight? And has this ever worked for you? My guess is probably not. Because I’ve tried this. I’ve tried this for years, and it has never worked. And I know why now. But running was not working.
I was running many, many miles to try to lose weight and I wasn’t getting any results. I tried all these different diet plans. I tried using sheer willpower. I tried restricting calories, none of this stuff worked. So I did tons of research. And I finally found the answer. It turns out that I had an unnatural over desire for food, and no amount of running was ever going to fix that.
I also learned that this wasn’t entirely my fault. My over desire, this unnatural over desire was caused by things like the way our food is made the way it’s marketed to us. And mostly by the way that I had trained myself to think and feel about food. So I was an over eater, okay, I was over eating. But the overeating was just a symptom.
The real problem was an underlying physical, mental and emotional relationship with food. And when I figured out those three things, when I figured out how to fix those three things, I was able to lose the weight easily. And I’ve been able to keep it off. So I’ve dropped 23 pounds in the last couple of months here. I’m actually back to the weight I was at when I was training for Ironman back in 2013.
And back then I was working out like over 20 hours a week. And today I’m barely working out at all, seriously, I’m running a couple of times a week, I go for a walk every now and then. But I’m not doing that kind of training. And I’m back to that weight. And then one of my weight loss clients just checked in with me this morning.
And he said he’s lost 29 pounds since he started working with me just six weeks ago. He says he feels great. He has tons of energy. He no longer suffers from those crazy food cravings and doesn’t have those uncontrollable urges anymore. And he says that for the first time in his life, he feels completely in control of his weight. He even said that he doesn’t have any pants that fit him and so he’s got to go buy all new clothes, which is not a bad problem to have.
But if you want to learn how to do this, if you want to learn how to change your physical, mental and emotional relationship with food, I’ve created a brand new training program. It’s free, and it’s called How to Become a Lean Running Machine and you can get it right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean to get the free training.
You’re going to learn why running more and eating less does not work to lose weight, and you’ll learn what to do instead, you’ll discover why we store fat on our bodies and how to train ourselves to burn more of it. You’re going to learn how to reprogram your mind so you stop craving food that does not serve you and you’re going to understand how to break those emotional eating habits.
Now I explain the science behind all this. I provide solutions to help you recalibrate your body to manage your mind to control your emotions. Just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean. And you’ll discover the secrets to becoming a lean running machine. And spoiler alert, it’s not about counting calories, and you don’t have to run 20 miles a day. Okay, just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you too can become a lean running machine. Cool.
So today we’re talking about making decisions ahead of time. This is a cool, cool brain hack. I’m really excited about talking about this today. So before we get into the content here, the actual solution, what we’re going to do, I need to explain a couple of things to you, I need to talk to you about how your brain works.
Now, we have kind of two brains, we have a primitive brain, and we have a modern brain, we have this primitive area of our brain called our amygdala. And this is often called the fear center of our brain. Now, the amygdala is like, responsible for our fight or flight response. Okay, this is like an old part of our brain that was used, you know, created eons ago, okay, so, a lot of times people call this our reptilian brain, or I like to call it our lizard brain, okay?
But this part of our brain is responsible for the fight or flight for those primal urges that we have for just survival. It’s always wanting to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Okay, so this is all of our like primitive urges, this part of our brain, the amygdala is responsible for all that, okay. We also have an evolved brain, and this is called our prefrontal cortex.
And the prefrontal cortex is, is more modern, it’s one of the newest parts of our brain. This is the part of our brain that controls cognitive behavior. It controls planning, it’s responsible for decision making. Okay? So just so you understand the difference between the two, we have our, our lizard brain, that’s the fight or flight, the fear center, the primitive urges, and then we have the prefrontal cortex. This is our modern evolved brain responsible for cognitive behavior, and decision making, okay.
So when it comes to making decisions, clearly, we don’t want to be using our amygdala. We don’t want to be using our lizard brain to make our decisions for us, okay, but too many of us do that. We do this all the time, we’ve trained ourselves to just give in to those primal urges, at all costs, okay? This is not good for us, okay.
So when it comes to reaching a goal, succeeding in anything that you want, like, if you want to succeed in running, let’s say you want to run a marathon, or let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds, either of those things, is just a series of decisions that you make along the way. Okay, Tony Robbins actually has this quote, and I love this quote, he says, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
So do you want to leave your destiny up to your primitive brain? Probably not. We want our destiny to be shaped by our prefrontal cortex by our thinking, cognitive decision making brain, okay. So what happens though, is we don’t do that, we have learned over our whole lives really to just give in to these primal urges to just be the lizard brain, okay?
But what happens when we do this is we make a decision, and then when the time comes to actually act on that decision, we give in to the feelings we’re having in that moment, okay. We don’t do what we say we’re going to do. So we may, we may plan on running tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes and we wake up in the morning, and we had it on our schedule to run five miles at 6am.
And then at six o’clock, your alarm, you know, or 5:30, your alarm goes off, and you’re like, I don’t feel like it. And so you just hit snooze, and snooze, and snooze, and you get up at like 7:30 or whatever. You just don’t feel like running. So you’re giving in to that primitive urge of like, oh, this is uncomfortable. I don’t really feel like doing this right now. So you don’t do it.
Or maybe you plan on eating healthy food tomorrow, okay, and then tomorrow comes and then you know, you’re at the company in the break room, and somebody has some cupcakes sitting there and you’re like, ah, screw it, I’m just going to eat five cupcakes, whatever, who cares? You know, like you’re just giving in to those primitive urges.
You know, you have this desire, this craving and you just give into it. That’s letting the primitive brain that’s letting your lizard brain run the show. Okay, you’re when you do this though, and we do this with everything in our lives. That’s crazy. When you do this, you’re putting your lizard brain in charge of your goals and your dreams. That’s crazy.
But I see this all the time. Runners, they don’t run. People who say they want to lose weight, and they just eat whatever the hell they feel like. And what do you get when you do that, when you continue to give in to these urges? You get nothing, you don’t get the results you actually want. You don’t get anything done, you don’t create the momentum you need. You don’t feel motivated, you feel stuck.
So you end up just giving up on your goals and your dreams, and leaving your lizard brain in charge of your life. And this, when you do this, it’s like a dream killer. Okay? Well, that sounds terrible, but it’s true. Okay, so instead, you want to put your prefrontal cortex in charge of your decision making, you want your modern evolved brain running the show, okay? You want that planning, thinking, and cognitive brain to be making decisions and following through on those for you.
This part of your brain is far superior at setting goals and accomplishing things, okay? You’ve got to train yourself, though, to use this part of your brain, it’s really easy to just use your primitive, primal fight or flight, you know, fear center, like just just get into that that’s easy to do. It’s not easy to use your prefrontal cortex to plan ahead, to write out your training plan to plan what you’re going to eat, and then actually do those things.
Follow through with those things. But you want to use your prefrontal cortex, you want to use it to make decisions and keep those promises that you make to yourself. Okay. So how do you do this? Well, step one is to plan ahead. So get the steps that you need, figure out what your training plan is, figure out what you’re going to eat, okay, and then put that stuff on your calendar.
Alright, so plan ahead, plan your runs for the whole week, plan on what you’re going to eat for the week. And I tell my clients always plan at least 24 hours in advance, this is key. You know, if you make plans for an hour from now, you’re already into that lizard brain thinking because you’re already like responding to how you feel in the moment, okay, and you, you cannot do that, you have to plan ahead of time, okay? It’s so easy to just give into the urges in the moment. Okay. So number one is to plan ahead, always, always, always plan ahead.
And then number two, there’s only two steps to this, by the way. Number two is to follow through, do what you say you’re going to do. If you put a training run on your calendar for tomorrow morning at six o’clock, do your training run tomorrow morning at six o’clock, when the time comes tomorrow to eat a healthy meal, eat what you said you’re going to eat, don’t deviate from that, okay?
Don’t deviate from your pre-planned schedule, or your pre-planned eating plan or whatever it is. So when you do this, you start to train yourself, you start to train your brain to use more of the evolved brain and you start to quiet the lizard brain. You stop giving in to the primal urges, like I don’t feel like it. And you start building momentum towards your goals.
So you plan ahead, and you follow through, you plan ahead and you follow through it, you plan ahead and you follow through this is how you get stuff done. This is how you build momentum and trust in yourself. This is how you build motivation. Your motivation is a feeling. That feeling is created by thoughts. You know, so what do you want to think? What do you want to do so that you feel motivated? Motivation doesn’t come from outside of you. It’s a state of mind.
So here’s an example from my weight loss clients. Okay, this is what I tell them to do. And this is how we apply this when it comes to losing weight. So I make them well, I encourage them and make anybody do anything. But I encourage them to plan all of their food for at least 24 hours in advance. Okay plan, I recommend writing out a two week eating food plan which we call a protocol. So write out a two week protocol. This is what I’m going to eat every day. Okay?
But at least 24 hours in advance you plan what you’re going to eat and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat okay, you don’t deviate from that ever. So you choose foods that are going to fuel your body in advance and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat. You do not deviate ever, okay?
You don’t give in to those primitive urges, or the cravings, and I teach my clients, I’ve got some awesome tools and strategies that they can use for how to deal with the cravings and urges when they come up because they do come up. But I teach them to honor their protocol no matter what.
And this is hard to do at first, because it’s uncomfortable. Our primitive brain is saying, like, I don’t want to be uncomfortable here. You know, I’m all about avoiding pain, and seeking pleasure. And this feels kind of painful to me, it’s not pleasurable. But I gotta tell you something, that uncomfortable feeling, it goes away, and it goes away pretty quickly, when you stick to this, you know, might be a few days, it might be a couple of weeks, but it goes away.
And then what happens is, my clients, they begin to lose weight, they begin to feel good about themselves, they start to build trust in themselves, they know that they can then go to a party, and they don’t eat the cupcakes that are there, not because they’re like white knuckling it and starving themselves and forcing themselves not to and using sheer where willpower is because they’ve built up some mental toughness, they’ve built the confidence that they need, and they just no longer have those cravings and those urges, okay, they begin creating these new mental habits.
They’ve hacked their brain, they’re creating new neural pathways, they’ve been creating new behavior patterns. So they’re no longer a slave to the lizard brain, their prefrontal cortex is now running the show. And it’s a lot easier for them to just stick to their plan. And they keep making steady progress, they get to their goal weight, and they end up having to buy all new clothes, which is a good problem to have, right.
But they’ve built so much trust and confidence in themselves that, you know, when it comes to just maintaining that weight, it’s a piece of cake. Pardon the expression, it’s easy for them. It’s a cupcake. And it takes practice, I gotta tell you, it’s not easy.
At first, it will be uncomfortable, but that’s okay, because you can handle a little discomfort. You know, your lizard brain is always trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure, it does not want you to be uncomfortable at all, you know, your lizard brain is gonna say just eat the Ben and Jerry’s, you know, or you don’t really need to run today, it’s fine, you’ll be fine.
But you cannot listen to that lizard brain, okay? Except the fact that there will be a little discomfort when you are, you know, going for some big goal that you want, except that you will be uncomfortable. That is part of the process. But do what you said you’re going to do no matter what. And do this over and over again. Plan ahead and follow through, plan ahead and follow through. Keep the promises you make to yourself. And it gets easier. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.
And you build mental toughness, you build confidence in yourself, you build trust in yourself. You said you were going to run and you did. You said you are only going to eat what you put on your food plan and you did, you stuck to it. You didn’t give into the urges eating give into the primal cravings. This builds a huge amount of trust in yourself. It builds a huge amount of trust in your ability to accomplish things that are important to us.
One of the problems is we get stuck in this moment of, you know, giving into an urge to eat the ice cream, even though we know we shouldn’t. And we know we’re not going to lose weight if we eat the ice cream, but we do it anyway. And what we’re doing here is we’re making the ice cream more important than our long term health and our weight loss goal.
We’re trading a tiny bit of immediate gratification for getting to our goal weight for feeling good about ourselves. You know, we trade away our long term health and happiness for some tiny bit of short term pleasure. So when you plan ahead and follow through you build trust and confidence in yourself and there’s really there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you won’t try.
You know you train your brain so you don’t make decisions on the fly that you make all of your important decisions ahead of time when you stick to them. This is a cool little brain hack. I’m telling you it works. You create new neural pathways and you create new brain patterns, right these are like new mental habits. And then you create these new patterns of behavior that become easier and easier over time.
So you’ll know you’ll have this confidence and confidence in yourself that no matter what you will stick to your training plan. And when you know that, when you know that no matter what you’re going to stick to your trading plan, how do you think you’re going to do in that marathon? Probably pretty damn awesome.
When you know, no matter what you’re only eating what’s on your food plan, how much easier do you think it’s going to be for you to lose weight, probably a lot easier. This is a simple little brain hack. But it’s so incredibly powerful. Most people have no idea how to do this. Most people just listen to their primitive brain, they just let the lizard brain run the show.
They let the lizard brain make all of their decisions, they just give in to all the primal urges no matter what. And most people never make any progress toward their goals because of this. And they always feel like they’re stuck. And they are stuck in this loop of like, avoid pain, seek pleasure, avoid pain, seek pleasure, and they’re not willing to get even a little bit uncomfortable. And so they don’t get anywhere. And their life sucks and they can’t figure out why.
Instead, learn how to use your evolved thinking brain practice using your prefrontal cortex. Put your modern thinking brain in charge of all of your important decisions, plan ahead, follow through, plan ahead, follow through, just keep doing that. And I promise you, you’re going to be a mental badass, there’s nothing you won’t be able to accomplish seriously. Alright, that’s all I got for you today.
Next week, I got something cool that I’m doing for you. Starting next week, I’ve got the first in a three part series that I’m doing all about why runners gain weight, and what you can do to lose the weight and how to become a lean running machine. I’m gonna be talking about that over the next couple of weeks. I’m excited about sharing that stuff with you guys. I’m really passionate about this.
I’ve had amazing results in my weight loss journey over the years, and most recently, some some sharing this with other people. They’re starting to get amazing results. And I want to share this with you guys. So that’s all I got. Listen, I got lots and lots of love for each and every one of you, my friends, always. I’ll talk to you soon.
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