Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Most people tend to be pretty motivated when they start something. You decide you want to lose weight so you change your diet, and for the first few weeks, maybe even a month or so, you are super …
Continue Reading about 188. The Cycle of Unstoppable Motivation →
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 188, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, the cycle of unstoppable motivation. So most people tend to be pretty motivated when they start something.
So you decide you want to lose weight. So you change your diet. And at the beginning, maybe the first few weeks, the first month or so you feel super motivated. You’re tracking your food every day, you’re sticking to the plan perfectly, and you feel good about yourself. You think, man, I’m crushing this.
But then over time that motivation begins to fade, you kind of stop tracking your food every day, you cheat on a few meals, which leads to a few more and a few more. And you just no longer feel motivated to keep going. Have you experienced this? I know I have.
This is the same reason why in January, all the gyms are full, but then in March, they’re empty again. Because people lose their motivation. So today, I’m taking a look at why that motivation fades, and what you can do to keep it going. I’m calling this the cycle of unstoppable motivation, so that you can actually crush your health and fitness goals.
But first, listen, when it comes to coaching programs, there are basically two main types of coaching out there. There’s group coaching, and private one on one coaching. Group coaching is something I do in my program where I lead a group Zoom call a couple times a week. These group calls are beneficial for a couple of reasons.
First, you get more opportunities for coaching to be held accountable, to ask questions and get answers. Second, you get to hear from people in the group who share similar goals and experience similar struggles. It’s very helpful. And third, having the support of the group is one of the main reasons why so many people are successful in my program, because they never feel alone. Right?
They always have this group of people who get it who are right there to help them and support them every step of the way. So that’s group coaching.
And then also, there’s private one on one coaching, this is probably the most powerful part of any kind of coaching relationship. This is where you and I develop your personalized plan, we make sure you’re sticking to the plan. That’s the important part. It’s one thing to have a plan, it’s another thing to stick to it, right?
And then that’s also where we make changes to that plan if necessary. One on one coaching is where you specifically are held accountable for your actions. Did you do what you said you were going to do? Yes, no, why? Why not? Losing weight and keeping it off for good requires a lot of knowledge, support, encouragement and motivation, feedback, accountability. That’s why I created my program the way that I did, because it delivers all of this and more.
If you’re interested, you can learn more about the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me.
And if you want a little bit of help getting started with all of this stuff that I talked about here on the podcast, I created a pretty comprehensive training program that you can check out. It’s a video, I think it’s about an hour long.
It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on the Free Training link to get started with that. Cool. Okay, so today I’m talking about the cycle of unstoppable motivation.
So when people set out to do something to make some kind of big change to their health or fitness, you know, like, people will join a gym or they’ll start running or they’ll change their diet. Early on in the process, they feel really motivated. They got all these positive vibes happening. They’re pretty excited.
But over time, something happens. They begin to lose the motivation to keep going. And eventually, they give up and they quit. I know you’ve experienced this in some form or fashion because I think everyone has at some point in their life, right?
Here’s the thing: we use all sorts of external excuses, and reasons why we stopped doing the thing and why we lost our motivation. People will say well, I had a bad week at work and you know, or, you know, the scale just stopped moving or it was really cold outside, so I couldn’t run outside or it was too hot outside, so I couldn’t run outside or whatever.
The bottom line is people lose their motivation and they quit. And they justify quitting with all these excuses, you know, and then they’ll say to themselves, like, why should I even bother, it’s too hard, it’s taking too long, the results aren’t coming fast enough. I don’t think this is working for me. And all of those are just excuses.
Even something like this isn’t working for me, it isn’t working, because maybe you need to change something. So instead of going off track, giving up and quitting, if you want to get results, if you want to improve your health, your fitness, if you want to change your body composition, if you want to lose weight, if you want to gain muscle, if you want to get faster. The only way to achieve this is to keep going, you can’t quit, there’s no quitting, right?
You’ve just got to keep going until you finally succeed. There’s this quote that I love. It’s like,
“Every success is built upon a big ol pile of failures, right?” So even though you think you’re failing, you gotta keep going. But people don’t keep going because they don’t feel motivated to keep going.
But here’s the thing, motivation is one of those things, and I’m gonna explain a little bit more about this in a minute here. Motivation is one of those things that we are responsible for. It doesn’t come from outside of us. It’s something that we create ourselves.
Okay, so if you want to accomplish anything, let’s just say that motivation helps, but it’s not the answer. Like you don’t have to be motivated to go run. I’m telling you what, here’s a good example: this morning, I woke up, I was tired, I didn’t sleep well last night. And for whatever reason, I woke up, and I was really tired.
And I did not want to go to the gym, I had zero motivation for going to the gym, and it was leg day, my least favorite day at the gym. And I was like, I do not want to go to the gym today. And I was saying that to myself, as I was putting my shoes on and as I was brushing my teeth and getting ready to leave the house to go to the gym.
I didn’t have the motivation. But I did it anyway, because it’s something that’s kind of become a habit for me. And while on this topic today, I’m not really talking about habits, that is kind of where we want to get to with a lot of this stuff, we want to build good habits.
Listen, if you want to lose weight, you have to stick with your food plan consistently, you’ve got to develop good habits around that. If you want to get bigger muscles, you have to continually lift weights, you got to get into a good habit around that.
If you want to run faster, you got to practice running faster, and you got to do it consistently. The problem is that most people won’t accomplish what they want for themselves, what they really want for themselves. Because it takes time, it takes time to lose weight, it takes time to get stronger, takes time to get faster.
And the road to getting there is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it. It sucks. Sometimes, today at the gym, I gotta tell you, I did not feel good. That was not fun. But I know that this is a means to an end, like I know that I suffer for an hour at the gym in the morning. And the rest of my day is amazing.
And I’m getting stronger, and it’s improving my running, and it’s improving my body composition. So we just have to understand that those things that we want for ourselves, we have to do them consistently, we have to stick to them. And that’s where this conversation comes in here.
Because how do we stay consistent? How do we stay motivated? How do we keep our head in the game, even when we don’t feel like it? That’s kind of what this whole topic is about tonight. Okay. So the goal of this talk today, this episode, is really to teach you how to make motivation a habit, how to stay motivated, how to stay on track, how to stick to the plan, how to keep taking action, even when you don’t feel like it.
When you get to that place, then there isn’t a question of whether you’re going to go to the gym or not, whether you’re going to stick to your diet or not, whether you’re going to do your speed work or not. You’re going to do it because you’ve created good habits around that. And you feel motivated to do that because you’ve created that motivation for yourself. Okay.
So here’s what I want you to visualize. I teach this to my coaching clients and I’m sharing this with you guys here today. So just so you know, this is one of those things that I teach to my clients but I thought pretty strongly about sharing this with you today.
And one of the things I can’t really show you here, but if you can imagine a visual of a circle with arrows, you know, circling around, like, you know, clockwise arrows circling around the circle. And in the circle, there are four quadrants basically.
And the first one is action. The next one, action leads to progress, which leads to confidence, which leads to motivation, which leads to action again, okay? So just, I want you to be visualizing this, you know.
I have a slide that I, when I teach this to my coaching clients, I have a slide that I use, and it shows this and it gives you a good visual, but just imagine a circle with the words action, progress, confidence, motivation around that circle, okay. I’m gonna explain what all that means here because I think it’s important to understand each one of these steps.
Okay, so the first part of the cycle, the cycle of unstoppable motivation is action. An action is everything that you do. So it’s your behaviors, your routines, your habits, it’s your plan, it’s like making a food plan and sticking to the plan, that’s taking action.
It’s like maybe abstaining from alcohol. So that’s actually something you’re not doing, you’re not taking action, but I’m going to consider that an action as well. Abstaining from alcohol is an action.
Running, you know, sticking to your running schedules, sticking to your resistance training schedule, going to bed early, so that you get a good night’s sleep. So you go, you can hit your workout at four o’clock in the morning, because you gotta do it before you work.
Reading a self help book every day, doing your morning routine, maybe some meditation, yoga, journaling. All of these things are actions. And what’s specific about these kinds of actions is that when you take these actions consistently, you start to get, you start to make progress. And you start to get results.
And the important part of taking action is that you are taking aligned action. So aligned action is actions that are in alignment with your goals. So if you take no action, you’re not going to get any results. I think we can all agree on that. Right? If you take misaligned action, so eating cake for dinner, instead of the salad and the chicken that you had planned, that’s called misaligned action, you’re going to get misaligned results. Results that are not in alignment with your long term goals.
Aligned action will give you aligned results, this will give you the results that you do want. So when you stick to your food plan, and you do this consistently, you will start to lose fat weight, you’ll start to improve your body composition, you’ll start to sleep better, you have more energy, running will improve, all those things, right. So we want to stay in aligned action.
I think we can all agree that this is pretty basic stuff right here, right. But this is where a lot of people will fall off because they stop taking that aligned action because they’re not motivated. So remember, in our circle, we have action, progress, confidence, motivation, which leads to more action and the cycle continues. Okay.
So we need to be taking consistent aligned action, that’s how we are going to make progress. So once you get started with a certain behavior, it’s much easier to just keep going and keep doing it.
It’s much harder to stop and start, stop and start. So for example, let’s say you want to eat healthy and you kind of created a healthy eating plan and you’ve stuck to it for a few weeks but then you went back and forth for a week you went and did you know back to the way you were eating before and then you decide oh, you know what I better go back to eating what I was before.
That’s a lot of work to get back started doing something like that same thing when you take a break from running . It’s much easier to just continue running and keep your fitness level up all year long. Yeah, we train in cycles.
Yes, it’s okay to take some time off here and there, but if we take an extended period of time from running because we just hate it or we don’t feel like it. I’m not talking about being injured but that can apply to you know, but that’s something you may not have as much control over.
So if you take a break from running, trying to get back into running again is really hard and I talk to people about this every day they’re like I just can’t get back into running again. It’s so hard. I took a year off because you know I got injured but then I got better but then I just didn’t feel like running, I wasn’t motivated anymore.
So keeping up and just maintaining your fitness is much easier than stopping and starting. Maintaining your good eating, your diet, your nutrition plan is much easier than starting and stopping. Okay, so we want to stay in action mode, we want to be taking a wind action. And we want to make sure that we are not relying on something like willpower to keep us going. Okay?
Taking action, taking consistent aligned action requires more than willpower, because willpower is like, it’s like a fuel tank, it gets drained as it’s used. So think about this, at the beginning of the day, you have lots of willpower, like you feel pretty, pretty strong and confident that you can stick to all your plans.
But by the end of the day, you’re like you’re tired, you’ve had an exhausting day, you’ve experienced all this stress. And that willpower has been drained that willpower tank is like empty by the end of the day. That’s why so many people just plopped down on the couch with a pint of ice cream and Netflix instead of working out when they said they’re going to work out in the evenings.
And I encourage people to, you know, work out in the mornings, if you can do it first thing in the morning and just get that out of the way, if you can do that. If you can’t, then you got to have more than willpower to get you going. And that’s kind of part of what we’re talking about here.
So really the secret of like creating and starting the cycle of unstoppable motivation is to take aligned action. And you got to take aligned action, even when you don’t feel like it. Example me this morning, putting my shoes on and going to the gym, even though I was like, not excited about it, not motivated, not feeling it. No good vibes happening at all, but I took aligned action, because I know, that’s what I want for myself. Okay.
So number one action, take aligned action, even when you don’t feel like it. What happens when you take aligned action, you make progress. And that’s kind of the second part of the cycle of unstoppable motivation, progress.
When you take consistent aligned action, you make progress. When you don’t take action, you don’t make progress, right? You can’t like lose weight by just thinking about losing weight, or listening to a podcast about losing weight or reading a book about losing weight, like you have to take action, right.
But here’s the thing, once you start seeing some progress, you start to feel good about things, right. Most weight loss principles adhere to the idea that we want to get you making progress from the very beginning and continually keep that progress going. Because that helps you to stay motivated.
Because once you start seeing progress, that progress will lead to the next step, which is building confidence. Okay, but once we see some progress, we want to keep going. We stay motivated when we’re making progress. So when we take consistent aligned action, we make progress. And we stay motivated to keep taking more because of consistent aligned action. Right.
When you make progress, you build confidence. When you make progress, you get results, even though they might be small, like little baby steps. You know, if you start lifting weights at the gym, and you expect to like grow some big giant muscles, it’s going to take some time, like, honestly, if you want to get big, like bodybuilder big, like it may take a couple of years to get there for you.
Which you just have to like understand that that’s the way these things work. And like you just have to commit to that. But progress, even if it’s minimal, we want to celebrate that and continually take action that’s going to lead to more progress. So you take more progress, you create better results, and that cycle just keeps going right? We want to measure our progress, right? So you can’t you can’t track something you can’t improve something that you don’t measure. So make sure you’re measuring progress.
Track your runs, are you getting faster? Track your weight loss, are you losing fat and gaining muscle? Track your strength training, are you getting stronger? Track your sleep, your productivity at work, everything that you want to improve, make sure you’re keeping track of this, okay?
And then also when we’re talking about progress, don’t focus on where you’re not, so don’t focus on well, you know, I really want to run a sub two half marathon. But you know, gosh, I’m at a 2:30 right now. I’ve got so much to go like it’s gonna be so hard to get there.
If you keep focusing on where you’re not though, oh man, you’re just going to be, that’s depressing. You’re going to be very unmotivated, if you’re focusing on where you’re not okay, so focus on the gain. That’s the progress that you’ve made. That’s why we track our progress, because we want to celebrate that and focus on the gains we’re making, even if they’re tiny.
And don’t focus so much on the gap. So let’s say you want to be 150 pounds, but you weigh 200 pounds, you know, you’re gonna be concentrating on that 50 pound gap. And that feels terrible. 50 pounds, oh my God, I got 49 pounds today, oh, my gosh, I got 48 more pounds to go. How about, you know what, I’ve lost a pound a week for the last three weeks. And I feel good about that. Oh, my gosh, that’s great progress, right?
I mean, that’s a very different way of looking at this, okay. So take consistent line action. When you do that, you start to make progress. Making progress helps to build confidence. That’s the next step in the cycle of unstoppable motivation, which is confidence. So confidence is a feeling, it’s an emotion, motivation is a feeling too.
Both confidence and motivation are created by you. These things are not out there. They’re not something that you get from someone else. You know, you might be inspired by somebody else. But you don’t get motivated. Motivation comes from within, you don’t get confidence from looking at what other people are doing, you get confidence because of what you do.
When you do something and you stick to your plan, you build confidence, you build trust in yourself, making progress helps to build confidence. So when you see things moving in the right direction, your confidence builds, you see that things are working, and this feels good. And you’re like, oh, you know, this could actually work, you know, I’ve started losing weight, I’ve started running a little bit faster, oh, man, I might be able to do this, oh, I might be able to hit this weight loss goal. Right.
So just the act of being consistent and taking consistent line action will create a little bit of progress and help to build your confidence. And again, we want to celebrate the wins, we want to focus on the gains, not the gap. So celebrate those successes, celebrate the progress that you make, that helps to build more progress, more confidence. And the longer you stick with something, the more confidence you create.
So keep making your plan and sticking to your plan. Keep planning on your workouts and stick to those workouts, keep planning your food and stick to that food plan. Just the act of being consistent with your plan will help to build confidence. Because honestly, that’s the only way you’re going to make progress and get results.
You don’t get results by being confident you don’t get results by being motivated, you get results by taking consistent aligned action. Okay? Again, confidence is a feeling it’s like this inner knowing that you’re on the right path.
Even if you aren’t getting much in the way of results, but you just know you’re on the right path. So building confidence is one of those things that will keep you in the game, it will keep you on track.
And one thing a lot of my clients have told me is that having somebody there like having me as a coach or the other people in the coaching group there helps them to get through some of the tough spots, helps them to stay on track.
It helps them to make progress and helps them to build their confidence. So having somebody there to hold you accountable is key to like gaining and maintaining confidence to keep you going okay? So you have all this confidence, and this is going to dramatically improve your motivation. Confidence leads to more motivation.
So now you’ve taken aligned action, you’ve made significant progress. This is building your confidence and trust in yourself. An inner knowing that you can do this, which keeps you motivated. Right. So motivation is like a general willingness or a desire to do something. It’s a feeling that drives actions and behaviors in a positive way. So now you feel like taking more aligned action. And then the cycle just continues.
So this is a beautiful thing, this cycle of unstoppable motivation, continually taking aligned action, continually making progress, feeling more confident, feeling more motivated, which leads to wanting to take more aligned action. And that’s it the cycle continues and continues.
And when you’re motivated, when you’re taking consistent aligned action, when you’re making progress, you create momentum. Momentum is what keeps the cycle moving like we want to stay in momentum, we want to keep the momentum going because momentum creates more motivation, which creates more momentum.
So you’ve heard this phrase, probably, “An object at rest remains at rest, while an object in motion remains in motion.” This is Newton’s first law of motion or inertia. So in other words, another way of saying this, and I kind of said this earlier is that it’s much easier to just keep going than it is to stop and start, stop and start, stop and start. Don’t do that.
Get into momentum, and keep the momentum going. Because once you stop, again, it’s really hard to start again. So we want to stay in the cycle, stay in the cycle of unstoppable motivation, which is you’re taking consistent aligned action, you’re making progress, you’re building confidence, you’re, you’re creating motivation to take more aligned action, making more progress, and on and on and on. Okay.
Now, there is sort of a dark side to this, this is the dark side of motivation. And I call this the cycle of demotivation, okay? The insidious cycle of demotivation. So this is where you don’t take action, or you take a misaligned action. What happens there is that it creates a lack of progress, or a regression of backwards progress, negative results, which destroys your confidence.
It creates a lack of confidence, self doubt, uncertainty, pessimism, which leads to a lack of motivation. you’re discouraged, you’re demotivated, which means that you are not motivated to take action. So you don’t take action. And you don’t make progress. And you feel less motivated and less confident. And that cycle just continues and continues, right?
Sounds depressing even talking about it. This is a terrible cycle to be in. So stay out of that cycle. How do you stay out of the cycle of insidious demotivation? Well, the first step is to never get into it in the first place. So, consistently do what it takes to stay in aligned action and consistently stick to your plan.
Just remember that when you’re in this cycle of demotivation, it’s like a whirlpool. It spins faster and faster. Like, especially in the middle. So stay out of the vortex. Like if you’re on the outskirts of this thing, and like you find yourself being pulled in a little bit. Just shut that down as fast as you can.
So that’s like, Oh, I missed a workout. Okay, well get out of this. Get out of the Whirlpool, get out of the vortex. Oh, you know, I had a cheat meal. I just couldn’t give up this donut they had in the break room at work like, okay, next meal, you get back on track, you skipped a workout. Great. Next workout, you’re back on track, stay out of the cycle of demotivation. Right?
Just because you screwed up once it doesn’t mean you’re done. Right? Stay out of that get back into align action as soon as possible. Failure is never final. Just because you screwed up. It doesn’t mean you are done. Right? You pick yourself up again, you look at what you did. Think about what you could do differently next time, and then get back on track as soon as possible.
We never miss two workouts in a row. We never have two cheat meals in a row. Okay, be consistent consistency beats perfection. You’ll never do all this stuff perfectly. Nobody’s expecting you to. I don’t do it perfectly. Nobody I work with does this perfectly. But yet, we all get amazing results. Because we do these things consistently. We are not after 100% perfection. We’re after 90%. Some days 95%. Some days might be 100%. Whatever it is, we want to be just taking consistent aligned action. Okay. So don’t get out of control.
Just, you know, another way of thinking about this is like divide your day up into four quarters. So we have like, early morning, late morning, afternoon, evening. And if you give into temptation, eat some cookies at lunch like okay, you lost that quarter. You lost your afternoon, quarter. No big deal. Now your goal is to win the next quarter. You might lose a quarter, no big deal. Don’t lose the day. Get back on track ASAP when the next quarter.
Losing a quarter will happen. It happens to all of us, okay. Never, ever lose two in a row. Never ever lose the day. Okay. That is how you stay in the cycle of unstoppable motivation. Take consistent aligned action, make progress, get results, feel confident. That increases your motivation to take more consistent aligned action and on and on and on that’s where I want you to be.
You do that, you’re golden. Cool, alright that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
I think we all know that eating too much sugar is not good for you. Excess sugar consumption has been linked to all sorts of metabolic dysfunction like high blood pressure, excess weight gain, …
Continue Reading about 187. Why Moderating Sugar is so Difficult →
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 187 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, why moderating sugar is so difficult. So I think we all know that eating too much sugar is not good for you.
Excess sugar consumption has been linked to all sorts of metabolic dysfunctions like high blood pressure, excess weight gain, insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes, just to name a few. So the solution is pretty simple. Just don’t eat so much sugar, moderate your sugar intake. Easy, right?
Why does it sound so easy, but is it so hard in practice? Why is moderating sugar so difficult? Today I’m going to take a deep dive into why this is, why moderating sugar is so difficult, and offer up some practical tips to help you take control of those sugar cravings.
But first, why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off? How many times have you tried and failed? Contrary to what you might think and what most people think there isn’t anything wrong with you, you’re not a failure. There are a few reasons why most people fail at losing weight. Number one, probably you’re not willing to get uncomfortable.
Most people don’t want to experience any type of discomfort, especially when we’re talking about food. The truth is, if you want to lose weight, you have to do things differently. This means embracing a little bit of discomfort, okay, change is uncomfortable.
If you don’t accept that the journey will be uncomfortable and you are setting yourself up for failure. Okay, so you have to understand that you got to get uncomfortable.
Number two, you’re kind of blaming everyone and everybody else for your lack of success. If you go off track, you don’t stick to your plan. You blame someone or something, you know, the boss, the school, whatever it is, you’re destined to fail.
People who fail tend to have a lot of excuses. They have reasons, they have stories, they blame other people for why things don’t work for them, okay? The only one responsible for your actions, though, is you, okay? So don’t blame anybody else. Take responsibility for your successes, and failures, and act appropriately.
Number three, number three, you just give up way too easily. Successful people, they just don’t give up. They keep going no matter what. Even if it’s hard, even if it takes a while. Even if it seems like it’s not working. If you want to succeed at losing weight and keeping it often you have to stop giving up right? You just have to keep going.
Okay, so these are the three things that you need to stop doing. If you want to be successful at weight loss, you know, be willing to get uncomfortable, stop blaming other people, take responsibility, and then don’t give up.
Okay, by the way, if you want help with all of this, I’m here for you, you can always join the Running Lean Coaching Project. That is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more.
And if you want a little help, just getting started with all this stuff, I created a cool training program that you can watch for free. It’s like an hour-long training program. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to find that and get started. Cool.
Okay, so today we’re talking about sugar. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I talk a lot about sugar, a lot about the issues around sugar. And one thing that I’ve stressed is that I think for most people, you know, there’s not one diet that’s going to work for everybody, right?
But I think for most people that reducing and moderating your sugar intake is going to go a long way in helping you to become a healthier human being. It’ll help to, you know, help you to get fat adapted, it’ll help you to increase your endurance, it’ll help you to be burning more fat in general, which gives you more energy throughout the day.
It helps with cravings in general like there’s lots of reasons why we want to moderate our sugar intake. And so we all know this, we all know that we shouldn’t be eating as much sugar. But moderating it is so difficult, right? It’s so hard for so many people to eat some sugar or they stop for a while, then they go back to binging out on it again or whatever.
Why is this? Why is it so hard to moderate sugar when moderating other foods is easy? Like it’s not hard to moderate broccoli intake, right? It’s not hard to moderate chicken intake, or steak or eggs or, you know, brussel sprouts? Why is sugar different? What makes it different?
So I want to answer that question today. And I will, but we have to understand that excess sugar leads to all kinds of issues from a metabolic standpoint, higher blood pressure, inflammation, weight gain, diabetes leads to fatty liver disease.
An increased risk for heart attack and stroke like these are serious things. This isn’t like, oh, you know, it, you just shouldn’t eat sugar because it’s, you know, might give you cavities or something. No, these are like some serious issues we’re talking about here.
Okay, so we know eating too much sugar is not good for us. We all know that. It’s hard to moderate, it’s hard to give up. It’s hard to control. So why is this, first of all, and then what can we do about it?
So these are the questions I’m going to answer here today. The first thing I want to mention here is kind of go over, you know, I talk to runners, you’re probably a runner, if you’re listening to this podcast, I want to talk about fat adapted running and what that means.
So when you’re a fat adapted runner, this means that you have just improved your body’s natural ability to burn fat, that is our natural state as human beings to store some of the energy that we get from food as fat and then to be able to burn that energy later on. Okay?
So improved fat burning means that you will improve your running endurance, because fat is a great source of fuel for endurance activities for running and cycling, and swimming, and rowing and all kinds of things, it means that you’ll have improved endurance, improved recovery, running will become easier for you.
But in order to get fat adapted, you have to really lower the amount of sugar that you’re eating, right. Sometimes I tell people to take a break for 30 days, or, you know, just really dramatically reduce your daily intake. And this requires a little bit of a change in lifestyle, right?
You can’t go, you know, eating all the sugar every other day, if you want to stay fat adapted, like you have to lower your sugar intake and kind of keep it low for a while. It’s a little bit different for each person.
I can’t tell you exactly how much you need to lower it and how many days you need to stay there. And when you’re going to raise it, what you need to bring it up to, because it’s a little bit different for each person. But just understand, it doesn’t mean you never eat sugar again, it just means you’ve got to eat less than you’re probably used to.
Okay, so maintaining a lifestyle, a lower sugar lifestyle is what we’re talking about here. If you want to improve your running and you want to stay fat adapted, you’ve got to maintain a sort of a lower sugar lifestyle.
So doing this is challenging, because of all the reasons I’m going to talk about here today. But sugar is so powerful, it is a powerful food substance that makes it very difficult to maintain a lifestyle free from sugar or low in sugar. Okay.
So one of the things that I talk about with people and they want out of my coaching is they want to get fat adapted, and they want to stay that way. They love how they feel when they’re fat adapted, they love how it improves their running, they can run faster, they can run longer, they have this all day energy, they’re sleeping better, their mood is better, like there’s so many good things with being fat adapted that they want to maintain that and they find it difficult because sugar is a powerful thing.
Okay, so and then the other part of this is weight loss. So the other part is if you want to reach your weight loss goals, you’ve got to lower your sugar intake because again, we’re talking about burning fat here, right?
You know, as our natural state as humans, we are good fat burners, we want to, we kind of prefer glucose or sugar as a fuel, but it’s like a paper, it burns very hot, but very quickly, we want to tap into that fat which is more like burning logs.
Fat burns for much, much longer. It doesn’t burn quite as hot so to speak, but it burns much longer. Okay. So we want to tap into that stored body fat as a source of fuel for running but also that’s how you lose weight. You’ve got to burn the fat, right? And again, this requires you to moderate your sugar intake.
So if you want to lose weight, you want to become a fat adapted runner, we’ve got to moderate our sugar intake and just about every doctor and dietitian out there will agree that yeah, this is the case. If you want to lose weight, then you need to moderate sugar intake.
So we have an interesting thing happening here. Burning fat will help you to become metabolically healthier to help you to lose weight, you’ll improve your blood work, you’ll have less inflammation, lower blood pressure, all these things, it also helps improve your running performance running becomes easier, you can go longer, push harder, recover faster, all those things. But it just requires one thing, just moderate sugar intake. Okay, simple.
This is so simple right? Now, there are other things that contribute to becoming healthy and to becoming your healthiest self, you know, you want to stay strong, you got to do resistance training, you got to manage stress, you got to make sure you’re getting quality sleep every night, we got to you know, address mental and emotional health.
But one big lever that we can pull is going to be moderating your sugar intake. Okay, if you want to get your body moving in the right direction, then moderating sugar intake is going to be the biggest, the biggest lever that you can pull to get that started. Okay, simple, right? Simple, but not easy.
So almost every person that I work with tells me that they have a hard time moderating sugar or they have in the past. They’re on point with a lot of other areas of their health and fitness, you know, they’re running is on point they’re doing resistance training, or, and they’re sticking with their training program for their, you know, maybe they’re training for a marathon.
They do the cross training they’re supposed to, and they never miss their workouts like they’re on point with all these areas. But when it comes to sugar, they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s my weakness. That is my weakness. And if this sounds like you just know that it’s super common, you’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with you.
In fact, it means you’re pretty normal, but if you want to become metabolically healthier, if you want to lose weight, if you want to improve your running, then we’re gonna have to get this whole sugar thing figured out. Okay?
So why is it so hard to moderate sugar? First, you have to understand that there are many factors involved with why we want sugar, why we crave it. There are a lot of different drivers. And I’m going to talk about those drivers here in just a moment.
There are some that are physiological drivers that work on our biology, there are some mental and emotional drivers. And then there’s external drivers. Those are factors that are outside of ourselves that make moderating our sugar intake very difficult.
So I want you to think about each of these drivers as like a gas pedal, like pretend like you are a car and each one of these is like an accelerator. And each one of these increases your craving for sugar. Alright, so here’s what I’m talking about.
The first one is this, the first driver is taste. And the taste of sugar is a powerful driver. We have receptors in our mouth, around our mouth, on our lips, or tongue or soft palate that all scents the sweet taste of sugar.
When we taste something sweet, it sends signals to our brain that we are about to get something sweet. And it increases dopamine, dopamine, and it feels good. And immediately, our craving for sugar is increased.
So this first driver, this first accelerator happens right away. As soon as we taste something that is sweet, our sugar cravings get increased. And we want more sugar right now. And that causes us to want to eat more sugar.
It also causes us to want to eat more food in general. So every time we have this receptor that sends dopamine to our brain about sugar, and it’s saying like, oh, this is a good thing. We want more of this. It also increases our wanting and craving for more food in general. All right. So the first driver is going to be the taste of sugary foods in our mouth.
The second gas pedal that gets pushed here is an increase in our blood sugar and this happens in our gut. So when you eat sugary food this causes your blood sugar to spike and it causes an increase in your blood sugar, which is normal. This increase in blood sugar also sends signals to your brain to release dopamine. And again, your sugar cravings go up and your food cravings go up.
And they’ve done these studies where they’ve fed rats sugary foods. But they’ve removed their taste receptors, so they can’t taste the sweetness of the foods. So they don’t have that sweet taste of the food in their mouth. Just the sugar is just being ingested.
And these rats will eat more sugar because of that, because they’re eating sugar, they’re eating, they want more sugar, and they eat more food in general. All right. This is also the main reason why food companies try to sneak sugar into everything. Even if you can’t taste it. They’re still sneaking sugar into foods.
Because if what you eat causes a higher spike in your blood sugar, you’re going to crave more of that food. And you’re going to want to eat more of that food in particular and more food in general.
And the food companies know this because if you’re eating more of their food, they’re making more money. They don’t care about your health. They care about the bottom line. Okay. So some of the crazy places where they hide food and you wouldn’t really know this. Some of them may taste a little bit sweet like low fat yogurt.
We all know that if you look at yogurt, it’ll say like, oh, low fat yogurt is healthy and good for you. Look at the label, it’s like all sugar. Okay, so be careful of that one, but other ones are a little more sneaky, like pasta sauce. Almost all pasta sauce has added sugar. Look at the label. Other sauces. Almost all condiments have sugar in them. So just be careful.
But this one is weird, like gravy. Why does gravy have sugar in it? Again as to make you crave more of that food. canned soup has a lot of sugar in it. Salad dressings, nut butters, which should be what they should be just nuts. Like you’d grind up some almonds and you make almond butter. But no, they add sugar to that to make it more delicious.
Crackers have a ton of sugar and bread gets added sugar, beef jerky. I love beef jerky, and I go out of my way to find one. I think the brand is Tillamook. And they have a no sugar beef jerky. So, and it tastes delicious, by the way, but you’ve got to be careful of this.
So there’s this other accelerator that’s forcing us to crave more sugar. And it’s happening in our gut and we don’t even necessarily taste the sugar, but it is happening in our gut. And so just understand that those food companies are out there. They’re pushing that accelerator.
Okay, so now we have a car with two accelerators. It’s hard to put the brakes on when you got two accelerators going. Okay, what if you have a third accelerator? All right, well, the third accelerator, the third like gas pedal that’s being pressed here happens in your brain.
And understand that glucose is one of your brain’s preferred fuel sources. The other one is ketones, which are a byproduct of fat burning. Okay, so ketones and glucose, your brain needs about half and half of these in order to function properly.
And so, you know, if you’re somebody that doesn’t eat sugar at all, you’re going to get all the glucose you need because your brain gets the glucose it needs from your liver, your liver will produce glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis. And it provides your brain with all the sugar that it needs to function properly.
Ketones get provided when you’re in a fasting state. So anytime you haven’t been eating for about eight hours, you’re burning some fat and you’re producing some ketones and you’re getting all the ketones that you need, we’re all producing ketones to some degree, as long as you’re burning some fat, right.
And this is a natural state for humans to be in, in this sort of fasted state where you’re producing some ketones, right so your brain needs both of these fuels. And so that is another driver that is causing your brain to crave more sugar because when you eat sugar, your brain sees this as oh, this is one of my preferred fuel sources.
And will increase your craving for more sugar and your brain doesn’t really know that too much sugar is bad for you. It just says, oh sugar, we want more of this. And so it turns on this process of craving. So just understand that sugar is one of the preferred fuels for your brain and just having that as a fact is it is a little bit of an accelerator of the craving for sugar.
Okay, so now we have three accelerators right, we have taste, we have an increase in blood sugar, and then we have this preferred fuel source. All three of these things drive our sugar cravings up, they all cause us to eat more sugar and eat more food. In general, people who eat more sugar will naturally want to eat more sugar, and they are prone to eat more food as well.
So if you’re trying to lose weight, and you’re eating sugar, then an increased appetite. And an increased appetite for sugar is going to make losing weight very challenging. So just understand this, right? So we have this car or human person here with three accelerators all going at the same time.
Really increasing our sugar cravings, making us want more and more sugar more and more food in general. So putting on the brakes, and slowing this car down is challenging, right. So these are the three physiological drivers. Okay, there’s a couple other ones I want to mention here, that make it pretty difficult to moderate sugar intake.
So the fourth accelerator, I’m going to call this, I’m going to lump the mental and emotional factors into this fourth accelerator here. So the first thing about the addictive qualities of sugar, this is like the mental cravings that we have for sugar.
So sugar increases dopamine, which makes us feel good. It also causes us to want to eat more sugar, which increases our dopamine even further, eventually, our dopamine baseline gets increased, meaning that you need more and more dopamine just to feel normal again.
So what’s going to get you to feel normal again? Well, eating more sugar, of course, and then this vicious cycle just continues, and it keeps pushing your dopamine levels up. So all the while you’re gaining weight, you’re feeling terrible, because you’re not getting the same effect from the sugar because you’ve increased your baseline, right.
So this is the same cycle that people go through with alcohol and drug addiction. And studies continue to show that sugar is just as addictive as some drugs like cocaine. So you have to understand that this is a powerful mental driver. There is a physiological process going on underneath the covers here, but understand that this is a very powerful mental driver that causes us to want to feel better.
Okay, and it’s the addictive quality of sugar. So just understand, we got to fight against this, these are all things that are kind of working against us here, okay. And don’t worry, I’m going to talk about some things we can do. And just know that there are some solutions here. Okay.
The other one is the emotional side of this. So this is where you use sugar as an emotional management tool or like a coping mechanism, right. And most people do this, most people have used food in some form or another as emotional, an emotional management tool.
Basically, you’ve just trained yourself for decades, that whenever you feel unwanted emotions, that you eat something like you have some chocolate and you’ll feel better. So just unlearning this is a big challenge in itself, just unlearning how to not do this, like not use sugar to manage your emotions can be challenging in itself.
But you really have to learn how to just deal with your emotions. So you know, the process looks like this, you have a difficult emotion, you eat sugar, and you feel a little better immediately. The problem with this though, is it doesn’t last.
There’s a rebound effect, where you actually feel worse, after that Sugar Rush wears off. And you haven’t addressed the emotional stuff that’s actually causing you to feel bad. So you eat more sugar to try to feel good again. And then again, we’re in this vicious cycle of like, not really dealing with our emotions, and we’re, you know, messing up our dopamine baseline and all these things.
So the answer is you’ve got to stop using sugar to manage your emotions. So when you do this, when people stop using sugar as an emotional management tool, then they’ve got to like deal with the emotions, they gotta like, feel bad. That means you’ve got to allow the emotion to be there without doing anything to dull it, or make it go away.
And this process is not comfortable. And it is not fun. But it is very, very powerful. And one of the most powerful things that you can do for yourself. So I want to encourage you to stop managing your emotions with sugar and start dealing with those feelings. Just feel the feelings, right, feel the feelings, let it be uncomfortable. Eventually they go away.
You know, nobody has felt a strong emotion forever. So it will go away. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes, sometimes it’s an hour, 24 hours, sometimes it takes a few days. But, you know, typically, there’s no emotion that’s going to last forever.
Think about the worst emotions you felt in your life. You know, years and years ago, that, you know, you’ve gotten over. And you haven’t even thought about that for a long time. Okay, so got to stop using sugar as an emotional management tool. So that’s the fourth accelerator that we have causing us to want more sugar and craving more sugar.
And the fifth one, I’m going to call these external forces. So what are these external forces, these are things that are outside of ourselves. One of them is the marketing that food companies do. And I kind of mentioned a little bit of this earlier when they sneak sugar into food, right.
So their whole goal, the food company’s goal is to sell more food. So they just want you to eat more food, so they can sell more food and make more money. That’s it. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know how all these processes work that I just talked about here.
They know all the physiological, mental and emotional drivers causing us to crave food. And they take advantage of all of them. They exploit all of these factors, so that you will eat as much of their junk food as possible.
So your job is to recognize this, know that it is happening, it’s not going to stop on its own. But you have to take control, you have to make better choices. Pretty much just stay away from packaged food, stay away from food with a marketing message behind it, pretty much I mean, read labels, you got to get really good at reading labels, right.
But if most of the food that you eat doesn’t have a label on it, you’re just eating a whole food, like real food that still looks like food, it’s not ground up, it’s not emulsified, it’s not ultra processed, it’s just like a strawberry, a egg, a piece of meat.
Like if you’re just eating eggs, and meat and fish and dairy and fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds and all this real food, then you don’t have to worry about any of this. And eating this way doesn’t really ever get boring in my opinion. It’s always fun and delicious, and will improve your health immediately.
So you don’t need all the marketing, you know, they’re gonna tell you that this food is gonna be, it’s gonna change your life, it’s so amazing. But just stay away from all that stuff. Stay away from all that. And you will grow to love eating simple and quote unquote boring foods. It’ll become your new normal.
And then the last part of this, like external forces, would be social pressure. This is like friends and family who, you know, they mean well, but they’ll say things like, oh, well, you know, I just want you to have a good time or, you know, you deserve to live a little, come on. It’s just, it’s okay. It’s just one donut, don’t worry about it.
You know, you deserve it, you’ve been good all week. You know, they want to make you a part of their crappy eating party. You know, they want to make you feel guilty for not eating the dessert that they made.
You know, they tell tell you stuff like you know what sugar is not the problem. You just have to cut your calories. All foods are okay, in moderation. Well, we know that’s not true. Everything I’ve talked about today tells us that, you know, eat not eating sugar in excess is very difficult. Right?
So there’s this social pressure, this peer pressure that will always be there, always gonna be a thing. It’s out of your control, like, you know what people think or say or do around you like you have no control over that. It’s up to you, though, how you respond to it. Okay.
The only thing you could control is your own thoughts, feelings and actions. You can’t control what other people think do or say. So you can’t control them. But you do have control over what you make all that mean about you or not, and how you respond to that.
So I always just smile at people and say like, you know what? You might be right. And when they tell me something like it’s okay, you should have a little or you know, sugar’s okay, you should just live it up.
Just say like, you know what? You might be right. And it just kind of shuts the conversation down right there. You know, it’s not aggressive. I’m telling the truth. I’m like, hey, you know what, you might be right. But at the same time, I’m kind of saying like, also you might be wrong. Okay. Little subtlety there.
But I like this phrase because it immediately diffuses the sugar pushers. Okay. So now we have five accelerators all going at the same time. Right we have taste we have an increase in blood sugar. We have our brain’s preferred fuel source, we’ve got an addictive quality of sugar, we’ve got using sugar as an emotional management tool. We have marketing messages, we have social pressure.
All this can make moderating sugar extremely difficult, right? Do you understand now why putting the brakes on sugar is so hard, you’ve got five accelerators all going at the same time. Okay? But just understanding all of this should help you.
Understanding all of this should help you to start making better choices around food for yourself. And I’m not saying that sugar is bad, or that you should stop eating sugar altogether. You know, listen, life is for living, you should enjoy some foods every now and then. I enjoy a little dark chocolate here and there.
What did I eat recently, I had a piece of cake recently. Which was not really all that good. I’m not a big fan of cake, to be honest with you. Cheesecake on the other hand, love, love, love me some cheesecake. But you have to understand that the cards are stacked against us when it comes to moderating sugar intake.
Sugar is powerful. It’s a powerful substance. Is it a drug man, that’s just let’s just say it’s like a drug. Right? It has the same effect on our bodies and our brains, right? So be armed with this information so you can make better choices around food in your life and around sugar, especially a few suggestions.
Try to avoid the hyper palatable foods. So these are the foods that are overly amazing, right stick to eating whole foods. Stay away from packaged foods. If you’re going to eat food with a package, read the label carefully. Watch out for hidden sugars. Sugar comes in many, many names. I think there’s like 96 different names that they use for sugar in packaging. And they do this to confuse us. They do it so they can hide the sugar.
So understand those 96 names for sugar, and be on the lookout for them. Start learning how to deal with your emotions. Without using sugar to numb yourself to your emotions. Just feel your feelings, right. Learn how to say no to the social pressures around sugar, the peer pressure that you get from others.
And maybe one thing that you can do that tends to help people just kind of reset their brain and their body which is to just take a break from eating sugar, maybe 30 days. 30 days away from sugar can reset your dopamine levels. It can help you to get rid of the cravings that you have for sugar. It can do wonders for you physically, get you burning fat again, and helps with mental clarity. It’ll help with your emotions because now you’ve learned how to start dealing with your emotions.
So maybe a break is an order of always if you want help with any of this stuff, reach out I got you okay. That’s all I got for you today here. I hope you got something out of this episode. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on human metabolism and I’ve noticed a lot of inconsistencies in the data available. There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about metabolism, especially …
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 186 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Demystifying Metabolism. So I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on human metabolism.
And I’ve noticed a lot of inconsistencies in the data that’s available out there. There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about metabolism, especially when it comes to you know people who want to lose weight.
So today, I want to take some time to address some of the most common myths and misconceptions around human metabolism. I did an entire episode on Fixing Your Metabolism that was Episode 141. So you can definitely check that one out.
I won’t be rehashing all of that here today. Today, I’m going to focus on demystifying metabolism. So you can separate fact from fiction and make better choices to improve your overall health and fitness.
But first, if you’re anything like most runners, you’re probably really good at being an endurance badass. You’re amazing at getting out there pounding out the miles on the roads or on the trails. But when it comes to being strong, if you’re like most runners, you probably fall a little bit short.
Building and maintaining strength is essential to improving your running performance and your overall health and hitting your weight loss goals. But most runners just don’t do it or they just don’t do it well.
So building strength is probably the second biggest driver when it comes to improving your body composition after nutrition. So if you want to lose fat and gain muscle, you have to be doing some sort of resistance training regularly because lean runners are strong runners.
So some of the benefits that you will experience, if you participate in some sort of regular resistance training, you’ll lose more weight and faster, you’ll be at a much lower risk of injury from running, your endurance will improve, you can actually run longer before you get fatigued, you will run faster, your power to weight ratio goes up making you a more powerful runner.
And evidence has shown that you actually live longer. People that do regular strength training tend to live longer than those who don’t. So it’s one of the best things you can do for your overall health and fitness and to change your body composition is to get stronger. Regular strength training will help you burn more fat and gain lean muscle the more weight you lose, you’ll run more injury free you’ll be able to run longer and run faster and live longer.
All these things are amazing. If you want to learn exactly how to become a stronger, faster, leaner runner, join the Running Lean Coaching Project. That is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about that.
And if you just want a little help getting started with all this stuff, I’ve got this great training program that I put together, you can watch it for free, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started.
Alright, let’s talk about demystifying metabolism. So I want to start with what is metabolism? So metabolism is a term that describes all the chemical reactions in your body that keep your body alive and functioning.
It’s also responsible for converting nutrients from the foods that you eat into fuel. So this provides your body with the energy it needs to breathe and move, digest foods, circulate blood, repair damaged tissues and cells and so much more.
So the faster your metabolism is, the more calories your body tends to need. Metabolism is the reason why some people can eat a lot without gaining weight while others seem to need less to accumulate fat. The speed of your metabolism is commonly known as your metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate.
It’s the number of calories you burn in a given amount of time, okay, and some people talk about it as calorie expenditure. So, the first myth I kind of want to address here is that metabolism is not just about calories. So many people consider metabolism only under the scope of calories and weight.
And you know, for the most part we are talking about that, but you have to understand that metabolism encompasses all chemical reactions in the body, from absorption of light to the creation of usable ATP energy to body temperature regulation to hormone production to balance of fluids and hydration in the body to your circadian rhythm and so much more.
So if it’s a function of the body, it’s likely to be related to metabolism in some way or another. Okay, so just understand that metabolism is about a lot more than just burning calories.
Okay, the next myth I wanted to address is that eating more often will increase your metabolism. So eating small, frequent meals throughout the day will help boost your metabolism. And the idea is pretty simple. Because whenever we eat food, our body does burn some calories to break the food down to absorb the nutrients. This is called the thermic effect of food.
So if we are constantly eating, wouldn’t our bodies constantly be burning calories? It just doesn’t quite work that way. Okay, so eating small meals throughout the day may help you with portion control, but it doesn’t really speed up your metabolism.
Researchers have studied people eating six meals a day compared to people eating three meals a day, and they found that there really wasn’t any difference in a 24 hour fat oxidation rate. So this is one measure of metabolism, okay.
They actually found that people that eat more often throughout the day, have increased feelings of hunger and tend to eat more in general, okay. So understand that there is a temporary boost in your metabolic rate when you’re eating food, all right.
But eating six small meals over the course of a day isn’t really going to cause any kind of overall increase in your metabolism. In fact, it’s going to probably cause you more hunger, and cause you to eat more food overall. Okay, so eating more often does not increase your metabolism.
Another big myth that a lot of people adhere to is that your metabolism slows down as you get older. And this is sort of true, but I want to break this down, so you fully understand what this means. Okay, so a lot of people will just say, well, I’m older, and so my metabolism has slowed down.
And you can pick any age, and people will tell me this, because I talk to people all the time in their 40s 50s 60s 70s, whatever. And they just tell me, oh, yeah, my metabolism, my metabolism has slowed down. So I tend to put on more weight.
Okay, so they’ve done some studies recently in like 2021. And they’ve shown that this is not really the case, okay. So the rate at which your body burns energy, your metabolism is thought to decline during middle age as people gradually lose muscle mass, okay.
So they did a study where they looked at total energy expenditure, including energy burned at rest, to perform basic functions like digesting food as well as energy burned during physical activity. And they looked at like 6400 people ranging in age from eight days old to 95 years old, okay, they looked at their height, their weight, their body fat percentage. So they calculated average metabolic rates for men, women and different people in different age groups.
And the data indicated that there were some differences in metabolism based on four distinct periods in people’s lives. So the first is from infancy to one year old, this is where your metabolic rate surge is, okay? It was about 50% higher than it will be during adulthood.
So this is a huge surge in your metabolism, which makes sense. You’ve just been born, you got to, you know, grow bones and get a big brain and all these things, your metabolism is super high during that first year of life, okay. Then, from age one to age 20, this is like the second period that we’re talking about here. Your metabolism decreases by about 3% a year. Okay, so your metabolism is actually decreasing from one until you hit age 20.
But then, from age 20 to age 60, they’ve shown that your metabolism really doesn’t change. It stays pretty consistent. Okay. After age 60, and this is the fourth period, metabolism decreases by 0.7% annually, which is not insignificant, but it’s not as much as people think. Okay.
So infancy to one year old, your metabolism is surging, it’s about 50% higher than it will be during adulthood from one to 20 when it decreases by about 3% a year. From 20 to 60 doesn’t change. And then after 60, it decreases by around 0.7% annually.
And something interesting about this is that there are ways to actually prevent that deep annual decrease after age 60. And it’s more likely changes in lifestyle, like eating the proper diet, staying active and maintaining lean muscle mass all have positive effects on your metabolism after age 60.
So even though the data is saying like, oh, you know, the average tends to be a 0.7% annual decrease after age 60, you can still offset that by resistance training by staying active. And by eating healthy, getting enough sleep and exercise and good relationships. And all that stuff helps do good mental health helps with all that stuff, too.
Okay, the other myth that’s sort of correlated with this is that menopause causes your metabolism to slow down. And so many women talk about this, that, oh, you know, I’ve hit menopause. And so I’m just gonna, I’ve just gained a bunch of weight. So we’re talking about perimenopausal and postmenopausal women, just understand that the same principles apply, as you get older.
You know, so they did the studies on men and women, and from ages, you know, all the way up to 95 years old. So lots of menopausal women and postmenopausal women. So just going through menopause does not mean you’ll automatically gain weight, whether you are a male or female, whether you’re going through menopause or not.
As you get older, you know, you need to stay active, get good sleep, maintain muscle mass, practice healthy eating habits, get in plenty of protein, that kind of stuff, and you should keep your metabolism going pretty well. Okay, regardless of menopause or age. Cool.
I know that was a big one. A lot of people don’t understand that. And these are pretty new studies. So this is good data that’s coming out here. Love this. Right. Alright, the next myth I want to address is that active people have higher metabolisms.
Okay, so this one is sort of true and false. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna start with why it’s sort of true. So, exercise will temporarily increase your metabolism, but it only lasts about a day or so. Okay, so you might think, oh, yeah, well just exercise every day. And that’ll keep your metabolism going. And that’ll raise your metabolism.
And yes, that’s kind of true, it will. But you have to understand that, you know, your body also needs enough rest and recovery. And if you don’t give your body enough rest and recovery, you are going to chronically elevate stress hormones in your body, you’re going to put your body into this state of chronic stress. And that will actually slow your metabolism down.
So I do know people who love to do these running streaks, and they run three or five, five miles every day, no matter what, and they never give themselves a rest. I’m a little concerned that they’re constantly in a state of stress and slowing their metabolism down.
I’ve told the story about a client of mine who was running at least five kg every day for something like seven straight years and gained about 50 pounds in the process. That shows me that running every day does not really increase your metabolism all that much. Or maybe putting yourself in a state of chronic stress is doing the opposite, having the opposite effect that you know that slight gain in your metabolism has okay.
And this is one of the reasons why I say you can’t outrun a bad diet because exercise alone isn’t going to move the needle that much from a metabolism standpoint. Okay. So, interesting studies they have done on Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.
So these are groups of people who are very lean, very active, very active people. And it was always thought that their resting metabolic rate was much higher than the typical, you know, American, or whatever. And it turns out that they’re burning about the same number of calories that we do per day.
So Hadza men and women, they walk like four to seven miles a day. They hunt wild game, they harvest honey, they’re digging for tubers, they’re picking berries, they’re fetching water and firewood. They get more activity in a day than the standard American gets in a week.
And surprisingly, the researchers have found that the Hadza don’t burn more calories than the average adults in the US and other industrialized countries. Hadza men burn about 2500 calories a day, Hadza women it’s about 1900. This tracks perfectly with what we know here in the US like what the average Americans, men and women burn per day, the resting metabolic rate.
So, it appears that human energy expenditure is pretty tightly controlled, right? The human body seems to adjust to physical activity by saving energy saving calories on other physiological processes to keep total energy expenditure in check. So your body’s really good at maintaining homeostasis.
And if you’re used to burning 2500 calories, you know, it doesn’t matter how much more activity you’re doing, it’s going to slow some things down. So you’re constantly just burning that 2500 calories. It’s just something interesting to think about. Because being more active isn’t really going to increase your overall metabolism.
Like I said, it does increase your metabolism for a short period of time. Another thing to keep in mind about this is that most of the energy that you burn in a day is really from your resting metabolism, your resting metabolic rate.
So there are three main ways that your body burns energy or uses energy each day. So there’s your resting metabolic rate, your basal metabolism. So this is energy used for your body’s basic functioning, while you’re at rest, you’re sitting on the couch, your body is actually just burning calories. Cool, right?
You can sit there and watch Netflix and know that your body is burning, you know, let’s say it’s around 2500 calories a day. So you know, let’s say it’s just around 100 calories an hour. Cool. Okay, you can go for a run, or you can sit on the couch watching Netflix, and you’re burning about the same amount of calories. So just understand that.
And then number two, the energy, there’s energy used when you break down foods. So this is called the thermic effect of food. I talked about this earlier, when you ingest food, your body actually has to use energy to digest that food. And the thermic effect of food is highest when you’re eating protein.
So you’re going to burn more calories when you eat protein than when you eat carbohydrates and fat. And then thirdly, there’s energy that you use in physical activity. So you have your basal metabolic rate or your resting metabolism, you have the energy used to break down food thermic effect of food, T.F. And then there’s energy used during physical activity.
Your resting metabolism, though, accounts for a huge amount of the total calories you burn each day. Physical activity accounts for about, let’s say about 20% and your resting metabolism. It counts for like 60 to 80% of your total energy. And that digesting of food is just about 10%.
Okay, so think about this. 60 to 80% of your total energy each day is just your resting metabolism, okay. So just understand that when it comes to, you know, trying to outrun your diet or trying to out exercise to get your metabolism, you’re still going to be not really doing much, you’re not moving the needle much compared to what your resting metabolic rate looks like. Okay, all right.
Next myth is that thin people just have naturally faster metabolisms. And this is just not true. So it actually takes more energy for a larger body to function compared to a smaller body. So an overweight person tends to have a faster metabolism than a thin person.
Very overweight people tend to burn way more calories at rest. And they tend to lose weight much faster compared to leaner individuals. So it takes more energy to carry more mass even if, let’s say you kept to people with different body weights and you kept them in bed for an extended period of time.
The heavier person will just have a higher resting metabolic rate just based on their size alone, okay? Also understand that body composition does matter here. Okay, so at a given body weight, someone with a higher amount of lean mass, so lean mass is your connective tissues, muscle and bone.
You really can’t change bone size, you really can’t change your connective tissue size that I’m aware of. But you can control muscle size, okay? So your lean mass, really the one thing that we can concentrate on and actually physically change is our muscle mass. So somebody with a higher amount of muscle mass will burn more calories than someone with less muscle mass.
So think of an athlete and a non athlete with identical body weights, the athlete with a more muscular physique will actually have a higher metabolism. So carrying more lean muscle actually increases your metabolism, this is a good thing.
Similarly, a lean muscular person who weighs 120 pounds, and has a healthy amount of lean mass will have a relatively fast metabolism. But another person who weighs the exact same amount 120 pounds, who has more fat will actually have a slower metabolism.
Okay, so increasing muscle mass is a great way to naturally increase your metabolism. And that’s one of the reasons why I talk about strength training so much. If you’re somebody that wants to, you know, lose weight, improve your body composition, get stronger, improve running, all those things, definitely want to focus on strength training, resistance training to build muscle and build lean muscle.
Okay, next myth, your metabolism cannot change because it’s just genetic. So, understand that your resting metabolism is likely genetic, but you can change your metabolism, you can increase your lean muscle mass, like we just talked about.
Muscle burns more calories at rest, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want to take responsibility, they don’t want to do the work to improve their metabolism by doing something like resistance training, because it takes some work, it takes some time to get stronger to grow muscles. Okay?
So genetics is at play here, it does provide a predisposition for metabolism. But environmental and lifestyle habits will actually have a positive effect on your metabolism, right. So it doesn’t matter the genes that you’re provided with, it’s always within your ability to improve your metabolic function, and to not necessarily let those genes express themselves to their fullest extent.
Okay, and then this leads me to the last myth I want to talk about today, which is that we can’t control our metabolism. So it’s easy to just blame your metabolism when you’re having trouble losing weight or something like that.
But studies have shown that we do have more control over our metabolism than we previously thought. Some stuff like strength training, getting good quality sleep each night helps to improve your metabolism, reducing stress, drinking more water, consistent resistance training, especially as you get older, building more lean muscle will help with that. Eating less often, these are things we’ve talked about here today.
Maybe just eat two or three times a day, eating enough food each day making sure that you’re getting enough quality protein each day, all these things can help to keep your metabolism going and could lead to improvements in your metabolism even as you get older. Okay.
And then the last thing I’m going to talk about here is, you know, we’re talking about metabolism and burning calories, but we have to think about what we are burning, what calories are we burning, you know, what is the substrate that we are burning?
And eating a diet high in sugar and carbs means that you’re mostly burning glucose, glycogen, sugar and carbs. Okay? If your goal is to lose weight, this is going to make it kind of difficult for you. Losing weight means you want to be burning mostly fat.
So when you ditch the sugar, you ditch the carbs and you get fat adapted, you train your body to be really good at burning fat. This means that you will burn more fat during exercise, but also at rest. So the factors that affect how your metabolism functions, that I’ve talked about here today, can increase either carbohydrate metabolism or fat metabolism.
Obviously, we want to increase our fat metabolism. So as an endurance athlete who also wants to lose fat, you want to increase your fat oxidation. The typical runners’ diet of all the sugar and carbs is probably not going to get you there. Okay. Your body always wants to prioritize that carbohydrate and glucose metabolism.
So ditch that stuff, get your body burning fat. That is the first step. That way when you do increase your metabolism, you will naturally be burning more fat, which is good. Burning fat is how you lose weight. Burning fat is how you improve your endurance as a runner.
Cool. I hope this has been helpful. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
I work with a lot of runners who are awesome at sticking with their running plans. They get up early on Saturday mornings religiously, regardless of the weather outside. They do the required …
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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 185 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, why it’s so hard to stick to your food plan.
So I work with a lot of runners who are awesome at sticking with their running plans. They get up early on Saturday mornings religiously, regardless of the weather outside, they do all the required speed work every single week, no matter what.
They never miss a workout even when they’re sick. And they should probably take a day or two off. So they’re really good at sticking with this plan, but when it comes to sticking with their diet so that they can lose weight, it all seems to fall apart.
Why is this? Why is it so easy for runners to stick to a very difficult marathon training plan, and it’s so hard to stick to a healthy eating plan? I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately. So in this episode, I’m going to explain why it’s so hard to stick to your food plan. And I’m gonna offer up some sound advice for changing this.
Okay, but first, when I first set out to change my diet so that I could lose weight, I did not do things perfectly. In fact, for the first few months, I kept slipping up, I kept reverting back to old eating habits. And I kept getting into cravings that I had for junk food.
And I used to think that every time I got off track, it meant that I was a failure. I thought it meant that I would never get this figured out, I would never lose the weight. I would stay on track for a while and I would slip up and then I would start again.
And I did this over and over and over again. And every time I failed, instead of quitting, I just got back on track as soon as I could. So I never did this perfectly, but I always kept going. I never quit, I never gave up on myself.
So instead of focusing on perfection, I focused on consistency. You won’t do this perfectly either. Actually, spoiler alert, nobody does. Nobody does this perfectly. So don’t aim for perfection. Aim for consistency. The key to losing weight and keeping it off for good is not perfection, but consistency over time.
Practice staying on your plan, practice avoiding those urges to eat junk food, practice being consistent over time, and I promise you, you will get there eventually. And if you want a little help with this, you want a little help practicing consistency, I’m here for you.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about my unique weight loss coaching program for runners.
Okay, why it’s so hard to stick to your food plan? So really, the big key to accomplishing anything that you want for yourself is to make a plan and then stick to the plan, right? This is so simple. It’s such a simple concept.
And if you’re part of my coaching program, you know I say this all the time. And we actually sort of joke around about it because I say it so much. But really, it’s ‘make a plan and stick to the plan no matter what’. That’s it. That’s the key.
And you guys are so good at doing this when it comes to running. You’re so good at doing this when it comes to training for some big event. You know, I work with runners all the time. And they are great with sticking to their running plan, their cross training, their weightlifting schedule, their stretching, all these things are easy. Like they’re like, oh, yeah, I got it. That’s not a problem at all.
But why is it so hard when it comes to food when it comes to sticking to a food plan so that they can lose weight and get healthier, and improve their life in all kinds of ways? It’s so hard. It’s so hard that most people don’t do it. Most people rarely will take the time and the effort to stick with a food plant to where they actually succeed at losing weight and getting healthier and failing, but some people do. And that’s great, but so many people don’t.
However, they are sticking with a running plan. They’re training for a marathon or ultra marathons and they’re great at that, they never miss a workout. So it’s interesting, isn’t it? I’ve always found this to be very interesting.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. And I’ve and I’ve got some ideas here that I’m going to get into in just a minute, but I just want you to be thinking about yourself. During this episode, think about where you fall.
In this scheme of mindset here, are you one of those people who was really good at sticking with a training program, but not a food program? And if that’s you, this is definitely going to be something you’re going to want to listen to maybe a couple of times, okay.
So we find it very difficult to stick with a food plan, but find it pretty easy to stick with a running schedule. Even though that running schedule, for all intents and purposes is hard, it is challenging, most people would say, oh my gosh, that is such a hard thing, I could never run a marathon, I could never do the work, I could never run an ultra marathon.
So let’s break this down a little bit. So when you are planning to, let’s say, I’m just going to use the running a marathon as our example here at a training schedule, because that’s pretty difficult, something that requires time and, and it is difficult.
So when you have a training plan written out, so you have a training schedule, you’ve planned this in advance, you know, you’ve signed up for something ahead of time, you’ve got all your training planned out, and you are most likely to stick to that training schedule, like your life depended on it, right?
Why is food so different? Why can’t we just apply that same concept to food? Logically, they are very similar things we’re talking about here. They’re very similar undertakings. Training for a marathon is hard. It requires, you know, a lot of hard work, it requires time, so does losing weight, it requires hard work, it requires time, they both require consistency over time.
They both require you to plan things out in advance and stick to the plan. Even if things aren’t, you know, perfect. Even if the weather is terrible, or, you know, you aren’t at home to make dinner for yourself or whatever, we still stay on track, right?
So logically, they require the same things like making a plan in advance, we have structure around that plan, there are steps involved. So for running, it’s your training schedule, this is a structured rigid thing, and it has very specific steps laid out, you’re going to run five days a week, you’re going to do speed work on these days, here’s when you’re doing your long run every week, you’re going to increase your mileage by so much every week, these are your days off, it’s all laid out for you.
And your food plan can be just as structured, in fact, I encourage you to, to create the structure around your food plan the same way you create the structure around your marathon training plan, eat these things, don’t eat these things. Only eat two, three times a day, cut out snacking, you don’t need to be snacking all the time, make protein your priority, eat mostly whole foods.
Stay away from stuff and packages and processed foods and you know, concentrated forms of carbohydrates. Again, this can be all laid out. It can be very structured and rigid. And it can be something that is all laid out. Right? They’re both the same.
And it’s interesting because looking at these two things on paper, they look identical, right? So what’s the big difference? Why is it so hard to stick with food? And I think that a lot of this boils down to your mindset. And here’s what I mean by this.
The mindset required to train for a marathon and successfully finish that marathon is exactly the same mindset that’s required to stick to a healthy eating plan so that you can lose weight. And I bet you’ve never really thought about it like that before because most people don’t.
They think they’re totally different. There are some differences. I’ll get into that in a second, but listen, here’s what’s required. From a mindset standpoint, to be successful at both running a marathon, you know, training for a marathon and running that and finishing it successfully, and losing weight, they both require a plan.
But more importantly, they both require sticking to the plan. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about here is focused on sticking to the plan. So the first mindset standpoint that they’re that they both need is this, this has to be something that is important to you. It matters. There’s a reason why you are doing this.
Why are you running a marathon or why do you want to lose the weight? It’s not just to be healthy. It’s probably to prove something to yourself that you can do hard things. It might be so that you can level up and grow and become more, evolve a little bit as a human being.
Maybe it’s to be an example to your kids. Or maybe it’s because you don’t want to die at age 60. Like, you know, you have a family history of that in your family. And yes, of course, to be the healthiest and most badass version of yourself.
So training for a marathon sticking to your food plan, they both require that same mindset, they are both important to you, it matters or, or it has to you, you have to adopt that same mindset across both. Okay.
The next thing I think you need to make sure you are doing, the other mindset you are adopting is that you have to have a clear end result in mind, what is your goal for this marathon? What is your goal for eating healthy? You need a very clear vision for the outcome that you want for yourself.
I want to finish this marathon, I want to finish it feeling good. I mean, relatively speaking, marathons are hard, and you usually feel pretty terrible at the end of it, but feeling good relative to maybe feeling really bad. Maybe not puking at the end too, I don’t know, maybe it’s to PR, or to, you know, qualify for Boston, that is a very clear outcome that you want for the marathon.
Okay, so what’s the clear goal that you can apply to your healthy eating, what’s the clear end result is it to lose weight is it to lose 40 pounds, is it to just feel better about yourself, to feel good about the body that you are carrying around, to have more energy, to wear those clothes you used to wear, to look better naked?
What’s the end result that you want for yourself? Be very clear about that. Because in order to stick to the plan, you need that clear end result in mind, you have to hold that vision of who you want to become at the end of this process.
Both of these things require a little bit of healthy fear of failure too, so you might not complete that marathon, that’s why you stick to the training plan. Training becomes very important. I remember training for things like my 100 miler that was very challenging.
Just you know, thinking about running 100 miles became one of those things where it pushed me through my training so much because I was failing, I had fear of failure, I did not want to fail, I really wanted to succeed at that.
There’s so many things that can go wrong, or training for an Ironman, lots of things can go wrong there because you’re talking about swimming, and I got kicked in the face, like within the first 10 minutes of being in the water almost knocked me out, gave me a black eye, somebody kicked my goggles and smashed my goggles into my eye socket. And just like really kind of gave me a black eye.
And I was like, oh my god, I could die in the water. I haven’t just started this thing, but you know, being out there on the bike, there’s all kinds of things that can go wrong there. And then, of course, running that marathon at the end of it.
So lots of points of failure can happen in these things that we do for ourselves, right? We can also fail at losing weight. And what does that mean? If we fail at losing weight, we tend to beat ourselves up, it means we’ll never be able to accomplish that, or we’ve tried in the past. And we’re afraid we’re gonna fail again, because we keep doing the same, we keep repeating the same things over and over again.
So there’s a little bit of a healthy fear of failure there. I think it kind of moves you away from what you don’t want, I don’t want to fail. I don’t want to be a failure. I don’t want to not succeed at this. So that’s actually not a bad thing.
Okay, that mindset can apply to both your marathon training and to sticking with your food plan as well. Another principle we need to apply here is that listen, both of these things are hard. They are both challenging, they will be tough to complete. They both require some hard work, some discomfort, some discipline, they both require a little bit of pain and suffering.
There’s pain and suffering involved in training for a marathon. Would you agree? Yeah, I think we would all agree with that. There’s some pain and suffering involved with giving up sugar. Or sitting there when everybody else is eating pizza and you have ordered a salad and you’re just gonna eat the salad that requires discipline, it requires grit, and requires enduring a little bit of suffering.
And then lastly, they both take time, like you can’t train for a marathon in two weeks, right? You just, you know, unless you are you’re already trained up but for most people anyway, training for a marathon takes time. It takes months right? And you can’t lose weight by just sticking with your diet for a couple of weeks. Right? These things both take time, months, sometimes years. years of work to succeed.
I know people who start running, and they’ve never run before, and they’re maybe a little bit older, 30s 40s 50s, whatever they’re like, I’m going to start running. And their goal is to run a marathon, but they know it’s going to take them like 18 months, two years or something like that, before, they’re ready to do that, they’re gonna start with a 5k, and then a 10k, and then half marathon, whatever, they’re gonna work their way up, and they, they plan it out.
And they know that if they stay committed and stay focused, and don’t get injured, that they can run that marathon in 18 months or two years. What if you committed to your food plan like that? What if you just said, you know what, it doesn’t matter how long it’s gonna take, I’m committed to this process, I’m gonna stick to this plan, you’d be a total badass, you’d be like, at your ideal weight, eventually, I don’t know how long it’s gonna take 12 months, 18 months, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
The point is that these things both take time. And so just make sure you understand that and apply that same mindset there. Okay. So I hope you can see that the mindset to be successful at both of these is the same, the mindset to stick to your marathon training program is the same as the mindset of sticking to your weight loss plan to your healthy eating plan.
So then, why is it so hard to stick to the food plan, when you have the same mentality around your training schedule, because you might be saying, oh, well, I do all those things. So we can talk about the addictive qualities of some foods. This is something we do have to consider here, sugar in particular.
So there’s certain foods, we call them hyper palatable foods, they are amazingly delicious. And it makes it hard to lose weight when all these foods are around. You know, it makes it hard to give up those kinds of foods because they light up our brain, they make us feel good.
And even with the right plan, and the right amount of structure around your diet and the right mindset, sugar, hyper palatable foods is a tough one. Every person that I work with has a little bit of struggle when they give up sugar, especially if they haven’t done this before.
So we do this because we want to get out of that addictive state that we’ve been in for a while. So we remove the quote unquote drug (the sugar) for a period of time, and then those cravings go way down. The cravings for junk food go away.
When you give up junk food, the cravings for sugar go away. when you give up sugar, stop eating donuts, and you won’t be craving donuts anymore. Stop drinking beer all the time, and you won’t be craving beer anymore.
And so these things don’t become a big deal after some time, but you’ve got to like have a period of abstinence in order to get to that place. But that’s where freedom comes from. That’s where true food freedom happens. Okay. So there are some addictive qualities of some foods that make it a little bit tougher, I get that part. Okay.
Also, there are a lot of marketing messages around food, like, oh, you can’t have a good time unless you’re eating doughnuts and pizza and drinking beer for breakfast, right? We get peer pressure from the big food corporations from friends and family to eat a bunch of junk food. There’s food pushers in our lives who are like, oh, come on, it’s just a little bit.
Just screw the diet for one day, just live a little bit. Enjoy. Can’t you enjoy your life? Come on. It’s my birthday. So please eat all this junk food with me, you know. And then there’s FOMO of course, which goes along with that.
We have fear of missing out like we feel like we’re missing out on something good if we don’t do what everybody else is doing. Okay, so there’s all that that we have to deal with. It makes sticking to the food plan a little bit more difficult, I get that. Also, food is most people’s go-to emotional management tool.
If you have a hard time coping emotionally without food, then it’s going to be harder to stick to a healthy eating plan. So part of what I do with my coaching clients is that we get to this place where we don’t use food as an emotional management tool anymore. And part of eating a healthy eating, diet or eating plan has to involve not using food to numb out to your emotions anymore. It’s a big part of what we do in my coaching practice.
I help runners to stop using food as a way of dealing with their emotions. And listen, if you’re doing this, if this is something that is an issue for you just understand that we all do it. Everybody uses food as an emotional management tool to some degree, okay, but we want to get out of that habit. You’ve just trained yourself over the years to use food to cope with your emotions. That’s it.
We’ve just got to train you and you can do this right. It’s not impossible to do it. But again, this can be a little bit challenging for people, okay, so there’s a few things here that do make, you know, sticking with a healthy food plan a little bit more difficult. And I get that.
But I think the biggest reason why it’s easy to stick to something like a marathon training plan, but not a healthy food plan is this, you haven’t made the decision. If you want to accomplish anything, first thing you have to do is make a decision that you are going to do it, you have to decide, like really decide.
And if you look at the root of the word decide it means to cut off like, you cut off all other options, except for this one, I am going to do X, I am going to stick to my training plan, I’m going to run a successful marathon. Right, you’ve made that decision. And that’s what you’re going to do.
What about food? Have you made that same decision about food? Probably not, I’m guessing. I know that when I personally make a decision to do something, it’s as good as done. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it, period.
16 years ago, I quit drinking. I wasn’t ready to stop for a long time, I knew that drinking was a problem for me. I knew that I had to stop at some point. But I hadn’t made the decision until I did when I did make that decision to stop, I quit and haven’t had any alcohol since then.
So for me, it’s like when I decide I’m going to do something, I do it. Training for an Iron Man. Once I decided I was all in, I knew I was going to do it. It was hard, hard work during all that training. And the race itself is very hard. But I had made that decision early on. And I did it.
Same thing running a 100 mile trail race. Recently, I sat down and did a 12 hour run and talked about that a few weeks ago on the podcast. I decided to do that back in like November or December of 2022. And I did it in May of ‘23. So I decided six months prior that this is something I’m going to do and I knew I was going to do it. Right.
So you have to make a decision, you made a decision to run a marathon, right? You signed up for it, you paid for it. And you committed to doing that race in your mind that is done. You are all in. So you can do this, right?
So sticking to your training plan, that’s a no brainer, right? Because you’ve already made that decision, you’ve decided I am going to do this, I’m going to run this marathon, I’m going to be successful, I’m going to qualify for Boston, I’m going to PR whatever that is.
So now you just have to make that same decision around food, just decide, I’m going to lose 40 pounds, no matter what I am all in, I’m going to put a plan together and I’m going to work the plan and I’m going to stick to it. And I’m not going to stop until I am successful.
I have decided. I’ve cut off all the other options. No other options. Now I’m just gonna do this. I’m gonna stick to the plan. So make that decision. Yeah, I’ve had this conversation with people, and they’ve told me, but Patrick, I’m stuck. I just can’t decide, I can’t do it. I can’t start. And this is all just BS. This is excuses and stories.
And it’s just you deciding that you don’t want to do it. There is a quote that has stuck with me since I first heard it back in 1980 from the band Rush. And it says this, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
So if you choose to do nothing, you’re making a choice to do nothing. If you decide that you want this for yourself, great. Take action, move forward, but don’t use these excuses about oh, I’m stuck. I can’t do it. I just can’t start.
Think about it like this. I heard another coach use this analogy. And I love it. She was saying like, oh people tell me they’re stuck. And they’re like, oh, I just can’t get up out of this chair. I’m stuck. I can’t get started. I want to go over there. I want to walk across the room, but I can’t because I’m just stuck in this chair. And it sounds ridiculous, right? It’s ridiculous.
But this is what we do all the time. It’s about making that decision and then taking that first step. It’s about just getting up out of the chair, making the decision and then going over there. If that’s what you want for yourself. It’s really that simple. We overcomplicate all of this stuff, okay?
So I hope you understand now why it’s harder to stick to your food plan. Yes, there are a few things that make sticking to a healthy diet a little more challenging than sticking to your training plan. But at the end of the day, I think it boils down to making that decision, decide what you want for yourself, make a plan, and then stick to the plan no matter what.
And that is also the important part is that very last little no matter what, because things will go awry. Your plan will meet challenges, obstacles will be in your way, all the time. This is called life. And it just happens. And that’s okay, we still stick to the plan, or we do our best, you know, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, and then go with the flow and do the best you can. Right.
But if we decide that we’re going to stick to the plan, no matter what this is, this is all you got to do, is make that decision. Okay, that’s it. That’s how easy this is. It’s not that easy, but it is simple. It’s a very simple concept. Make the decision, make the plan and then stick to the plan no matter what. Okay.
And if you want a little bit of help getting started I’ve got a great training program you can watch for free. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
A lot of people set out to lose weight and then quit. They change their diet, start exercising, and then at some point just throw up their hands and give up. This was definitely me and it was …
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 184 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, The Incredible Power of Focus. So a lot of people set out to lose weight and then at some point they quit.
They changed their diet, they started exercising, and then at some point, they just throw up their hands and they give up. This was definitely me, and it was probably you at some point, I’m guessing.
And while there are a lot of reasons why someone might just give up on themselves, one of the most likely reasons is a serious lack of focus. Being focused means more than just paying attention to what’s in front of you, it can actually be the key to accomplishing all your health and fitness goals.
So in this episode, I uncover the incredible power of focus and how it can help you become the leaner, stronger, more badass runner you’ve always wanted to be. But first, I often get asked by runners who want to lose weight, how to get started, how to get started with proper nutrition, resistance training, how to get stronger how to improve their running, maybe run longer or run faster, or maybe they just want more energy, they want to improve themselves from the inside out.
I get asked this so much that I put together a free training program designed to do just that to get you started on your health and fitness journey to get you started on your weight loss journey. And it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
If you’re looking for a great place to start, this is it. It’s an on demand video training. So you can go through it at your own pace, whenever it’s convenient for you, you’ll learn what it means to eat real food, how to improve your ability to burn fat, how to get stronger, how to increase your endurance as a runner, and so much more, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started.
Alright, let’s talk about the incredible power of focus. So if we look up the definition of focus, there’s a couple. One of them is, “The center of interest directivity.”
Another one is, “A clear visual definition.” That’s like when you take a camera and you bring something into focus into clearer visual definition.
And the third definition here is, “To pay particular attention to something.”
Okay. So when we think about focus, I want you to think about a couple different ways of looking at this, you know, this is the center of your interest, you’re putting your mindset on something, and you are paying very close attention to that something or paying particular attention to that area of interest or activity and bringing it into clearer focus, bringing it into clearer definition.
So I like all of those definitions of the word, focus, think about focus this way. And this, this describes the incredible power of focus for sure. If you were to take a 150 watt light bulb, and you are to put it on a lamp in the middle of a large room and turn it on middle of a dark room, and you turn on that 150 watt light bulb, it would scatter light all over the room and light up the room you wouldn’t be able to see in a dark room. Very cool, right?
But if you were to take that same 150 watts, and focus the light into a very small laser beam, you could actually cut through steel with that same amount of light, it’s the same amount of energy, the same amount of light being produced, but it is focused.
And you can see that the power of that focused beam of light is much more powerful than a light bulb that’s just scattered as its light all over the place. There’s nothing wrong with a light bulb, it’s doing its job, it’s lighting up the room. But think about how much more powerful that light is when it is focused.
Okay, your focus is similar. If it’s spread all over the place, if there’s no precise direction to it, if you’re scattered. I mean this is okay and most of us live our lives this way where we kind of scatter our focus and our attention everywhere. And that’s okay. But what would happen, if you took that same amount of energy and you concentrated it?
What if you were to concentrate that energy more precisely on certain areas of your life, on certain goals that you have for yourself? I think things would change dramatically for you. And I think you would agree with that, you would become unstoppable. You could accomplish amazing things.
You know, if you want to lose weight, this requires focused energy. And a lot of people that give up, that quit things, they do it because they lack the focus, they lack the ability to stay focused on the goal.
What do you need to succeed at anything, especially like, health and fitness goals? You need a very clear, focused vision for that end result that you’re looking for. Who is it that you want to become? What do you really want for yourself? What does the future version of you look like?
And we talk about this a lot in my coaching program, when you’re a client of mine, I kind of make you go through this process of like painting a very clear picture of what that future version of you looks like.
What do you look like? How are you sleeping? How? How is your life different than it is today? How are your clothes fitting you? What clothes are you wearing? Are you comfortable taking your shirt off at the pool? You know, things like that.
And when we have this clear vision of our future self, when we have this sense of purpose, and we know exactly what we want for ourselves, well, that’s good, because now we have focus, we have direction, we have a plan a path steps, we can change our actions and behaviors because we know where we’re going.
But you have to have a clear and organized version of that future self, you have to have a clear and focused vision for who you want to become if you want to become that person. Because without a clear vision for yourself, you’re just going to be like, whatever.
So when we have this clear focus, this creates a lot of consistency, it creates a lot of motivation. And we’ll talk about more of that in a minute. But you are more likely to reach those goals. Because you have a clear vision for who you want to become.
When you don’t have focus, you don’t understand where you’re going, you know, you have no clarity of purpose, no clear vision for your future self. There’s no like big picture here, or you have a big picture, but it’s very, it’s like a blurry big picture. It’s not focused, right?
And without focus, we tend to forget our purpose, why we want these things for ourselves. So your health, your fitness, your exercise, your nutrition, it’s all scattered, right? No direction, no motivation to do anything. Because it doesn’t really matter. Because you don’t have that sense of purpose.
You don’t have that clear vision for who you want to become which just drives your motivation down. And this is why people quit. Because they don’t have that focus, they don’t have that clear vision of their future self.
And when you don’t have motivation, you lack progress. You don’t get the results you want. And of course, you’re gonna quit, why would you keep going. But with focus, you create that clear vision of your future self, you have that clarity of purpose, you have very clear goals, and dreams and hopes and things that you want to accomplish for yourself.
This is amazing at helping you to maintain motivation. Because without focus, you get very, it’s very demotivating. You know, you’re just scattered all over the place. You don’t even know where you’re going. How can you even track progress? You know, and that’s where you kind of lose motivation and give up.
But with focus, you maintain motivation. You continually make progress because you’re, you’re taking consistent aligned action. And you end up getting the results that you want, you produce results consistently. And even small results, even if they are, you know, small wins, achieved consistently you will eventually reach your goal.
It’s like running an ultra marathon. It doesn’t matter how slow you go, you gotta run 100 miles, just keep moving forward. But when you stop moving, or when you go backwards, or your heart isn’t in it anymore, and you have no clear vision of where you want to be at the end.
And there’s no purpose for you to continue, why would you continue? It’s just so easy to give up. Okay, so you can start to see, I’m hoping anyway, I hope you can start to see that focus is the key here. Whatever it is you want to accomplish, you want to lose weight, it takes time.
If you want to run an ultra marathon, it takes time, it takes time for the training, it takes time to do that actual event as well. And these things mean that you are going to have to spend a lot of time staying focused, so you stay in the game.
And another way of thinking about focus is this word, constraint, think about constraint. So what is the definition of constraint? This means a limitation or a restriction. And I know when people hear this, they think of this in a negative way, oh, I don’t want to be restricted, I don’t want to be limited. But don’t think about it in a negative way.
Think about it as restricting or limiting your focus to you know, one thing at a time. So constraint of focus is very important. And they’re similar. But it’s almost like taking your focus and really fine tuning it, it’s like, you know, that laser that I’m talking about earlier, instead of being a light bulb, be the laser constraint helps you to do this.
So we don’t want to scatter our focus all over the place, we want it to be very laser like and so constrained is how we do this. So one thing to understand is that people make a big deal about their ability to multitask.
And I don’t know if you guys know this or not, but multitasking is really not something we do well. It’s just as nice as it would be to be able to do two things at once. Lots and lots of studies have shown that the human brain simply isn’t capable of paying full attention to more than one thing at a time.
In fact, our brain has evolved to be really good at single tasking, to only be able to think about or do one thing at a time. So when somebody says they’re multitasking, that’s just somebody who is scattered. They’re trying to justify it. Oh, I’m just, I’m a multitasker. It’s like, no, you’re just not focused. You lack focus and constraint. Okay.
So multitasking is not real, we want to focus on one thing at a time. And let’s, you know, see what this would look like. So if you want to achieve health and fitness goals, you know, and like I said, these things take time, you want to lose weight, it’s going to take time, you want to become a runner, and just be able to run a half marathon or marathon or a 5k, whatever this takes time.
It’s really hard to get out there and just like run and accomplish something big from a running perspective. Or lifting weights at the gym, you know, you want to build some muscle you want to, you know, get more toned, that is not something that you’re going to see right away, you can’t go to the gym three times and be toned, like it takes a while months of hard work to get to that place. Right. And so we don’t see results for a while.
So we need to stay focused. And we need to practice constraint. So here’s an example of someone who’s trying to lose weight, let’s say you’re, you want to lose weight. And you are really motivated to lose weight.
And so you are going to do everything all at once you’re going to cut calories, and give up sugar, and start intermittent fasting and cut out snacking. And you’re going to start logging all your food and tracking your food and an app and counting your macros and skipping breakfast and doing all your workouts fasted.
And I will tell you that this approach can feel way too overwhelming. It’s just too much to change all at once. And you are very likely to fail and or quit. And a quick story of one of my clients who was very motivated early on in the process. And he came to me and on our first call, he had said okay, I’ve made all these changes.
And he literally was doing everything I just said. And he was like I’m super motivated. I’m doing all these things. And I said listen, I really don’t recommend that because you’re going to kind of feel overwhelmed and you’re probably not going to be able to sustain this very long.
But he was determined that it was fine that he could do it all. And so I said okay, let’s see how it goes. And two weeks later, he was like I can’t do this. He could not maintain that type of lifestyle, you know, all those changes at once was way too much for him.
So I said, Okay, let’s just start over. Let’s start over. Okay. But I don’t know about you, I have done this before, too, because I get this, like, you know, what do they call it shiny object syndrome, where I’m like, oh, this is cool. Oh, look at this cool thing over here. Let’s try that too. Oh, that looks fun. I saw that on Instagram. Oh, let’s try that.
So when we have shiny object syndrome, and we try all these different things at once, that all sounds great, but it’s too much. It’s too much. And it’s really hard to maintain that, especially when it comes to, you know, lifestyle changes, like from a nutrition and exercise standpoint, okay.
So constraint means focusing on one thing at a time. So for this particular person, and for you, and for others, I would say, let’s just start with one thing, like, let’s give up sugar, let’s just give that a couple of weeks, see how you feel, get over the withdrawal symptoms, which are real, by the way, once you feel good about where you are, and you’ve gotten over that initial withdrawal from sugar, and you’re starting to feel better, let’s go on to step two. Let’s try something else. Right.
And this is my strategy with clients. It’s always a layered approach, we make one or two small changes, we wait a couple of weeks, we see how things are working or not working. And then we can layer on the next change. This is my, I call this like my layered approach, right?
We’re layering on different changes, making sure that your body and your mind adjust to these things, and give you enough time to adjust to these things. So that then when we move on to the next thing, it doesn’t feel so overwhelming. You’re like, oh, I already got this one thing, let’s, let’s go on to step number two.
So this practice is very effective. It gives you the ability to get used to one small change at a time, this is how you change habits. Right? You cannot change habits by changing everything at once. You have to do these one step at a time.
So this is where constraint is very important, right? This practice is effective because it gives you feedback. And so you know exactly what’s working. What isn’t? Because you’ve only changed the one thing, if you change 10 things, how do you know which one of these things is making you feel terrible, you just don’t know?
Alright, so we change one thing at a time. And then this practice is also sustainable, because we are constraining our changes to one thing at a time. You get used to each stage to each change before we move on to the next stage before we move on to the next change. And so building habits this way is very powerful, very effective.
Okay, so let’s, let’s talk about how to get started with this. How do you get started with practicing constraint and focus? And I want you to start with that vision for your future self. So who are you becoming? Where do you want to be in 6 to 12 months? What goals do you have for yourself?
Do you want to lose weight, improve your strength, you want to get faster, maybe you want to qualify for Boston or run that ultra marathon. Maybe you’re just someone who’s like, I just need to fix my dysfunctional relationship with food. Whatever it is, be very clear and focused on who you want to be. And then write it down.
And then spend at least five minutes a day thinking about this future version of yourself every single day, spend some time writing about it, journaling about it, reading those journal entries, recording a voice memos, talking to somebody else about your goals and your dreams for your future for yourself who you want to become.
Everything that you want for yourself, every accomplishment that you want to achieve starts in your mind. It starts with thinking about who you want to be, and what you want that end result to be, what is the outcome you’re looking for. And the more focused and the more clear that vision of your future self is, the more likely you are to achieve that.
So spend time every single day thinking about who you want to be, you have to have this very clear vision of who you want to be if you want to get there, right? If you don’t have focus around your goals and the vision for your future self you’re just going to fail. So don’t skip this step. Consistent focus on your future self will help you stay motivated. It will help you keep your head in the game and keep you making progress towards those goals.
Keep reminding yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. People who don’t do this, they will be motivated at the beginning of the process. You know, we all get motivated when we make a change. Oh I’m gonna lose weight. I’m gonna change my diet. I’m gonna stop eating sugar and they feel motivated at the beginning.
But over time, that motivation will fade and then they will think that they are just a failure, that they can’t do this, that it will never work for them. That is not true. The actual truth is they just lost their focus. That’s it. Clarity of purpose, that’s the key.
Keep reminding yourself of this purpose, keep reminding yourself why this is important to you, and you will stay motivated. And you will be much more consistent in your actions. And you’ll keep moving toward that vision of yourself for the future. Okay, so start with that vision of who you want to become. And then you have to practice constraint.
And this is the thing that is hard for most people, because I’m going to tell you, just pick one thing to change. You know, pick an area of your life, whether it’s, you know, running, getting faster, improving your endurance, whether it’s losing weight, or getting stronger, pick one area, and then pick one, you know, behavior that you want to change one action that you want to change, don’t get sucked into the shiny object syndrome, where you want to try to change everything at once.
Just choose one area, and then one action item that you can do and give it a couple of weeks, you know, like giving up sugar. Give that a couple of weeks and see how it’s going for you. What are the results? Is this working, or not? Is this terrible? Do I still feel terrible? Or am I feeling better now?
Okay, but don’t be tempted to keep changing things every single day. Don’t do everything at once, make one small change, and then make sure that you’ve adapted to that change before layering on the next thing. And then it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating this process, because over time, you will find that changing habits is much easier if you practice constraint instead of trying to do it all at once.
And then the third part of this is to have a plan. Being focused means that you have a plan. And of course, you got to stick to the plan. But people who lack focus, people who are scattered, they don’t have a plan.
Their plan is to just wing it with everything that they do. And how does that work for you? That doesn’t work very good. I’m gonna tell you, it might work in the moment, and sometimes we do have to wing it. And that’s just because, you know, maybe something happened externally. And your plan has to change because of outside circumstances that you have no control over.
And that is completely fine. But winging it is not a plan, okay. So I always tell my clients that the key to accomplishing everything that they want is to have a plan, right and stick to the plan. That’s the important part, right? You got to have a plan, but then you got to stick to the plan, right?
Being focused and practicing constraint. This gives you the ability to stay on track. And it helps you to continue to make minor changes, tweaking the plan if necessary. But when you’re focused and you’re practicing constraint, it means you are working a plan very intentionally, not haphazardly.
Like you’re, you’re doing everything with intention. With direction you have a laser-like focus on what you’re doing. And then what the next thing is, what’s that next step that’s going to move you closer to your goals. Without focus, you don’t have any idea what the next step is, with focus.
And with constraint, you know exactly what the next step is, because you’ve planned it in advance, and then you do it because you’re not distracted by a million other things. So make a plan. And stick to the plan. This is simple, but it requires you to be focused and it requires constraint, okay.
Remember to continue focusing on your future self always. And anytime you feel like you’re stuck, or you’re lacking motivation, you don’t feel like going to the gym, you don’t feel like running, whatever it is, remember why you’re doing this, go back to that future version of yourself, spend some time in that place. And then the other thing should fall into place for you here.
And then lastly, be careful where you put your focus. So if you focus on the negative on the things that are not working for you, you’re going to feel terrible, you’re going to feel less motivated, and you’re probably going to quit. So if you focus on your failures, you’re destined to repeat them and continue to fail.
If you focus on how long it’s taking, or I can’t do this or I’m a failure or this is too hard. It will continue to be hard, it will continue. You will continue not to be able to do it and you will continue to fail, right. If you keep focusing on the negative, you’re going to feel more and more negative and keep getting more negative results.
You always get more of what you focus on. So focus on what you want. Have you ever noticed that negative people always seem to attract more and more negativity into their lives? Have you ever noticed that positive people seem to attract more and more positivity into their lives?
It all has to do with where they put their focus, you get more of what you focus on. So focus on what you really want. And I love this quote from Bruce Lee that says, “The successful warrior is the average man or woman with laser-like focus.”
So be the successful warrior. Maintain laser-like focus on your goals and your dreams, and you’ll experience success like never before.
And then lastly, have you ever thought about doing something hard and then just decided I can’t do that? I’ve done this many times. I’ve told myself, I can’t lose weight. I can’t run a marathon. I can’t finish an Ironman. And the problem with thoughts like I can’t is that that thought becomes the truth for you.
Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” And I love this quote so much because it sums up this whole principle beautifully. It means that whatever you believe you can or can’t do will be true for you.
So thoughts like ‘I can’t’, they don’t serve any purpose other than to keep you stuck and limit your potential. By the way, I stopped saying I can’t a long time ago. Since then, I’ve been able to lose weight. Keep the weight off for good. I’ve run like 20 marathons, I finished the Ironman Triathlon.
Stop saying I can’t and start saying I can and see what amazing things you’ll be able to accomplish. Let’s you and I work together to see what you can do. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Over the last 100 years or so, we have become a society of pleasure-seekers and pain-avoiders. We do anything and everything to avoid what we perceive as painful and chase everything we deem …
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 183 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, are you addicted to dopamine? Over the last 100 years or so, we’ve become a society of pleasure seekers and pain avoiders.
We do anything and everything to avoid what we perceive as painful. And then we chase everything we deem as pleasurable even if it’s something that is actually harmful to us. This is classic addictive behavior, especially when it comes to how we consume things like food and alcohol.
But what are we really addicted to? Is it the chocolate chip cookies? Is it the IPAs, or is it something else? In this episode, I’m going to explain how dopamine might be the real culprit here. I also want to help you decide if you might be addicted to dopamine.
Spoiler alert, I think we all are to some degree. I’m also going to offer up some tips for you to help you avoid getting sucked down into the dopamine whirlpool.
Cool, but first, listen, I have run countless half marathons, marathons, ultra marathons, triathlons, I’ve done a 100 mile trail race, a full Ironman, I have a ton of experience with long distance running and endurance sports.
But despite all of this, all this knowledge and all the experience, I still managed to gain weight every year. I thought I was doing all the right things from a nutrition standpoint. But clearly I wasn’t something was wrong, and I needed to fix it, but I didn’t know what to do.
And then I did something that changed everything. For me, I got a coach, I had someone there to explain exactly what was happening in my body. And this whole thing was a game changer for me, having an experienced coach show me what to do.
To fix all this was literally life changing. This changed the whole trajectory of my life. I had someone there guiding me every step of the way, showing me what to do and how to do it. I had someone there that I could go to anytime I had questions because they always had answers.
I had someone in my corner cheering for me, also doling out a little bit of tough love when I needed it. I had someone there to hold me accountable for my actions and helped me stay on track. And I had such an amazing transformation working with a coach, actually several coaches, that I decided that’s what I wanted to do.
Now, every day, I get to help people like you with your transformation. So when you’re ready to commit to becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, I suggest you find a coach that will help you get there. It doesn’t even have to be me, just find someone who has what you want, and then get started.
This could be the best thing that you ever do for yourself and could change the trajectory of your life as well. If you’re ready to hit the easy button on your running and weight loss goals, just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about my unique weight loss coaching program for runners.
Okay, let’s talk about dopamine. So are you addicted to dopamine? First of all, what is dopamine? Dopamine is a neurotransmitter made in the brain. Basically, it acts like a chemical messenger between neurons. And dopamine is actually released when your brain is expecting a reward.
So there’s actually a pre-release of dopamine that happens before you actually get the reward that you’re anticipating. So imagine you smelling some cookies cooking in the oven, some warm chocolate chip cookies, right, and you can smell them and your brain will start to release dopamine because you’re expecting that reward. Okay.
When you associate a certain activity with pleasure, the anticipation of that activity may be enough to actually raise your dopamine levels to produce some form of dopamine. It could be food, sex, shopping, alcohol, just about anything that brings you pleasure. Okay.
So again, imagine that your favorite food is chocolate chip cookies, just thinking about them or smelling them cooking in the oven will trigger the release of dopamine in your brain. So it’s like that pre-release of dopamine, okay.
And then when you actually eat those cookies, your brain gets the reward and you are flooded with dopamine. Okay? So dopamine affects you in a lot of different ways that contributes to feelings of alertness and focus and motivation and happiness and a huge flood of dopamine.
Like maybe if you eat five or eight of those warm chocolate chip cookies, which I could do in a heartbeat (btw), you get this flood of dopamine that produces feelings of euphoria. And the more intense the dopamine hit is, the better you will feel the more intense that feeling of euphoria is okay.
So chocolate chip cookies, or exercising, or laughter, these all cause releases of dopamine, but they’re pretty, pretty low doses of dopamine. But things like heroin and cocaine and alcohol cause a huge release of dopamine, and really increase the feeling of pleasure and relief and euphoria that you get from those substances.
Okay, so we have to understand that there is this cycle of pleasure that we are all prone to, which is motivation, reward and reinforcement. So the motivation to take action and on something is thinking about cookies, smelling the cookies, cooking in the oven, dreaming about the cookies, this gets you motivated to eat the cookies, okay, so there’s a motivation factor, even when the cookies are not around, even just thinking about them can get you motivated to, you know, want to go out and get cookies.
Then there’s the reward and reinforcement. So when you actually eat the cookies, this floods your brain with dopamine, which gives you the reward that you were anticipating that your motivation was driving you towards.
It also reinforces this pattern of behavior that’s getting you this desired result, you feel really good, it feels euphoric to eat a bunch of warm chocolate chip cookies. And if you’re thinking right now that you have to go and get some warm chocolate chip cookies right now, that is the dopamine motivation cycle.
And the pleasure cycle in, in practice, like you’re actually doing it right now. Because I’m kind of getting there myself. I’m like, oh, man, a warm chocolate chip cookie sounds pretty amazing right now. So just understand that there’s that cycle of motivation, reward and reinforcement.
And we have to understand that this is happening. Step number one, we have to have awareness of what’s going on with our brain and what’s going on with dopamine in our brain, especially. And we have to start getting good at breaking the cycle.
So let’s say you know, you have been dreaming about those chocolate chip cookies, and you know, you have some at home, your brain has that pre-release of dopamine, as you’re driving home, you’re like, oh, I can’t wait to get home, I’m gonna just dig into those chocolate chip cookies, but then you get home, and you discover that your kids ate all the cookies.
Now you have this disappointment factor, you have this big letdown, you didn’t get the reward, you had the motivation, but you’re not rewarding yourself with the actual cookies, with the dopamine that you’re gonna get. And so you have this big, like, down, downplay of dopamine, and you feel terrible, this feels really terrible.
You guys know exactly what I’m talking about, right? Because we’ve all experienced this, in one way or another, we’re anticipating a reward, we don’t get it, the desire actually increases. So the desire actually goes way up when we don’t get the reward. And that causes us to be in a bad mood, we don’t get the reward we wanted.
There’s no reinforcement, you feel really terrible, you’re kind of really grumpy. And you’re feeling just really miserable. So that is the cycle that’s at play here. And we have to understand that we don’t have to complete the cycle all the time that we can break that cycle. And it’s a little bit tricky, and I’ll explain how to do that in a minute here.
But just understand that that cycle has to be broken at some point. And we might have to actually experience a little bit of misery in order to get to the other side of this. Okay, I’ll go over that in a minute though.
So understand that everyone is somewhat addicted to something. We all have the capacity and most of us are addicted to dopamine in one form of another or another. So it could be food, alcohol, drugs, caffeine, sugar, your phone, social media, video games, shopping, gambling, porn. There’s so many things that we are addicted to.
In society today, so many things that we use as escapism or ways of numbing out to the world around us or how we’re feeling. The two most common are probably food and alcohol. And those are the ones I tend to kind of talk about with most of my clients.
But we eat and drink to feel different, we eat and drink to feel better, we want to reduce stress, or we’re bored, or we’re anxious or we’re frustrated, or we’re pissed off, or whatever it is, we don’t want to feel any of those things these are all will be considered negative emotions, right? And we don’t want to experience any of that stuff.
So if we eat some junk food, or drink some alcohol that just numbs us to those feelings, we don’t have to feel those things. Okay, we’ve become addicted to pleasure, we’ve become addicted to dopamine, we want that hit of dopamine to feel better. And this makes it so hard to resist all those things I just mentioned, especially sugar, junk food, alcohol.
We’re going to do anything we can not to have to feel discomfort, we’ve become addicted to the pleasurable feelings that we get of dopamine, when we get that release of dopamine, we love that and we’re addicted to it, we all are to some degree. We’ve just become addicted.
You cannot tolerate discomfort at all, we cannot tolerate any moments of discomfort. So we seek out pleasure, we numb ourselves to what we’re feeling. We distract ourselves from feeling our normal everyday feelings. Sometimes those feelings are negative, and it’s okay.
But instead, we escape from that and we want to escape from reality. So we don’t have to deal with, you know how reality makes us feel. You’ve got to understand, though, that we are human beings, and we experienced this wide swath of emotions.
And in that wide swath of emotions, our positive emotions like joy and happiness and kindness and ecstasy and love. And then we have what we call negative emotions, like anger and frustration and things anxiousness, and grief, and shame and fear, like, but there’s no like picking and choosing here, this is like just this as being a human being, we have to experience all of these emotions.
And it’s kind of like a 50/50 thing, like half the time, we’re gonna feel positive emotions half the time, we’re gonna feel negative emotions. And if we try to numb ourselves to the 50% that we don’t like, or the ones that we deem as negative, then we’re just numbing ourselves to 50% of our human experience.
And we have to stop doing that. Or we have to stop trying to escape from reality, you know. So this becomes more of an emotional tolerance problem, we have to learn how to tolerate our emotions better. Being addicted to dopamine is mainly a problem of not having any emotional tolerance.
You know, you can’t deal with having a negative emotion. So you’ll do anything and everything to make it go away right now. And over time, we’ve become so intolerable of having any of these emotions, that we will often do things to self sabotage our own success, rather than have to feel a negative emotion, we will self sabotage, rather than feel something we deem as negative.
So you have to learn how to experience your emotions, the good, the bad, the ugly, all of them, instead of turning to the quickest and most powerful source of dopamine that’s available to you. Because when you do this, when you are able to resist the temptation for the dopamine hit to escape or numb, then you actually can train your brain to become stronger.
And you become more easily able to deal with your emotions, you become an emotional badass, if you can just experience an emotion without having to numb yourself to it without having to go for that dopamine hit, you become an emotional badass.
You have to embrace the discomfort of having a negative emotion, stop trying to suppress them, or squash them down or numb them or escape from them. Let’s go back to this idea of self sabotage because we’ve been talking about this in our group this past month. And we spend a lot of time talking about how self sabotage is mainly a problem of emotional tolerance.
It’s not something that is solved by you know, oh, we have to you know, just fall follow these five steps and you will never self sabotage again. It’s mostly a problem of like, being able to tolerate any emotion, every emotion all the time. So self sabotage is anything that you do. It’s an action or an inaction that moves you further away from who you want to be, right.
Self sabotage is actions that are not in alignment with your long term goals. And we would rather sabotage our own success than have to feel an emotion. That’s kind of crazy, right? But we do it all the time. Oh, yeah, I want to lose 40 pounds, but I had this really stressful day at work.
So instead of having a salad, I’m going to eat cake for dinner tonight, even though that goes against everything you want for yourself, and you know, you’re going to gain a pound or two or something, you know, just by eating a big ol’ cake for dinner. You’d rather feel good right now, you’d rather not feel stressed today in this moment for about 15 minutes, than actually commit to that goal and actually lose the 40 pounds, even though that’s better for you.
Even though you know that’s better for you. And you know, in that moment, you’re making a decision that is not good for you. But you choose it anyway, because that dopamine has its claws in you, you know.
So, here’s a definition of addiction, I started looking this up. And there are literally like dozens of different definitions of addiction, I’m going to just give you one that I thought was kind of appropriate here. So, “Addiction is a repeated involvement with a substance or an activity, despite the substantial harm it causes, because that involvement with the activity is pleasurable.”
So addiction is doing something over and over again, either taking a substance or doing some sort of activity that brings you pleasure, even though there is substantial harm caused by it. Okay? So think about this, where in your life are you involved with something, a substance or an activity that you know is causing some sort of harm, but it is pleasurable, I guarantee you’re going to find one or more areas of your life that fit this description.
And one of those that’s kind of sneaky that I sort of mentioned earlier, is the cell phone, scrolling through social media, and I catch myself doing this. I actually put a timer on my phone to give me just 30 minutes of social media per day, and I just use Facebook and Instagram.
And I mainly do that from a business perspective, I go and comment on things and postings, and then I try to get off of there, but I find myself being sucked into these, you know, TikTok videos, or, you know, these reels are whatever they are, that, you know, seem innocuous enough until, you know, 15 minutes later, I’m still scrolling through these stupid videos. And I’m like, what, what am I even doing?
Like, I just find myself being pulled into this. And it’s because the activity gives us that little hit of dopamine. So think about this, that motivation, reward reinforcement cycle works the same way with scrolling through social media, we’re anticipating that we’re going to find something good.
And that’s going to make us happy, or make us laugh, or make us feel something like we were anticipating something good that’s going to happen is the same thing that happens with gamblers, when they pull that lever on the slot machine, and they anticipate that something good is going to happen.
In that moment, they get a release of dopamine, you get the same release of dopamine when you open up social media, and you’re waiting for it to load and you’re expecting something good to be there. Same thing happens at that moment, we get that release of dopamine, it’s that pre-dopamine release, and then we’ve got to satisfy that now.
So we scroll until we get something that is a reward. But that reinforces that behavior. And so we do it again and again. And again. The gambler can’t stop pulling the lever on the slot machine. We can’t stop doom scrolling. It’s the same thing.
And the same thing applies to eating junk food. You know, we anticipate it, we see pictures of junk food on Billboard’s and on websites and advertisements on Instagram, whatever. And it drives this desire for that thing. It increases the motivation to get that reward.
We have that pre-release of dopamine and then we just we gotta get it, we got to have it, can’t live without it. But if we can actually break the cycle there. If we can stop giving ourselves the reward and the reinforcement, we can actually make some pretty amazing changes in our lives. And I’m working on that with social media. It’s not I’m not perfect at it yet. I’m working on it, I have put a timer on my social media use every day.
And when that timer goes off, I try to put it down because you can like just say, like override timer, which kind of defeats the purpose. But anyway, I’ll find myself overriding a couple times throughout the day, just to check a few things. But I’m trying to get to the place where I just don’t do that anymore.
And I’m not devoting a bunch of time to doom scrolling, you know, because it really isn’t enhancing my life very much. Okay. So, another thing we have to be careful of here is that we become resistant to the effects of dopamine.
Over time, our brains will build up a resistance to dopamine. So we need more and more just to feel kind of normal again, just to get back to our baseline. This is not good, this, what’s this is what leads to drug addiction, alcoholism, binge eating, all kinds of really, you know, addictive behaviors.
But I think we all have a little bit of this addiction built into whether it’s scrolling social media, eating junk, food, drinking, whatever. So when we constantly reward ourselves with dopamine, this leads to an adaptation. So you become adapted to whatever you do consistently.
And if you consistently eat sugar, 12 times a day, you’re going to become super adapted to that and your brain will actually down regulate the amount of dopamine that you are producing.
And so you will need more and more to get that feeling. Again, this is classic addiction, right? Your brain gets used to the flood of dopamine, and it builds up resistance to it. And you keep going back to whatever your favorite source of dopamine as you go back over and over again, because you’re just trying to get that feeling again, and you can’t get it because you’re becoming resistant to it.
Resistance happens when you produce more dopamine than is normal over a long period of time. And then you require more and more to get the same effect. So the pain of not having the dopamine that your brain actually really desires leads to a very miserable existence, right, you find that you, you can’t even live without it, right?
You become like so addicted to the dopamine that you have to find something to make you feel better, right? So why many people find it so hard, or almost impossible to give up something like sugar for any length of time, because they’re so they’re addicted to it, they’re addicted to the dopamine, they become resistant to its effects, they need more and more just to get back to feeling quote unquote, like normal again.
And over time, if you continue to feed that dopamine monster, then it’s going to no longer produce the desired effect. And you’re going to end up just being miserable and struggling and needing more and more and more just to like, feel normal. Okay, and I know this all sounds pretty gloomy, but I want you to know that there is hope here, okay.
And it requires the willingness to experience pain. So the ironic thing here is that when you work hard to avoid pain, you eat the sugar and you drink the alcohol or you take the drugs because you just want to not have to feel pain in the moment, it actually causes long term pain and suffering.
There’s all kinds of negative consequences from drinking and eating sugar, and other addictive behaviors. Lots of long term pain is actually produced in what you’re trying to do is seek pleasure, but you’re actually creating pain, you’re trying to avoid pain, and you’re actually causing yourself a ton of pain.
The other ironic point here is that when you seek pain, you actually experience more pleasure in your life. Right? It’s like when you go to the gym, you go to the gym, it’s kind of a painful experience, right from getting up early in the morning, to sticking to the plan every day, to actually lifting the heavy weights. Like all this stuff is painful to some degree mentally, emotionally, physically, right?
You lift the heavy weights and it hurts, right? But the rewards that you get, the pleasure that you get on the other side of that is pretty amazing. You get stronger, you get healthier, you feel better, you improve your running, you sleep better, you’re happier, you actually up regulate your dope mean levels naturally.
So exercise is one of the best ways of up-regulating dopamine and has very positive effects. But it’s kind of a painful experience, right? You know, when people are, I don’t want to, I don’t want to run, running is hard. You know, I gotta commit to it, I gotta get up early in the morning, it’s cold outside, or it’s hot outside or whatever. But when you commit to doing that, quote, unquote, like painful thing, you actually produce pleasure.
Okay, so it’s kind of ironic there, right? So stop chasing the dopamine, and start chasing those things that seem a little painful in the moment. But that actually gives you the long term pleasure, because chasing the dopamine is a vicious cycle to be in, and you’re never going to get the desired results, you’re never going to actually create long term pleasure for yourself.
Now, there are other ways of achieving an upgrade regulating your dopamine levels naturally, like eating right, things like intermittent fasting actually helped to upregulate dopamine, cold showers or cold baths, running, especially sprinting or hill repeats something where you’re running very intensely, very hard.
Meditation, listening to music, laughter; all of these things help to upregulate dopamine naturally, and are actually good for you. Okay, so the way we get out of this cycle is to stop it. At some point, we have to break the cycle at some point. And it really requires that, that being able to tolerate your emotions, because what we’re trying to avoid the pain of experiencing a negative emotion is what we’re mostly trying to avoid.
If we can get good at just experiencing those negative emotions, we can actually stop chasing momentary pleasure and self sabotaging ourselves. And we can actually focus on what is good for us and those things that are going to produce long term health and happiness and, and positive feelings going forward. Cool. All right.
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