Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
There’s a lot of conflicting information out there in the world today about proper nutrition, the best ways to lose weight, what types of exercise are best for weight loss, and on and on. But I …
Continue Reading about 163. 3 Proven Ways to Get Your Body Burning Fat →
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 163 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today three proven ways to get your body burning fat. I know that there’s a lot of conflicting information out there in the world today about proper nutrition, the best ways to lose weight, what types of exercise are best for weight loss, and so on and so on.
But I think we can all agree on one thing that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, right? Losing weight means reducing the amount of fat you have stored in your body period. When you look at yourself in the mirror naked, you see exactly where this fat is to write. That’s the stuff you want to get rid of. But how do you do it?
Maybe you’ve tried running it off. And maybe you’ve made some progress with that, but maybe not. For many of us running just doesn’t move the needle at all. There are lots of ways to reduce body fat. Today, I’m gonna go over the three proven ways to get your body burning fat so that you can lose weight and so that you can improve your running performance.
But first I want to talk about something. Here’s something that most coaches get wrong. Most coaches focus on one thing, they focus on what you should do, which is fine. That’s part of coaching, you need to know what to do, you need to know how to do it. But there’s more to it than that, especially if you really want to make changes to your health and fitness that lasts, especially if you want to make sustainable, long lasting lifetime changes.
So in my program, we don’t focus on just what you’re doing. That’s part of it. But rather, we focus on something bigger, like who are you becoming? This is a much more powerful approach to creating lasting change. Because when you focus on who you are becoming, you are way more likely to get there, you’re more focused, you’re more committed, you stay on track, more healthy habits become a way of life, they just become part of who you are, and what you do. So decide on who it is that you want to become.
And then hey, let’s make a plan to get you there. To learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Okay, so three proven ways to get your body burning fat. The first thing I want to talk about here is what is weight? Because we talk about weight loss a lot. And people say I just want to lose weight, I want to lose weight.
So what is this weight that we’re talking about? Well, we’re talking about body fat, right? A lot of times when people go on calorie restrictive diets to lose weight, a lot of the weight that they’re losing is muscle mass, we don’t want to do that, especially if you are somebody who wants to continue improving your running performance or get stronger and just be a healthy fit human being you want to maintain or even gain muscle weight.
And while you are getting rid of the fat weight, and this is something that you can absolutely do, is what we call improving your body composition. Your body is composed of fat, muscle and bone and all kinds of things. We want to improve your body composition, we want to increase your muscle mass while reducing your fat mass. So this, this is really what we’re talking about when we talk about losing weight, we just don’t want to drop weight, we want to drop the fat weight, right.
And this all makes total common sense, right, we want to get stronger, we want to have more energy, we want to feel better, we want to be as healthy and as fit as possible. That is really what the goal is here. The goal isn’t even to lose weight, the goal is to be as healthy and as strong and fit as possible.
When we do that, when we make that our goal, the fat loss happens as a nice side result of all that right. So let’s just make sure that we understand we’re talking about fat weight here. Okay. And how do you lose the fat weight? Well, you gotta burn the fat. We can all agree on that. All right. I know there’s a lot of information out there and different ways of doing things and calorie restriction and don’t count calories and track all your food and never track your food. Only eat these kinds of foods, never eat those kinds of foods. And on and on and on.
And it gets pretty frustrating, right? But I think we can all agree that if you want to lose weight, you want to lose fat weight, you’ve got to burn the fat. Right? So let’s just focus on that this is what our focus is on this discussion today is how do we burn fat? How do we get our body burning fat more efficiently, we’re always burning a little bit of that.
But if we’re not losing that fat weight, we’re not burning enough. So we have to increase that fat burning capacity in our bodies. So the first thing I want to talk about here is the insulin model, because this is something that is very well adopted now and very well researched, and something that I think most people could agree is probably what’s going on with the majority of people who have a hard time losing weight.
And the insulin model looks something like this. When your insulin is high, in your blood, when your body has a high amounts of insulin, then your hormones are put into a state where your body cannot burn fat. High insulin means your body is storing fat, not burning fat. So the idea is to keep insulin levels low, so that your body can burn fat. So this is, this is what the insulin model is, it’s pretty simple.
It gets a little complicated when you talk about the best ways to keep insulin levels low. And a lot of this has to do with the study of obesity and the study of type two diabetes. But it applies to all of us really, and this is something that I think is really fascinating is that even though we might be healthy, and we don’t have pre diabetes, or diabetes, you know, we’re not obese, but we were runners, we’re pretty fit people, but we can’t seem to lose weight.
Maybe you know, there’s some truth to this insulin model of weight gain and weight loss. And maybe there’s something that we can apply to even us as runners, right. So, I think that we have to just take this as a baseline, understanding that when we have high levels of insulin, that our body is storing fat, when we can keep our insulin levels low, then we can create an environment where our body can burn our stored body fat.
Okay, so how do we keep our insulin levels low? So the first suggestion or tip or the first way, the first proven way to get your body burning fat is to lower your carbohydrate intake, get off the sugars, get off the refined grains, stop eating tons of carbs, this is not about you know, zero carbs. But you gotta get away from those refined carbs and the foods that really spike your blood sugar.
And here’s why. Because when you eat sugar, for example, your blood sugar spikes like crazy. So you get this huge spike in your blood sugar. When you have a huge spike in your blood sugar, insulin gets produced, again in a huge amount in order to bring that blood sugar back down to baseline.
So a high spike of blood sugar, glucose in the blood, high spike of insulin; now your body is storing fat, your body cannot burn fat when you’re in this high insulin mode. Okay, so we keep our carbs low. We don’t eat a ton of sugar, we don’t eat any sugar if we can avoid it. We don’t eat a lot of things like you know refined grains.
And, what happens is the food that you do eat, let’s say you eat some chicken and some broccoli, or some scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon and some avocado. These are all foods that are low glycemic. These are foods that won’t raise your blood sugar, a ton of good sources of protein, good sources of fat, and will not raise your blood sugar.
So what happens when you eat these foods is that your blood sugar stays pretty, pretty steady. It’ll go up a little bit. When you eat protein, your blood sugar will go up slightly. When you eat fat, your blood sugar doesn’t go up at all. So if you ate for example, I have coffee in the morning. I’ve put a little MCT oil in my coffee, maybe a little bit of grass fed butter in there, blend it up. Tastes amazing. Gives me a little bit of energy in the morning but does nothing to raise my blood sugar because it’s just pure fat.
Pure fat does not raise your blood sugar, carbs and protein will raise your blood sugar, carbs much more so than protein. Okay, so we eat a diet that is higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates. And what happens? Well, you’re getting all the nutrients that you need. You’re getting a very nutrient dense diet when you do this and you are keeping your blood sugar pretty low.
And when you do this, insulin is low, which means your body is constantly in fat, fat burning mode, not fat storing mode. Alright, so do we understand this much of this process so far? Because it’s very important that we understand this concept.
So here’s something we need to understand. As runners, we need to understand this as well, because we basically have, you know, two types of fuel that our body can use, there’s more, but I’m just gonna go over these two. So we have glucose, carbs, and we have fat; stored body fat as fuel. And think of it as a gas tank, and at the bottom of the gas tank is this huge supply of stored body fat as fuel.
So this is going to burn for days and days and days. But then at the very top of that gas tank, we have a little bit of glucose, so we have a little bit of fast burning glucose, there’s only a little bit but as long as that’s there, that’s going to be the preferred fuel source. So our body wants to burn that first. So if we burn that top layer of glucose off, then our body can start tapping into that huge supply of clean burning long lasting, stored body fat.
And this is how you start to burn fat really efficiently. And you can start to lose weight and things like that. As long as you keep that top level of fuel topped off, as long as you keep carbs, and glucose. As readily available fuel for your body to use as energy, you will not get into that fat burning, you will not be able to get into that other source of fuel.
Think about this: as runners, we’ve been told we need to keep our carbs up, we need to keep our glycogen levels topped off, which means that we need to continually eat carbs, continually eat sugar, so that we always have that to use as fuel. Fine, okay, that works as a fuel source just purely for running performance. But it also keeps your body in this fat storing mode. So you’re constantly going to be gaining weight in this process.
This is why so many people come to me and they’re like Patrick, I am training for this marathon. And I’m gaining weight, like what is going on here? And we look at the diet, we see that you know, maybe this person is eating the typical runner’s diet of nothing but carbs and sugar and then fueling with carbs and sugar, recovering with carbs and sugar and then repeating that process day in and day out. And they can’t figure out why they’re gaining weight.
And this is the process here, you just keep topping off the carbs and keep topping off the glucose and so you don’t have the ability to access that huge supply of stored body fat, okay, so get rid of that top layer of fuel, get rid of the glucose, get rid of the glycogen. And now you’ve got the ability to start burning stored body fat.
Okay, so the first proven method of getting your body to start burning fat more efficiently, is to lower your carb intake and just cut out most of the carbs. And we’re not talking about anything crazy here, if you’re eating 50-75 grams of carbs a day, that’s pretty low compared to what most people do. I know people that do very low, I probably do around 30-40 grams of carbs a day, maybe 50.
Some days when I’m running, I’m going to increase that to be a little bit higher, because I’m using that as a little bit of fuel before running. But that’s because I’m very efficient at burning fat. I’m already fat adapted, and I can use some carbs as fuel. I’m not trying to lose weight. But if you are trying to lose weight, just keep that stuff out of the equation, you don’t really need carbs, you don’t need carbs for running you can, you can run really well without carbs.
You really can. You don’t have to do it all the time. But you can do it most of the time, especially for the longer distance, lower intensity stuff. Okay. So lower the carb intake, and you can start getting your body burning fat instead of storing fat. The other thing I want to say here before I go on to the next one is that burning fat is our natural state.
We as human beings have always been really proficient fat burners. We’ve always eaten a pretty low glycemic diet. And it can be argued what we ate as human beings. Lots of meat, lots of fat, lots of, you know, tubers and some berries and things like that, honey. So you know, it’s not like we ate zero carbs or zero vegetables or zero fruits, but we didn’t need the kinds of processed foods that we have today. We didn’t have access to that stuff.
They weren’t obese, you know, ancient ancestors were not obese people. If they didn’t have type two diabetes, they didn’t have heart disease then they would have all the problems that we have today. So they were really good at storing some of the energy that they consumed as body fat. And then they were really good at using that stored energy as body fat.
It’s kind of like you’re putting wood on the woodpile to burn later. But in modern society today, over the last 40 years or so, 40-50 years, we have been a society that just keeps putting more and more wood on the woodpile, we’re not burning the wood for fuel, we’re not burning that fat for fuel, we’re just adding to the fat stores that we have. So this is a really big problem.
But just understand that we are, we can take control of the way our bodies work, and we can get back to being really efficient fat burning machines, like we used to be, as human beings forever got. So this isn’t some weird thing that I’m explaining isn’t like some fringe thing that just happened, you know, a year ago or something like that. Now, we’ve always been efficient fat burning machines, we just want to get back to that natural state.
Okay, so lower the carbon take, that’s number one. Number two, don’t eat all the time. Another way to get fat burning going, is to not eat constantly. So remember what I said about blood sugar? Well, every time you eat, even if you’re eating just, you know fat and protein, your blood sugar will go up a little bit.
So that means that when your blood sugar goes up, your body is going to produce some insulin to bring that back down to normal. So instead of eating six times a day where our blood sugar is constantly up, and insulin is constantly present, why don’t we just eat a couple of times a day?
You know, the human body is really designed to eat like once or twice a day. When we do that, you’re keeping it. This is another great way of keeping insulin levels steady and low, and giving your body the ability to burn that stored body fat.
Well, you know, well, what about timing for running? I need to fuel my runs. I need protein right after a workout. And I have to tell you something like there’s been so many studies that have really proven that it really doesn’t matter when you consume protein after a workout. As long as you get the right amount of protein each day, the timing is not that important.
You might have some minuscule gains from eating protein within an hour after a hard workout. But the results have really shown to be negligible, there’s really not that big of a difference between people who time their protein, you know, right around a hard workout, or they just eat later, you know, give themselves a couple of hours after a workout and eat when they feel hungry again, so people don’t get hungry right after working out. It’s more important to get enough protein each day.
So as long as you’re getting the right amount of protein each day, then that’s going to be more important, that’s going to have a bigger impact on your recovery and on muscle maintaining and muscle building, then, you know, this one, our timing right after a workout or something like that. So maybe eat a couple times a day, eat when you’re hungry, don’t eat when you’re not hungry.
When you do this, when you extend the amount of time between meals, and you know, we call this intermittent fasting, and people freak out when they hear the word fasting, but it’s just the thing. It’s not a big deal. We just don’t eat all the time. So we do some intermittent fasting, which means we’re just you know, going to maybe skip breakfast.
So maybe we do our workouts in the morning in that fasted state. And we do that there’s a reason why we want to work out in that fasted state, the number one reason is that we can really take advantage of the fact that we have not raised our blood sugar, we don’t have fuel onboard, we didn’t eat a bunch of you know, pancakes or whatever that we’re going to be using as fuel for our runs.
We can go out there and workout in that fasted state, which really improves your body’s ability to burn fat. So now you can start burning fat even more efficiently because you’re working out without any other fuel to draw from that glucose, that top level of fuel that I talked about earlier. It’s not there, you’re fasted.
So it helps to increase your fat burning. It increases your adrenaline when you work out in a fasted state. So it actually can work out a little bit harder. A you increase your recovery hormones like human growth hormone, which means you can recover faster from some of these harder workouts. And you’re kind of forcing your body to use stored body fat as a fuel source.
And the more you do this, the more efficient you get at it. So if you want to lose weight and you want to get your body really burning fat and you want a great source of fuel for running, just don’t eat all the time. Do some workouts in that fasted state, as well. And this will help to keep insulin low and it’ll help keep your body into that fat burning mode as opposed to the fat storing mode.
Okay, so we want to lower the carb intake and then we do want to space out our meals a little bit and not eat constantly. And then the third way of getting your body burning fat and this one you probably have figured I was gonna be talking about is exercise, right? I mean, this is the most, most common way that people think of when you think of oh, how do you burn fat?
And people think cardio, step aerobics, Zumba, Jazzercise, whatever, they think, you know, you just need to like go out there and run more, and that’s going to be the answer. And moving your body more will help. Only as long as you’re doing the first two things right? As long as you’re eating the right diet, you’re not eating tons of sugar, refined grains and tons of carbs. And you’re not eating constantly.
If you do cardio, you know, without all the sugar and stuff and without, you know, eating constantly, you will actually be able to burn more fat than you would if you’re eating the wrong diet and things like that. This is why people have a really hard time losing weight when they are running a lot is because they’re just the diet is wrong, right, you can’t outrun that high carb diet, okay, all the exercise in the world isn’t going to help if the only fuel that you’re burning is carbs.
So if you want to burn fat, you have to get rid of the carbs first. So number one, change the diet, get your body burning fat naturally without exercise, then when you do add an exercise, you’re just going to improve your body’s ability to burn fat that much more.
Okay, now we’re going to talk about a couple different types of exercise. So there’s two types of exercise that we want to do in order to burn fat. Actually, there’s more, I’m just going to talk about these two today, though. So we’re going to talk about low intensity exercise and high intensity exercise.
So low intensity exercise, this is long distance running. This is like a lot of running in zones wanting to or if you use the RPE scale, the rate of perceived exertion, this is like one to four this is that very easy, comfortable conversational pace, this easy effort, the stuff that you can do all day, like just go out there and run doesn’t feel hard. You know, it just feels very natural and very comfortable for you. Whatever that is, that low intensity running. This is great for fat burning. Even a brisk walk can get you there, you know, whatever. Whatever gets you into that state where you’re in those zones one and two, then you’re in the fat burning zone. This is awesome.
And we call these steady state exercises. This is running, this is swimming, this is cycling, elliptical rowing, anything that is going to keep you in that steady state for an extended period of time and extended can be 30 minutes, it could be six hours, you know, just depends on what floats your boat, right. So we like the low intensity stuff for fat burning.
But also, we also want to include some high intensity workouts. The high intensity exercise is interesting, because when you add in moderate to high intensity, like running, for example, you’re going to make gains and your endurance and your speed and your power, which all help to increase your body’s ability to burn fat even more efficiently. And so these are exercises like sprinting, you know, HIIT workouts, weightlifting, hill repeats, even things like dancing and boxing and martial arts like these are all high intensity, shorter duration, typically maybe up to an hour or so, but higher intensity.
And something that I think is really fascinating is that most carb adapted athletes, so most traditional athletes who are following a traditional, you know approach to nutrition and stuff, they’ll hit the crossover point from where they’re burning mostly fat to burning mostly sugar. Most people, carb adapted athletes will hit this crossover point around 65% of their VO2 max.
Whereas fat adapted athletes who are very efficient at burning fat can push this crossover point much higher. So instead of 65% of their vo to max they can they’re burning mostly fat at 70% of their vo to max or 80% or 90%. Jeff Browning, he’s famous, he’s an ultra runner, he’s famous for still burning mostly fat at like 90-95% of his VO2 max so even at the higher intensities.
You can increase your fat burning ability. So just understand that the high intensity workouts can help to push your lactate threshold help push your your ability to burn fat at these higher levels as well. And you know, when we exercise, we’re always burning both types of fuel. So never just one, but the ratio goes way up and fat burning when you keep the carbs low when you don’t eat all the time. And when we do these fasted workouts, you’re just going to increase your body’s ability to burn fat. So, you know, the carb adapted athletes just burn less fat, they need to refuel constantly, they’re using sugar for fuel, they’re never tapping into that stored body fat as a fuel source, they have a hard time losing weight, and a lot of times they even gain weight, especially during higher training periods because they tend to up the carb intake. Okay, so that’s carb adapted athletes.
Fat adapted athletes, however, burn much higher amounts of fat, they don’t need much in the way of fuel if any, for most workouts, they train themselves to use stored body fat for fuel, they do high intensity workouts as well, which helped to push their fat burning ability even higher, they tend to lose weight pretty easily. So these are the three best ways to get your body burning fat, reduce your carb intake, and eat less frequently. And be sure to include both high intensity and low intensity exercises. So you can burn tons of stored body fat and turn your body into a lean mean fat burning running machine. Cool. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
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I get a lot of questions about how to improve running performance and one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer or faster you have to improve your …
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 158, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, building your aerobic engine. So I get a lot of questions from people in general and clients about how to improve running performance.
And one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer, or run faster, you have to improve your aerobic fitness. So building and maintaining a solid aerobic base should be the goal of every runner, regardless of your running experience. But many runners skip this step, because they just want to get to the faster running the higher intensity running.
So in this episode, I’m going to explain how building your aerobic engine is essential to helping you improve both your running speed and your endurance. And Happy New Year everyone. This is the first episode of 2023. And is this going to be a new year and a new you or a new year and the same old, same old you?
So I want you to think about this, where do you want to be this time next year? When you look back? Over 2023? What do you want to have accomplished? Where do you want to be with your health and your fitness? Do you want to make this year the year that you finally lose the weight and learn how to keep it off for good?
So I really want you to think about this, what do you really want for yourself this year, because here’s the truth. Whatever you want for yourself, it’s available to you, it’s achievable for you. So let’s get you there together. When you sign up for coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability you need to achieve everything that you want for yourself in 2023.
So let’s make this year 2023 your best year yet, to learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application. You and I will get on a call, we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is, boom, we’ll get you started. And we’ll start making this the best year yet for you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.
Okay, so lots of people who are new to running, especially the newer runners, want to kind of skip the part where they have to focus on building their aerobic base, or what I like to call the aerobic engine. And this is a good time of the year to be talking about this, because I think a lot of us are just about to start marathon training, or maybe half marathon training, a lot of spring races happen in the United States.
And so the beginning of January is when a lot of training begins. The problem is that most runners don’t do a really good job of building their aerobic engine properly. At the beginning of a training cycle, lots of runners, even very experienced runners who are maybe following some sort of training plan.
So they may have some sort of marathon training plan that they’re doing. They just begin by, you know, doing all their miles at a kind of medium hard intensity, and they end up kind of maybe getting burned out or getting injured. A lot of overuse injuries happen, especially with new runners, but even with experienced runners.
And a lot of these overuse injuries happen kind of at the first half of the training cycle, which leads me to believe that when we start our marathon training or start our half marathon training program, you need to be you need to have developed a good solid aerobic base, you need a good solid base on which you can build, right?
So you want to start with a good base, start with a good aerobic engine, and then you can get faster and build your intensity levels on top of that. So what does it mean when I’m talking about your aerobic engine? So really what I’m talking about here, as I’m talking about increasing the efficiency of your cardiovascular system, right?
The cardiovascular system is the different functions of your body that can combine to enable you to run for longer distances, right? Your cardiovascular system is, you know, your heart, your blood, carrying oxygen to working muscles and organs to every working part of your body. So it’s mostly, you know, how, how efficient is your heart? How much blood can your heart pump out at a time, like how much blood volume can you pump out?
Because the more blood volume in your heart can pump out, the more oxygen you will be delivering to working muscles, the better you are at delivering oxygen rich blood to working muscles, especially those muscles used for running, that easier running becomes. So we want to improve this system. And it’s something that you can absolutely improve.
Now, if you’re a new runner, and you’re just starting out, and you get out there, and maybe you’re training for your first 5k, and you get out there and to run a mile is takes everything you’ve got and you feel completely winded at the end of that mile, that is fine, that is normal. If you’re just getting started with this, then that is something where if you continue running, and you continue doing the right kind of running, you will find that running a mile becomes very easy.
And then running two and three miles becomes a no big deal. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, I’m just gonna go ahead and, and run a half marathon or trust our training for a marathon, right? But don’t get ahead of yourself. Work your way up to that slowly. And I’m going to be talking about that in a minute here.
So really, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about your aerobic engine, is your cardiovascular system, you know, your body’s ability to deliver oxygen rich blood to all the working muscles and organs and all the functions in your body that help you to improve your running efficiency and your running performance.
Okay, so why do we want to build an aerobic engine? Like why is it important to build this? Well, you know, you just can’t expect to go out there and run a fast half marathon or a fast marathon. Without doing the work to build your cardiovascular system, you can’t improve your running performance, if you don’t start with a good base, right?
So you need to first build a solid aerobic base, then you can work on getting faster, and increasing the intensity of your running over those longer distances. But I want to make sure this is very clear, do not skip this step, do not skip the part where you build that aerobic base. And something that is actually kind of counterintuitive. But I’ll explain why this works in just a minute here, you will actually get faster, just by improving your aerobic engine.
So by doing more slow, easy running and improving your cardiovascular system, you will become more efficient at running and you can actually run faster at the same intensity levels. This is one of the huge benefits of building a strong aerobic base is that you can improve your running efficiency, you can improve your running speed.
In fact, there are many benefits to improving your aerobic engine here. So when your cardiovascular system gets more efficient, when you improve your aerobic fitness, running becomes easier. This is like one of the number one reasons why we want to do this, it just gets easier, right? You can run longer distances and you can run faster at the same perceived effort level.
So let’s say you go out there and you run out a perceived effort level of a three or a four and you’re like this feels great, it feels pretty easy for me. And you might notice your pace is a 10 minute pace. For example, over time, if you build your cardiovascular system the right way, if you build your aerobic engine properly, over time, you can run at that same three four effort level.
Oh, this feels pretty easy. But now your pace is a 9:30 or a 9:00 minute pace because you’ve improved how your body is fueling itself and how your body is using oxygen and and how much blood volume you’re pumping out there. Okay, so you actually get faster at the same effort level, which is amazing.
Another reason why we want to improve our cardiovascular system, or our aerobic engine is that it actually increases the number of mitochondria in your body. So this is the powerhouse of your cells. And you can actually increase the size and strength of your mitochondria as well. So this right here is going to give you an edge and this is one of the reasons why you run easier and you can run faster at the same effort level.
You also get denser capillaries and you can deliver more oxygenated blood with more capillaries working in your bloodstream. So your working muscles will actually get more oxygen, which makes running easier. Another kind of benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to build mental toughness. So as you improve your cardiovascular system, you start to feel more confident. So you can go out there and run three miles and it feels tough.
But as you, you know, increase your running volume as you increase your distance as you increase your aerobic capacity and your aerobic performance, then running becomes easier and becomes more confident you can run 8, 10, 12 miles and and feel like well, yeah, I can do this. And it makes you more mentally tough because it pushes you, enables you to push yourself a little bit harder, enables you to shoot for higher and higher goals. And next thing you know you’re running a half marathon or you’re running a marathon, you’re starting to train for an ultra marathon.
Another benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to improve muscular strength, you know, you’re delivering more oxygen to muscles, you’re able to run longer, you build more muscular strength, you improve your running economy, you improve your running efficiency, you become more energy efficient, you know, you’re using the same kind of you have the same inputs, but your output is much more efficient. And then you get faster, you know, you’ll be able to perform better at races.
So all these reasons are why we work hard to improve our aerobic engine, okay. So do not skip this, we absolutely want to make sure that before you begin your training, or the first phases of your training for any kind of endurance events should be to really build a strong aerobic base. Now some people like to do this in the offseason, they like to spend, you know, four to six weeks building that aerobic engine, even up to 12 weeks, you know, really building a strong aerobic engine before they get into their training cycle.
But you can absolutely do this at the beginning of a half or full marathon training cycle. So how do we do this? How do you start building your aerobic engine? What are the keys to improving your aerobic fitness and improving your cardiovascular efficiency?
So the first tip I’m going to give you here to improve your aerobic engine would be to increase your running volume. Right? The simple fact of running more will help you to increase your aerobic capacity, increase your running efficiency, just running more and increasing your volume helps to improve your running form and helps to increase your cardiovascular system.
You build stronger muscles. Running becomes easier, just by running more. But the caveat with this is you don’t do too much too soon. This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes that new runners make is increasing their volume too much too soon. So the standard sort of rule of thumb has always been to increase by no more than around 10% a week in your weekly volume.
So that means if you’re starting out and you’re running about 10 miles a week, you know, for the first few weeks, I would only increase that by like a mile each week. So maybe week one you’re at 10 miles and then you build up to 11, 12, 13. Maybe you can jump up to 14.5 or 15, 16, 18, 20. But you don’t really want to increase volume too quickly.
So people get excited when they start running and they’re like oh running is amazing. I feel so great doing this and your muscles might be ready to take on the miles but your connective tissues, your tendons and ligaments are not quite ready for that yet. And a lot of the running injuries that people experience are tendinitis issues or strained, you know ligaments or tendons. They tend to be more connective tissue issues than they do with muscular issues.
It’s pretty rare to strain the muscle from running in the beginning especially. It’s more common to have these connective tissue issues so definitely be careful and don’t do too. Too much too soon try to keep it around that 10% increase in weekly volume, then, you know, if you’re a more experienced runner, you can increase that from 10 to maybe 15 or 20% per week. The idea is that you have to do what feels right for you. And don’t overdo it. That is the key here. Less is more in this case, right. So just slowly build your volume, but definitely increasing your volume is going to be one of the best ways to improve your aerobic engine.
Another way of doing this is to run slower. So when I talk about running slower, there’s different ways we can look at this. So running slower means you’re running in, maybe you’re running in a zone one or two. From a heart rate standpoint, maybe you’re someone who likes to just use RPE, rate of perceived exertion, the scale of 1 to 10. And you might like to stay in the one to four range.
That would be nice, easy running, maybe you’d like to just run at a conversational pace, you’d like to just, you know, go by if you can carry on a conversation or not. The idea here is that you need to slow down, and you need to do a lot of running slower. When you do a lot of running slower, you increase your distance, but if you keep the intensity levels very low, you are at lower risk of injury. And you put less stress on your systems, you put less stress on your bones and muscles and those connective tissues like I talked about.
So slow running is one of the best ways to build your aerobic engine, it’s one of the most effective ways to build your aerobic engine, you’re not going to be able to get more aerobically fit by just cranking out every workout, you can’t go out there and do every workout hard or medium hard, you know that you have to spend a lot of time running easy and rolling slow.
So something I noticed here, so I took about three months off of running. And since August, so August, September, October, getting into November, I’ve been running very consistently since the middle of November in my room or maybe like Thanksgiving, let’s just say. And I’m noticing that I’m paying very close attention to my effort level and my heart rate.
And I’m noticing that I’m staying very consistent from an energy standpoint, very easy running most of my runs, I would say 90% of my runs right now or at a very easy conversational pace, probably that one to two zones, and the heart rate zones, and maybe three to four on the RPE scale, or two to four somewhere in there and that our RPE scale.
But one thing that’s interesting here is I noticed that my effort level is staying the same, my heart rate is staying the same, but my pace is increasing. So I’m getting faster, at the same effort level. So this is a sign that I’m building a strong aerobic engine. And this is what I want for you too. You should notice that over time, doing a lot of running 90% 80% of your runs at this slower pace, just slowing things down, will help you to increase your aerobic engine and help you to get faster.
So now as I get to the place where I’m you know, going to get into marathon training here, and I’m training for an ultra marathon event here in May, I will continue doing a lot of this slow, easy running and see my pace continually increase, you know, to a certain degree here, okay? The other way that you can really increase your aerobic engine is by running faster.
And I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive here. But doing higher intensity, like short, higher intensity workouts is another amazing way of building that aerobic engine, right? So why these work is that these workouts put a very high amount of stress on the cardiovascular system, very high amount of stress for very short intervals. This elicits an adaptive response where your system improves.
Think about it, like you know building muscle, like if you lift heavy weights, and you do you know six to eight reps of a very heavy weight. And you get to the point where you just cannot lift one more rep of that weight.
And then you stop and so that’s a short interval but very intense. Your muscle is going to have been put under a high amount of stress for a very short amount of time. That muscle is going to have an adaptive response. It’s going to get stronger. It’s going to grow. You’re gonna see some growth rather than that muscle, and the next time, you’ll be able to lift a heavier weight.
The exact same response happens in our cardiovascular system. So we put high stress for a very short amount of time on that cardiovascular system that improves, this isn’t there’s an adaptive response, your body’s like, hey, we need to, you know, change the way we’re doing things here, we need to increase the amount of blood we’re pumping out per heartbeat. So increase our blood volume, you know, we need to deliver more oxygen working muscles.
And this is another very effective way of improving that aerobic engine. And especially when you combine it with your longer slower runs, right, your very easy lower stress run. So very low stress, long runs, and then very high stress, short runs. So running fast and hard for short intervals, like this could be like, one to three minutes, a very hard running 4-10 minutes of moderate intensity running maybe 12-30 minutes.
For tempo type workouts, these are just examples of different intensity levels that you can add in there. But you know, anything short is one to 30 minutes, maybe. And it just kind of depends on the event that you’re training for. But high stress for short intervals, and low stress for the long runs equals a badass aerobic engine, right there. Okay?
So those two combined are a really, really good way of improving your cardiovascular fitness. So the slower runs focus on 80-90% of your runs at that slow pace, and then higher intensity, shorter workouts, you know, 10-20%, depending on where you are in your training cycle, when we’re talking about building your aerobic base here, I would I would focus on more of a 90/10 breakdown there, okay.
And then probably the most common method people think of when they want to improve their aerobic fitness would be the long run, like improve the length of your long run. And when I say long run, it depends on what you’re training for, again, so this could be 30 minutes, if you’re training for your first 5k, that could be a long run for you, or six hours, if you’re trading for for a 50 miler, you know, so, long run is very subjective. So it just kind of depends on what you’re training for.
Most of us, if we’re training for a marathon, let’s say, most people are going to be doing a long run anywhere from an hour to three and a half hours, something like that, okay. So when we’re talking about in increasing the distance of your long run, the effort level has to be low. So we’re talking about, you know, heart rate zones wanting to wonder for on the RPE scale, this is a conversational pace, this is a easy, I could run all day at this pace.
Okay, this is gonna be one of the most powerful ways of improving your cardiovascular system. So we’re, we’re not just doing one of these things. By the way, we’re not just picking one of these things and saying, like, Oh, I’m just going to improve my long run, I’m just gonna increase the distance on my lawn, or I’m just going to do some HIIT workouts or I’m just going to run slower.
No, you got to do a mile, you got to increase your running volume, you got to run slower, you got to run faster for shorter distances, and you got to increase the distance of that long run, you got to do all these things. But when you do and you combine them all, you’re going to find that your aerobic engine is pretty badass. Okay.
And then the last thing I’ll add to this list is really just getting better at burning fat. You need fuel for running. And when you’re especially running slower and running at these lower intensities, the preferred source of fuel your body’s going to want to use as fat, the better you can get at burning fat, the easier running is going to feel for you.
Listen, we as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burning machines, we’ve just gotten very far away from that state. You know, we’ve been eating a diet that forces us to use glucose as our main fuel source. And granted, it is a very easily available and very quick burning source of fuel especially for running but you run out of that fast and your body isn’t using a whole lot of glucose. When you’re running at these lower intensities fat is going to be the main fuel source, so you got to get good at burning fat.
I suggest you get fat adapted stop using sugar and carbs as fuel. stop relying on glucose as a fuel source. Start training your body to tap into your own stored body fat as a source of fuel for running run in the fasted state. That means you don’t need to fuel up before you run. Maybe for a long long run or a high intensity run, yes. But for the most part, you know, you don’t really need to feel up before the runs, train your body to get good at burning fat.
And this isn’t about like zero carbs or anything like that, this is just about using the right kinds of carbs and using carbs properly. Keeping the carbs pretty low, though, okay, so get better at burning fat. Listen, we’re great at storing fat, right? We’re really good at storing fat, we’re just not good at tapping into our own body fat for fuel. And if you’re somebody who has, you know, 10-20 pounds to lose, you’ve got way more than enough body fat to get you out there and run for many, many, many miles for days, days.
I’m pretty low in the body fat percentage, and I’ve got hundreds of 1000s of calories of body fat on my body right now that I could use, I could literally run for, you know, weeks at a time or something like that. So get better at burning that fat. And you’ll find that your aerobic capacity, it gets better too. And just running just becomes so much easier. Okay.
So remember, we want to build our aerobic engine, we want to, you know, we only want to be delivering more oxygen to working muscles. The way we do this, as we increase our running volume, we run more just more often, we want to run slower, keep it in those zones wanting to keep it in the fat burning zone, right? You know, RPE should be, you know, one to four, run faster, do some HIIT workouts, do some high intensity, but short workouts run longer, like increase the distance of your long run, and then get better at burning fat.
And when you do these things, and you combine all these things, you’re going to be well on your way to being a fit faster, more efficient runner, running is going to become easier for you, you’re going to be able to get faster, and your spring marathon or spring race, whatever it is that you’re training for, will be a huge success for you. Cool. Awesome. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
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What separates successful people from those who fail? What do successful people do that unsuccessful people don’t? While there are a LOT of things that differentiate people who achieve greatness …
Continue Reading about 155. 3 Things All Successful People Do →
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 155, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, three things all successful people do. So what separates successful people from those who fail? What do successful people do that unsuccessful people don’t do?
While there are a lot of things that differentiate people who achieve greatness and those who don’t. Today, I’m going to focus on a few that I feel are most important. Whether you want to lose weight or run an ultra marathon, you will either succeed or fail based on a few simple but very powerful principles.
So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to share three things that all successful people do that most people just don’t do. And I hope that you choose to apply these principles that you hear about today, in all areas of your life. So you can accomplish everything amazing that you want for yourself.
Think about this, what do you want for yourself? What do you want for yourself? For 2023? What goals do you have for yourself? What goals are going to push you outside your comfort zone? What goals are going to cause you to level up in 2023? Have you thought about that? It’s a great question, right?
If you’re having trouble coming up with big powerful goals for yourself, or maybe you have some goals, but you have absolutely no idea how you can possibly achieve those goals, then I have something that I think might help you. Let’s work together on this. With me as your coach, I will help you set big, huge, scary, impossible goals for you for the new year. Doesn’t that sound like fun?
Then we’ll put together a plan to get you to those goals. And then lastly, I’ll help you stay on track every week. So you actually make progress every week and move towards that goal, so you actually accomplish them.
So if you’re ready to stop thinking about big goals, and instead start working on them, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. This is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners where I help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself yet. To learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply and get started.
Okay, today, three things all successful people do. So it’s this time of the year where we start reflecting on the past year and start setting goals and start deciding what it is we want to accomplish in the new year. So we’re coming up on the end of 2022. And the start of 2023 is right around the corner. And like I mentioned a minute ago, like what is it that you want for yourself? What is it that you would like to accomplish in this coming year?
So for me, this time of the year is a good reminder, not just of what I’ve accomplished through this past year. But it’s a good reminder that I always want more for myself, that I always want to continue to grow, to learn and to become more. This is not something that is a one and done for me. And it shouldn’t be for you either.
We should always be striving to learn and grow and become more. And when I stopped to think about this a little bit, I was thinking about what it takes to accomplish big goals. And it really got me thinking and that’s why I’m talking about this today because it got me thinking about myself. And I’ve got some big goals for myself for 2023.
And the way I’m going to accomplish those goals, in big part, is going to be due to the principles I’m going to share with you today because I’m applying these principles in everything that I do in my life. So some people are able to achieve big, huge, amazing things. They’re able to accomplish big things in their life. And then there’s some people that don’t seem to ever amount to much, right?
So what separates successful people from the unsuccessful? You know, what are successful people doing that the other people are not doing or maybe they’re not willing to do? Okay, I’ve identified three key principles that I’m sharing with you today that are vital. If you want to achieve greatness in your life, however you want to define greatness, what does that mean for you?
What does greatness mean for you? You run your first ultra marathon this year, or you climb that higher mountain, or you lose 40 pounds once and for all? You change your relationship with junk food and sugar, and cake and cookies and ice cream and pizza and french fries? What is it that you want for yourself? What is that big goal that you just saw that seems to be impossible for you to accomplish? What is going to cause you to level up?
Define that for yourself. Think about that. As we’re, as I’m talking through this episode today. What is it to achieve greatness for you? What does that mean for you? Could it be something in your career, maybe you get a promotion and you become, you know, a leader in your industry? Maybe it has to do with your relationships? Maybe it has to do with you know, being a parent? Having kids, what areas of your life do you want to achieve greatness? What would achieving greatness look like for you?
Because I’m going to tell you right now that it doesn’t really matter. You get to decide what you want for yourself. But there are things that will help you to get there. There’s some attitudes or some principles that will help you to get there. And if you don’t adhere to these principles, it’s going to be really challenging for you. And that’s where most people are.
Most people want things for themselves, but they don’t actually apply these principles I’m going to talk about and so they never really accomplish those things. And they’re always out there. They’re always out there on the horizon as in like, one day I would love to run an ultra marathon or one day, I would like to finally lose this way once and for all and keep it off. Like what Why are you just thinking about that? Why not just do it? If that is what you want for yourself, I want to encourage you to start working towards that. Stop thinking about it, start taking action, start taking action today, towards that goal.
So the three things I’m going to talk about will help you to achieve greatness in your life, whatever that looks like for you. These are three things that all successful people do, and that other people just don’t do or won’t do. Most people might know about these things. And when I start talking about these, you’ll be like, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense.
That seems so simple, but they’re not simple. They’re not simple. If they were simple. I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. You would just do it. These are things that most people maybe know about, but they’re just not willing to do. But if you’re willing to do the work, if you’re willing to apply these three principles I’m gonna talk about today, you will achieve anything you want for yourself.
Now, there are more than three things that successful people do. I’m not going to get into, there’s probably hundreds of things, right? If you really think about it. These three are huge. These three are, are the big ones, okay? And they’re often overlooked, or they’re minimized. You know, people are like, oh, yeah, I get it. I get that one, Patrick. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. I get that. But no, you don’t get it.
You don’t get it because you’re not doing it. If you got it, you do it. But most people are not willing or not. Or are they just not wanting to do these things? Because honestly, because they’re hard sometimes because they’re hard. Okay. Here’s the thing, though, all of us are capable of greatness, you are capable of greatness. We’re all human beings. None of us is a superhero.
None of us are superhuman, we are all you know, pretty much the same, we are able to accomplish huge things that, you know, that a lot of people can’t do because they’re just not willing to do the work. So we’re all capable of greatness. So understand that you are capable of greatness. Whether you achieve that or not, it is going to be whether or not you apply these principles, okay.
So just keep that in mind that, you know, none of us are superhuman, you know, you could run 100 miles if you want to, you could run that ultra marathon, you could lose 40 pounds and keep it off if you really want to.
Okay, the first principle is this. Successful people don’t settle for what’s comfortable. You know, what’s comfortable, everything you already have. If you want to become more, if you want to become anything more than who You are today, you have to be willing to get uncomfortable. You have to go beyond your comfort zone.
But most people never do this. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable by nature, right? That your comfort zone is very comfortable. Outside Your Comfort Zone, not comfortable. It’s unfamiliar. It’s the unknown. And when you start to think about doing something that gets you out of your comfort zone, you start to question that decision, you start to think, what if I fail? You know, what if it doesn’t work? You know, what if I, what if I look stupid doing this? You know, what if I let people down? What if I let myself down?
Yeah, guess what failure is possible, you might fail, you might let yourself down. People might judge you, why? This is not a reason not to do something, though. The reason you do something that’s hard is because it’s hard. It’s not because it’s easy. If success was guaranteed, it’s really too easy. It’s in your comfort zone. If success is inevitable, it’s not pushing you. It’s not causing you to level up, it’s not causing you to grow. It’s too easy.
You know, I’ve I’ve talked to people all the time about goals and stuff, and, and I’ll hear from somebody like, Oh, I really love to run a little bit of a fast or half marathon. Okay. All right. I’m like, why? Why do you want to just run a half marathon? Why not push yourself? Why not run a full marathon? Why not run an ultra marathon? Why not qualify for Boston? Why not do something big?
Why are you just settling for something that you already can do? Why are you not pushing yourself beyond your current limits? You got to go bigger, you gotta dig deeper, if you want to become more. Just doing the same known familiar thing isn’t going to cause you to grow, it’s not going to cause you to level up.
So striving for greatness means going beyond the known beyond the familiar, and it means getting really uncomfortable. If it’s easily achievable. Is it really worth it? Does it cause you to level up? Does it cause you to change? The answer’s no. It really doesn’t. You got to push yourself beyond what you think you’re capable of today. And this process of going after big, impossible goals is that this whole process forces you to become more in the process of going after that goal.
The process itself changes whether you actually achieve the goal or not. So let’s say you decide, you know, you want to train for an ultra marathon. And 50k is a great distance. If you want to get into ultra marathons for the first time. But you could do a 50 miler, you could do a 12 hour run, these are fun 24 hours, see how far you can run in 24 hours. These are timed events, you can do 100k or 100 miles.
But today, you’re not the kind of person that can run 50 or 100 miles, you might only be comfortable running 10 to 15 miles today, right? Today, you are not an ultra marathoner. So the process looks like this: you pick a race, you sign up, you pay for that thing, and you get some skin in the game, and you start training.
The process of training for an event like this will change you in ways that you just cannot imagine, okay? The training alone is very tough. But here’s the thing, the process of doing the training, you’re gonna get really good at being uncomfortable. Just doing the training for an event like this, you’re going to venture into unknown territory, like running 20 miles or running 30 miles at a clip doing back to back 20 mile runs on the weekends, you know, you run 20 on Saturday and 30 on Sunday or something like, right?
The training alone will force you to level up. So when you show up on the day of the race, and you toe the line at the start of that ultra marathon, you’ve already become that badass runner that you worked so hard to become. You’ve made it and it really doesn’t even matter if you finish the race or not at this point.
Now, of course, I’m going to encourage you to actually run the thing and finish it you know, finish the damn race like become that ultra marathoner, but listen, you toe the line at that thing. You’ve done the hard work now you just have to like put the icing on the cake so to speak, right? The process of just going after something like that will change you profoundly.
Training for a half a marathon though, is that going to really change you? Is that something you just keep doing? Because you know, you could do it and it’s comfortable. And yeah, you might shave a minute or two off your time. But don’t settle for that. Don’t settle for what’s comfortable for you. Because you already got all that.
Now, if you’ve never run a half marathon before, and that seems impossible for you today, then absolutely do that. Okay? The point with this is that successful people do not settle for what’s comfortable. I don’t want you to settle for what’s comfortable, either. Do not settle for what you already have, you already have all that stuff, go after something else, something bigger, something that will cause you to level up, something that will cause you to get outside your comfort zone.
Everything you want, but you don’t already have lies outside your comfort zone. So push yourself. See what you’re capable of. Go beyond what’s easy, what’s known, what’s comfortable. what’s familiar, get into that unknown territory, get into the unfamiliar territory, that’s when big things happen for you. Okay. So successful people do not settle for what’s comfortable, they go after the uncomfortable, they push themselves, they level up.
Okay, number two successful people take responsibility for all their successes, and all of their failures. One thing that separates successful people from unsuccessful people is this concept I’ve talked about before here on the podcast, and I call this radical responsibility. What do I mean by radical responsibility?
Radical responsibility means that you take ownership of everything that is happening in your life, the good, the bad, the ugly, the wins, the losses, the successes, the failures, everything. Successful people take radical responsibility for where they are in their life, no matter what. They also take responsibility for where they are not. So if I make progress towards my goal, I did that. If I fail, or if I feel stuck, I did that too. I’m responsible for that, too.
But here’s the thing you know, most people have, most people have stories. Most people have excuses. Most people have reasons, and most people blame others. It’s so easy to blame others when things don’t go as planned. Because when you fail, when you fall off your food plan, when you give up on yourself when you don’t hit your goal. Blaming others is so much easier, so much easier.
And you know what, it takes all the responsibility off of you, because it’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. You know, unless things go well, then it’s like, oh, it’s all me, I did that. Most people are super happy to take all the credit when things go right, and then blame everyone else, and everything that’s going on in their life when things go wrong.
Do you know what I’m talking about? Do you know somebody like this? Is this, you know, have you ever done this before? I have done this before I’ve done this in my past, I don’t do this anymore. Now everything’s my fault. Everything is on me. The Good, the Bad, the successes, the failures, all of it. So what does this look like?
Let’s say you want to lose 40 pounds, and you have a food plan. And you’ve thought about this, you got a well thought out food plan, maybe you worked with a coach and you’ve got figured out a good plan for you. And so you’ve got this plan, and you’re sticking to the plan and things are going okay for a few weeks, and you’re sticking to the plan, you’re laying off the junk food, you’re off the sugar, you’re not eating that processed junk food anymore. You’re getting fat adapted as a runner, running is starting to feel better, you’re losing some weight, things are going well.
And then, for whatever reason, you fall back into old habits, you binge out on a bunch of junk food. Candy, cookies, maybe this goes on for a couple of days, running starts to kind of suck again. Maybe you start gaining weight.
And then you’re like, oh my gosh, why did I do this? And the answer is usually something like this, you’ll start to say well, you know, it’s the holidays, or well the kids are off school now and they really love it when we make these cookies and gosh, things are so crazy at work these days, especially this end of the year stuff so much. So much stress at work. My boss is so demanding or my husband just doesn’t support me.
Oh my gosh, whatever the excuses are, there’s always excuses. They’re always stories. There’s always reasons and all this is just blaming, you’re blaming everyone What else and everything else in your life except for yourself. Everything else is the reason why you can’t stick to your food plan or why you fall into old habits has nothing to do with you.
It is just, you know, you know, everybody’s out to get you essentially, oh, I’d be able to stay on track if it wasn’t for my boss, my husband, my kids, my job, the holidays, the weather, whatever, fill in the blank. Successful people do not do this. They don’t blame anyone else for what’s going on with them. When you take radical responsibility for everything in your life, The Good, the Bad, and the otherwise. There’s no more excuses. There’s no more stories, there’s no more reasons. There’s no more blaming, it’s just you, it’s all your fault.
Whether you succeed, or whether you fail, it’s always your fault. I want to encourage you to start taking radical responsibility for every result that you get, or you don’t get in your life. Starting today. When you do this, you will start making progress towards your goals.
Because listen, everything’s on you. And this is the good news and the bad news. It’s good news. Because if it’s all on you, there’s actually something you can do about it. Because when you blame others, you give away your control. You give away your power, and you’re diverting the responsibility to somebody else.
But when you take the responsibility, you can actually do something about it. And that’s the good news, right? The bad news is, it’s all on you. And now you have to do something about it. So get on that, start doing something about it. Successful people take radical responsibility for everything in their life. So get on that right now. Start taking responsibility.
Alright, the third thing that successful people do, successful people never, ever, ever quit. This is probably the most powerful principle of these three. And the one that separates the successful from the unsuccessful, really, the principle is just do not quit, ever. You might falter. You might fail. You may go backward. You may have setbacks, you may have some disappointments. But no matter what, you keep going, you just keep going.
You never ever, ever quit. It’s like running an ultra marathon. Sometimes you twist an ankle, and you’re hobbling along for a while or you get lost. And you have to backtrack several miles, or you trip and fall. I’ve done all these things by the way, trip and fall and you feel like you can barely walk another step. But you don’t quit.
You keep going no matter what. You don’t stop when things get hard. You don’t stop when you’re tired. You don’t stop when everything hurts. You stop when you are done. Period.
This mentality keeps me going through all kinds of setbacks in my life, personally, professionally, physically. Some years ago, I hurt my shoulder. And I think I did this when I fell during an ultra marathon on a trail. I wiped out, I fell, I put my arms out to brace myself from falling and I jammed my shoulder. And it hurt for years to be honest with you, it hurt for years after that.
But it was never, you know, bad enough to keep me from doing the things I love to do. I kept running, I kept you know, doing some weight lifting and things like that. I pushed through the pain for years until it just kept getting worse and worse and had to finally do something about it.
And so about a year ago, I had an MRI. And it turns out that I had torn three muscles in my rotator cuff. And I had to have surgery, trying to avoid surgery, but I just had to do it. There’s no way these things were going to repair themselves. Okay. So a year ago, I had rotator cuff surgery and the recovery time was pretty significant in several months before I could actually get back into running.
And then when I started running again, it took me a really long time for my running to progress to the point where I felt like, you know, my old strong running self again. And I got to this place last summer back in August where I was feeling really good. And my pace had come back and I was finally at this place where running was really I was feeling really strong in my running again.
And then I was finishing up a 10 mile run and feeling really good about where I was with things. And I happened to be running back towards my house and I was at about mile nine, and I had one mile to go. And I happen to be running down through downtown Cincinnati. And there was a 5k going on. And it was running down the street. I was running up.
And so I was looking at all the people that were running this 5k. And I’m like, because I know a lot of people in the running community. I’m like, Oh, I wonder if I know anybody running this thing.
Well, no sooner did I take my eyes off the sidewalk. Then I just found myself on the ground. I tripped on this big old crack in the sidewalk that I didn’t see. Because I was looking over here at these people running this 5k, totally distracted myself. And couldn’t even get up right away. Like I was, I didn’t even know what happened. Like it happens so fast. You know, at first, I was worried that I had jammed up my shoulder again.
And my hands were really scraped up from hitting the ground. But what was really more concerned when I tried to get up was my knee. My knee was like really painful. So I didn’t think I could run home. I ended up kind of walking a little bit, I did end up kind of jogging at home that last mile. But that night, and the following day, my knee blew up, it was huge. And I had to stop running for a while. So this took me out of running for a period of time.
I tried a couple of weeks later to go for a quick little one miler. And my knee just hurts so bad. Every time I ran, it got worse, it got more inflamed, more swollen. So I just had to take some time off running. So I took like three months off of running, which was really tough, you know, I just got to this place where I was back and had to take time off again.
So now I’m back to running again, I’m building my cardio base, again, is a big setback for me though, right? Because I was feeling so good about where I was. But listen, I’m not giving up. I’m not done here, right. I have big goals for myself for next year. And I refuse to quit just because it’s hard. Or just because it hurts or just because I fell down and busted up my knee. I am not done. I am not giving up. I am not quitting, I will quit when I’m done, which I’m hoping is around the time when I’m about 100 years old.
Honestly, I want to live to about 101. I think that would be really cool to do. So that’s my goal. And I’m going to try to keep running up until that time. So I’ll be watching the sidewalk a little more closely. But here’s the thing, we experienced setbacks, we don’t quit, we experienced failures, we don’t quit, we fall down and bust up our legs. We don’t quit, we keep going.
I know that there are big, amazing things that you want to accomplish in 2023. And I want to encourage you that you do not quit until you accomplish those things. Yes, it will be hard. Yes, you will probably fail. Every success though every success is built upon a big old pile of failures.
How many times have you tried to lose weight? Maybe only to see minimal progress? Or maybe, you know, to see like a little bit of progress on a plateau and then you start gaining weight again. Have you ever done this? Yeah, we all have, right? And then what do you do? You just give up because quote unquote, like that diet doesn’t work? Have you done this before?
Here’s the thing, losing weight is never a linear process. I’ve never seen anybody just lose, lose, lose, lose, lose. And just perfectly like in a straight downward like, like on a graph. It never happens that way. It’s always an up and down kind of a process. Okay. So if you tried some diet and it doesn’t work perfectly for you out of the gate, try something else.
The reason you keep failing at losing weight is that you keep quitting, period. People who succeed at losing weight don’t quit. They never, ever, ever give up. They keep going until they reach their goal. That doesn’t mean they keep doing the same things over and over again expecting different results, they change something, they try something else. And this whole process takes time. It may take months, it may take years. Are you okay with that? You have to be okay with that.
Because the truth is it takes whatever it takes everybody’s a little bit different. Sometimes it takes a while. So just let it be what it is. But where would you rather be a year or two from now? Very, very close to your goal. Maybe you’re just so close to your goal weight you got another five pounds ago or something? Or would you rather be just where you are right now still feeling miserable because you quit after a couple months? Think about that. The only way you truly fail is if you quit. Successful people never ever, ever quit. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on running lean and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
It’s officially the Holiday Season and that means it’s time to gain a bunch of weight over the next 30 days and start the new year feeling like crap, right? I know it seems kinda crazy when I say …
Continue Reading about 153. 5 Tips to Avoid Gaining Weight This Holiday Season →
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 153 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, five tips to avoid gaining weight this holiday season. So it’s officially the holiday season. And that means it’s time to gain a bunch of weight over the next 30 days and start the new year feeling like crap, right?
I know it seems crazy when I say that out loud. The truth is, though, that’s the way most people do it. Most people gain a bunch of weight during the holidays. And then at some point, they swear a solemn oath that they’re going to change everything and get back on track in January.
And I know what this feels like. I’ve done this many, many times. I also know how terrible it feels when January comes around. And you have to lose a bunch of weight just to get back to where you were before Thanksgiving. So in this episode, I’m gonna offer a better approach for this whole time of the year.
Okay, I have five tips to avoid gaining weight this holiday season. And listen, if you’re the kind of person who’s ready to make some changes, right now, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to wait until January to actually start improving their health to start losing the weight to start changing their relationship with food to start becoming the healthiest version of yourself, then I want to encourage you to apply for coaching.
There’s no obligation, you can just fill out a quick application, you and I’ll jump on a quick zoom call, we’ll have a conversation, we’ll talk about coaching, I’ll explain exactly what coaching looks like, I’ll explain my approach which is a little different for most coaches, we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. And if it’s a good fit, great if it’s not no harm done, maybe you learned a little bit more about yourself, you maybe learned some tips that can help you get started in the right direction.
But here’s the thing, if you’re ready to change now, don’t wait, you don’t have to wait till January one in order to to begin a program like this or to begin changing the how you feel about yourself, or changing your health or improving your health or improving your running or losing weight, you can start now just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Again, fill out that application and you and I can get started, I want to encourage you to just take some action.
Now whatever that looks like, if it’s coaching, great if it’s not, do something today, to start improving yourself to start improving your health to start improving your fitness to become that best version of yourself. Cool. So just you know, go to runningleancoaching.com/apply I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project where the project as always, is you.
Okay, so today, I got these tips for you. I got some tips to help you avoid gaining weight this holiday season. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. And so many people think that this time of the year they will automatically gain weight. In fact, so many people think this because the average adult American says that they expect to gain around seven pounds during the holidays. That’s a lot of weight to gain in a month, right.
And one in four of those people say that they’re still carrying extra weight from the previous year. And so you know, let’s just say it’s a few pounds, I mean, you’re this is just this time of the year, you’re just going to be continually gaining weight. And if you multiply this by 10 or 20 years, this is a big problem. This can be a huge problem, right?
So, let’s stop this trend right now. Let’s take control of our health and our fitness and our weight for once. Don’t be average. Don’t be the average American. You know, I’ve talked to so many people about changing their diet and eating differently and maybe, you know, giving up things like sugar and grains. And people are like well, but I don’t want to be different. I just want to be able to do what everybody else is doing.
And I’m like to listen, listen, what everybody else is doing isn’t working, there’s like 78% of people in this country have some sort of metabolic dysfunction? Do you really want to be one of the normal people? Do you really want to be one of the average Americans? And this applies to other countries as well. But I say no, I say let’s be, let’s be the minority, let’s be different.
Embrace that, like, don’t be normal, don’t be average. Okay. So instead of expecting to gain a bunch of weight during the holidays, we need to have a different approach, you got to do things differently than the way most people are doing things. And yeah, that means that you might not be indulging in all the Christmas cookies, and all the booze at the parties and all this other stuff that other people are doing.
But guess what, you’re gonna feel so much better when January 1 comes around, and you haven’t gained that seven pounds. And that’s kind of average, I think some people gain more, you know, 10-12 pounds. So for me, here’s kind of the way I used to do it. So this time of the year was always the, well it’s still is pretty much the offseason for running.
And so we’ll do a full marathon. And then we sort of take a break from running. But for me, I never really changed my diet, like I just kept eating the same amounts of food and the same types of food. And of course, I was eating a ton of sugar and a ton of carbs. And so this time of the year, I would always gain weight.
And I would always gain 5-10 pounds somewhere in that range. And then I would always tell myself that yeah, come January 1, everything’s going to change, I’m going to get serious, I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to, you know, start focusing on eating better, and all this other stuff.
And guess what, January 1 would come around, and I would sort of start some of that stuff, I would kinda maybe watch my calories, or start adding food into a food tracking app. And you know, you know, going lower fat and trying to exercise more, and all the things that we’ve tried that really don’t work long term. And I might do it for a short amount of time. But then it became problematic, it became frustrating, became too tedious, and I would just stop doing it. And I would always, you know, I might lose a few of those pounds, but I would always gain a few extra pounds every year, during this time of the year.
And you know, you do that for 10 years. And, you know, I found myself 40, more than 40 pounds overweight. And I was eating what I thought was a really clean diet. You know, I was plant based and I was just eating a ton of carbs. I was a carb-atarian, let’s just say it that way. Eating nothing but sugar and carbs, and running a lot. I was running and training for marathons and ultra marathons.
And it wasn’t that I wasn’t exercising, I was going to the gym two or three times a week, doing yoga a couple of times a week, like I had a regular exercise regimen, I was running like crazy every year. And still I would gain weight during the holiday season. And I couldn’t, couldn’t lose it. And that just kept you know, adding on and packing on more weight and more weight.
So there’s a better way to do this, there’s a better way to get through the holidays. And, and I’m going to give you a few tips here for you to apply and actually take action on because these tips are great. If if you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh, these sound great, Patrick, that’s one thing.
It’s a whole other thing if you take action and actually do what I’m going to suggest that you do here today. Because if you do what I suggest you do here today, you’re gonna get through the holidays in a much different way than somebody who doesn’t take action. Any kind of program like this, anytime we’re talking about improving yourself, it requires something on your part.
You’re not just going to lose weight by listening to somebody talk about what to do, right? You’ve got to take action, you got to do this stuff. Okay? So if you’re the kind of person who loves getting into action and loves, you know, doing, you know, these kinds of tips, then do it. I want to encourage you to just start today.
So here’s the tips I’m gonna give you tip number one, and this is probably the one that most people won’t do. And this is why I’m sort of prefacing this by saying like you have to take action here because most people don’t want to do this. And that is to create a vision for who you want to be on January 1, create a vision for who you want to be on January 1.
How do you want to show up for yourself? How do you want to feel about yourself? How do you want to look? How do you want to feel mentally, emotionally, physically? How do you want to have approached this holiday season? Like, I really want you to get detailed about this future version of yourself. So we’re only talking about 30 days in the future. As we record this, it’s December 1. And so we’ve got, you know, what, 31 days, 32 days, something like that until January 1. So create a vision today.
And I want to encourage you not to just think about this, but to actually write it down. So grab a piece of paper, grab a journal, whatever it is that you want to use, do it on your computer, it doesn’t really matter. But write down in detail as much as you want. How do you want to show up for yourself on January 1, who do you want to be?
Most people don’t do this. Most people are just like, yeah, yeah, whatever, I want to feel good, but whatever. But they don’t really spend any time really thinking about this. But here’s something that’s very interesting. There’s this very powerful thing that happens, when you start thinking about who you want to be in the future, your subconscious mind will actually start moving you in the direction of that vision, your subconscious mind will actually get on board with this plan.
Everything that we want for ourselves, we first have to create in our mind, there’s not one thing on this planet that’s been created that hasn’t first been a thought and a vision, you know, think about things like a rocket ship, or an airplane or the iPhone, all these things were first an idea and a thought.
And then they were written down, and they were then you know, expanded upon, you know, so all these things that we want for ourselves have to start with a thought they have to start with a detailed vision. And when we create this vision for ourselves, it’s important that you get into that emotional state of how you want to feel on January 1.
Do you want to feel like you are regretting your decisions over the last 30 days? Do you want to feel like you have fallen behind or fallen off the wagon, or let yourself down? Or do you want to feel like you’ve built some confidence in yourself, you’ve built some trust in yourself, you said you were going to do some things, and you actually did them. Because that is available to you.
But you first have to start with a vision, you have to start with a detailed accounting of how you want to show up on January one. So don’t skip this step. Do it, I’m gonna encourage you to just do it, write it down, it’ll take you 10 or 15 minutes, spend about that much time writing free, write just as much as you want, or as little as you want. But do this step. Okay.
So that’s step number one, create a vision for who you want to be, and how you want to show up for yourself, and how you want to feel that’s the important part. Because once we get into that emotional state of how we want to feel, we can access that throughout the month, you know, you might have a day where you wake up and you’re like, I really don’t feel like running today, or I really don’t feel like you know, sticking to my plan my food plan today or whatever, you’re gonna be like, oh, but you know what that feeling that I want on January 1? I’m only gonna get that feeling.
If I stick to this plan, if I go out and run, if I go lift weights or whatever. So make sure that you get into that emotional state of how you want to feel on January 1, okay? That’s a very, very powerful state to be in. Okay, that’s how all visions come to life is just creating that vision getting into that emotional state. Okay, so that’s step number one.
The next tip I have for you, after you create a vision, you have to have a plan. You have to have a plan. Most people think that they will just sort of wing it. And I’m just going to tell you right now winging it does not work. If you think well, I’ll just kind of like I’ll get through the holidays, it’ll be fine. I’m not too concerned about it.
But if you’ve got some weight to lose, and you really want to make some changes and you want to get through this unscathed, you want to, you know, show up on January 1 really feeling good about yourself. You have to have a plan. Okay? So that means that you need to write down what you’re going to do to get to that vision that you have for yourself on January 1.
So you have a vision, great, how are you going to achieve that vision? You have to have a plan. I’m going to not eat sugar this month, that’s a plan. I’m going to, you know, work out every day, that’s a plan, I’m going to do yoga three times a week, I’m going to strength train twice a week, I’m going to run three times a week, I’m going to, you know, eat, you know, a good amount of protein at each meal, these are all plans, and you write these things down.
And there’s things that are going to happen this month. So we got holiday parties, we got a couple of holidays, really, we’re only talking about a couple days here, we got like Christmas, and New Year’s right, and then maybe New Year’s Eve, right? So maybe, or maybe even Christmas Eve for some people.
So three or four days really is all we’re talking about, you know, from here on out. So, plan those days, then if you have holiday parties, you’re gonna be going to or family’s gonna be in town or whatever, plan for that stuff, make a detailed plan of how you’re going to achieve your vision for yourself.
And this is what I do with all my clients. We work together on a plan and we get very detailed about what they’re going to eat and what they’re not going to eat, when they’re going to work out, when they’re not, when they’re going to recover. And we put together a detailed plan. And then obviously, you have to work the plan, you have to actually stick to the plan.
But you’re more likely to stick to the plan when you’ve created that vision for yourself. And then you’ve written it down. And then you’ve also written down a plan. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got it written down. You can look at it every day and say, okay, what am I doing today, and then just follow the plan. It seems almost too simple. Create a plan, and then stick to the plan no matter what. But that’s how simple it is. Create a plan and then stick to the plan no matter what.
And it’s that no matter what part that’s kind of important, right? For example, I am working on running every day during the holidays. So if you’re part of the Running Lean Facebook group, and if you’re not, you can join us just search for Running Lean community on Facebook. We are doing the running through the holidays challenge right now, which is to run every day, outside from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day. And that’s 39 days of running.
And it’s just, you know, just gotta run at least a mile each day. So some days, I’m running one mile, some days, I’m running 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever. But the other day, I did not run during the day, I had a busy day. And I wasn’t able to get outside and you know, it gets dark early, it gets dark at like 5:30. And this is like 7pm and it was raining. And it was cold. And it was windy. And I did not feel like running. Not at all did I feel like running.
I had already eaten dinner and stuff. And I’m like, oh my god, I forgot I have to run still. And so you know what I did? I put on my running shoes, and I put on a rain jacket and I just headed out the door. And I got my mile in outside in the rain and the wind and the cold. And I have to tell you that it didn’t feel awesome. When I was out there I was you know, I had to put a headlamp on and you know, watch out for debris in the streets and roads and stuff like that.
But I did it, and I felt good about myself because I stuck to my plan. So I had a plan to run every day. That’s a plan. And then I stuck to the plan no matter what even though I didn’t feel like it. It could have been so easy for me to just say screw it. I am not doing this. I don’t feel like it. And it’s cold and it’s raining and I could have used all the excuses.
But I didn’t do that. I had a plan and I stuck to the plan no matter what. Okay? It’s that no matter what part that’s important, okay, so create a vision and have a plan and then stick to the plan no matter what. Cool.
Alright, my third tip is this. You’ve got to manage stress, you cannot go through this holiday season super stressed out about everything you just can’t. Stress will cause you to hold on to body fat. Stress will cause you to gain weight. The stress response is a glucose response. Being stressed out will spike your blood sugar, will spike your insulin levels and will put you into fat storage mode. And if you’re chronically stressed out and a lot of people are during the holidays, they stay kind of in this chronic state of stress from Thanksgiving through January 1.
I’m going to tell you right now it is going to be very difficult for you to lose weight, in fact, you will probably gain some weight just based on being stressed out during the holidays. So you have to have a stress management regimen, you have to have some sort of routine that you’re doing regularly like every single day to keep stress levels to a minimum.
Because if you don’t, you’re going to have a very hard time losing weight or have a hard time maintaining your weight during the holidays. So there are two types of stress. There’s the stress that we put on our bodies when we work out and maybe we lift weights or we go for a run. And maybe we do some sprint intervals or something like that.
This is called acute stress. And this is the good kind of stress. This is a positive type of stress, we stress our body, we stress a muscle, we stress our cardiovascular system. And then we have a positive adaptation because of that stress. So our muscles get stronger, our cardiovascular system improves, our speed improves, we raise our lactate threshold. So when we put acute stress on our bodies, this is acute and short term, very short term stress, this is a positive thing, this is a good thing we want to stress ourselves out in that way.
The kind of stress that we don’t want to be engaging in is like we’re constantly thinking about, you know, work or relationships or family issues. And we’re just constantly, you know, in a state of chronic stress, chronic stress is the kind of stress that is going to cause us to have that glucose response and cause us to keep our insulin levels high. You know, cortisol is a stress hormone.
When cortisol is high, our body is in that fight or flight mode, we’re in that sympathetic mode. Remember, the sympathetic mode is stress sympathetic for stress s for stress, the parasympathetic mode is, is peace, P for peace. So parasympathetic is when we are calm and relaxed and at peace and the sympathetic nervous system is when we are stressed out.
So we want to tap more into that parasympathetic nervous system and reduce the amount of stress we’re in. So that means that we can’t wait until we’re super stressed out to start working on it and that we have to work on it continuously. That means you have to have some sort of stress relief plan in place every single day.
Some of the things you can do to help reduce stress, meditation, journaling, going for a walk, going for a run, doing some yoga, just taking a nap. Maybe. Naps are very underrated, by the way. Getting enough sleep is super important. Getting good quality sleep, you know, we need seven, eight hours of sleep most of us as adults.
Just doing anything, playing a game, laughing, going to see a movie, doing something with friends, doing something with family, just being silly with your kids, anything like that is going to help to reduce stress, you need to figure out what works for you, everybody’s different. So figure out what works for you and what you can do every single day to make stress management a priority.
Because if you do that, I guarantee you, you’re gonna have a much easier time getting through the holidays and your body won’t be holding on to as much body weight, you won’t be holding on to as much fat you’ll be able to burn fat, we always want to be burning fat, not storing fat. So you’ll get into fat burning mode instead of fat storing mode. And you’ll get through the holidays without all that extra weight.
Okay, so that’s tip number three is to manage stress, and you have to do it every single day. You can’t wait until you’re stressed out to start working on it, you have to manage stress every single day.
And this brings me to my fourth tip, which is to exercise daily. So not only does daily exercise help with stress management, it also helps you to burn fat, you know, so obviously exercise can be helpful to fat burning, especially if you’re doing the lower intensity exercise, you know, you stay in that zone one, zone two, you know, you’re in that aerobic zone. That’s what’s considered sort of the fat burning zone, right?
So if you’re doing some sort of exercise every day, go out and run a few miles. Really easy. Go for some, you know, do a power walk, do some yoga, walk the dogs, play with the kids. It doesn’t have to be something intense but do something every day. And I promise you, you are going to not only feel better, but you’re going to help you to maintain your weight and probably help you to lose a little bit if that’s, you know, one of your goals here.
So, one of the reasons why we want to exercise every day is that when we exercise we get our dose of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. So we get that rush of feel good hormones, and neurotransmitters. And when we have these feel good chemicals kind of running through our body, it puts us in a better mood, it helps us stay in that parasympathetic nervous system state. And we feel good.
It’s not only a good way to manage stress, but it’s a way of keeping our body feeling happy, like it improves our mood as well. You know, also more burning fat, you know, like I said, but it’s just this way of continually feeling good and feeling good about ourselves and feeling good about who we are and what we’re doing. And it’s such a better way to go through the holidays feeling good, as opposed to being, you know, super stressed out and freaking out about all the junk you’re eating and all this other stuff.
So when you’re in a good mood, you tend to make better decisions, when you’re exercising every day, you tend to build some momentum and want to keep exercising, it helps you to, you know, stay on track with your food plan, when you’re exercising daily. This is one of the big reasons why we have this running through the holidays challenge going on right now is because I want to encourage you to get outside every day, and do some exercise and the outside part is important.
During the winter, we tend you know, the days get shorter, and we tend to spend a lot more time indoors, the days are shorter, it’s darker in the morning is darker in the evening, there’s not as much sunlight during the day, we need to get outside and get some sun in our eyeballs, like we need to, you know, have that sun in our face on our bodies, if we can, it’s so important for us to you know, be outside in the elements in the sun.
And it helps to put us in that, you know, good mood, it helps with our serotonin levels. You know, we build serotonin during the day. And that’s what helps to create melatonin to help us sleep better at night. It helps with our circadian rhythms and helps us to sleep, you know, improve our sleep quality during the night when we can get outside into the sun every day.
So I know a lot of days around here, you know, I’m in Cincinnati, and a lot of days around here in the wintertime, it’s just gray, and dark. And there’s no sun. But those days that there is sun, take advantage of that and get outside. We’ve had a lot of gray days here. And then this morning, I went for a run and had to bring my sunglasses with me because it was so beautiful out, very, very cold, very cold.
But the sun was shining and it felt so amazing to be outside and to see the sun and to be in the sun. So exercise daily, put together you know, make exercise daily part of your plan. You know, make it part of your plan, part of your daily plan. And you’re going to get through the holidays feeling so much better about yourself, okay.
And then my last tip is going to be this when it comes to nutrition. We’re all a little bit different. And it’s hard for me to make some recommendations as here’s what you should eat or whatever. So I’m going to give you this tip. And I think this is one of the most powerful tips around nutrition that I can give you and it’s one that is underrated and something that most people just don’t do or maybe they’re not aware of, or they think it would be too hard.
But it’s this, skip some meals, skip some meals, you don’t have to eat three meals a day, every single day all the time. You don’t have to eat three meals a day, plus three snacks a day, plus dessert every single day, you really don’t have to eat that much skip breakfast, skip breakfast and lunch one day.
Skip snacking, skip dessert, like just pick something that you think would work for you. And you don’t have to do this every single day. But just consider skipping some meals. You know, there’s a lot of benefits that you’ll gain from exercising in the fasted state, which means that, you know, if you exercise in the morning, don’t you don’t have to fuel up before you get outside and run.
Just skip it, just skip fueling, you know and try some what we call intermittent fasting. And when people hear that word fasting, they’re like, oh my gosh, that’s, you know, I’m gonna die. I can’t do that. It’s like, dude, no, listen, it’s just like, skip breakfast is our target about here. It’s not that big of a deal.
You know, we’ve been doing this as human beings for millions of years. We didn’t eat all the time. We didn’t have snacks. We didn’t eat dessert, like there were no three meals a day, kind of a deal. Like a lot of times, and a lot of cultures, they eat like once a day, maybe twice a day. And so I think we’ve, you know, in the Western world, we’re under this impression that we have to eat a lot, just all the time. And it’s just not true.
Like we just don’t need to eat that often. Okay, so, one thing I did recently is Thanksgiving Day. And so that was Thursday and then a couple days later on Saturday we did another Thanksgiving with my girlfriend and our kids, well, we all got together. And so we did like two different Thanksgivings, super fun.
But each of those days, I only ate that one meal each day. So I ate one big meal on Thanksgiving, and then one big meal on that Saturday, and I just skipped breakfast, I typically eat twice a day, you know, I’ll have a pretty good sized breakfast around noon, and then I eat dinner around 6pm, 7pm, something like that.
And, and that’s usually good for me. But some days, I just skip that first meal. And, and I feel so much better when I, you know, can skip a meal and, and then I can maybe eat a little bit more at that second meal and still be in a bit of a deficit and still not be overeating and still not be eating, you know, a ton of calories that day.
So for me, it feels really good to skip a meal every now and then. And this is one of the simplest things that you can do to help manage your weight and help you to not gain weight during the holidays. It’s just like, pick a few days a week here and there and skip some of these meals. And you might be surprised how good you feel. You might be surprised how much easier it is to exercise in that fasted state and take advantage of the adrenaline that you get from exercising in the fasted state.
So you actually, you know, people think, oh, I won’t have the energy. But now your body will produce the glucose that you need, your body will produce the adrenaline that you need to be able to actually work out a little bit harder. And then there’s another positive benefit from exercising in the fasted state, which is an increase in growth hormone.
So after exercise, your body will produce more growth hormone, which will help you to recover faster. So not only can you exercise harder in a fasted state, but you can also recover faster. So these are good benefits. And you don’t have to do this all the time. But try it every now and then and see how it goes for you.
Okay, so quick recap, you know of my five tips to avoid gaining weight this holiday season. Number one, create a vision. Who do you want to be on January 1? How do you want to feel and write it down?
Okay, number two, have a plan. Write down your plan. And then write down your plan every week and consult your plan. And make sure you’re staying on track with your plan no matter what.
Number three, you have to manage stress and it has to be something you do every single day.
Number four exercise daily. Get outside if you can do whatever it takes to move your body and to release the endorphins and get the dopamine and the serotonin and all those good feeling chemicals that you get. So power walk yoga, walk the dog, play with the kids, go for a run, lift some weights, swim, bike, whatever you need to do, but do something every day. Do it outside if you can get in the sun.
And then lastly, skip some meals here and there. You don’t have to eat all the time. This is like intermittent fasting simplified, right? It doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t have to do some sort of long three day fast or anything like that. Just like skip a meal here and there. And you might be surprised how much easier it is to get through the holidays without gaining weight.
Cool. All right, you guys, I hope you take some action on these tips here and actually do these things because I guarantee you it’s going to make a difference on how you show up for yourself on January 1. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
There seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the endurance world when it comes to the terms “keto” and “fat-adapted.” Keto gets a bad rap because people tout it as being an all-fat diet - all …
Continue Reading about 149. Keto vs. Fat-Adapted – Which is Better? →
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 149 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today keto versus fat adapted, which is better? So there seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the endurance world when it comes to the terms keto and fat adapted.
Keto kind of gets a bad rap because people tout keto as being the all fat diet, right? Like you’re just eating sticks of butter wrapped with bacon, but this is definitely not the case at all. And then being fat adapted on the other hand, it causes confusion because there’s the word fat in there. And so people are running in the other direction because they’re afraid of fat. We’ve become kind of a fat phobic nation here. All right.
So any kind of dietary intervention that allows you to consume higher amounts of fat seems counterintuitive and scary and all that. So today on the podcast, I’m going to clear up all this confusion and help answer the question: keto versus fat adapted, which is better?
And whether you want to lose weight, run longer, or just become that healthiest version of yourself, burning fat is how you get there, and figuring out how to best get your body into fat burning mode; this is what I do every single day as the weight loss coach for runners.
So working together, you and I will put together a plan to get your body burning fat effectively. The way it’s supposed to. This is not some weird fat diet. This is like getting your body back to its natural state of being a fat burning machine.
We humans are excellent fat burners, we’ve just gotten away from that with the crappy diet most people eat. Okay, so if you’re ready to get back to being a fat burning machine, apply for coaching with me and we’ll get you there to learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you.
Okay, the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because there seems to be this confusion over the terms there’s confusion about what it means to be keto. There’s words like the ketogenic diet, and being in ketosis and ketones and ketone bodies and all these different words around keto, and people don’t fully understand what it means.
They also hear people talk about keto is just being like this diet, we’re eating nothing but fat. And fat adapted, you know, people are confused about what does that mean? What does it mean, fat adapted? And do you have to eat high amounts of fat in that diet, too? Is it all just about eating a bunch of fat?
So I want to break this all down for you today, I want to like kind of help you to understand the difference between the two. There’s some similarities to keto and fat adapted, they share many similarities, right? I’m gonna go over what those similarities are, how there’s some overlap between the two. And then what the differences are between the two. And I’m hoping that by the end of this episode, you can make that determination for yourself, which is better for you as a person.
Okay, I’m gonna just gonna say from the outset, that they’re both very beneficial states to be in being fat adapted and being keto, they’re both really healthy for you and they have lots of positive health benefits, okay. And I want you to understand how this relates to you as a runner as well. Okay, so I want you to understand the difference between keto and fat adapted, I want you to understand the implications that it will have for you as a runner.
I want you to understand the health benefits of both of these things and then hopefully, dispel some of these myths and misconceptions about keto and fat adapted and, and really just help you to make an informed decision about your own health and fitness journey. Okay, and what you want for yourself, so be thinking about that.
What is it that you want for yourself? What are the goals that you have for yourself, and then as I’m talking through this stuff today, think oh, that might be a way that can help me get there or maybe that’s not for me. Either way, it’s fine. There’s no right or wrong answer here. Okay. So first, let’s get into this.
Let’s talk about keto. What doees keto mean? Okay. So when we talk about keto, a lot of times we’re talking about the ketogenic Diet a ketogenic diet is a diet that is low in carbohydrates. It’s higher in fat, you know, when you drop the carbohydrate ratio, you’re going to increase your fat content as well. Okay? But it does not mean we’re eating sticks of butter wrapped with bacon all day long. That’s not what we do.
It’s basically keeping your carbohydrate levels pretty low so that you can lower your blood sugar, lower your insulin levels and shift your body’s metabolism away from burning carbs towards burning fat. And ketones are using mostly fat and ketones for energy.
Okay, so the ketogenic diet offers many health benefits right? Many studies have shown that this type of diet can help you to lose weight and improve your health and a bunch of different ways. The ketogenic diet has proven benefits that help reverse diabetes that help prevent cancers, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease.
But really the main focus here in the way that I want to talk about this today is on fat metabolism, your body’s ability to burn fat for fuel, okay, so you lower your carbohydrate intake, blood sugar, lowers insulin levels, lowers and now your body can access your stored body fat for fuel, okay? So the ketogenic diet is a diet that is low carbohydrate and higher in fat, yes, but it helps your body to start burning fat really effectively and producing ketones and and this state of producing a certain amount of ketones is called ketosis. Okay?
Ketosis is a metabolic state where your body is using fat and ketones for fuel instead of sugar and carbs and glucose, okay? It’s called dietary ketosis because in this state, your body is producing a certain amount of ketones. There are three main ketones that get produced: beta hydroxy butyrate, acetylacetate, and then acetone. The first two beta hydroxy butyrate, or BHB, and acetylacetate seemed, are the the main ketone bodies that get produced, okay, acetone is actually a byproduct of acetoacetate.
And in order to know whether or not you’re in this state of ketosis, you have to test your blood, your urine, your breath for the presence of one or more of those ketone bodies, okay? So being in ketosis means that you are producing between point five and three millimoles of ketones per liter of blood. So for me, when I have like, tried to get into ketosis in the past, I never really produced these numbers, I might get between like point five and one.
So I might be where they consider trace amounts of ketones, I might produce small amounts of ketones, but I never got into this place where I was burning, you know, two, three millimoles of ketones, right? Or producing those kinds of numbers. And to be honest with you, I never worried about it. I felt great when I when I do more of a Keto type of diet, when I keep my carbs super low.
And for me, it’s not about the number on some test device. It’s about how I feel and how my workouts are. And if I’m maintaining weight, if I’m losing weight, if my cognitive function is high, all those things are important to me, not a number of ketones. It’s produced on a certain test meter or something like that.
I’ve done the urine tests, I’ve done the blood tests, haven’t done the breath test, but there’s different ways of testing ketones. So if you follow a strict ketogenic diet, meaning you’re keeping your carbs very low, and you shoot for probably between 20 to 50 grams of carbs total per day.
So this is a dramatic lowering of your carbohydrate intake, especially if you’re used to eating like a standard kind of American type of diet with very, very high in carbs. If you follow this very strict ketogenic type of diet, you will most likely get into that state of ketosis, okay, which is great. Your blood sugar’s level out, insulin levels out, your body starts being able to use the stored body fat for fuel.
Ketones get produced as a byproduct of this fat burning, and you’re in ketosis, okay. And there’s a lot of great benefits to be in this state of ketosis. Okay. So some of the benefits of being in in ketosis and in doing the following a strict ketogenic diet, fat burning is put into high gear you are burning fat really effectively, you’re no longer burning glucose for energy because you’re not giving your body glucose for energy, you’re not really eating much in the way of sugar or carbohydrates at all.
So the only fuel your body has now is your own stored body fat and some of the fat that you’re consuming that you’re eating, okay? So fat burning is put into high gear, weight loss will absolutely begin to happen for you. If you want to lose weight, you got to burn fat, this is a great way to get fat burning going.
Okay, lots and lots of studies have shown the effectiveness of a ketogenic diet for weight loss, right? This is very well known. It’s the you know, they’ve proven like they’ve compared it to the low fat diet or low calorie diets, and they get better results. So you lose weight without counting calories without tracking your food, and with less hunger and deprivation because you’re eating a higher fat, higher protein type of diet.
And what’s interesting is they did a study, one particular study I’ll mention here was in the journal, Nutrition and Metabolism found that people who followed a ketogenic diet for eight weeks lost nearly five times as much body fat as those who followed a low fat diet, okay, so a low fat diet is not as effective at losing weight, like you can burn much more fat and get your body into this natural state of fat burning by just lowering your carbohydrate intake getting into ketosis, and boom, you’re gonna start to feel great, you’re gonna start losing weight, some other other health benefits of being in ketosis, your endurance improves.
So runners who follow a pretty strict ketogenic diet will most likely also experience an improvement in their running endurance, because you’re burning fat really effectively here, this is the key thing we have to understand here. You’re burning fat really effectively, even at higher running intensity. So people think that oh, you know, keto is great. You know, you really can’t, like run fast when you’re doing this when you’re doing the super low carb, you know, ketogenic approach, which is not really true.
They’ve done some studies, they’ve shown that typical carb adapted athletes, you know, they can hit, they can burn their burning fat up to about 65%, or their VO2 max, right. But the keto adapted athletes, somebody who’s doing more of a strict ketogenic type of diet can burn fat, you know, 70, 80 up to 90 or more percent of their VO2 max.
So as the intensity increases, as a keto adapted athlete, you can increase your fat burning as well. So just keep that in mind that athletic performance does not have to suffer because your carbohydrate intake goes down because you’re doing kind of a Keto type of diet, okay? Also, sleep is improved.
Studies have shown that ketogenic diet promotes adenosine activity in the body. So adenosine promotes the sleep drive. So it is a chemical that helps you sleep more effectively, right. And so they’ve shown that adenosine gets produced. It helps to relax the nervous system, it helps to reduce pain and inflammation, all of which help you improve sleep.
Your focus and concentration improve on the ketogenic diet. So your brain loves fat and ketones as a fuel source. And most people when they switched from, you know, a regular high sugar diet, high carb diet to a low carb ketogenic type of diet, they experienced the lifting of the brain fog that happens when they make this switch.
And most people don’t even know they’re in a brain fog until they start experiencing this. And they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how much more clearly I could think and concentrate. People experience more sustained energy throughout the day. So blood sugar and insulin levels are normalized. So you no longer have these spikes and crashes and energy levels throughout the day.
You don’t have to get an afternoon coffee just to get you through the last part of the day. Food cravings subside greatly. So when you switch to a lower carb diet and a strict ketogenic type of diet, you no longer have your hunger signals being jacked up by all the carbs and insulin. And so your food cravings go way down. You’re not as hungry during the day, this is a really good place to be by the way. If you’re feeling hungry all the time, there’s something wrong with your diet right there. There’s some dysfunction happening there.
Also, people experience less bloating and inflammation. Keto is a non inflammatory diet, you’re removing the inflammatory carbohydrates from your diet. So inflammation and bloating become a thing of the past which helps you to recover faster from the harder workouts as well. So you have this lack of inflammation And this is gonna play a role in helping you to recover faster especially from the longer harder workouts. Okay?
So these are all benefits of the ketogenic diet. These are all benefits of fat burning, when you really kick your fat burning into high gear. These are all the amazing things that can happen. Studies have actually shown that this kind of a diet, the ketogenic diet can have other benefits for a variety of different health conditions like heart disease.
They’ve shown that the ketogenic diet can help improve risk factors like body fat HDL, which is the good cholesterol blood pressure, normalized blood sugars normalized, and this can have a positive effect on your risk of heart disease. Cancer, they’ve shown that the diet has been explored as an additional treatment for cancer because it helps to slow tumor growth, which is really interesting. The keto diet may help reduce symptoms of Alzheimer’s and actually help to slow its progress. Research has shown that the ketogenic diet can cause significant reductions in seizures for children that have epilepsy.
They’ve shown that this diet can help improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The ketogenic diet also helps to reduce insulin levels, which plays a key role in PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome. And then the last thing that I thought was pretty interesting was that some research has shown that this diet, the ketogenic diet improves the outcomes of traumatic brain injuries as well.
Okay, so lots and lots of benefits of getting off the carbs and switching to a very low carb ketogenic type of diet. Okay, so that’s keto. That’s what it means to be in ketosis. You know, we’re keeping our ketone bodies up into that point five to three millimoles per liter of blood. We’re producing ketones, we have all these positive health benefits that begin to happen.
Now, let’s talk about the difference between keto and being fat adapted, okay. So first and foremost, understand this: being fat adapted shares a lot of the same benefits. In fact, all of the same benefits as keto they both mean that you are burning fat for fuel, you are training your body to become really effective at burning fat, right? They’re both great as weight loss interventions.
They’re both great at helping to improve cognitive function, sleep endurance, energy levels, blood sugar and insulin levels, faster recovery, everything else I mentioned above. So being fat adapted and being in the state of ketosis or following a ketogenic diet, share all of those same benefits. Okay. So in one aspect, they are virtually the same thing you would think right?
Being fat adapted means you’re burning mostly fat for energy, you’re producing ketones as well. Probably not as many though, and this is where there’s some overlap between the two. And this is where the differences start to happen. Okay. The biggest difference between being fat adapted and being keto is that when you’re fat adapted, you increase your ability to switch between burning fat and burning carbs for fuel.
So someone doing strict keto, you know, keeping the carbs super low, producing that point five to three millimoles of ketones is mainly using fat for fuel and ketones. But they will not be as metabolically flexible, meaning that you can’t switch between burning fat and carbs as easily. Okay, so eating a bunch of carbs may not shut down fat burning totally, but it will definitely kick you out of ketosis.
Okay, so as soon as you start increasing your carbs, you’re going to be kicking yourself out of that ketogenic state out of ketosis, okay. The fat adapted athlete can handle a carb load. So let’s say you eat a couple of sweet potatoes that night before a long run. In the short term, you’re going to be kicked out of ketosis, right? But it’s not a problem. Because as soon as your blood sugar and your insulin levels normalize, you’re going to be back to burning fat really effectively.
So you’ll quickly go from burning sugar burning carbs to burning fat, and you can kind of switch between the two. So, the key differentiator here is that the fat adapted athlete has the ability to use both fat and carbs as fuel. Metabolic Flexibility is the key here and this is a really good place to be. So you can switch between being keto and being fat adapted and one of the processes that I work through with all my clients.
First of all, we want to get their bodies used to burning fat, we got to get really good at burning fat. And this is the state we are naturally in as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burners. And we’ve gotten away from this state because we’re just eating tons of sugar, tons of grains, tons of processed foods, and we’re just burning all that for fuel.
So you’re constantly have to keep, you know, putting this big, fast burning fuel on the fire, it’s like putting paper on a fire and you just got it, you’re you keep burning through that paper really quickly, what we want to do is we want to be putting logs on that fire that burned really slowly.
And for long periods of time, that’s fat, okay, the paper is sugar, right? So we want to get our body back into the natural state of burning fat really effectively. And this is where keto is a great tool to us for a period of time, okay, so you can, you can go really strict ketogenic diet, you can keep your carbs super low at the beginning.
And you really don’t even need to test for ketones just keep your carbs super low, and you’re gonna start burning fat, right, and this may take some time, it may take two to four weeks, it may take longer, everybody’s a little bit different here. Okay. But then we can start incorporating more carbs back in the diet. And what we do is we time the carbs around key workouts.
So we want to get your body used to burning fat and used to burning carbs as fuel during certain times when your body demands more fuel from your body. So this is being fat adapted, right? But it’s not like a free for all with the carbs and sugar. This is not an excuse to binge out on ice cream and candy and stuff like that.
We’re still eating real food, nutrient dense sources of naturally occurring carbohydrates, for example, root vegetables or fruit, right? And then we time these around your workouts, you earn your carbs, and then you burn your carbs. Okay, and if you do this properly, you should still be experiencing all the benefits of keto.
So weight loss, improved endurance, improved cognitive function all day energy, etc, etc, etc. all the benefits I mentioned above, and also being able to use carbohydrates strategically around workouts as fuel to give you that extra gear, okay. So you can be fat adapted and not be in ketosis, you can be fat adapted, and not have to follow a strict ketogenic diet, fat adapted and keto are using the same pathways for energy.
So they’re both utilizing fat and ketones for fuel. But being fat adapted will allow you to also use carbohydrates for fuel, which is especially ideal for the endurance athlete. So I hope this clears up the confusion about keto and fat adapted, they’re similar. They’re similar states to be in their long, they’re like different sides of the same spectrum of fat burning, right, and they’re both great.
They’re both great places to be right, tons of health benefits for both and you get to decide what works best for you. Some people love being in ketosis all the time, they feel great, their workouts are great. They don’t need the extra push, they don’t need the carbs, and it can help them to lose weight or maintain their weight pretty effortlessly.
So keto is a great option for a lot of people. Other people prefer the option to use carbs for workouts. And being fat adapted gives them all the benefits of keto without having to be quite as strict right. So they also get the added benefit of having that extra gear for the higher intensity workouts and adding in some carbs, is how you do that. And that will definitely give you that edge. Okay.
And as always, if you want help with any of this, I’m totally here for you. We’ll figure out what works best for you. We’ll put together a plan for you and I’ll help you stay on track with that plan. Cool. All right. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
A lot of people make the assumption that if you’re a low-carb runner, it means you don't ever eat any carbs at all. But this simply isn’t true. There’s a time and place for carbs in your diet, …
Continue Reading about 148. Determining Your Carbohydrate Tolerance →
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 148 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners today, determining your carbohydrate tolerance. So a lot of people make this assumption that if you’re a low carb athlete, that means that you don’t ever eat any carbs at all. And this simply isn’t true.
I’ve talked about this before, here on the podcast, there’s definitely a time and place for carbs in your diet, but you need to understand how carbs affect you as an individual, before you start piling all those sweet potatoes onto your plate. Okay, we all have differing levels of tolerance. When it comes to carbohydrates.
Some people can handle more than others without any negative side effects at all. Others need to keep their carb intake fairly low, or they experience all kinds of issues. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. Carbohydrates are not bad. But understanding how you tolerate them can definitely prevent a lot of the common issues and a lot of the negative side effects that a lot of people experience.
So here today, I’m going to explain the importance of determining your carbohydrate tolerance, so that you can lose weight and prove your endurance and basically achieve all of your health and fitness goals. And for a lot of people figuring out how many carbs is going to be right for you as an individual is challenging. It’s kind of confusing.
And this is why this is a big part of what I do as the weight loss coach for runners. So we’re not only going to focus on how many carbs you’re eating, but we want to focus on the timing of those carbs as well. We want to make sure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck, so to speak, without any of the issues that come along with increasing carbs in your diet.
So it’s not an all or nothing kind of thing we need to figure out, we need to do a little bit of experimenting, we do a little trial and error. And we got to figure out what is the right plan, what is the right sort of recipe for you around workouts, how many carbs the timing of your carbs. But listen, having a coach there to help you make sense of all this and help you figure it out. It’s just like hitting the easy button on all this for you.
Okay, and this is my jam. This is what I do every single day. So if you’re ready to just stop struggling and hit that easy button, I’m here for you. Okay, to learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a short application, you and I will get on a call and we’ll see if the Running Lean coaching project is a good fit for you. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started.
And if I sound like I’m a little nasally today, it’s because I have had this head cold for like 10 days now. And I rarely get sick. The last time I was sick was at the beginning of 2020 before COVID I probably had COVID at the time, but I haven’t had any kind of head cold or anything since then. And this one has been lingering. And it’s kind of I’m ready for this to be done because it’s driving me crazy. Not only do I sound nasally, I feel like my head is still going to explode.
I’m trying not to take any medication. I did that for a few days at the beginning. But that stuff just messes me up. And I feel like I just want my body to fight this off and do what it needs to do naturally. But one thing about this is that for about a week there I completely lost my sense of smell and taste. And I did a COVID test because I was like man, I think I probably have COVID because I had a fever and, you know, coughing and lost my sense of smell and taste. Tested negative for COVID. So that’s not what it is. It’s just a head cold that is really messing with my whole system here.
So, this past week again, though, the reason I’m bringing this up is because this past weekend, we’re here in Cincinnati, we had this festival called the Coffee Fest. And it was, it’s one of those things where we have lots of festivals here in the summer, you know, we have, and they’re all revolved around drinking, right? They’re all about wine tasting and beer fests. And or, you know, we have Oktoberfest Cincinnati, which is really popular here. And it’s just a bunch of junk food and beer.
And finally, there’s something where I can go and actually enjoy. This is my jam. I love coffee, I love good coffee, I drink very high quality coffee, I grind my own beans. And I’m very particular about coffee. And I’m like, this is going to be perfect. So I got these tickets. And I’m like, man, I hope I can actually taste some of this coffee, and showed up at Coffee Fest, and I’m walking around the different vendors and, and trying their coffee and trying to smell it.
I like I could not smell or taste anything. I mean, nothing at all. And, you know, I felt bad because I was like, man, I would really be enjoying this. If I could smell or taste any of this. So much of taste is is through your nose, right how you smell things. So I’m at this beautiful place with music playing. It’s a beautiful place. All these amazing coffees around, I’m tasting the coffee. And they’re explaining to me the different notes of citrus and floral and cocoa.
And I’m just like, yeah, I was just going to take your word for it because I can’t taste anything at all. It’s such a bummer. But my sense of smell and taste are coming back, I can definitely smell things now. And my taste is coming back. And I love food too. I love to eat. And eating food has not been extremely enjoyable. To me, it’s just been like, I better eat some food because I need the energy to, you know, get through my workouts and such. But it was nothing that I could taste at all.
So what a weird experience to go through, I’ve never had this before, I’ve never lost my sense of taste and smell like that before. So I don’t recommend it. I’m just gonna be honest with you. It’s no fun. But I’m getting through this, but I’m hoping that, you know, by the next time I record my next podcast, I will sound so nasally but um, I’m about apologizing, you’re just gonna have to deal with it for right now. Okay.
So here’s what I want to talk about today. I have been talking to a lot of runners, and you know, a lot of people are into this higher training cycle, you know, higher training parts of their training cycle, because we’ve got all of our fall races happening these days, you know, New York Marathon is, you know, about 10 days away. So a lot of people are talking about training and you know, how there may be increasing carbs, or we’re having these conversations in our client calls and our coaching calls about how to match your carb intake along with your training. Okay.
And for everybody that I talked to, it’s a little bit different. We all have a different tolerance for carbohydrates. Okay. And I want to explain, first of all, what this means, like what does it mean that you can tolerate, quote, unquote, like tolerate carbs or not tolerate carbs? You know, I’ve talked before that a lot of people have some level of intolerance.
For carbohydrates. I think the human body in general, has some level of intolerance for carbohydrates, and some people are more susceptible to that than others more sensitive to that intolerance than others. Okay? So when I talk about tolerance, what I’m really talking about is how many carbs you can eat that you can ingest without any negative side effects.
So we have to make this assumption that to some level carbs are somewhat toxic to the human body, okay, they have an element of toxicity, and it’s very much like alcohol, when you think about it this way. Alcohol in small amounts is slightly toxic to the human body, but is it really very harmful? I mean, you can argue why this might be harmful, even in small amounts.
But from a metabolic standpoint, even in small amounts, carbohydrates do have an effect on the human body and there’s some negative effects of carbohydrates on the human body that I really want to address here today. Because when we talk about whether you can tolerate more carbs or not? We need to be looking at these negative side effects that a lot of people experience when they are eating a high carb diet, or moderate carbohydrate diet.
Okay, now, a lot of people means that the majority of people have some sort of intolerance to carbohydrates. And they experience one or more of these negative side effects that I’m going to talk about here in just a second. But at higher amounts, all of these things get exacerbated.
Okay, and so in higher amounts, people experience more of these issues, and people experience them and in greater degrees, okay, so some of the dysfunction that I’m talking about here are things like bloating, inflammation, blood sugar spikes, and then crashes, weight gain, the inability to lose weight. These are all side effects of carbohydrates, carbohydrate intake, sleep issues, chronic stress, incessant hunger, cravings for more carbohydrates, sugar cravings, brain fog, the inability to think and concentrate, gas, constipation, diarrhea, high heart rate while exercising, the inability to recover quickly from harder workouts.
Endurance issues where your endurance just tanks, you know, you’re out there running and you hit the wall. Things like irritability, grumpiness, anxiety, depression, these are all symptoms of high carbohydrate intake. And of course, there’s a bigger list of things that will happen as a result of, of years and years of high carb intake, we start to get into metabolic diseases.
But these are just very common, these are not weird one off things I’m talking about here. These are all very common side effects, very common symptoms of carbohydrate intolerance. And a lot of people experienced these side effects, especially when they’re ingesting carbs and higher amounts, okay. And as we get older, we become even more carbohydrate intolerant, meaning that as we get older, we probably most of us can’t handle carbs like we did when we were younger.
So lowering your carb intake is going to be especially helpful and beneficial for the aging athlete if you’re in your 40s 50s 60s and beyond, okay, so really, determining your individual carbohydrate tolerance is going to be key to you, not just becoming a fat adapted runner, but also to help you to become the healthiest and fittest human being that you can possibly be.
Alright, we need to figure out what works for you from a carbohydrate standpoint, if you want to be the healthiest person that you can be. Okay, so let’s look at one common scenario. A common scenario would be somebody that is interested in losing weight, and I talked to so many people who are runners who are trying to lose weight and having a hard time with it, they’re struggling with it.
Most people that listen to this podcast are probably people that fit into that category. Right? Right. So if you’re a runner and you struggled with your weight, then this is, you know, a pretty common scenario. Okay, so let’s look at what changes you might make and how to get a feel for what your carb carb tolerance might be.
Okay, so let’s say you have been eating that standard runner’s diet that I’ve talked about in the past the standard runners diet is the all carbs all the time diet hits, where your your carb loading basically every single day, you’re pre fueling with carbs, you’re fueling during running with carbs, your post fueling with carbs. And you have it in your head, you can just eat anything you want at any time because you’re a runner.
So I call this the carbterian diet. And you might be sick of doing that and that’s not working for you any more. So you stop doing that, okay? And you decide, okay, I’m gonna, I’m going to try this Patrick, I’m gonna I’m gonna adopt a low carb approach here, I’m gonna, I’m gonna adopt a low carb diet, I’m gonna stop eating all the carbs and like you say, and I’m going to try and lose weight.
You know, your goals might be to lose weight to improve your body composition, you know, to lose fat weight, gain muscle weight, improve your endurance, you, you want to reduce inflammation and all those things, right? So you have these very specific goals, and you decide to go on a quote unquote low carb diet.
And so you might decrease your carb intake to like 100 to 150 grams of carbs a day. And this may not seem very low to most people. But most runners are probably eating between 5 and 800 grams of carbs a day, you heard me correctly, 5-800 grams of carbs per day, then remember, the dosage determines the poison, right.
So eating a few grams of carbs a day, not a big deal, but 5 to 800 grams of carbs a day is gonna have a significant impact on your metabolism and on your health in general. And I did a little bit of research into this and looked at what traditional running coaches recommend, and traditional running coaches will recommend from a carbohydrate standpoint, two and a half to four and a half grams of carbs, for every pound of bodyweight, you know, to kind of depending on where you are in your training cycle, but the higher end of this is so crazy.
So for somebody like me, so I weigh about 180 pounds these days, okay? For me, if I’m at that, you know, four and a half grams of carbs, for every pound of body weight, that is 110 grams of carbs per day, that the traditional, you know, conventional wisdom will tell you is appropriate, right. And I used to eat this way, I did.
And it was amazing. Like, I loved eating all those carbs, like I was like, bring it on, you know, I was training for ultra marathons and running several marathons a year and several ultra marathons a year. And I was gaining a lot of weight. Until you know, after a few years, I realized that I was 40 pounds overweight, and I was like this is stupid, like I can’t keep doing this, I can’t go on this way.
Like there has to be a different way of doing this, right. So just keep in mind that 100 to 150 grams of carbs a day, is pretty low compared to where a lot of people start out with this thing, okay, so you reduce your carbs, you’re down to 100, let’s say you’re about 150 grams a day, and you’re like, you know, I’m feeling better, my inflammation is going down, I don’t feel so bloated all the time, I’m feeling pretty good. I like I’ve got pretty good energy all day long, like, I’m actually losing a few pounds too, you know, so you stick with that approach for a while.
And then after some time, your weight loss might kind of stall out. So you hit a sort of a plateau. And maybe your endurance, so your running isn’t really improving much, right. So at that 150 grams level, your body is probably still relying mostly on carbs as the main fuel source, right, so you’re really not tapping into your own stored body fat as your main fuel source, you’re still relying on carbs, you might feel better, you might lose some weight.
And this may be a place where you want to stay and totally fine if that’s what you want for yourself, okay? Fat adaptation, probably not going to happen at this level of carbs. Okay, in order to get fat adapted, you have to reduce your carbs. And we’ll talk about that in a second here. But if you’re okay, like just with a lower carb approach, and you’re at that level, 150 grams, something like that, you still get to eat a lot of food that maybe you have always eaten, and it’s pretty easy to do, and pretty easy to maintain this.
Great, that’s a good place for you to be, then stick with that, if that works for you. Okay, but if you really want to get fat burning kicked into gear, if you want to become fat adapted as a runner, meaning you’re burning mostly fat instead of sugar, then you you’re going to have to drop the carb intake, okay, if you really want to get weight loss moving, you’re going to have to drop your carb intake, you know, you might be better suited in that 50 to 100 grams per day range, something like that, okay.
For me, I tend to stick with a pretty low carb approach most of the time. And then what I do is I add carbs around certain workouts or when my training load increases. And this works really well for me. And one thing I need to say right here is like we don’t need to be tracking these grams of carbs every single day, for the rest of our lives. That’s not what we’re about here.
We do want to get a feel for where we are, and then we can start to use our intuition and eat the kinds of foods that we know will work for us and avoid the kinds of foods we know don’t work for us. Okay. And that’s a big part of what I do in my coaching with people as individuals as we get to this place where All of this just becomes intuitive for you. And it just becomes how you live your life.
Like I understand what I can and can’t eat, I understand how many carbs I’m eating without even having to enter anything into an app or track any of my food. I know what I’m doing. And I know how to add extra carbs around certain workouts, or when my training load increases, to give me a little bit of an edge, and to help me with that higher gear with that higher intensity training. So that’s a beautiful place to be and, you know, if you want help with that, I can help you get there.
Okay, but just understand that, for the most part, I tend to stick with a pretty low carb approach most of the time, okay. So I do something that’s probably more like a low carb, keto carnivore type of diet, okay, I’m probably in the 20 to 30 grams of carbs total for most days, right, this is really low. And a lot of people don’t like doing this. They don’t think it’s sustainable, or they think it’s too hard or too restrictive. Like, that’s fine. But I love it.
I feel amazing when I’m super low carb like this. But then around certain workouts, I’m going to add 20 to 40 grams of carbs. So on days, when I up my training, and I have a really intense workout, I might be in the 50 to 75 grams of carbs for that day. But here’s something that’s interesting is we have to earn our carbs. Okay?
So you earn your carbs around high intensity workouts or longer workouts, okay. And, like I said, there isn’t exactly some right number that I’m shooting for. Because I don’t really track this anymore. I go about how I feel, and what I need for this particular workout that I’m about to embark on here.
Okay, so I tie my carbs around my workouts. And this is key, you have to understand this, because during a high intensity interval session, for example, I’m going to burn through that sugar that’s in my system pretty quickly. So I may raise my blood sugar by eating some carbs, but I’m essentially going to burn through that sugar very, very quickly during that workout. So I’m earning my carbs for that workout.
And then my blood sugar comes back down the rest of the day, and I’m back into that total fat burning zone again, right, and I’m back down into that, you know, keto, carnivore, whatever you want to call it, right, I don’t really have a name for that, because I don’t really track ketones and things like that, right.
So just understand that you gotta earn your carbs, and we want to time them around our workouts, okay. And lower intensity workouts basically require fewer carbs, because you’re staying in that fat burning zone, right? Usually, that’s gonna be zones one, two, and three, even, you can even get into zone four, and still be burning a lot of fat if you’re an experienced fat adapted athlete.
And I know that there are some elite athletes out there, you know, top of their game in the world who are burning mostly fat still in zones for even in the zone five, like this is like up to 80 90% of their vo to max, they are still burning mostly fat, which is amazing, which is so so amazing.
But for most of us, you know, we’re going to be into that zone one, two, and three, possibly a little bit into zone four, okay. But for those higher intensity workouts or workouts that are going to be, for me, maybe longer than two, three hours, I’m going to add more carbs to help me defend against that glycogen depletion. And just to keep my glycogen levels high, so that I can continue to perform at the level that I want to perform at.
So it doesn’t take much for me during a long workout. It doesn’t take much in the way of carbs during long workout for me to get the fuel that I need. And for me to experience that little burst of energy and a little bit of rocket fuel.
So for me, I might be adding 15 to 20 grams of carbohydrate fuel per hour, which is totally sufficient for me. There are some athletes who, like you know, talked about Zach Bitter in the past, elite ultra marathoner, right? He does something more in the 40 to 50 grams of carbs per hour. And he’s running these world record paces like he’s trying to set a world record for the 100 mile or something like that, right? This is not something that I’m going to ever have to worry about.
Okay, so, my guess is you probably won’t either, which is fine, but it’s interesting that he only needs 40 or 50 grams per hour and he can still perform as one of the top ultra runners in the world. Okay? So, for me, and I’ve experimented with this for years, I know what works for me, I know what works for me and my goals.
For me, I can keep my carbs super low, increase them around workouts, add some carbs during some higher intensity or longer workouts. And, and I know what to do when I’m in these situations, and I and I just intuitively know how to keep things working for me, okay, and I know what to do when things aren’t working the way I’d like them to work.
Okay. So for example, a couple of months ago, I, I hate even admitting this, but a couple months ago, I fell running through on the sidewalk and tripped over a big crack in the sidewalk. I was not even paying attention. I went down hard, blamed up my knee, so my knee was all swollen. And for a couple of days, I could run still, and I was like, oh, I think I’m gonna be okay. But it just got worse and, and I really had to cut back on my running because any running at all hurt my knee like crazy.
And I’ve done this before, in the past, both my knees are kind of messed up from falling down. Especially trail running. You got to avoid those roots and rocks and stuff when your trail running makes it a much more adventurous type of running for sure. But so both my knees are a little bit jacked up. But you know, it’s not enough to keep me from running, you know, I get some pain every now and then. But not a big deal.
So these last 60 days, though, I have not been able to run without a significant amount of pain. Now, the pain is getting better. And I can actually start to increase my mileage. But in the last two months, I’ve run around 30 miles total. And I was getting closer to around 30 miles per week before I fell. Okay, so anyway, because of this, I’ve had to really lower my cardio, you know, I’ve had a lower my, my running, not exercising as much. And I just know intuitively that when I get to this place where I am having some periods of inactivity, or I’m not able to exercise, then I’m gonna just drop my carbs to like zero basically, right?
So during this period, these last 60 days, I’ve been very low carb, keto carnivore-ish, right. And, and I feel really good, I feel lean, I’m not gaining weight, right. And as soon as my weekly mileage went from that 25-30 miles a week down to like three to five miles a week, because that’s about all I can handle these days. I just decreased the carbs, I just dropped the carbs altogether, basically. Right. So I’ve been focusing more on weight training more elliptical rower to get that kind of endorphin rush that I love from running.
And I’m getting better, my knees feeling better, my runs feel much better. There’s much less pain, not quite where I want to be. I was scheduled to do a half marathon this fall, I had to cancel because I can’t do it. There’s no way I can run that far right now. Without my knee just like going ballistic on me here. So for me, I know that when I get into these places where my training intensity goes down, so does my carb intake, I feel really good.
And then when I increase my intensity again, those carbs will go back up again, in order to make sure that I am like I said, defending against that muscle glycogen. And then I’m giving my body the energy that I need to crush those harder workouts. All right. So this is what I want you to do. This is all an experiment, okay? There’s no right or wrong way to do this. There’s no magic number that is perfect for you or for everybody. It’s all an experiment, okay?
And it’s a fun thing to do. Like we get to play around with this. You get to decide what you want to do for yourself. As long as what you’re doing is working for you. You’re feeling good, your inflammation is down, you’re losing weight, running is improving, your endurance is improving. You’re not experiencing the inflammation and bloating and all those side effects that I mentioned. Your body composition is improving.
Sleeping is good, your energy levels are good. Brain fog is lifted. All those things are happening then you’re doing it right. And I don’t care what that number is for you. Okay, listen, we’ve been doing this low carb approach to our diet as human beings for like two and a half million years of evolution is always the way we’ve done it. We were never a high carbohydrate society. So this is just getting back to our roots. This is just getting back to the natural order of things as human beings, okay?
So first of all determine your goals, what is it you want for yourself? If you want to lose weight, you want to improve your running, you want better sleep? Do you want more energy throughout the day? Do you want all those things? So determine what goals you want for yourself, make some changes, try it for a while, track your progress and see what works for you. And then look at your results. Okay, is this working or not? What is working, what’s not working.
And look at all these different metrics you know about weight loss and your body composition, sleeping and energy and all these things, right. And if you’re noticing things aren’t working the way you want to change something, you know, maybe add more carbs or drop your carbs lower. You know, experiment with this, have fun with this. It’s all a fun experiment, right?
And basically, you’re just going to rinse and repeat this process until you feel like you have a good handle on what works for you. And that’s what this is all about. Determining your carbohydrate tolerance means that you get to decide what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. Okay, and as always, if you want help with this, I’m here for you. We’ll figure it out together. We’ll put together a plan. I’ll help you stay on track, we’ll hit that easy button, and together we’ll crush those goals. Okay. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
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