Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
As a runner, you’ve probably been told that if you want to avoid hitting the wall, you need to consume a whole lot of one main fuel source - sugar. This approach does work for some, but for others …
Continue Reading about 135. The Benefits of Becoming Metabolically Flexible →
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 135 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, the benefits of becoming metabolically flexible. As a runner, you’ve probably been told that if you want to avoid hitting the wall, you need to consume a whole lot of one type of fuel: sugar basically, right?
And this approach does work for some, but for others, it spells metabolic disaster leading to incessant weight gain, insulin resistance and a host of other health issues. If you fall into this latter category, you may want to consider becoming metabolically flexible. Metabolic flexibility means you’re able to use multiple fuel sources effectively, this approach will help you lose weight, run longer and run faster.
So in this episode of the podcast, you’ll learn exactly what metabolic flexibility is, you’ll learn all about the benefits of metabolic flexibility. And I’ll show you how to get started with it. And you have to understand something: metabolic flexibility is not a one size fits all type of solution.
Okay, this does not work the same for everyone. Everyone’s a little bit different. We all have our own goals, we all have our own metabolisms, we all have our own likes and dislikes. You know, we all have our certain food preferences, body types, genetics, all these things factor into how we approach nutrition from an athletic performance standpoint, and metabolic flexibility, you know, choosing different sources of fuel for different types of activities is going to be the same it’s going to, it’s going to be different for every individual.
Okay, this is one of the reasons why I created the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program. And in my program we work together. So I work with you as an individual to help you come up with a personalized plan that works for you. You want to become metabolically flexible, you want to become more efficient at burning fat, you want to, you know, lose weight, you want to get faster, you want to be able to run longer than you ever have before.
All these things require some level of metabolic flexibility is what we’re talking about on the podcast here today. But also, if you want to take things a step further, and you want a little help with this, then consider joining the Running Lean coaching project. And what we do together is that we will put together a plan that works for you. And that will help you to get to your individualized goals, whatever those are for yourself.
So it’s really about you becoming the best possible version of yourself, the healthiest version of yourself, the most badass version of yourself and making it last. This is about long term, sustainable results, not about quick fixes, okay.
So if you’re ready to lose weight, get stronger, run faster, run longer, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. You’ll fill out a short application, you and I will jump on a quick zoom call. We’ll talk about your goals. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you. I would love to have you join me in the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Put in your application and we’ll see you soon. All right on to the topic.
So what is metabolic flexibility? At its simplest, metabolic flexibility is your body’s ability to use whatever fuel is available to it at the time. It means that your body’s metabolism is flexible, the ability of your body to metabolize different substrates, meaning different types of fuel. So different types of fuel could be food that you just ate could be used as fuel. It could be fuel that is stored in your muscles like glycogen.
It could be fuel that is stored in your fat stores could be stored body fat that you use as fuel. And so for most people, and I’ll get into this in just a minute for most people, though, they are only using like one source of fuel, mostly that stored glycogen, okay? And we want to change that we want to be able to tap into multiple sources of fuel, the two main sources of fuel we’re going to be talking about.
And the two main sort of preferred fuel sources that your body prefers to use, especially for exercise, like running, are going to be carbohydrates stored in your body. So sugar is stored in your body as glycogen in your muscles, and fat that’s stored in your body’s fat cells. Okay, so these are the two preferred fuel sources that we love to use it we’re very well adapted at using.
So the science calls this glucose oxidation and fat oxidation, okay. And something you have to understand about, you know, fat burning or a sugar burning is that we are always burning both at the same time. So it’s never just one or the other. Or very, you’re always burning a little bit of one or the other, okay? But what we’re talking about here is, is maximizing the amount of fat or, or glycogen that you’re burning, okay, so it’s never an all or nothing when it comes to fat and glucose oxidation, you’re always burning both.
But for example, the longer you’re out there running, the more fat that you’re actually burning, your body will, you know, if you’re running at a lower intensity, you will start out burning more carbohydrate, but that fat oxidation will continue to go up. And so what’s nice about you know, being really well fat adapted, is that you can burn much more fat much more efficiently.
And you can run for longer and longer distances without having to, you know, refuel, because you’ve got plenty of fuel on board at all times. And if you are a fat adapted athlete, so if you’re a low carb athlete, and you’ve become fat adapted, then you can even run at higher intensities, and still be very efficient at using fat as your main source of fuel. This is one of the reasons why we get into fat adaptation.
It’s because we want to be able to burn fat very, very effectively for long distance running. But also we can get into some pretty intense running as well. So they did a study a while back, it’s called the faster study and you can look it up. And one of the things they did was that they found that for the most part, most athletes that are, you know, the carb adapted athletes, so just your standard athletes, not fat adapted athletes, that once they get over 65% of VO2 Max, that they they tend to stop burning fat and start burning, mostly carbohydrate. Okay. So this is the majority of people out there.
Once you get over 65% VO2 max, you’re burning mostly carbohydrates up to 65%. And you’re burning mostly fat. And this goes across the board for most people. With the faster study, they found that the fat adapted athletes could burn much more fat than the carb adapted athletes. So their peak fat oxidation was 2.3 times higher in the fat adapted group.
So over twice as much fat they were able to burn. And they found that they could increase their intensity and still be burning mostly fat so they could get up to 76% of their VO2 max and still be burning more fat than carbohydrate and really didn’t need the carbohydrates in order to the carbohydrates in the form of fuel in order to achieve those kinds of numbers.
So just understand that one thing I think people get into this idea of becoming fat adapted, and they think that they’re just burning fat, you know, and that’s it. That’s the end of the story. Or if you’re not fat adapted, you’re only burning sugar, you’re only burning carbohydrates.
And really, it’s not the case, you’re always burning both, okay? Just understand that. But as a fat adapted athlete, you can take advantage of your levels of fat oxidation, which are going to be much higher than the standard of carb adapted athlete. And it’ll give you a bit of an edge.
So why am I even talking about this? Well, I’ve been really on this kick this whole month about talking about ancestral living, you know, and what we’ve done as human beings for millions of years. And really, for since like 2.5 million years ago, to about 10,000 years ago, humans have been very metabolically flexible, we’ve been able to, to burn fat very, very efficiently, we’re able to take advantage of other types of foods when they were available to us, you know, think about, you know, times when certain types of foods would have been scarce, we had to have different types of fuel, and we had to be able to metabolize those different types of fuel.
So for example, when we would hunt and you know, eat meat, or we are eating things like fish and eggs, very dense, nutrient dense types of foods, we could eat, we could hunt and eat a lot of meat, you know, and share that with the group. And then we might go for days without food. So in that case, we are consuming fuel in the form of, you know, meat and animal protein. But then we would go days, without food, where we would be basically using our own stored body fat as fuel, right?
This is the way we are designed to operate as human beings. We are very efficient fat burning machines, we always have been. What has happened in the last 50-60 years is that we’ve gotten away from that? And we’ve gotten more into just relying on very quick sources of energy, like carbohydrate, like sugar, like grains, like really concentrated refined carbohydrates, refined grains, that kind of stuff.
And the problem with that approach is that we really well, there’s all kinds of problems with that approach. But from an athletic standpoint, we’re only using one source of fuel when we do that, we’re not able to take advantage of the fact that we are really efficient fat burning machines. Okay, so back in the day humans would eat sporadically, we would take advantage of the fact that we could find things like tubers and nuts and seeds and fruit and things like that. And we would be able to use those things as fuel as well.
So we became really good, really efficient at being metabolically flexible. It’s one of the reasons we’ve survived. Whereas a lot of other hominid type species did not, you know, because we were able to have that flexibility. Okay. And all I’m proposing here is that we get that back. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying.
And especially if you’re a runner, then you are absolutely leaving a lot on the table. If you’re not taking advantage of metabolic flexibility, you absolutely are leaving a lot on the table. Our bodies are well adapted to feast and famine. Our bodies are well adapted to a variety of fuel sources, especially using stored body fat as a fuel source. Most people do not do that. Most people, most people are good at storing fat, but not actually using it as a source of fuel.
But we humans, we are really good at burning fat. We’ve been doing it for millions of years, I just want us to get back to being really efficient at burning fat, okay. And as a runner, you absolutely want to be taking advantage of this virtually unlimited source of fuel that you have on your body. stored body fat is an amazing source of fuel. And I talk to runners every single day and I coach runners on how to become fat adapted every single day.
And I get a lot of skeptical runners out there. They’re like I just don’t see how this is possible. I don’t see how, you know, not taking in all these gels and stuff and sports drinks that I’ve been doing forever. I don’t see how I can possibly run without all that stuff. And then they do it. And then they’re pretty surprised at how amazing they feel, okay?
But it’s not about just doing just using that one source of fuel. This is the thing I want to kind of drill home here today is that metabolic flexibility means you can use multiple fuel sources. So yes, that does mean that you can use carbohydrates as a fuel source as well as fat. But most runners don’t take advantage of the fat side of things. They’re only interested in the carbohydrate side of things.
But why would you leave a tool on the table, so to speak, you know, why not become fat adapted and get really, really good at burning fat? And also, you can use carbohydrates strategically, in order to have that flexibility for different types of activities, different intensities of running different distances, all right.
The problem is that most people are just metabolically inflexible. So most people, especially here in the United States are eating the standard American diet. It’s interesting that the acronym for that is SAD because it’s a sad diet. It’s so sad, it’s making us sad, it’s making us unhealthy, or it’s creating a nation of sick, weak, unhealthy, overweight people.
And one of the issues with this is that it’s a very, very high carbohydrate diet. And it means that you have to rely on just one fuel source for energy. So if you’re a runner, and you’re eating the standard American diet, you are relying on one source of fuel carbohydrates for energy for running, and you’re not taking advantage of being fat adapted.
So that standard American diet with all the carbs, you might be eating six, seven times a day, you know, you are relying on one source of fuel and you need it, you need it every couple of hours, or else you’re going to crash and burn.
Not to mention you’ve got to carb load before running the night before you got to carb load before you get out there and run you got to carb up during runs. You’ve got to carb up after runs or else you’re going to crash and burn. And this might work okay for you for running like it might help to fuel your runs. And you might be okay with that.
But eating that much carbohydrate, especially eating every few hours, it does a few things. Not good things by the way. For example, It ramps up your cravings for more carbs. So you just want more and more and more of that same stuff, same sugary goodness, you know, it causes your body to keep storing a lot of that excess energy as fat in your fat cells.
And because you’re not fat adapted, you can’t really tap into that fat for energy. So you just keep storing more and more fat in those fat cells. It causes massive spikes and dips in your blood sugar, and therefore your energy levels throughout the day.
And you end up being hungry all the time you feel fatigued, you have these massive cravings for more sugary foods, more carbohydrates, you get what people call hangry because you’re hungry and angry at the same time. And really, it just causes a host of issues not just weight gain, but it can lead to things like insulin resistance, which means your body is producing so much insulin that your body has become accustomed to that much insulin and so it’s no longer bringing your blood sugar down the way it’s supposed to.
Which means your body just keeps storing more and more fat in your fat cells. And insulin resistance is something that causes type two diabetes, and it leads to gaining a lot of weight and obesity and things like that.
And not to mention that eating that standard American diet with all the carbs and you know, eating just a ton of carbs, especially for running means you’re going to be hitting the wall at some point during a long run because you’re going to crash and burn unless you keep the sugar intake coming in.
But even that can have all kinds of digestive issues, it can cause digestive stress, and a lot of people cannot handle that much sugar while they’re out there running. And so they end up just sort of like either having to find a portapotty or they end up just crashing and burning. And you’re hitting the wall.
So that’s kind of the problem with the way that most people do this thing, right? They’re not metabolically flexible. So they have to rely on one source of fuel only for running. And you end up running out of fuel, you end up with insulin resistance with weight gain, and with a host of other metabolic issues, right. So that is the way that most people do it.
And I’m just saying here, listen, there’s another approach that you can take and you can become more metabolically flexible, you can actually train your body to use fat and carbohydrate as your two main fuel sources. very effectively, you can do this very effectively. So here are some of the benefits of metabolic flexibility.
So first of all, you can tap into different fuels and use different fuels for different types of activities, more intense activities, you can increase your carbohydrate intake, you can use different types of carbohydrates, you can use, you know, very concentrated forms of carbohydrates. So you can use slow burning types of carbohydrates. And you can use carbs for long distance activities, or for higher intensity activities. But one of the benefits is that you have this flexibility, and you have the ability to use different fuels.
So as you get into that higher, you know, intensity exercise closer to 65-70-80% of your VO2 max, when your fat oxidation starts to go down, you can actually increase your carbohydrate intake. And in preparation for that, you’ve got to do it ahead of time. But you can increase your carbohydrate intake, and maintain high intensity levels, without as much carb intake as you would need if you were not fat adapted.
Okay, so that’s one amazing benefit, obviously, you’re gonna burn more fat. One of the biggest benefits here is that you burn fat very efficiently. And when you burn fat, you know you’re losing weight, it’s much easier to lose weight. If you become fat adapted, if you actually train your body to be a really efficient fat burning machine, right. And you use fat as a source of fuel for running, then you’re going to lose weight much easier, and you’re no longer going to be storing so much body fat, you’ll be burning that body fat. Okay, so losing weight becomes much much easier when you’re fat adapted.
You know, one of the other benefits is that you can improve your athletic performance not only running longer, but running faster again, because you can tap into different types of fuel, you’re not relying on just fat, or just carbohydrate as a fuel source.
One of the other things is that you become more insulin sensitive. So instead of becoming insulin resistant, your body becomes more sensitive to the effects of insulin, meaning your blood sugar’s will normalize, you won’t have those spikes, and crashes and blood sugars, you’re going to have more all day energy. So you’re going to have more steady energy throughout the day, which is amazing.
You’re going to be able to think more clearly because your brain uses fat as a source of fuel. So your cognitive function will be improved. You will sleep better at night, you will feel more rested when you wake up in the morning. And going forward with your weight management or weight maintenance. That becomes much much easier if you are metabolically flexible. It’s much harder if you’re relying on just carbohydrate as a fuel source, because it just it makes managing your weight much more of a challenge because then you have all these other things the insulin resistance and the weight, you know the storing body, storing of more body fat, and incessant weight gain and hunger levels and things like that.
So being metabolically flexible means that you have the ability to tap into multiple sources of fuel, and you have the ability to improve your athletic performance and just become this amazing fat burning machine as well as having the ability to use carbohydrates as fuel.
One thing a lot of people one mistake a lot of people make when they become fat adapted is they don’t regularly use carbohydrates as a fuel source for certain athletic endeavors. And you got to kind of train yourself to use carbs as well as you know, your stored body fat as fuel, you don’t want to just become fat adapted and wait six months, and then, you know, try carbs for a race, because your body at that point is so used to using fat as fuel. It’s not really used to having that carbohydrate glycogen stored as fuel the way that it used to when you were carb adapted.
So you have to actually train yourself to become more carb adapted as you get into some of the more intense running and things like that. So that’s just something to keep in mind. So how do you do this? How do you become more metabolically flexible?
There’s a couple things you can do to get started, number one, is getting fat adapted, this is really important. So you gotta get your body burning fat more efficiently. And most runners just don’t do this. Right. So you got to get off the sugar, you got to get off the refined grains and things like that, and start training your body. To use fat as a fuel source, one of the easiest ways you can do this is just train in the fasted state.
Don’t eat anything before you run, like let’s say you run in the morning, don’t eat anything after dinner the night before, you know, just get out there and start running in that fasted state. And that will force your body to start using stored body fat as fuel. And of course, you have to lay off the carbs too, that’s going to kind of hinder this process.
But getting fat adapted is one of the best things you can do to become more metabolically flexible, because now you’ve taken advantage of this fuel source that most runners are not using. Okay. The other thing you can do to become more metabolically flexible, is to exercise regularly. And you gotta do it the right way, you have to be doing both aerobic type exercises. So long distance running would fall into that category beautifully, right.
But also you have to include some form of high intensity exercising, so something like weightlifting or HIIT training, or sprinting, all those things are going to help increase that intensity that you’re putting on your, your systems, you know, your muscles, your aerobic system, you’re, you’re gonna help to increase your lactate threshold and things like that. All those things will help you to become more efficient at burning fat and help you to become more metabolically flexible. Okay.
So getting fat adapted, and then doing both aerobic type of exercise and higher intensity, shorter duration, but higher intensity exercises, is going to kind of kick things into gear for you there. Okay? So think about this this week, I want you to think about becoming more metabolically flexible. There’s so many reasons why you want to do this. You don’t want to be doing things the way that most people are doing things. Because the way most people are doing things does not work. It does not work for the majority of us, okay?
And if you’re one of those people, and you find yourself wanting to lose some weight, and you find yourself wanting to improve your running performance, and you find yourself not wanting to rely on all the carbs and having all the negative things that go along with that thing, consider becoming fat adapted, and taking advantage of that metabolic flexibility that we as humans have developed over millions of years. Let’s just get back to that. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you this week. 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.
Today, I’ve got another episode in my Back to Basics series. This time it’s all about why runners get fat. I’ve talked about this topic a lot here on the podcast, but I want to go over it again …
Continue Reading about 127. Back to Basics: Why Runners Get 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 127, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’ve got another In My Back to Basics series, why runners get fat. So I’ve talked a lot about this topic here on the podcast in the past, but I kind of want to go over it again today in a little bit of a different way. Because understanding why you get fat, even if you’re a runner, is going to help you to make the changes that you need to make to reverse that runners are not immune to gaining weight and getting fat.
In fact, getting a lot of weight as a runner is a big part of my story. And it’s kind of why I do what I do today. And it’s also something that I hear from other runners every single day, every day I talk to people who tell me the same thing, I’m running all the time, and I’m gaining weight, and I don’t understand it. So it’s not just me, it’s not just you, it’s a problem.
It’s a problem for a lot of runners out there, okay? And I need you to understand this, I want you to know that it’s okay. It’s okay. If you’ve gained weight as a runner, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person, you’ve just been given a lot of bad advice. And you’ve been doing things a certain way that just clearly don’t doesn’t really work for you, right?
So today this Back to Basics episode is all going to be about why runners get fat, and then what you can do about it. Cool. So first, I just wanted to mention that in June, for the whole month of June, we’re going to be talking about mastering your mindset over in the Running Lean Coaching Project. So how to take control of your mind, because changing your mindset is the way that you get everything good that you want in your life.
Everything that you want requires the right mindset. It’s the foundation for creating change of any kind in your life. Okay, it’s also required for maintaining change in your life. If you can’t lose weight, you’ve got to fix your mindset. If you can’t maintain your weight loss, which I know is a problem for a lot of us. You’ve got to fix your mindset.
But armed with the right mindset, there’s virtually nothing that you can’t accomplish. So some of the things we’re going to talk about, this whole month is going to be how to fix your mindset, so we can stop self sabotaging. So you can build the mental toughness that you need. So you can create a more disciplined life. So you can create permanent habit change, so you can become an emotional badass, all of these things require a shift in your mindset.
So if you’re ready to become more, if you’re ready to take your health and fitness to the next level, and ready to make these changes in your mindset, then you’re ready for the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is the container that I’ve created to give you all the knowledge, the support and the accountability that you need to be able to hit your health and fitness goals. If you want to lose weight, if you want to get stronger, if you want to run faster or longer, this is the place for you to do it. We support you, you get coaching, you get all the information that you need. You’re going to learn exactly what to do, how to do it, we’ll put together a plan that is personalized for you that will help you to reach your specific goals because we’re all different.
The same thing doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re interested, if you want this for yourself, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. You’ve got to fill out a short application and schedule a call with me. We’ll talk about your goals and we’ll just see if this is a good fit for you. Okay, runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join us in the Running Lean Coaching Project.
Okay, so, back to basics. Today I’m talking about why runners get fat. And the first thing I want to mention is that there is no fat shaming here at all. This is not what this is about. Getting fat is one of those things that happens to a lot of us and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. And I’m using the word fat because that’s what it is. I was fat, I lost a bunch of weight, I started running like crazy. I ended up getting fat again, because what I was doing was not working for me.
So I’m not using the word fat here. We’re so scared to use this word, it’s like, it’s like it’s a four letter word, right? I know, it’s only three letters. But it’s like it’s a four letter word. And it really isn’t. It’s just fat, it’s body fat. And even as runners, a lot of times we’re just storing more body fat than we’re burning.
And this is the same principle that applies to anybody who has gained weight, right? You’re just, you’re storing more energy than you’re burning, you’re storing more body fat than then you’re using his fuel. And we have to fix that, there’s a way to fix it. I’m gonna talk about that today.
But I want you to understand that this isn’t about, you know, calling people out or shaming anyone, I’ve been there, I’ve looked in the mirror and said, dude, you are fat, you’ve got to fix this problem. This is not okay. It was not okay with me to look the way that I looked, and to feel the way that I felt and to be out of shape, and overweight. And even when I was in shape, I was overweight.
So there’s this, there’s this concept, they call it tofi, you can be kind of thin on the outside, but fat on the inside, you can actually have a pretty good body shape. Like it kind of looks pretty good on the outside, a lot of runners like maybe they look pretty good on the inside. But inside, you could have a lot of visceral body fat, that you’re not even that doesn’t really show the way it does in other people that are not as fit.
So I just want to make sure that we understand that this isn’t about shaming anyone. This isn’t about saying that, you know, you’re a bad person or anything like that. Fat is just part of our vernacular, but it’s become something that is like taboo. And I want to break that taboo, we need to talk about this. We’ve got to eat fat, right? So we’ve got to eat that. And fat has been so vilified, that people don’t even want to talk about it. They don’t even want to say the word out loud.
So I’m trying to, you know, just step into this. And just say like, listen, we’re going to talk about getting fat, we’re going to talk about body fat, we’re going to talk about eating fat. None of it is bad. Okay, so let’s just lay the foundation. Let’s start there. Okay.
So the first thing I wanted to kind of talk about is the energy balance theory and why it’s really just, it’s too simple. It’s too simplified. So the energy balance theory is this idea that you have to burn more calories than you eat. And if you are burning more, you know, if you’re expending more calories than you’re taking in, you should be able to lose weight. And while there is some truth to this, it is not that simple. I really wish it was that simple.
If it was, I don’t think we’d have an obesity epidemic, the way that we do here in this country today. If it was that simple. I think a lot of us as runners would not gain weight. But it’s just not that simple. For a long time, I was a runner for a long time when I started gaining weight again. And over the course of several years, I put on something like 40 pounds. So I had gotten down to like 161-165.
And I could maintain that pretty easily through running or so I thought but then the weight started to creep back up again. And I ended up getting close to 200 pounds again. And I was training for ultra marathons and running two marathons a year like I was always running a ton of miles. So what is going on here? I was even tracking my food in an app.
And you know, I was counting the calories that I was taking in and I was counting the calories that I was supposedly expending during exercise. And the numbers should have added up the numbers should have created weight loss in me and they just didn’t. And it was confounding. It was very confounding. I did not know what the answer was.
And so I started digging into this and got really down a lot of rabbit holes honestly with this. And then I came across The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. And a light bulb went off in my head when I read this book, and if you haven’t read it, definitely read it. It’s amazing. But the gist of it is that there’s more going on than just calories in calories out.
You know, that works perfect if you’re a, you know, steam engine, but it does not work perfectly for the human body. Because we’re much more complicated, different foods trigger different hormonal responses within us. Those hormonal responses determine if we store some of that energy as fat or not. And so it becomes a little more complicated than just calories in calories out.
Go back and listen to the Eating Real Food episode that I did a few weeks back, that was another Back to Basics episode that I did. And I talk a lot about this and share some studies and science with that I’m not going to get into all those details today. But go back and listen to that one if you haven’t listened to it, because it’ll kind of lay the foundation for some of the stuff I’m talking about today.
But the whole idea of calories in calories out is just too simplified. I mean, it does work to a certain degree, like think about the show The Biggest Loser, they take these people who are big, you know, they’re super overweight, and they exercise them like crazy, they cut their calories down dramatically. And they get these people to lose weight, like it does work.
But here’s the problem with that approach, when you drop your calories, so low like that for an extended period of time. And when you’re exercising, they were doing like, up to like three hours of like cardio type of exercise every day. When you put that much demand on your body, that much stress on your body, and you limit your calories, that low, your body goes into what’s called starvation mode, so your body will start to slow down your metabolism to match what’s coming in.
And if you’re eating 800 calories a day, your metabolism, let’s say your metabolism is normally about 1800 calories a day which is what your resting metabolic rate is, that’ll start to slow down and slow down, slow down until it matches the energy that’s coming in. And when you add on top of that all the exercising that’s going on, that’s putting your body into this state of panic, it’s putting your body into the state of survival mode.
They call it starvation mode. But it’s more like survival mode where your body’s like I gotta shut down some of this stuff, we gotta slow this metabolism down. Because we’re not getting enough food, we’re not getting enough fuel, we’re not getting enough nutrition here to sustain us. And all this exercising is just compounding the effect of the starvation mode, it actually makes it worse.
And so when you combine those two things, and your body starts to kind of slow down, you start to see the weight, the weight coming back on again. And almost everybody on that show, The Biggest Loser, ends up gaining the weight back and then some. There’s a lot of people who gain more back, even though they’re kind of sticking with the same plan. So it’s interesting, right? Because if it was all about energy in energy out, that should not happen. But it does.
So yeah, you can lose weight by exercising like crazy and cutting your calories way back. So the energy balance theory, in theory works. That’s why they call it a theory because it’s just a theory about the energy balance factor, you know.
So it does kind of work, but it’s not sustainable. And it’s not how we were designed as human beings to survive. Because the whole idea of cutting calories and increasing exercise puts your body into this state of panic, this state of survival mode. And that is not our normal state of being.
So our normal state of being we call that homeostasis, that’s when we are at our neutral best, you know, that’s when we’re like everything’s working the way it’s supposed to. And your body is always fighting to get back to homeostasis. So you know, expending that many calories is going to slow down your metabolism to match the calories that are coming in.
And you can only do that for so long until the weight just starts coming back on again. And you have to understand that the types of foods that we eat make a big difference here. And going back to Dr. Fung’s book, The Obesity Code, you know, he lays out this whole idea: this concept that eating sugar raises blood sugar, like crazy it spikes our blood sugar and carbohydrates do the same thing, especially refined carbohydrate traits like flour.
And when we eat that kind of food on a regular basis, our blood sugar is constantly elevated super high, it’s spiked in a way that it normally shouldn’t be our blood, blood sugar goes up when we eat food. You know, if you eat a piece of chicken and some broccoli, your blood sugar is gonna go up a little bit, and then it’ll come back down to baseline.
But when we eat these highly palatable foods full of sugar and refined grains and carbohydrates, it spikes our blood sugar like crazy. That’s why it feels good to eat that stuff, we get a rush when we eat that stuff, right? It’s like massive amounts of energy. And as you know, ancient humans, we would find some honey or some berries, and we would eat that stuff. And it would be like, ooh, we get this massive rush.
And we were like, it’s training our brain to go back to that, like, oh, we need to find that again, at some point, because that’s massive calories. It’s, um, it spikes our blood sugar. And, you know, this is like a good thing to our ancient humans. But it was very rare. It wasn’t like something we were eating every single day, because there weren’t Krispy Kremes back then, right?
But now with the Krispy Kremes and, you know, craft beers everywhere, like we’re just constantly, that’s our constant diet. So every time we eat that kind of food, it raises our blood sugar like crazy. And then what happens in response to that is insulin gets produced. Insulin is a hormone that’s created to manage blood sugar to bring blood sugar back down.
So again, eating the chicken in the broccoli, blood sugar is going to go up a little bit, and then insulin is going to get produced a little bit, and then your blood sugar is going to get back down to normal, and all is good. But with this spike in eating, you know, Krispy Kremes, then the blood sugar goes super high. So insulin response goes super high, it gets produced in extra high amounts, which causes a crash in your blood sugar.
So your blood sugar actually goes down below baseline. That’s where you feel that crash and burn after eating a bunch of donuts or whatever, like, you just want to take a nap. That’s because your blood sugar has gone below baseline and you have crashed. Alright, so I talked about this a lot, the spike and crash, like we want to stop doing that we want to, we want to normalize blood sugars. Okay, we don’t want to be dealing with these spikes and crashes.
But the other interesting thing about this is when insulin is high in your body, when insulin is present in your body, your body goes into storing fat, your body goes into fat storing mode. So your body is actually storing a lot of that energy as body fat to be used as fuel later. So think about that ancient humans, we find a bunch of honey, we find a bunch of berries or something like that.
And the berries weren’t as sweet as they are today. But let’s just say they were pretty sweet. You know, they find some really sugary foods out there in the wild. And they eat that stuff. And some of that energy that they’re eating gets turned into stored body fat, so that they can use that as fuel later, which they did. We were always burning fat, we were always fat adapted.
Back in the day, we had adapted ourselves to using our stored body fat as a fuel source very efficiently. This is our natural state of being to be in as human beings. We’ve always been good at this. And when I talk about being fat adapted today, people think I’m like, talking about some weird fringe diet thing. You know what I mean? And it’s like, no, no, no, no, it’s not some weird fringe diet. This is like the way we’re supposed to do things.
Why do we store body fat? Why do we store body fat? It’s a good question, right? We store body fat because our bodies need to use fuel when we don’t have food coming in. Our bodies are designed to not eat all the time. Our bodies are designed to store some of the energy that we consume as fat to be used as fuel later, later never comes though in this modern society today. All we do is store more and more and more and more. And so we have to understand that this is not normal.
This, this goes against, you know, getting our bodies into homeostasis. This goes against the natural state that we should be in as human beings, we should naturally be really freaking amazing, fat burning machines. That is our natural state. And I want to get back to that. I want you to get back to that. Because when you do, you don’t store more and more and more fat. You burn the fat. You lose the weight. You start to have all this energy. You feel much better. Running becomes easier.
This is our natural state as humans. And I want to get back to that. I feel like I’m there. Like, I feel like, you know, I would say 98.5% there, I always think I’ve got a little work to do. And I don’t do this perfectly. I like chips and salsa. I like sushi. There’s some carbohydrates that I’m just not going to say no to.
But I think that where I am today, versus where I was 10-15 years ago, is pretty damn amazing. And I’ve never felt better, never been in as good a shape today at 55 than I have the previous 54 years. If you can gain weight, as a runner, you can lose it too. And this is something that I thought was going to be impossible for me. And I tried all the things.
I tried all the diets, I tried all the apps, I tried cutting calories, I tried being a vegan, you know, and not eating fat, I tried all the stuff. And it just just didn’t work. Nothing was working for me. It wasn’t until I got off the sugar train, you know, until I just stopped eating, you know, processed foods and, and refined grains and sugar. And once I did that, everything started to shift for me, I was able to start tapping back in two that stored body fat as a fuel source.
The key to losing weight is to burn fat. And the key to getting your body into fat burning mode is to just keep the carbs low, keep the sugar low. The easiest way to do this, by the way, is just eliminate sugar and grains from your diet. These two things are problematic if you keep eating sugar, and grains. And of course a little bit is fine. But if you keep eating these things in the quantities that are recommended that we eat these things in, you are going to keep your body in that chronic state of fat storing and I don’t care how much running you do, you will not be able to move the needle. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve seen it in hundreds of people that I’ve worked with.
And they tell me the same thing, I’m running like crazy. I think I’m eating a pretty good diet. But I can’t lose weight. It’s just the weights not budging. It’s not budging. Maybe it worked when you were in your 20s or in your 30s. But as you get into your 40s and 50s, maybe it just stops working.
Maybe it wasn’t working all along and you just kept storing a little bit of fat, a little bit fat a little bit that it just kind of added up. And then all of a sudden you’re like, hey, how did this happen? That was definitely my story. I went from like 161-165 to like 200 pounds in the matter of a few years. I don’t know exactly when the weight gain started happening. But I would say it wasn’t longer than like three or four years, you know what I mean?
And I found myself at this place of like, I’ve got to fix this. So the energy balance theory is a little too simple, there’s a lot more going on, you have to understand that the kind of foods you eat will cause your body to either be in fat storing mode, or fat burning mode, we want to be in fat burning mode. But then think about the typical runners’ diet.
The typical runners’ diet is carbohydrates on top of carbohydrates on top of carbohydrates. It’s just all sugar. And sugar is just a very concentrated form of carbohydrate, carbs are sugar, carbs, or sugar. That’s it. And remember eating that stuff is going to, depending on what it is, you know, of course, a potato isn’t going to raise your blood sugar as much as you know, a spoonful of honey would but there’s a spectrum there.
And there are some carbs that are better than others. And I did a podcast about this a while back called Good Carbs, Bad Carbs, you can go back and listen to that one. But when we change the diet and we get our hormones balanced out and we normalize our blood sugars and our and we put our body in that state of homeostasis where it’s supposed to be.
This is when the good stuff starts happening. This is when you start burning fat. This is when you start using fat as a fuel source which we’ve limited because the more sugar you’re eating, the less you’re burning fat. The more sugar that’s available, the less your body’s going to go to that stored fat as fuel. And so, to be fat adapted as a runner is such an amazing thing because you’re taking advantage of the fact that you’ve trained your body to be really efficient at burning fat. Okay.
And again, this is just going back to what we’ve always done as humans. Okay, and you, you cannot get fat adapted, eating tons of sugar and refined carbs, you just can’t, your body’s going to use that stuff as fuel, and then store some of that as fat, it’s going to use some of that as fuel and store some of it as fat, the storing is just going to keep happening, the burning is not going to happen the way that we want it to.
Yeah, you’re always burning a little bit of fat and a little bit of you know, sugar, a little bit of glucose, glycogen, whatever you want to call it, when you eat carbs, you know, your body is going to produce is going to turn a lot of that stuff into glucose, and then glycogen gets stored in your muscles.
But just a cool little fact is that your body actually produces all the glucose that you need, our bodies need glucose to survive, our brains need a certain amount of glucose to survive, I think it’s something like the equivalent of about a teaspoon full of sugar a day. And your liver actually produces that, it creates it, it creates it in a process called gluconeogenesis.
That literally means creating new sugar. So your liver is actually like, dude, I got you covered. You don’t need to eat all that sugar I got you, I got it. I got it. And I’ve gone through periods where I’ve eaten zero carbs. And I’m not suggesting you do this. I’m just saying that, you know, I’ve done it just as an experiment to see like, how could I function? How can I possibly function if I’m not eating any carbs.
And guess what? I functioned just fine. My weightlifting sessions were awesome. My runs were awesome. I did this training for two different marathons and had an incredible performance. At the first one, the second one, I just was taking it easy. I was like whatever it is, tried a different approach or whatever. But that first one was amazing. And I was eating zero carbs during that training and during that race, and my body was producing all the glycogen that my muscles needed to perform and was getting produced by my body like I was just creating it. It’s kind of cool.
And listen, carbs are not the enemy. And I’m not like anti-carbohydrate. I’m not about saying like you should eat zero carbs. This is not my agenda at all. This is not what I’m about here. Right. But the recommendations that they put out there for us that the government suggests we eat, they’re, they’re just too high. They’re too high. For most of us. Maybe for some of us, they work okay.
But for the majority of majority of us, we’re carbohydrate intolerant, we just can’t tolerate 65% of our calories coming from carbohydrates. That’s crazy. That’s crazy high. And that’s not something we’re used to doing as human beings. We don’t need that much. So you can, you can survive just fine. You can thrive just fine on a lower carbohydrate diet. And if you’ve never done this before, or you think it’s some weird fringe thing, I want to suggest that you just try it.
Trust me, try it. Go 30 days without sugar and grains and see how you feel. See what happens. It’d be fun little experiment. Carbs are not the enemy. You can eat carbs. I eat carbs. I eat fruit. I mean, here’s what my diet looks like today. My diet today looks like meat, fruit, eggs, and a little bit of dairy. That’s it. It is that simple. Meat, fruit, eggs, little bit of dairy. That’s it.
That is what we’ve eaten as human beings forever. I do eat some vegetables, too. I always forget about that. I’ve told this a couple of different people lately. And they were like, you don’t need vegetables. And I’m like, oh, no, I do. But I always forget about that. Because they’re not that important for humans, honestly, like we don’t need to eat a ton of vegetables to be super fit and healthy. We just don’t. But I do eat some vegetables too.
But carbs are not the enemy. This isn’t about zero carbs. The recommendations, I think are too high. And I would encourage you to give it a shot. Just try it. And then understand this. We’re not, this isn’t a diet. Right? I want to make this point very, very clear. This is about changing your lifestyle. This is about becoming more like the human beings that we’ve evolved over millions of years to become.
It’s like it’s saying no to the status quo, because the status quo out there is to be overweight, to be obese, to be unfit to be unhealthy to be sick, to be on medication. And that is normal. That’s what’s normal. I do not want to be normal. And I don’t want that for you either. So this is about changing your lifestyle, to become a total freaking fat burning badass. I want that for myself, I hope you want that for you too.
And I have to tell you, I have a bit of an agenda here. I have like a secret agenda. Maybe it’s not so secret. Well, I’m gonna tell you what it is right now anyway, but here’s my agenda. I want to open your eyes to a different way of doing things. I want you to consider that it’s possible that there’s a better way to do things. And that you don’t have to do what everybody else is doing. That I want to be an example of what is possible for you. And I want to inspire you to do the same thing.
I want to inspire you to be an example of what’s possible to the people in your world. And I want to create this ripple effect, this huge impact of health and fitness and positivity. Because the people that I have helped tell me all the time how this has changed their life in ways they did not even know, it could have an impact on their life.
And it’s not about, this is not about losing weight. That’s a side effect. When you get amazingly healthy and fit. And you shift your diet back to eating just real food, the way that I talk about it, you, you get super, your body just becomes super healthy. And that weight loss happens as a side effect. That’s not the main goal. It’s but it’s a cool side effect. Because it means that you’re on the right path again.
And like I said earlier, if you can gain weight as a runner, you can lose it too. It is possible. It is possible. But it starts with a shift in your mindset, you’ve got to change the way you’re thinking about this stuff. You can’t be thinking that that high carb, carb loading, all carb diet, whatever is going to work for you. Because if it doesn’t work for you, you’ve got to make some changes.
And listen, I know it’s not easy, it’s hard. It’s hard to make these changes. That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I created this coaching program. Because I want to help you, I want to give you the support that you need. And if you want that kind of support, I’m here for you. If you want to try it on your own, you can do that. Try it on your own, see if it works. If you can get it to work. I think you can, there’s a lot of people to do. If you want coaching, great, I’m here for you. If you don’t, that’s totally fine, too.
But my mission in this world is to open people’s eyes to the fact that the way they’re telling us to do things is wrong. It’s just wrong. For most of us. You know, there’s not one diet that works perfectly for everyone. There’s not one way of eating or one lifestyle that works perfectly for everyone. And I totally acknowledge that.
But if you’re listening to this today, and you’re still if you’re still listening to this today, thank you for being here, by the way. Thanks for putting up with me. But if you’re still listening to this, then chances are you’re interested in making these kinds of changes because the status quo is not working for you either. So try it. See what happens. Cool. All right, love you all keep on Running Lean. It’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I’ve taught a lot of nutrition and mindset concepts over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast, and some of these topics are worth a revisit. Either because I’ve discovered new …
Continue Reading about 123. Back to Basics: Eating Real Food →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 123 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, Back to Basics Eating Real Food. I’ve talked a lot about nutrition and mindset over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast. And some of these topics are worth a revisit, either because I’ve discovered new information about the topic and I want to share that with you.
Or because it’s just so important, it’s worth another look. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to be sprinkling in some of these back to basics episodes to share new and improved info, and then revisit some of the key concepts for weight loss and sports nutrition for runners. And today’s topic, eating real food falls into both categories.
So I’ve learned a lot since first talking about eating real food. And it’s also one of the most important things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So it absolutely deserves another look. And eating real food is a simple concept. But it looks a little different for everyone.
If you’re a runner, and you’re interested in making a change in your eating habits so that you can lose weight while also supporting your running goals, then I want to invite you to join the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program that includes group coaching one-on-one coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability that you need to learn what to do to learn how to do it, and to help you stay on track.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, you will fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me. And we’ll talk about your goals and see if coaching is a good fit for you. I would love to help you learn how to eat real food, lose the weight without all the frustration and learn how to build good habits that last for life.
If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started down. All right back to basics, eating real food.
So I’m just gonna jump in and talk about why I teach this concept. And the really the first reason why I talk about eating real food is that there’s something really wrong with the standard American diet. Alright. So for millions of years as humans, we did really well, you know, eating real food was just something we did naturally.
But then pretty recently, we screwed it all up, all right? The standard American diet is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it was created back in the late 70s. It was like 1977, I believe, I think they published it in like 1980. But they basically told us that we should all be eating a very high carbohydrate diet, like upwards of 65% of your calories should be coming from carbohydrates. And low fat, like fat is bad. They just decided this right?
And immediately upon implementing these guidelines, the health of this country began to decline. So why did they make this change? Well, there was this guy named Ancel Keys. And he was a researcher and a doctor. And back in the 50s, he proposed this idea. It was called The Diet Heart Hypothesis. And it was an idea that eating fat would cause people to die of heart attacks. So he did all these studies. And he did. He published a study called The Seven Countries Study.
And the interesting thing about this study is actually there were 22 countries involved, but he just cherry picked the seven that kind of fit with his idea of what he wanted the results to be and he only published the seven countries that that kind of supported his claims. Anyway, none of the stuff that he proposed in this study have actually been proven.
In fact, a lot of it has been disproven over the years. A lot of the stuff that he proposed in this Diet Heart Hypothesis has been disproven yet. We changed our dietary guidelines back in 1977/1980 and we’ve changed everything, this has affected everything. It still does today, the guidelines that they produce and they haven’t changed much over the last 50 years or whatever.
But these guidelines have a profound effect on all areas of our lives. So all school lunch programs are being generated based on those guidelines. Right now, 19% of school aged kids are obese. This is a problem. All military rations, all mess hall food and military is dictated by the guidelines. 7% of our troops are obese.
All the special nutrition programs for women, infants and children like WIC are being determined by the guidelines. 15% of toddlers and WIC are obese toddlers, all hospital food is dictated by the guidelines. Food Programs for the elderly are being dictated by the guidelines. Life expectancy in the elderly is going down.
There’s more Alzheimer’s disease, more diabetes, more cancer. These things are rampant among the elderly. And they’re all diet and lifestyle caused diseases. Agricultural production is dictated by those guidelines. It’s simplified, it’s incentivizing farmers to produce more and more cheap carbohydrates like soybeans, wheat and corn.
Those are like the main things that we produce here in this country. And then of course, the food industry uses the guidelines too, so they produce more garbage food that’s loaded with things like vegetable oil, right? And high fructose corn syrup and all this junk. So all these things I just mentioned, they all are using those guidelines to produce, you know, the foods that we eat, and the guidelines are just wrong. They don’t work.
Since implementing the guidelines in ‘80, 88% of Americans are today considered metabolically unhealthy meaning they’re overweight, they’re obese, their insulin resistant they have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and on and on, only 12% of us are considered healthy. This is wrong. This does not work.
“For the first time in history, we had a government telling us what to eat.” This is a quote from Ben Bikman. He’s a PhD, a Utah professor and a leading metabolic scientist and he says, “For the first time, we have a government telling us what to eat, encouraging us to eat far more refined carbohydrates, and much less healthy fats and proteins and our weight, and our health has only suffered for it.”
The results on the nation’s health and weight have been dire since the government first set dietary guidelines in 1977. The food industry has completely shifted the types of foods they produce to our overall detriment. According to the CDC, the weight of the average adult American today is nearly 30 pounds more than that of the average adult American in 1977.
This is a problem. What are we doing? There’s all sorts of issues and diseases related to eating this particular diet too, by the way. Obesity rates have more than tripled in the US because we’re following the guidelines. We have a diabetes epidemic. 14 different types of cancer have been related to diet, including breast cancer, colorectal cancer.
Alzheimer’s disease is diet related. They call it type three diabetes, PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, is diet related. All of these issues are mostly caused by you know too much insulin in the bud. And that’s called hyperinsulinemia. And how do you get too much insulin in the blood? Eat a lot of carbohydrates and eat a lot of sugar. Right?
So the diet is wrong. It’s making us sicker, it’s making us fatter, and we need to get off of that. Do anything else do anything else, then what the dietary guidelines are telling you to do? Okay. And I don’t think I’ve talked about this, but they did a study a while back, and this was called The Pure Study.
And they did this over a 10 year period. And they did it from 2003 to 2013. And they followed over 135,000 people in 18 different countries. And they basically, you know, divided these people up based on their macronutrient intake and basically there were people who are eating high carbohydrate and lower fat, and then low carbohydrate, high fat.
And the conclusion basically is this: I’ll just read the conclusion to you. High carbohydrate intake was associated with a higher risk of total mortality body death. Whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.
Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings. So that’s the conclusion from this study. The interesting part about that, I mean, the whole thing is fascinating to me, because basically they just disprove that Diet Heart Hypothesis right there, they’re saying fat has nothing to do with it.
In fact, the people with the high fat diet had lower risk of dying from all these diseases. And the saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke, meaning that the people who ate more saturated fat had less stroke than the other people. So that was really fascinating, right? That kind of blows all that out of the water, right?
Okay, so how does this affect you, as a runner? Aren’t runners just immune to all this stuff? Can’t runners just eat whatever we want? No, we cannot. Runners are humans too, in case you haven’t noticed, and lots of runners experience a lot of these health issues, weight gain, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes, right?
There’s this phenomenon called TOFI. And this is someone who is thin on the outside, fat on the inside. And this is especially true with runners who look pretty lean on the outside. But on the inside, they might have a lot of visceral fat. And they might have developed something like type two diabetes, and no amount of running more is going to fix this right.
This is a diet related problem, a diet related disease. And one of the famous examples of this is Professor Tim Noakes, who wrote the book, The Lore of Running, and this guy is a total badass, right? He’s a researcher, he’s run over 70 marathons, but he ended up getting Type Two Diabetes. As a runner, he looked fine on the outside, but his doctor was like, you need to switch your diet.
It opened his eyes, he switched to a low carbohydrate diet. And now he coaches world class athletes on this low carb approach and this fat-adapted approach to running. And in his book, The Law of Running, he has a chapter on nutrition in there, which he advocates for the traditional high carbohydrate approach that, you know, you’ve probably heard of that most runners have heard of, right.
But he famously like, tore that chapter out of the book, because he just could no longer support that he’s like, I was wrong. I wrote this stuff about eating all the carbs. And it’s completely wrong. It’s bad for you, it’s killing us, we’ve got to stop doing it. Okay. So this whole low carb approach to running to sports nutrition, it’s no longer some weird fringe thing.
This is becoming more and more common. So the NASM, the National Association of Sports Nutrition, this is where I got my sports nutrition license. They used to teach the traditional high carb approach to nutrition for endurance activities running and such.
Several years ago, they made a big decision in that they couldn’t do that anymore, they’re going to move away from that high carb approach, and move to a more of a low carb fat adapted approach to sports nutrition. This is a bold move for this organization. But they could not in good conscience keep telling people, especially athletes to eat this crap diet, this diet that is literally killing us.
So they said we can’t do it, no more. And the funny thing is, is that this decision was not well received by everybody. Like there’s people who, you know, we’re following that traditional all carb approach to sports nutrition, and they wanted to get trained in this and wanted to get licensed in this approach. And they were not happy about this, but they just decided that this was what they had to do.
They couldn’t, you know, in good conscience, they couldn’t keep telling people to eat this garbage food anymore. Okay. And this is probably the biggest reason why I signed up with NASN is because they promote the low carb approach to sports nutrition, they understand the importance of being fat-adapted and how it’s not just good for for us as humans and to become the healthiest people that we can be.
But also, it’s great for endurance sports. And then there’s doctors like Stephen Finney and Jeff Bullock, who wrote the book on low carb sports nutrition called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. And then there’s all these companies out there right now that are making nutrition products for low carb running like Mirror Energy, s fuels, you have Elemental Labs, and there are more companies coming on board all the time, they’re springing up all over the place.
Why? Because there’s a need. There are a lot of athletes like me and you who want to perform at our best without eating all the garbage. All those like nutrition food like substances like Clif Bars, I used to eat a lot of Clif bars back in the day when I was like doing the high carbohydrate thing. And I would eat a couple Clif Bars every day and I was like, well, this is healthy, you know?
And look at the ingredients, Clif Bars, these things are not good for you. In fact, I was on their website and I was like what is in a Clif Bar. And so I’m going to read you some of these ingredients: organic rolled oats, so that’s all carbs, organic brown rice syrup, sugar, soy rice crisps, which are made from soy protein isolate rice flour and barley, barley malt extract, which is a form of sugar. Organic roasted soybeans, organic tapioca syrup, that’s sugar, organic cane syrup, that’s sugar. Unsweetened chocolate, chicory fiber, soy flour, high oleic, sunflower oil, natural flavor, sea salt, cinnamon, there’s not a whole lot of nutrition in here.
Okay, this is a bunch of carbs. This one bar is 43 grams of carbohydrates, including 17 grams of sugar with 16 grams of added sugars. And only 10 grams of protein. So this is just a candy bar essentially, is what it is okay. And on their website, it says there’s like a FAQ section like frequently asked questions that says are Clif Bars good for you? And here’s their answer, “Clif Bar is the ultimate energy bar trusted for nearly 30 years by athletes and sports nutrition experts to get you started and help you keep going during long outings on the bike trail or slopes.” Notice how they don’t actually answer that question.
Because their lawyers probably were like, you can’t say that they’re not good for you. Right? So they kind of skirt that answer. But anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that instead of eating this, like processed garbage food, we need to be eating real food. And I’m gonna get into that in just a second. Okay, I’m gonna tell you what that means.
But we’ve evolved as humans to like, eat real food. We’ve thrived on eating real food for millions of years. And I just want to say that we’ve changed things recently, pretty recently, right? I mean, we’ve evolved as hunter gatherers, our diet was mostly animal based for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, we’re also omnivores, we can eat a lot of different foods. It doesn’t mean we should.
But for the most part, we were eating a diet of meat, tubers, fruit, not like the fruit we have today, honey, but there wasn’t broccoli. Broccoli didn’t come around until the 1700s. There wasn’t tomatoes, tomatoes didn’t come around until 700 ad. Even bread is a relatively recent thing, like refining grains that happened about 1000 years BC, so maybe about 10,000 years ago, right?
But in the grand scheme of things, two and a half million years of human evolution 10,000 years is not that much time. And prior to that, you know, we just didn’t need that stuff. You know, and if you look at the mummies of ancient Egyptians, they, you know, we can study the actual bodies, you know, because they’re, they’ve been preserved for the last few thousand years.
They have rotten teeth and distended bellies, and they’ve determined that this is from eating refined grains, a lot of refined grains, rotten teeth, distended bellies. Prior to that though, Paleolithic man, they found all these, you know, they didn’t find the bodies, but they found the skeletons and the skulls and they all have like perfect teeth.
So no refined grains, no tooth decay, you start eating this stuff, and it starts to be bad for you, right? The bottom line is that the refined grains are a problem, right? Alright, so what I mean when I say like, let’s eat real food. Let’s go back to eating real food. Real food is food that still looks like and it’s food that our ancestors would recognize.
So a Clif Bar does not fit into this description. Okay. So eating real food means you’re sticking with unrefined unprocessed food. Food that still looks like it’s supposed to look, if it’s a piece of salmon, it’s a piece of salmon. If it’s a sweet potato, it’s a sweet potato. If it’s broccoli, it’s broccoli. Not food that’s been ground up into powders or liquids, not food that’s been extracted from whole foods, but the actual food, okay.
I think it’s a good idea to stay away from most foods that come in packages. Most packaged food is basically processed food, okay, and I’m not anti packaged food, but most of it is highly processed. You just have to be careful, read the labels, right? Most processed food, most packaged food contains like the three worst things you can eat. I call this the Vile Triumvirate. Right?
It’s sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. If you stay away from packaged food, you’re not going to get any of that stuff. I promise you. Stick with whole foods, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit, natural fats, like olive oil, butter, some dairy like whole milk, Greek yogurt. Stay away from highly refined, highly processed food made with a million unpronounceable and unnatural ingredients. All right.
And then when I start talking about this, people get this idea in their head, and they’re like, isn’t this just like keto or low carb, high fat or paleo? And the short answer is like, no, it’s really none of those things. It’s similar. Paleo is pretty close. But even that isn’t quite right. Because here’s the thing. This is going to look different for each individual. And last week’s episode, I talked about this in depth, that’s episode 122.
Like we’re all different, we all have different goals. We all have different lifestyles, different food preferences, genetics, our metabolism, our culture, all that has to play a part in what you choose, as the diet that works best for you. Right? There’s not a one size fits all plan that’s going to work for everybody.
There just isn’t, there’s no such thing. And to be clear on this, this isn’t about eliminating a food group. This isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates, right? Or never eating a carb again, or anything like that. This is about shifting your body back to the way it’s supposed to function. The way that your body has been functioning beautifully, as humans for thousands or millions of years, right?
I think it’s ignorant to think that introducing all this processed food in the last like 60 to 100 years or so is not going to negatively impact our health it is it has, it’s a problem. So the best thing and simplest thing you can do for yourself right now is just eat real food, food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize.
So what if you do this what happens when you start eating real food? Well, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to. You know, the way that humans have been functioning for millions of years, hormones become balanced and regulated. You’re no longer hungry all the time. You’re getting all the nutrients your body actually needs. Things like insulin drop, like you stopped storing so much energy as fat, right?
You keep eating sugar, a lot of that sugar energy can’t be used right away. So your body stores it as fat. If you’re not eating that stuff, you’re not storing all this fat, you’re actually burning fat, your fat begins to be released from your fat cells and you begin to burn fat and you begin to lose weight.
You start sleeping better, you wake up feeling more rested. You have this steady supply of energy from burning fat, so you don’t have these afternoon crashes where you need that Starbucks Triple Shot, Caramel Macchiato with extra whip, just to get you through your workday. Right. So when you start eating real food, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to.
So what about running? How does this affect your running? Or why would runners choose to eat this way? Well, one of the biggest benefits of eating this way is that you become really efficient at burning fat. And fat is an amazing fuel source for long distance running. And when you become fat adapted, this is a pretty amazing experience. Like if you’re into running and I know you are, then I suggest you try this. I can’t explain it.
Like you have to go and you know, try this for yourself and see how you feel. Now there are some misconceptions about what it means to be fat-adapted. So I want to explain this a little bit more. Being fat-adapted means you are training your body to burn fat very efficiently. And we all have a virtually unlimited supply of energy on our bodies at all times in the form of stored body fat.
Okay, now, I want to go back to our prehistoric man for a second because in doing a little bit of research for this episode, I came across this fascinating study in this article. And I just want to talk about what it means to be fat-adapted and how we have evolved to kind of, this is like our normal state of being okay.
So we are born runners, we are really good at running long distances. We’ve adapted to become these amazing long distance runners, right? Modern humans, and their immediate ancestors, like Homo erectus, have several adaptations that make humans instead of being some ferocious, furry fleet creature, the animals, the animal world’s best, we are the world’s best distance runners. Right?
Early humans, scavengers, ended up becoming persistence hunters. So we develop these long springy tendons in our legs and our feet that function like large elastics like rubber bands, right? They store energy, and then with each running stride, release it and this actually reduces the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There’s also other adaptations to keep our bodies stable as we run.
So we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, we have these large butts and these large buttock muscles that hold our bodies upright. And we have this elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady. All of this stuff is designed to help us run very efficiently, right? Even the human waste, which is thinner and more flexible than that of our primate relatives, allows us to twist our upper bodies as we run to counterbalance the slightly off center. It forces exerted as we stride with each leg.
Okay, so once humans start running, it only takes a little bit more energy for us to run faster. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a ton of energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances, right?
Those adaptations make humans and our ancestors better runners, it’s our ability to run in the heat that may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game. So humans have several adaptations that help us dump the amount of heat that we generate when we’re running. These adaptations include being hairless, virtually, some of us more than others, our ability to sweat, the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, it allows us to take bigger breaths, and helps us to dump heat.
And we can run in conditions that no other animal can run in. So other animals, they get to get rid of excess heat, they pant, they have to pant and they can’t pant when they’re running, so they have to stop and rest and pant to dump the heat. That means to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans, they just kept that animal running. So altogether, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day, when most animals are resting right.
So we practice persistence hunting. We would chase a game animal during the heat of the day, make it run faster than it can maintain, we would track it, flush it if it tried to rest and repeat the process, just keeping the thing going until the animal would literally overheat and collapse. And so the animal would develop hyperthermia, which is like heatstroke in humans after about 6 or 10 miles of this.
And so, by the end of all this, even humans with their crude, early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. And adding credence to this theory is the fact that some Aboriginal humans still practice persistent hunting today. And it remains an effective hunting technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of nutrient dense fuel in the form of meat.
Okay, so all that is just to say that running long distances is part of our DNA. And running long distances means that we needed a steady fuel source available at all times, especially when we were not eating we would be fasting we would be, you know, running an animal for days until we, you know, caught up with it and whatever. That’s where our stored body fat comes into play.
We’re naturally born fat burners. And when you get off the sugar, and you get off the refined grains and the packaged garbage food, you can turn your body back into a long distance running badass fat burning machine. And right now, most people, like the average runner probably has around 100,000 calories of stored energy in the form of stored body fat, enough to run for days and days without stopping.
On the contrary though, your body can only hold about 2000 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glucose. So if this was our preferred fuel source, we would need a lot, lot more of that to be able to track animals for days, right. So the idea of getting fat-adapted should be really stated like getting back to being fat-adapted like we were meant to be.
The other misconception about being fat-adapted is that you make this switch from burning all carbs, you know in sugar, and then burning all fat. And this is never the case, you’re always burning both your body produces glucose, all the glucose that your body needs your body actually creates at your liver creates glucose for your brain and for your muscles to function properly.
And as long as your activity level is kept low enough, like during most long distance running, you will continue to produce enough glucose glucose for your working muscles while also utilizing fat as your main source of fuel. But as your exercise intensity gets higher and higher as you start burning more glucose and less fat, and you will probably need to add some sort of fuel in the form of carbohydrate to maintain the more intense effort, okay, and you got to practice this in your training.
And then you can dial in exactly how much carbohydrate you need, at what level of intensity. So you can keep that inner fire burning hot, right? So you can keep delivering a steady supply of fat and glucose to working muscles and kick some serious butt out there. Okay, so when you get good at this when you practice both, using both fuel sources efficiently, this is known as being metabolically flexible or metabolic flexibility.
So you train your body to use both types of fuel very effectively. Again, this isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates. This is about switching your body to going back to being an efficient fat burner, okay? The only thing with this is that if you go too high in the carbs, you kind of shut down the fat burning process. So you have to be careful with how you do this. And you have to experiment with it.
Okay, and everybody’s a little bit different. And so you have to practice with this in your training. This is not something you’re going to just do on race day, for sure. Okay. So eating real food, I want to recap real quick, what I just talked about, the standard American diet is wrong, needs to be changed.
Runners are not immune to the effects of this terrible diet. So just stop doing it. Running does not mean you can eat whatever you want, okay. Humans have evolved by eating real food. We’ve become amazing creatures, the most advanced creatures in the universe as far as we know. And we did it by eating real food. So we need to get back to that.
Humans have also evolved to be badass runners and badass fat-burning machines. We need to get back to that too. And the easiest way to get back to that to get back to our badass purpose is to eat real food. Eat food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize. Cool, this is fun. I love talking about this. I could talk about this all day. Hope you guys have an awesome day. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Today I have a bit of a different episode for you. I’m going to be asking you a lot of questions about your diet, your weight, your current health, your running performance, and a few other …
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My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 121 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, is it time to change your diet? So today I have a bit of a different episode for you. I’m going to be asking you some questions about your diet, your weight, your current health, your running performance, and a few other things.
The reason for this is that I want you to consider how your current diet, whatever you’re doing today, might be affecting you in a bunch of different areas of your life. Most people don’t pay attention to their diet unless they find themselves suddenly overweight, or their doctor wants to put them on some kind of medication.
And of course, I’m joking because it’s never suddenly, “I’m overweight!” It’s a slow, gradual process, right? We just don’t notice it until it’s like I can’t put my pants on anymore. The point is, this episode is all about you and your diet. So I want you to be thinking about your diet and your current state of health and fitness as I talk about diet here today.
And by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of the effects of food, the effects of your diet on your health, and your sports performance. And I want to help you decide whether or not it’s time to finally change your diet. And listen, I know what it’s like to try to change your diet.
I know how hard it can be. I’ve done this many, many times in the past, it was never easy. For me, it was always some sort of a struggle. And the only time it really wasn’t the only time it finally worked permanently, was when I reached out and I got some help.
I got a coach to help me figure out what I should do. What was going to work for me, not based on some fad diet. But putting together a custom plan that I felt good about that I sort of created myself and man it finally worked.
I lost 40 pounds after making this change, running became easier. I’ve never felt so good. I’ve never had so much energy. And now this is what I do. I help runners like you lose the weight that you’ve been struggling with. For years, maybe I help runners to get leaner and stronger and to become running bad asses.
So if you’re a runner, and you’d like to get that weight problem solved for good, I want to invite you to apply for coaching with me. You’ll fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me, we’ll jump on a call, we’ll talk about your goals. And we’ll see how coaching can help you get there.
I would love to help you lose weight, and do it without all the stupid struggling and frustration. I know what that’s like, there’s a better way. If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started.
Alright, so today, I want to talk about diet and whether or not it’s time for you to make a change to your diet. So specifically, we’re going to be talking about whether or not your current diet is working for you. And listen, people get pretty emotional when talking about diet, especially when anyone suggests that maybe you should change your diet, I’m not going to make that decision for you.
I want you to just think about this for yourself and make that decision for yourself. Because your diet is either, it’s either working for you or it’s not. And sometimes we don’t understand the effects that our diet is actually having on our health, on our athletic performance on our general mood, you know, and we naturally put up a lot of resistance when anyone suggest that we change our diet, or that maybe somebody suggests that diet could be the cause of a lot of the health issues that you’re experiencing.
And I totally get this. And there’s a lot of information out there. A lot of people that are pushing an agenda on you and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to push an agenda on you. I want to help you to make a good decision and this is what I do with my coaching.
This is why the way that I do coaching is a little bit different from other coaches, I don’t just tell you what to do, we come up with a solution together, something that you feel good about. Because only you know what kinds of foods you like and don’t like. Only you know what’s going to be sustainable for you.
And when we can put together a plan that you feel good about, that you are in alignment with, this is the game changer here. Okay, and, and this was what was the game changer for me too, when I finally decided to change my diet for good and it started to work and I started to lose the weight and I became fat-adapted, and I understood how certain foods were affecting me.
And I put that together myself, I kind of put that plan together myself, obviously with a lot of guidance with a lot of help from experts and things like that. But I just want you to understand that I just want you to think about whether or not your current diet is working for you. Okay.
Now, before I dive into this, I want to also explain how I’m using the word diet today because I tend to not use this word a lot. Just because people freak out a little bit when they hear diet. I’m not saying diet in the sense of like, you need to go on a diet, or you need to really limit how much food you’re eating.
You know, I mean diet in the sense of a nutrition regimen, a food plan died in the sense of the food that you habitually eat, not like vegetarian or carnivore or vegan or keto or South Beach diet or anything like that. I just mean like, the foods that you eat, because we’re all different. You know, we all eat differently, I can’t really put what I eat, I really can’t put it into a category, like the ones I just mentioned, it’s just different. It’s just what feels good for me and what works for me, which is different from what’s going to work for you.
But people hear the word diet, and they immediately start thinking about cutting calories, deprivation, struggle, suffering, falling off the wagon, it brings up all these negative connotations, right? So today, I just want to use the word diet freely to mean the foods that you eat on a regular basis, right? It’s not good, it’s not bad. I don’t want to be polarizing here. And I’m not talking about the latest fad diet or anything like that, just the foods you typically eat. That’s the way I’m using diet here today. Cool.
And then lastly, I want to help you to understand how profoundly your diet is affecting you, and your running, and your overall health and your weight and whether or not you can lose the weight. And I want to help you decide if changing your diet is right for you or not.
So you might be doing fine. You might be listening to this and like you’re super healthy, you’re at your natural weight, you feel amazing, you have tons of energy, all this stuff, there’s probably not a real big need to change anything.
But I’m guessing that there are a lot of people listening to this right now. And there’s some areas in your life or some areas of your health and fitness that you’d like to improve. And your diet is one of the most powerful drivers of your health, good health or bad health, and it depends on the diet.
So by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of how your diet is affecting things like your energy levels, your mood, your sleep quality, running performance, body composition, and really your overall health and happiness.
And then I want you to have what it takes to be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not it’s time for you to change your diet. Cool. Okay, so let’s look at a few of these indicators here.
So again, think about your current state of health and your current diet. When I go through some of these questions like first and foremost, how is your weight? Think about your weight. This is always the number one thing people look at when they consider changing their diet. Am I overweight? Do I need to lose weight?
So one of the ways that people determine whether or not they need to lose weight is they look at something like BMI, body mass index. And they look at this as the one indicator of whether or not they’re overweight. And you see these charts in doctors offices and things like that.
The problem with BMI, I don’t like the BMI to be honest with you because it’s only taking two data points. It’s taking your height and your weight and then making an assessment based on that. BMI is not a very accurate indicator of your state of health and fitness.
And it’s definitely not accurate if you’re pretty fit. So BMI can be very off; it can be very inaccurate, especially if you’re muscular. So for example, my son and I are the same height. We’re both 5’11. But he probably weighs 25-30 pounds more than me. And so if you look at the BMI chart, he’s borderline obese, he’s over, he’s considered overweight on the BMI chart, he’d be borderline obese.
But I have to tell you, he’s nothing but huge. He’s a bodybuilder, you know, he’s muscular. He’s put on a lot of weight in the form of muscle. But the BMI which is telling that he’s overweight, okay. So that’s a good example of where BMI can be wrong.
Right now, I’m in a place where I’m trying to gain weight. So I’m starting to dip into that overweight range of BMI. And I’m not overweight, okay, I’m gaining muscle, I’m doing some pretty intense gym workouts, I’m really focusing on building muscle this year.
So anyway, BMI, not a super good indicator of whether you are overweight or not. Okay, there is a better way to determine your body composition. When we talk about weight, I’m really talking about fat weight, okay, there’s a certain amount of fat we all need to have on our bodies. And fat is not wrong or bad.
Like, people talk about zero body fat, you would die. If you had zero body fat. The minimum body fat requirements to sustain human life for men, I think is 3%. For women is 12%. Women need more body fat to support their, you know, female reproductive systems and things like that.
So we don’t aim, we’re not aiming for a 0% body fat ever, right? Just as to sustain life, women need 12%. So maybe 20-25% body fat is where you want to be. If you’re a female, or maybe you know, 18-16% as a male. It’s different for everybody, really.
But you can use something like the US Navy body fat calculator, you can find this online. So you take some body girth measurements along with height, weight, and age, to determine your body composition. So this is a better indicator of whether or not you want to lose some of the fat weight. Okay.
And the goal when I tell people that, you know, we talked about weight loss, and I asked people like, how much weight do you want to lose? Where do you want your body composition to be? And sometimes there’s just like, I’ve never thought about that before, I just want the scale to go down.
I’m like, well, let’s say we start gaining muscle, you’re losing some of the fat weight, but you’re gaining muscle, the scale is not going to go down, it’s going to kind of stay the same. Are you okay with that?
And so then I’ve got to like, get them to take some other measurements, and we’ve got to do some other type of measuring so that we can see that we are improving our body composition, okay. And they have scales that can do something like this, you know, those smart scales that use an electrical impedance, so they send a little bit of electric current up through your body and it you know, has to do with it tries to determine your muscle weight versus fat weight.
And so it’s trying to make a determination based on how fast the electrical current goes through your body of whether or not your competition is mostly fat, or muscle or whatever. They did a study about five years ago, and consumer reports on these different scales.
And they compare them to a bod pod, so bod pod is an air displacement measuring device, which is very accurate. So you have to go somewhere and you have to sit in this thing that looks like an egg. And they shut you in there. And it’s very, very precise.
Okay, it measures volume, and it can definitely measure, you know, the difference between your fat and muscle weight. But they, they took that as the base baseline measurement, and then they compared these scales, and the scales were off by like, a lot, you know, 20 to 30% difference, this is huge, right?
There’s a huge difference between what is considered to be, you know, accurate. So, I don’t really suggest these scales are very accurate, you know, can they help you to kind of determine if you’re losing some fat weight and gaining some muscle weight, probably, but just know that they’re not very accurate, okay.
Here’s what I want you to do instead, instead of worrying about all these measurements and things like that, some are good, some not so good. Go by how you feel. Use your best judgment. You know your body better than anyone else. Ask yourself some questions.
Do you feel like you’re overweight? Would you feel better if you lost weight? Do you feel pudgy? Or doughy or fluffy or bloated? This was me. I always felt doughy like when I started to feel doughy, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, I was like, I don’t want to feel like that. And if this is how you feel every day, then you can decide for yourself if you want to lose weight or not.
But it’s not up to a number. It’s not up to the government, it’s not up to some standard that you see on a chart somewhere. Just determine this for yourself. How do you feel about yourself? How are your clothes fitting? Are they tight? You know, have you had to go up a size or two?
And a few years back, when I started gaining weight again, my clothes were getting a little snugger. And I refused to buy new clothes. I was like, eventually, I’m just going to lose this weight. But you know, for now, I’m not buying new clothes, there’s no way I was going to go up a size in pants or shirts or anything like that.
So the clothes kept getting tighter. And I kept feeling less confident. I was feeling more self conscious, I would put on the shirts like a button up shirt, and the buttons would be sort of like pulling apart at the around the belly section. This is not a good look. All right. And it was very embarrassing for me.
And so I would like just choose whatever the loosest fitting clothes I had, and not a lot. All the tight fitting clothes, I had just ended up in the back of the drawer or the back of the closet, whatever. And then I remember I had some shorts in the summertime and I had some shorts that used to fit perfectly and I loved the shorts, but I couldn’t even button them anymore.
Could not even get them buttoned. And that was part of my wake up call was like, I’ve got to do something about this because I’m not going to buy new clothes. I’m not going to go up sizes. Alright, just so you know those shorts now I wear them today. And they’re like loose on me. Like I almost could go a size down. I’m not going to do that though.
But listen, I want you to decide for yourself, do you want to feel better about yourself? Do you want to feel better in your body with losing some weight? Maybe some fat weight and gaining some muscle help you to feel better about yourself. Now I always encourage people to work on the way they feel about themselves before they decide to go on a weight loss journey.
Like you have to like, kind of love yourself through this whole process. You can’t just hate yourself and expect to love yourself when you lose the weight. No, it doesn’t work that way. But no one else can decide whether or not you need to lose weight. It’s not up to the scale or to chart or anything else like that.
And it’s not up to other people in your life, either. Because sometimes I work with people who come to me and they’re like, yeah, I really want to lose like 10 pounds. But you know, my husband tells me I look fine, and I don’t need to lose weight, or my mom tells me I shouldn’t lose any more weight.
And I just want to like encourage you to just decide what you want to do. If you want to lose five or 10 pounds, you know, maybe you want to improve your running time. You want to run a faster marathon and losing 10 or 15 pounds is gonna really help you to get there, then absolutely, that should be something that you decide for yourself.
It’s not up to other people, other people just want us to feel good about ourselves, they want us to be happy. And if they see you, you know saying like, oh, I need to lose some weight, they might think you’re unhappy. And it’s not about that. It’s about becoming our best selves. It’s about becoming badass, right?
It’s not about you know, not feeling good about ourselves. Okay, so going back to the question, how’s your weight? How do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about your weight? If you want to lose weight, if you feel like you’re overweight, diet is going to be the number one driver of this for you. We want to change your body composition, then we’re going to change your diet.
Okay. The next indicator of whether or not it might be time to change your diet is your relationship with food. Like if you struggle with food choices, if you struggle with making good choices and staying on track with a pretty healthy diet, then it might be time to give that diet an overhaul. You know if you find it very difficult to avoid junk food, sugar in particular, then it might be time to change your diet.
Listen, sugar jacks you up. It’s more like a drug than a food. There’s no real positive nutritional benefits from eating sugar. There aren’t. There’s a lot of negative consequences though. You know, sugar causes all kinds of metabolic issues like higher blood pressure, inflammation, gain, weight gain, diabetes, fatty liver disease, increased risk for heart attack and stroke.
Too much sugar in the diet is the number one cause of metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, Alzheimer’s and all these things that I just mentioned. And what it really does is it puts your body into this state of hyperinsulinemia with too much insulin in your blood, or insulin resistance, that means your body just can’t regulate insulin properly, and so it just keeps pumping out more and more and more insulin.
Insulin drives fat into fat cells. Insulin drives your body into fat storage mode. So when insulin is high all the time, you’re just storing fat all the time. You can’t burn the fat. And then in researching this podcast today, I found some other negative side effects of too much sugar in the diet.
And some of these things I did not realize first is dental health. Now of course, we all know that eating too much sugar can cause cavities, right? You know, bacteria in your mouth feed on sugar. And they release these acid byproducts which cause tooth decay, right and cavities. Think we all know that one.
But sugar also cause like an increase of kidney disease risk. Having consistently high blood sugar can damage the delicate blood vessels in your kidneys. And that can lead to an increased risk of kidney disease. Too much sugar can cause gout. Gout is an inflammatory condition characterized by pain in the joints, especially in the toes, like big toes.
I had gout some time ago, years and years ago, because I was eating a real crap diet. And I will tell you it is one of the most painful things you can experience. There was almost nothing I’ve ever experienced that was as painful as gout. I couldn’t even couldn’t even walk, couldn’t put shoes on, couldn’t have the sheets touching my feet. I had to sleep with my feet like not touching the sheets. Not good.
But sugar raises the uric acid levels in the blood, which helps make gout worse, it makes it really bad. And then another thing that I did not know is that high sugar in the diet can lead to cognitive decline, impaired memory and increased risk of dementia. Right. So why are we eating sugar?
Listen in moderation. Yes, very, very limited amounts, you know, whatever. Okay, but listen, sugar is not healthy, this is not good for you. There’s only negative consequences to eating sugar, it’s more like a drug than it is a food. It causes harm at certain levels like a drug does, it’s very difficult to quit eating sugar.
And if you struggle with giving up sugar, this is an indicator that something may have to change in your diet. Okay, if you find yourself craving sugar all the time, or just thinking about giving it up kind of sends you into like a panic mode, then it might be time to get off the sugar and change your relationship with food or change your food choices and change your diet. Okay.
Another indicator that it might be time to change your diet is your eating habits in general, like are you using food as an emotional management tool, because if you are, we got to change something here. Okay. This is about changing your thoughts and feelings, but it’s also about changing what you’re eating.
Because if you’re binging on junk food, if you’re using this hyper palatable food, you know, most processed foods most junk food is considered what they call hyper palatable, it’s been engineered to be incredibly delicious, and give you like a dopamine hit and, and make you feel good and releases all these chemicals that make you feel amazing. Again, like a drug, right?
And so if you’re using food as an emotional management tool, maybe it’s time to change your diet. Right? If you’re eating because you’re stressed, you’re bored, you’re anxious, you’re frustrated, you’re overwhelmed, angry, lonely, whatever. These are reasons to consider making a change to your diet.
Okay, you have to be able to handle your emotions and your emotional experiences in this life. Like a mature, evolved adult human being not like a toddler. The toddler reaction to our emotions is when we just want them to go away right away. I don’t want to feel this way. Give me some food to make me feel better. Right?
That’s what we do. And I’m kind of like saying it funnily. But listen, funnily is a word. I don’t even know if that’s a word. I’m saying it in a funny way. But we got to deal with our emotions like mature evolved adults, we have to actually be able to just sit with our emotions and experience these emotions without having to eat over them when we’re eating just to feel better.
This is a problem. These are not good eating habits, okay? And listen, ending emotional eating, this is not an easy thing to do. And I get it. This is a complicated topic. And we actually spent a whole month last month on this topic in the coaching project.
And people got a lot out of it, to be honest with you, we really dug deep into emotional eating and how to stop doing it and how to deal with our emotions instead, it was pretty powerful stuff. But if you regularly find yourself eating, not because you’re hungry, but because like you just want to feel better, maybe it’s time to change your diet, okay?
Another indicator that it might be time to change your diet, are you hungry all the time, because you shouldn’t be. If you’re hungry all the time, there’s something wrong. Humans evolved over, you know, millennia, I would say, lots of millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, we’ve evolved to eat a couple of times a day, at most, and then sometimes we would go for days without food altogether.
So think about our human ancestors, we were amazing, persistent hunters. That’s why we’re such good runners, because we would, you know, call an animal from the herd, and then run it down. And we could just keep up with this animal, they would, they would die of exhaustion, but we can sweat really well.
We maintain our body temperature. And we’re really good at running we have big butts, which help us to balance when we’re running. And, you know, we are really good at long distance running. Right? That’s why I love endurance events, especially ultra running, where you’re running through the woods for extended periods of time, because this most typically, most directly mimics how we’ve evolved as humans, it’s like built into our DNA, this persistent hunting and this running.
But we would run down animals, this would take days sometimes. And we wouldn’t have food during that time. And during that time, if not having food was a problem, we would you know, crash and burn and die along with the animals. Right. But no, that’s not what we did, we could maintain.
Our brains actually got more focused, we became more cognitively aware of what was going on in our surroundings. And we had plenty of energy to just keep going. And if we had to eat every couple of hours, if this is the way we’ve evolved as humans, this wouldn’t have worked at all right?
This is just not normal, our digestive systems, our pancreas and things like that are designed to work sporadically to work intermittently, not all the time. So if you can’t go for a couple of hours without food, this means that your body is not working the way it’s supposed to. Okay, it means your hunger signals are messed up, your hormones are messed up.
And what causes that is the wrong kind of diet. If you’re eating the kind of diet where you know, you’re hungry all the time, this is a problem. This is not right, you need to change your diet. Speaking of energy, how are your energy levels, because if you’re crashing and burning every afternoon, then this is a problem. This means your diet needs to be changed, right?
You want to have sustainable energy, that’s pretty consistent all day long. We don’t want to be having these spikes of energy, oh my gosh, I feel amazing. And then crashes where you just feel like falling asleep at your desk at three o’clock in the afternoon, right? The wrong kind of diet will cause these spikes in your blood sugar.
And when we have these massive spikes in our blood sugar, when we come down from that, we actually kind of dropped below baseline. So we want to stay near that baseline as closely as possible. But when you spike really high, you crash really low. And that’s where people say, oh, my blood sugar is low, I need to eat some sugar, whatever, you know, I need an energy drink in the afternoon.
So this is a problem. Again, this is not normal. We should have pretty pretty steady energy all day long, right? But a diet high in sugar, high in refined carbohydrates, high in highly processed foods is typically the cause of these energy spikes and crashes. All right. And as a runner, you don’t want this. You want steady energy being delivered to your brain into your muscles like all day, especially for running especially for your athletic performance.
Speaking of which, how is your running? How is your endurance? Do you find yourself hitting the wall during long runs? Are you just getting gassed? Are you running out of energy at some point? Do you have to like wash down a bunch of gels and goos and stuff just to like, get out there and do a 10 mile run or something?
So when we talk about, you know, running out of energy, this is like hitting the wall or bonking when you’re running, right? And if this is you, if you find yourself consistently just running out of energy, then we need to look at your diet, it could be, it could be a big problem, okay?
So, running out of energy hitting the wall is a pretty common thing, especially with the marathon runners, right. And for me, I used to hit the wall between mile like 18 and 20, pretty consistently. And this is where most runners that I talked to tell me that they typically would hit the wall.
This is when you run out of glycogen in your muscles, and you have no alternative energy source. So you’re not fat-adapted, you’re not burning fat efficiently. And you’re you have no more fuel, and you just crash and burn, boom, you’re done. You just have to stop and walk. And then it’s kind of a slog fest, those last five, six miles on a marathon, right?
So you know, for me, one of the big reasons I got into sports nutrition, and especially sports nutrition with this, you know, kind of leaning towards the fat-adaptation side of things is that I wanted to figure out how to become a fat adapted runner, I wanted to figure out how to stop the bonking, how to stop hitting the wall at mile 18 or 20, I wanted to have unlimited, you know, fuel for running.
And when you become a fat-adapted runner, you virtually become bulletproof. You have this endless supply of fuel onboard in the way of your own stored body fat. And just to prove this, I’ve heard other people that have done endurance events without any calories at all. And I wanted to see, you know, can I even do this? Is this even feasible? You know, is this possible?
And then last year, once I got fat-adapted, I ran two marathons. And then the year before I did a 50k, and I did all these events on zero calories, I didn’t eat breakfast beforehand, I didn’t take in any calories during the event. And I had plenty of energy to complete these distances.
So you can absolutely do it once you’re fat adapted, you can absolutely do these long distance events without having a bunch of fuel or any fuel really, except for the fuel that you’re producing, using your own body fat. Now, is this optimal for everybody? Maybe not, I just wanted you to understand that when you become fat-adapted, you no longer need massive amounts of fuel, you can get away with not very much, right?
I actually teach my clients how to use fuel strategically during races to enhance running performance, you can use some types of fuel to keep the fat burning going, but also take advantage of you know, the carbohydrate sources or, you know, other sources of fuel to give your muscles more glycogen, so that you can like, get a little bit faster, maybe have that top gear, okay.
Speaking of speed, how is your running speed? This could be an indication that you need to switch up your diet, you know, if you find yourself just stuck at the same speed, and you just can’t make any improvements, your diet is going to help with this. Okay, your diet could be hindering your speed and your performance.
And of course, you know, when it comes to running faster, you’ve got to work on strength training, you’ve got to build stronger muscles. You want to become a more powerful runner. And you also have to do speed work, right? These are things you need to do. But diet plays a huge part in this too. Right? The wrong diet can kill your speed.
If you’re eating a bunch of junk food, processed food, a bunch of weird ingredients, you’re not giving your body, you’re not giving your muscles the nutrition that it actually needs to perform at its best. And you’re just doing yourself a disservice you’re not going to get faster, it’s going to be very difficult to get faster. Put it that way.
So look at your running speed and if you’re trying to, you know PR a marathon PR a 5k or 10k Let’s look at the diet it could be having a negative impact on your running speed. Okay. And then how are you recovering from running? Most runners who eat the Standard American Diet who eat a lot of sugar, a lot of processed foods, a lot of refined carbohydrates and refined grains experience chronic inflammation.
This means that recovering from hard workouts takes a lot longer, which will actually decrease your running performance overall. And when we get fat adapted when we change the diet, the runners that I work with telling me that they have, they are recovering faster than ever, they’ve never experienced this kind of like, they’ll go and run a 20 miler, and the next day, they feel amazing.
They no longer feel all the inflammation and the bloating. And even their doctors report the lower levels of the inflammatory marker, I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head here. But when you get your blood work done, there’s that inflammatory marker.
And they can see that that’s greatly lowered because of diet. So diet can have a huge impact on your recovery. And when you recover faster, and your body’s not in a state of chronic inflammation, you can become a stronger runner, you can improve your running performance, you can actually get faster too.
A couple more things. What about sleeping, how is your sleep? Sleep is often overlooked. But this is an important part of your training, it should be. It is crucial to get a good night’s sleep, your body has to use that time to, to rebuild to recover, and so that you can go out there and get after it the next day. And if you’re not getting the right amount of sleep, if your sleep is horrible, and you wake up not feeling good, feeling tired of feeling exhausted when you wake up in the morning, this is a problem, this is going to put your body in this state of chronic stress.
Chronic stress will increase your cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone, your body will produce more glucose in response to that stress hormone, which increases insulin levels, which keeps your body in that fat storage mode. Chronic stress leads to chronically storing body fat, and it makes it very difficult to improve your body composition.
If you’re super stressed out, we want to practice like acute stress in our body. So we want to run hard. Sometimes we want to lift weights hard, sometimes that’s acute stress, it’s short, short term, your body can adapt to that kind of stress.
There’s an adaptive response that happens when we experience that kind of stress, chronic stress being stressed all the time, which what is what happens when you don’t get a good night’s sleep every night, you can be just chronically stressed out, this is going to just keep it keep you from losing weight, it’s going to keep you from running at your best, it’s going to just make it very hard for you to recover.
So you gotta get a good night’s sleep. diet plays a huge role in this diet plays a huge role in your sleep. If you’re not, if you’re not eating the right diet, if you’re eating a bunch of junk food and eating a bunch of sugar, I’m going to tell you right now your sleep is going to be messed up.
People that I work with report that they’re sleeping has never been better, once they get off of that sugar kind of roller coaster. And then the last thing I want you to consider is your ability to focus and concentrate. One of the best things about being fat adapted for me, is the clear headedness that I experience, I can think more clearly, I concentrate more easily. And I can stay focused all day long.
The wrong diet doesn’t give your brain the kinds of fuel that it needs to function properly, your brain actually thrives on fat as a fuel source. So if your diet isn’t promoting fat burning, then you’re probably experiencing, you know, brain fog. And it’s hard to know that you’re experiencing brain fog when you’re in it. It just seems like this is the way things are.
But I’m telling you right now, when you get off of that sugar roller coaster, when you change your diet, you start eating real food, you start burning fat more efficiently. All of a sudden, it seems like the world comes into clearer focus, and you can concentrate and you can think more clearly.
And it’s like the fog has been lifted. It’s amazing. This is like one of my favorite parts about eating this way is that I just feel like my brain works the way it’s supposed to. Right. So all these things we just talked about are all indicators that your diet is either working for you or it’s not, you know, and if you’re finding yourself deciding that, yeah, you know, it’s time for me to change my diet. I want to encourage you to do something about it. Don’t just think about it. Don’t just listen to this and go okay, good stuff.
Let’s move on to the next one or whatever. I want you to do something, try something, take a break from sugar. Start eating real food, you know, food that still looks like food, right? Get fat-adapted as a runner. It takes a little bit of time to do that. It’s not for everyone. It’s a little bit of an uncomfortable process to go through. But once you get there It’s amazing.
And I’m going to tell you right now, you’ll never want to go back to doing what you’ve been doing in the past, right? Maybe eliminate processed food, that’s a good place for a lot of people to start. Anything that comes in a package, just stay away from it. Stop it with all the ingredients, right?
Most of these processed foods are not designed for your health, but they’re just they’re designed to taste amazing and to sell you more food really. They keep you hungry. They keep you craving foods so that you’ll buy more of their crappy processed packaged foods, right? The food companies are making a lot of money, but we pay the price with our health right?
And then consider getting some help. If you’re looking for some help with all of this. If you want some help and guidance, consider joining us in the Running Lean coaching project because you’ll learn exactly what to do and how to do it. You learn how to get fat-adapted the right way.
You’ll get support from the group and from me as your coach, you’ll get encouragement to keep going accountability to help you stay on track. And you’ll just get to your goals faster when you have the expert guidance helping you get there. Okay, so if you’re interested, love to have you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, and we can get you started on your journey to becoming a badass today. Cool. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I’ve received a lot of questions about the Running Lean Coaching Group’s January 8 Pounds Down Challenge so I decided to address all of your questions in this bonus podcast episode! Starting on …
Continue Reading about Bonus Episode: January 8 Pounds Down Challenge →
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 this special bonus episode of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about the coaching group’s January eight pounds down challenge.
I’ve received a lot of questions about this challenge and about what we’re going to be doing over in the coaching group. And I wanted to make sure that I addressed all of your questions. And I was going to do this in this week’s Facebook Live. But there are some mitigating circumstances where I cannot go live on Facebook right now. I’ll talk more about that in a minute.
But I just want you to know that starting on Tuesday, January 4, we’re going to be focusing on getting fat-adapted as a group, we’re going to be doing this in the coaching group, we’re going to be getting fat-adapted and dropping some weight.
And the goal is to try to lose eight pounds by January 31. So if you think about it, it’s roughly two pounds a week, maybe a little less than two pounds a week. Very doable. Can I guarantee everybody’s gonna drop at least exactly eight pounds? No, but you know what, we’re going to set ourselves up for success, okay.
Some people might might lose a bit more, some people might lose a bit less. It’s all good. So if you’re interested in stepping up your game and joining us for this fun and transformative challenge, be sure to listen to this episode, because I’m just gonna be talking about what we’re going to be doing over there. I’ll give you all the details, and then join us in the group, it’d be fun to have you in the group. Okay.
So normally, I would be talking about this on my Facebook Live that I do every week in the Facebook group. And because of some glitchy thing that I did a couple of years ago, apparently, the Facebook algorithm found some old posts that I shared some meme or something like that, that apparently went against the community guidelines for Facebook.
And I’m basically restricted from going live for 30 days. No big deal. Whatever I posted was innocent enough, there was something sarcastic, which I’ve been known to do every now and then. And looking back on it, I can see how it was maybe just in poor taste or whatever. Okay, so, lesson learned. I’m kind of restricted from going live on Facebook right now.
So for this month, I’m going to maybe do a couple of bonus episodes of the podcast, is that cool with you guys? Cool. So it’s all good. Lesson learned. You’ve got to be careful what you post on Facebook, I’m telling you right now they take stuff very seriously, you know, even if you’re joking around. So just be careful with that kind of stuff.
You guys, you know what? I always try to keep things positive, you’re probably listening to this going, like, I can’t believe you would post something like, what did you post I know, it was just something dumb that I shared that somebody else created, you know, some meme, you know.
But apparently, it went against their guidelines, so lesson learned.
Okay, so here’s what I’m gonna talk about today – I want to talk about this challenge that we’re doing over the Facebook group. So this is all about getting fat-adapted and doing our best to lose eight pounds by January 31.
Okay, so why are we doing this? Well, first of all, this is a great time of the year to do this not because it’s January 1, and we’re all like setting resolutions and all this stuff. No. It’s a good time to do it because we are just getting started with marathon training.
Or maybe your half marathon training hasn’t started yet. So this is the offseason and this is a good time to kind of get started with any kind of nutrition changes, any kind of dietary changes.
You don’t want to wait six weeks until your marathon to start something like this. Okay? So, most spring marathons are going to be in, you know, April, May June, kind of in that timeframe. So we’ve got plenty of time to get fat adapted, okay.
I want to help you create some momentum as well to start this new year. I want to help you develop some new eating habits and some new relationships with food really, and with exercise and I want you to understand what it takes to become a fat adapted runner.
I want you to see the benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner, and I want to create some momentum. I want you to create the momentum to help you just project yourself into the rest of the year like really give you some momentum to just keep things going and really create some good positive habits.
You know, when we talk about losing weight, we talk about getting fat-adapted, we talk about getting healthier, we talk about getting more fit, improving our health, improving our fitness, whatever it is, it’s all about changing your habits. It’s all about what you do, every single day.
And most people, what they do is they, you know, they get to a day like January 1, and they’re like, I’m gonna lose weight, you know, and then they just kind of arbitrarily kind of half-ass a plan and sort of, you know, try to eat better, whatever that means.
And they don’t really succeed at that, right. I mean, this is why the gyms are full in January, and then by March, they’re empty again, right. So most people try to do this in a way that just doesn’t work. Okay.
And so, a couple of other things that kind of don’t work is trying to do it on your own. Right? It’s hard to do this on your own. Without guidance, it can be challenging, okay. Without accountability, it can be very challenging. Without direction, or somebody to help you get through the tough stuff, it’s going to be almost impossible for you.
So what we’re going to do as a group is we are going to learn together, exactly how to get fat adapted. So you’ll be able to do this with a group, you’re going to get expert guidance and direction from me and from other people in the group.
I’ve got people in my coaching group who have been in my membership program for many months. And some people, I would consider them to be experts at this as well, they’ve got a lot of experience doing this.
So you’re going to hear from me and from other people that have had a great experience doing this, okay, but I’m going to be your coach, I’m going to be coaching you through the tough stuff, okay. You’ll have a clear and proven plan, you’re going to have a plan that has worked for countless other runners.
And we are going to kind of figure out our plans together. And you’ll have a chance to ask questions. Every week, you’re going to get encouragement, you’re going to get that accountability, where you have to sort of check-in, you’ll get to talk about what’s going well, what’s not, you’re going to stay motivated, you’re going to stay on track when you do this as a group. Okay?
That whole accountability thing. Somebody asked me this recently, like, what does accountability look like? It looks like this. It looks like every week, we’re going to say hey, this is what your job is for this week. Here’s the work you need to do. Maybe you got some homework assignments you have to do this week. Here’s what we’re going to do as a group together, yeah, let’s do it.
So we all say, yes, we’re committed, we’re going to do this thing. And then every week, you’ve got to show up and say, did you do it or not? That’s what accountability looks like. Okay, because you don’t want to show up to the group and say, I didn’t do it. I didn’t stick to my plan. You know, I just gave up. You don’t want to do that. Right?
So you’re going to stay on track, you’re going to do what you said you’re going to do, because you got to check in with us and tell us you did, or you didn’t do it. That’s what accountability looks like. Okay.
And I also need to say this, I need to say that when we do this when we go through this process in this group together as a group, we are going to have fun doing it. Okay. It doesn’t have to stop at losing weight, getting healthy and becoming fitter can be fun. Is that crazy to say, does that totally blow your mind? Because it can be fun.
Most people think you have to suffer. Most people think it has to be super terrible. And you have to live in this world of like, dust deprivation and white-knuckling it. And, you know, just being hungry all the time. And feeling like crap. Like we’re gonna try to minimize that kind of stuff. Right? We’re gonna have some fun doing this.
Okay, um, I always say like losing weight doesn’t have to be a suffer-fest. Like we can do it in a way that feels good. That’s actually kind of fun. Okay. So how does all this work? So, what you’ll want to do is you’ll want to join the Running Lean coaching group and do this before Tuesday. Okay, Tuesday, the fourth.
So Tuesday, the fourth at 8:30 pm is our first group coaching call for January. And those are the only that’s the only time each week that we do this call. Okay, right now, I only have one call time each week.
As this group grows and we get more interest, you know, I could change that time or add more times, but for now, we just have the one call time and I try to accommodate, you know, as many people’s schedules that can there’s no way I could possibly pick a time that would work for everybody, but this time seems to work for a lot of people.
But don’t worry, if you can’t make the live calls, you can still get a lot out of the program by listening to the replays. So I post all the replays, all the video replays, from our group zoom meetings on a private website that you’ll have access to, I also have a private podcast feed that you can listen to.
So you can actually just listen to the coaching calls as you’re out running or whatever, which is a great way to kind of, you know, replay and get that information if you can’t make the lives but I do encourage you to make the live calls.
The people that make the live calls get a lot more out of the program, I’m just gonna tell you right now. Okay. So as soon as you sign up for the program, you’re going to get immediate access to all of my online training materials.
So my big flagship program is called the Weight Loss Training Course for Runners. And this is a big, multi-module program, it’s got, I don’t know, 40 videos, 45 videos, something like that, of training on a variety of topics about fat-adaptation, about the mindset required to lose weight and keep it off.
Strength training, explosive workouts for runners, there’s just so much information in there, okay, you get my course called Achieving the Impossible. This is all about setting big, huge impossible goals and then making them happen, you’ll get access to my course called Getting It All Done, which is a productivity course and helps you with planning.
A lot of what we do in the program is about planning, we plan our meals ahead of time, we plan our workouts, and then we stick to our plan. So I show you exactly how to plan your whole week, using different calendar tools and a very effective way of getting everything done.
And then you’ll have access to all the previous group coaching calls to all the recorded stuff, like I said in the private podcast, so in addition to all of that you get access to my private Facebook group where we kind of do a little bit of Q&A in there, sometimes you get to ask questions and get answers. So I would encourage you to get signed up before Tuesday. And we will all get started together on Tuesday, January 4. Cool.
So each week, you’re going to have you know, some different work to do, you’ll have some different sort of assignments, you’ll have different layers of like, what it looks like to get fat adapted, and how we change our diet, and how we, you know what you’re supposed to eat, what you shouldn’t eat, things to avoid, things you should definitely add in how to schedule your workouts around all this. How to make sure you’re getting the most out of the out of your running workouts, how to get through this tough fat-adaptation phase because the first few weeks is a little bit challenging.
And so you know, got some tips and tricks for getting through that quickly. You’ll get to ask questions and check in every week in the program. Cool. So that’s what the program looks like, I just want to encourage you, if you’re the kind of person who is like interested in doing this, you’re interested in starting your year off, by getting yourself fat-adapted, like this is something you’ve been thinking about for a long time, and you’re ready to take action, just I’m just gonna encourage you to take action. Okay?
Go over to runningleanpodcast.com/join and you can read all about it. And then you can just get yourself signed up. And as soon as you get yourself signed up, you’ll have access to all the online training materials, and then you can join in the live call on Tuesday.
You know, if you’re the kind of person who keeps gaining and losing the same 10 or 20 pounds over and over again, and you want a different way to do things, you want a different way that’s going to maybe work permanently for change, this is a good program for you.
If you’ve been running a ton of miles like trying to lose weight and it’s just not working for you anymore, this is definitely the program for you. Okay, if you want running to feel easier, you want to become virtually bonk-proof so you can run without hitting the wall and have this like steady energy for running also just for like getting through your day and not having these energy spikes and crashes all day long – definitely the program for you.
Okay, take control of your nutrition game. Let’s get you fat-adapted once and for all. We’re gonna do it together and experience all the fun and all the benefits and all the health benefits, especially of getting yourself fat adapted and losing some weight in January. Cool.
I know you guys are gonna have questions you can post questions in the Facebook group about this. I’m excited to be on this journey with you. I’m excited to take a group of people through this together. I think we’re gonna have a lot of fun doing this. If I haven’t mentioned that already, I’ll say alright, we’re gonna have fun.
And then together we’re going to have an awesome January and set you up for success for everything that you have scheduled for the rest of the year. All of your spring marathon and half marathon goals, and just all of your overall health and fitness goals. Cool. All right, you got this my friends love you all keep on Running Lean. Reach out if you have any questions and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
The 2021 Flying Pig Marathon is officially in the books! I did some things differently this training season from a fueling perspective. Some things worked pretty well, some not so much, but I …
Continue Reading about 98. Marathon Recap: What Worked and What Didn’t →
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 98 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m giving you a marathon recap, I’m going to talk about what worked and what didn’t in my recent marathon.
So the 2021 Flying Pig marathon is officially in the books. And it was fun, had a great, great weekend. And I did some things differently. This training season, especially from a feeling perspective, some things worked pretty well, some not so much.
But I definitely learned some very valuable lessons this training season and during the marathon itself. So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to go over how I feel differently for this training season and how I feel for the race itself, what worked, what didn’t, and what I might do differently next time.
And just so you know, I originally recorded this episode, over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So each week I do a live call where I do some teaching and coaching and answer questions. And so this was one of those calls, this is the call we did last week.
And if you’re not currently in the Facebook group, this call that you’re going to listen to now in this in this podcast episode will give you a good idea of what those live calls are all about.
So I would love it if you would join the Facebook group and join in on the conversation. So just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, and join us over there.
And then here’s a recent message that someone in the Running Lean community on Facebook posted so they posted this right after finishing their marathon. And so this is from Jima and she wrote: “2021 was the year of unexpected achievements. In each race, I was able to experiment with fat-adapted running with excellent results. With this last marathon, I was able to run 20 miles fasted with no bonking and only consumed a slow-burning energy gel at the end just for replenishment. Thank you, Patrick McGilvray, for sharing your expertise and knowledge.”
Also, much thanks to you all in the Running Lean community, as you are all inspiring. Love it. I love those kinds of messages. And congratulations on an awesome marathon season, Jima.
And then people ask how they can work with me. And one way you can do that is to join the Running Lean coaching group. And I’m going to be talking more about that later on in the podcast.
This whole month of November, we’re talking about self-sabotage just in time for the holidays, you guys. So we’re going to learn how to recognize self-sabotage, how to understand what it really is, how to stop it before it gets out of hand, and how to eliminate it from your life for good.
So if you’re interested in learning more about the coaching group, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And then as always, you know, I do one on one coaching with people, this is what I do, this is my jam.
So if you’re ever interested in a little expert guidance, support, encouragement, accountability, maybe a little tough love every now and then. Then just reach out. You’ve got to apply for coaching.
So just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply. And we’ll just see if coaching is a good fit for you. Cool. All right. So I’m going to go ahead and play for you. The marathon recap what worked and what didn’t from last week’s Facebook Live.
Hey, everybody, welcome to your Sunday live coaching call. This is something we do every single Sunday afternoon. For the most part, I didn’t do it last week, because I was running the flying pig marathon. It was Halloween. And I thought we’d all take the afternoon off.
But today what I want to do is kind of give you guys a little bit of a recap of specifically sort of how I did my training, how I fueled for my training this marathon training season, how I fueled specifically for this marathon, and I did some things differently than I have been doing in the past. And I want to talk a little bit about that.
Some of it was, you know, there were some positives and there were some you know, I wouldn’t say negatives, but there were some things I would recommend doing maybe and some things that I’ll probably do again, and there were some things that I maybe won’t do again.
So let’s get into this whole marathon training, thingsthat I did differently, I want to talk about what I did differently this time and share some of my insights with you guys. I get a lot of questions about what I eat and how I fuel for these things. And I’ve talked a little bit about some different fueling strategies in the past.
And I’ve talked about how I’ve done several marathons and even an ultra marathon, completely unfilled, like just not needing any kind of fuel at all. And then I did things a little bit differently this training season. And I want to talk about that.
And I want to explain to you guys why I made the decisions that I made. And what I was trying to do with all that. A lot of the stuff that I do here is just to like, share the data with you guys, you know. So just to kind of give you guys a little perspective here, everything that we do is a is an experiment of one.
So everything that we’re doing in here when it comes to how to fuel properly for a marathon, or what’s the right diet for weight loss. When people ask these questions, I always just say, like, try something and see if it works.
That’s it like just try something and see if it works. What works for me may not necessarily work for you. And I don’t even know what works best for me. I’ve tried all kinds of things, and I keep continuing to try different things.
I do different fueling strategies and training, different fueling strategies for long runs. Sometimes I’m carb-loading, sometimes I’m not. And all this stuff is to just find out how I feel and how my performance is affected by these different strategies. Okay.
And I’m always learning. And I don’t know it all, I’m just going to tell you guys right now, I don’t have all the answers. But because you know what the answer is within, you know, the answer is within each of us the right answer as to what is the right fuelling approach for you as an individual.
So but what I want to do today is give you guys a little bit of a look a little snapshot of what this looked like, for me though, this training season and some of the lessons I learned, so that maybe you can like start experimenting with some of this stuff on your own. Okay, so that’s kind of my high level to look at why I’m talking about this today.
And what I’m hoping that you get out of this today. Okay. So I have a question. I want to ask you guys and feel free to answer this in the comments. Because this is just kind of a funny question. Could be a serious question could be a funny question.
But what has been your best or worst fueling strategy for a marathon or half marathon? Like, what’s something you did that worked really well? Or what’s something you did that just went horribly wrong? Those might be more entertaining. So drop your answer in the comments, and we’ll get to those later.
I also want to let you guys know that if you have any questions about anything that I’m talking about here today, just ask away, ask in the comments, and I’ll get to all your questions. before we’re finished here today.
Okay, so if anything comes up for you, and you’re like, you know what, how did that work? Or what do you mean by that? Like, just ask, ask away, okay, that’s what we’re here for the interaction, okay?
I do this podcast or I’m talking into a microphone. I like these lives where we get to have a conversation, okay, where you get to ask the questions, and I can answer them live. That’s super fun for me. So feel free to ask questions. Okay.
So, what did I do differently this time around? So, like I said, most of the last year and a half of training for me, I’ve done now.
Two, I’ve done through three marathons and a 50k. So three marathons and an ultra marathon in the last year basically, and all three of these, or four of these, events have been you know, done as a low carb fat-adapted athlete, okay.
Within that, you know, those parameters of being fat-adapted and low carb, there are lots of different ways of doing things. Okay, so it just doesn’t mean like you never eat anything, it just doesn’t mean you’re eating nothing.
But you know, steaks, you know, for your training and stuff like that. Steaks and sticks of butter, although pretty delicious. Melt some butter on a ribeye steak, there’s really nothing better. So the fueling strategies can be different for all these different kinds of events.
But within the parameters of a low carb endurance athlete, a low carb fat-adapted runner, I’ve done some things a little bit differently. So last year, I did a marathon at this time of the year. Zero calories I did a 50k zero calories, and then I did my marathon in the spring, basically zero calories.
And those three events were fantastic. I felt amazing, especially the last marathon that I did. And I ran that one a little bit harder actually had sort of a time goal. And I felt amazing. So that last marathon was sort of the culmination of for me what it felt like to be a truly fat-adapted athlete, and not really needing any fuel.
So for me, and I’m not crushing goal times here, I’m not qualifying for Boston or anything like that. I ran a 4:15 in the spring. And that was really good for me. And I was pushing the pace. And I had to step up my game a little bit for that one. And I felt amazing.
And again, no, like carb-loading before that event, actually, my ramp-up to that event, I made a point to like, pretty much eat zero carbs. So I talked about this on a podcast called Zero Carb Marathon Training.
And I basically went carnivore for about 40 days leading up to that marathon. And felt amazing, and it was a great experience, okay. And so when, when it came time to do this next marathon, I thought I could do the same thing, and feel the same way and sort of stay in that carnivore sort of mode, and just see how that goes.
But I didn’t want to do that I was actually really interested in getting some carb adaptation, okay. So when you’re fat-adapted, and you’re really good at burning fat and your low-carb athlete, if you want to start incorporating carbohydrates back into your strategy, you have to practice with it and do it for a while.
So you have to sort of get yourself carb-adapted again. And so I made a point to add more carbs in for this training cycle. So what does that mean? Like, what am I talking about?
Was I eating a bunch of cupcakes and stuff like that? No, it’s not that kind of carbs, I wasn’t eating sugar, I’m not eating processed flour and stuff like that.
I was eating more salads, I was eating more avocados, I was eating more yogurt, and some berries, like I love like yogurt with strawberries, and blueberries, nuts.
And then the day before or two days before and the day before my long runs, I would incorporate more slow-burning carbohydrates like wild rice, and sweet potatoes, that’s kind of my go to has been my go-to.
So this was a pretty intentional strategy for me over the last 12 weeks or so, you know, maybe longer than that. Really just to kind of ramp up during this marathon training, because I wanted to make sure that my body could also use the carbohydrates as fuel.
So when you’re really good at burning fat, and then you start introducing some carbohydrates into the mix, you’re not really efficient, and bringing the carbs and having the carbohydrates in the system kind of shuts down the fat burning the efficiency of the fat burning.
So we just have to be careful with this sort of approach. Like if you’re a super fat-adapted athlete, and you’re like, oh, I just want to like run harder, run a better time or something like that.
And you start adding in a bunch of carbs, like just the day before your marathon or something like that, and you haven’t been training this way, you’re not going to have a good experience.
And this was my take when I first started introducing carbs back into my training, I noticed a little bit of a downturn in my performance. So that was one thing that I would say was a negative.
And that was something that I did not enjoy. I didn’t enjoy adding the carbs in and then having this more of a sluggish feeling. Okay. So I pressed on, though, because I’m like, okay, I need to really do this. And I know it’s hard. And I know it doesn’t feel good, but I’m just gonna continue doing it.
Kind of like we do when we get fat-adapted, you have to kind of push through, there’s like three, four weeks of really tough running. Well, I kind of experienced the same thing when I started incorporating carbs back into the mix. So I found that very interesting.
And I’ve done a bunch of reading on this a bunch of research on it, and it’s totally normal. It’s like, part of the process. Okay. So, if you if you’re desiring to add carbohydrates into your marathon training strategy and into your marathon fueling strategy, you have to train with them for I would say a few months leading up to this, okay.
So that’s something that I just wanted to make sure you guys kind of understood and that it is something you can’t just you don’t want to just like incorporate it in the last minute.
Like, you know, you’ve been training super low carb all season and then all of a sudden, drop a bunch of carbs into the mix the night before your marathon and think it’s going to help you because it could really hinder your performance, at least for that one event. So that was interesting.
And the other thing that I started doing this training season and I experimented with, I started using a line of products called S fuels. So S fuels makes endurance, fuel for endurance for low carbon dirt, athletes fuel for low carbon endurance athletes, so the fuel that they have is mostly kind of fat and protein-based.
So MCT oil, amino acids, electrolytes, and they have different types of fuels. So they have a product called Train, which is something you add to water, it’s got a very, you know, water-like consistency, tastes great, and fat and amino acids and electrolytes, great for like, you know, two, three hour runs four or five hours, whatever it is, you can just kind of take that as you go.
They have another product called Race Plus, which has some slow-burning carbohydrates in there, as well as the fat and protein. And electrolytes, that would be something that you would, you know, kind of practice with and use for your events that you want to like run harder and run a little bit faster.
Okay, that’s really not my strategy to run super fast, but I played around with the fuel just to try it out. And then they make another product called Life Bars. And the life bars are basically well, they’re delicious. And they’re like chewy bars are made with like, almond butter or nut butter, cacao nibs and they have the MCT oil and amino acids and things like that.
So it’s kind of like the equivalent of like the fat and protein like you would eat almond butter or something like that. But it’s a little easier to, you know, chew up and swallow.
The almond butter can be a bit of a problem because it’s super thick. And if you’re trying to eat that, while you’re running, it’s difficult.
Somebody posted a comment about that. I think today, they were like I had to drink a lot of water with that almond butter just to get it down. It’s like yeah, it’s a bit much.
So S fuels makes a whole line of products, they make a recovery drink with like a protein powder. And listen, these guys don’t sponsor me or anything like that. I should talk to them about that though, right? Yeah, I probably should.
But, um, so I’m not like getting I’m not trying to like get you guys to go by this, I’m just giving you an example of something that I use that works pretty well for me.
Okay, so I practice with these fuels during the training season. And I enjoyed them I think they are spot on because what you’re doing is you’re adding the fat and the protein in which is what you really want as a low carb athlete.
You want that sort of exogenous fat, the fat that you eat, and the protein helps to keep your keep you feeling good and, and keep the fat-burning going.
So when you’re efficient at burning fat, you can burn the fat that you’re eating as well as for fuel, right. So that’s why we want to keep our fuel intake to the fats and proteins and not the carbohydrates when we’re trying to stay fat adapted and stay in that fat burning zone and really maximize fat burning. Okay.
So for the race itself by I did a life bar beforehand. And I did the Train product and some electrolyte drink. And I did some of the Race Plus beforehand. So I had a little bit of carbs in me, I did some carb-loading the days before I did a bunch of sweet potatoes and wild rice and stuff like that.
And I really wanted to like prime the tanks with glycogen, you know, make sure that I topped up my glycogen levels and got into the marathon. And I have to tell you – so this is the one thing that I noticed that was different from the last three long events that I did.
Where I did them unfold basically, the one thing that I noticed is that I felt very sluggish for the first half of the marathon. Like the first 12-13 miles I was not feeling it.
And you know, I was maintaining a decent pace and listen, we were out there just to have a good time. We had done the 10K and the 5K the day before. And so this was sort of just a fun run for us. Me and some friends we hung out together. We had a great time. It was super fun.
We all helped each other get across the finish line, but I just wasn’t feeling it for about the first half. The longer I was out there, the better I felt. And so this tells me something, this tells me that I probably had more glycogen on board at the beginning.
And as I burn through that, I got more efficient with the fat burning. And I felt better. And I had more energy and more stamina. And I just, I finished feeling much stronger than I did at the beginning of the event. So that was something I thought was really interesting. And I did not like that.
So for me, my biggest takeaway from the actual marathon itself, was that next time, I’m probably going to do away with the carb-loading and the training with the higher carbs, you know because it didn’t give me the boost that I thought it would.
I thought though, beginning half of the marathon, I would have like more energy and feel better. And then the second half, I would, you know, sort of be feeling a little bit more tired or whatever. But it was exactly the opposite. It’s very fascinating.
Again, now, this is an experiment of one. So this is my experience with this, I’m not saying you would have the exact same experience if you did the same thing. Certainly, try it and see how it works for you.
So if you’re if your goal is to run a super fast marathon, maybe some sort of carbohydrate loading would be a good strategy for you to try. For me. I wasn’t trying to run a super fast marathon just like slow and steady, and it didn’t really work for me. Okay, just keep that in mind.
Okay, so definitely try something, some of these things, and see what works for you. But my biggest takeaway was that I didn’t like the feeling of eating the carbs, you know, the sweet potatoes and the rice and stuff like that prior to the event.
I did enjoy the s fuels, I think they helped. And I think that’s what sort of got me like through the event. I did take another life bar with me because I wanted the extra fuel. But I didn’t want to have to mix a drink. I didn’t want to carry a water bottle with me.
And I was trying to do this as like as Spartan as possible. So the only thing I took with me was salt tablets and the life bar. And that was like my fueling strategy during the event.
Now, here’s my other very interesting takeaway. I usually fuel with Elementi Element, the electrolyte mix from Elemental Labs. I love this stuff, I’ve been training with it for a couple of years now. Never had any problems.
I decided, for this training season, I was going to practice using like, what is it called salt stick tablets, like the little capsules with electrolytes, because I didn’t want to have to carry a water bottle with me. During the marathon again, I was just trying something different. So I practice using the salt tablets and they were okay.
Honestly, I do better with more sodium, electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium, the element product has just a very high amount of sodium – 1000 milligrams of sodium per packet. And something like 400-600 milligrams of potassium and magnesium.
So the electrolyte profile is very high. And something fascinating I learned recently is that when we’re exercising, when you’re out there running a marathon, you lose something like 1200 milligrams of sodium per hour, per hour.
So you need to be replacing that and the salt tablets that I was taking either I probably wasn’t taking enough of them, or they didn’t have enough sodium so the sodium content was lower, and I didn’t take as many.
So I think I did something like two salt tabs every four or five miles maybe two every hour or something like that, every 45 minutes or two an hour and I thought that would be sufficient.
I kind of did the math but because the electrolyte profile is different in those things. I don’t know, I probably could have done better with a water bottle just carry a water bottle and take my own electrolyte drink with me.
So there are different ways we can do this stuff. I was just trying to like not have to carry a water bottle with me. You can carry a backpack, mix up your electrolyte drink in your Camelback or whatever. And then you can just like sip on it the whole during the race.
You can carry it in a water bottle and keep refilling it if you want to. That’s what I’ve done in the past and has always worked really well for me. But again, I was just trying some different things this time just to see what works so that I could share it with you like I’m doing right now. So that’s something else I would do differently.
Next time, I’d probably just carry my water bottle like I’m used to doing, it does take a little bit of extra time at the water stops to, you know, unscrew the top, open up the packet, pour it in, get the water, and you got to sort of dork around with that at the water stops.
But you know, if the electrolyte that you’re using isn’t really working for you, you need to fix that, like, it’s super important to make sure that we’re getting enough electrolytes during these events. It was a great day, it wasn’t super hot, but still, we sweat out, like, close to 1200 milligrams of sodium per hour. So you got to be replacing that up there.
Okay. So, all in all, I’m gonna say this, we had a super fun time at the event, I felt better the second half of the marathon than I did during the first half. And I have to tell you guys that, you know, we did this thing where we ran the 10k and the 5k, the day before, so I was starting this marathon on tired legs already.
And so that has to be sort of factored into all of this too. Okay, so that’s typically not recommended to do like a nine-mile shakeout run the day before your marathon. So that has to be sort of factored into all this stuff, okay.
But what I would do differently next time, I think next time, I’m going to stick with my low carb during training season and not introduce the carbs and not try to do any carb-loading or not try to become more metabolically flexible.
So metabolic flexibility is where you can use more fat and carbohydrates more efficiently, but you got to like work through that and you got to really get good at that. And maybe I didn’t do it the right way.
Or maybe I didn’t do it long enough. Whatever the case is, for me, the way that we’re I’m sitting here today, looking back on the last year of events, the ones where I did the best is where I didn’t do any carb-loading and I didn’t do any fueling during you know.
I would say you know, maybe the next time I just add the s fuels products, which I think are pretty amazing. And nothing else. So just kind of stick with those. And that way I’m just getting a little bit of extra boost you know, that might help with the longer distance stuff especially when you start getting into like a marathon distance.
So that’s kind of the recap I’m going to go through your questions you guys and find out kind of what questions you have.
So Gene says, “Fat for fuel, no glucose.” Good job. Awesome. “Ran three marathons fat-adapted, no fuel just electrolytes and water felt good.”
Yeah, me too. Gene. I’m with you on that approach. Okay.
Let’s see Bill says. “Sorry 10k is the farthest I’ve done.” Don’t be sorry 10k is awesome! “Always fasted so started training that way and will continue.”
Awesome. Yeah. Never apologize for your resistance distances right you guys like our people say oh, I only ran the half. Like team, you ran a half marathon! That’s awesome.
Let’s see Zoey says, “Fueled and hydrated better on days leading up to the second marathon compared to first.”
Yeah, lighter meals less carbs had less gels. Ricard also, yeah. Lots of whey isolate chocolate shakes.
Yeah. I do a little protein supplement here, especially after hard strength sessions for sure. Denise did a gel, wants to try peanut butter cups, wants to carb bounce protein wraps. These are all solo marathons or ultras, there is no difference to water only interesting. But I ran my first in-person marathon in December. Thanks for your vices. Absolutely, Denise.
Yeah. So that’s interesting. So you’re actually trying a bunch of different things. And I think this is super important. You’ve got to figure out what works for you. You know, and so, I think we put too much emphasis on like, we have everything has to be perfect every single time.
I purposely do things just to find out like, how does it how’s it gonna feel? You know, I may crash and burn. That was definitely a possibility. The way I was fueling for this marathon, I was like thinking to myself like this may not go well.
Especially that first half I was feeling kind of sluggish. And I was like, oh, this may not go well. But I was like, you know what, I’m gonna just try it. I gotta try different things.
Josh says, “Trying to consume less carbs for my train this time.” Yeah. Give it a shot. Denise says, “I can relate to this. I ran 400 miles in October.” Nice job. “So I just did some carb loading because I thought it might help to maintain the training load, now a week later still feel sluggish. Oh, yeah. I’ll get off the sugar again and see what happens.”
Yeah. Here’s the thing. If you want to get off the sugar like it’s a process like you got to get fat adapted you have to go through that, that sluggish period, where, you know, you get off of sugar, processed carbs, and you’ve got to keep your carb, you know, intake pretty low for anywhere from 2-6 weeks. You know it averages about three weeks, 21 days or so. And that’s where training is very sluggish. It’s very hard.
Don’t do this a couple of weeks before your event, like make sure you start this process at the beginning of your training season or in the offseason, get fat-adapted, and then start your training for your big event.
Because once you’re fat-adapted, the training is going to be so much easier, you’re going to get stronger, faster, and you’re going to be like, super efficient at burning fat and you’re just going to kick ass at your event.
Let’s see. Kim says, “Hi from Canada. I love my element. And I’m excited to start trying s fuels.” Yeah.
And then Marianne, “Any suggestions for after the race food feel like I should be allowed to eat anything? But I get tummy trouble doing that?”
Okay. So that’s such a good question, Marianne. So here’s my take on it. After a marathon, I do give myself a little bit of permission to indulge a little bit. But here’s what I mean by indulging.
Okay, you guys are gonna laugh because here’s me indulging. So after the marathon, it was Halloween. And so I went to my son’s house and in the main room and Halloween, with the family and stuff like that.
And they made his big batch of chili, you know, with ground beef and stuff like that, but it had beans in it. And I’m like, I’m eating beans, I’m just going to go ahead and eat all these beans, this thing was loaded with carbohydrates right in the form of beans, well, I’m gonna eat it.
So that was me, carb-loading or whatever you want to call it, like carbing it up after my marathon. But that’s, like, that’s not a big deal. That is not a big deal, right? Usually my go-to would be something like tacos, I love tacos. So we’d go out and have chips and salsa and tacos or something like that. That’s going kind of off the deep end for me.
But listen, you get to decide what you want to do for yourself. And so if you want to indulge a little bit, here’s my suggestion for you. Plan ahead, just make sure you’re planning ahead.
And you’re not just you know, giving into the moment, you know, because if people are eating pizza and ice cream and a bunch of junk around you, and you’re like just getting into that and stuffing your face and it makes you feel terrible.
Don’t do that. Okay, plan ahead what you want to do. So if your post-marathon go to is something like tacos or whatever do that. Honestly, for me, like an indulgent thing for me, or something that really makes me feel good is eating a big ribeye steak and eating that.
And I do this pretty often. And so that’s sort of a way of treating myself and it tastes great, but it doesn’t throw me off my game. You know, it’s a fun thing to do. It’s indulgent. And it’s part of my plan.
And I plan it and I just keep doing that. Bill says, “Yeah, it hurts not to be perfect.” Yeah, he’s talking about the 10K’s. Yeah, but you’re awesome, so there!
Kristen says, “This is my first marathon fat adapted. And I felt great. Even with the racing the day before.” Super awesome. Kristen, you did such a great job, too. And Kristin went through the whole fat adaptation process. And she, her running improved like crazy.
She became this badass runner that she knew was inside her. And she was like, I’m determined to make this happen. And she did. And then she showed up. Kristen actually lives in Cincinnati, and I saw her after the marathon. So that was super fun. So good stuff, you guys.
I hope you all learned something from this. I hope you got a little something out of this. I hope that me taking one for the team here helps you guys kind of learn maybe what to do maybe what not to do, or maybe something some things that you can try for yourselves because it is fun to try this stuff. It’s fun to experiment.
Listen, we take ourselves pretty seriously. Sometimes we take running pretty seriously sometimes. And I’m at this place in my life where I’m like, I just want to have fun with this, you know, and if that means trying a different feeling strategy, see how it goes. Just so I can like, share my experiences with you guys. So be it. It’s fun for me to do this stuff.
Okay. Next time though, I’m going to kind of go back to my more low-carb ways and more. Just kind of sticking with the non-carb fueling strategy that I’ve done in the past that’s just worked so well for me and increase the electrolyte intake.
I think those are my biggest sort of fuels you know or biggest takeaways from my dueling strategy. Cool. All right, you guys. Well, everybody, enjoy the rest of your amazing Sunday afternoon.
I don’t know about you guys, but here, it’s just gorgeous. You know, it’s something like 63 degrees, super sunny outside, the leaves are changing colors. It’s this amazing time of the year. I love it. We’re getting into the holidays.
And in the coming weeks, I’m going to be talking about how we get through the holidays. This is going to be a good topic for us coming up. Okay. How do we survive the holidays?
You know, what does it mean to get through like Thanksgiving, which is all about indulging in food, right? Like, how do we get through a holiday with that without totally losing our minds, you know, without totally like, screwing up everything good that we’ve done for ourselves up to this point, right?
So we’ll be getting into topics like that. And then how do we get through the winter because it’s gonna start getting colder and darker. And how do we get through the crazy holiday season that is looming just in front of us?
Okay, so you guys all have an amazing day. We’re going to have some fun over the next several weeks here. Okay, if you have any other questions, drop them in the comments here and I’ll get to them soon. Okay, great seeing you guys all on here. Everybody. Have a great afternoon and talk to you soon. Bye.
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