Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Last weekend I ran the Sloppy Hog 50k. This wasn’t an organized event, and since most of the ultras have been canceled this year, I decided I would just do one on my own. So I picked a date, …
Continue Reading about 51. How I Ran a 50k on Zero Calories →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 51 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about how I ran a 50k recently on zero calories. So last weekend, I ran the sloppy hog 50k. This wasn’t an organized event. You know, since most of the ultras have been canceled this year, almost all races have been canceled, right? I just decided I’m going to do this on my own.
So I picked a date, I mapped out a course on some local trails, and bam, the sloppy hog 50k was born. So what makes this particular event unique, though, is not just the amazing name that I chose for it. It is an amazing name, right? It’s that I did the whole thing without using any fuel at all. I took in zero calories before or during my roughly eight hours-ish of running.
So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to break it all down for you, I want to tell you exactly how I did it. But maybe even more importantly, why I did it. That is all coming up. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, come check us out on Facebook, we have this awesome group in Facebook called the Running Lean community, you can find us by just going to Facebook and searching for Running Lean community.
It’s a bunch of runners like you who are interested in nutrition, and weight loss and achieving big goals. And we all support each other and encourage each other and motivate each other. We’re in the middle of this running challenge. Right now it’s the running through the holidays challenge. The challenge is to run a mile every day, at least a mile every day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. And we are well into this and it is so much fun.
People are finding all kinds of motivation, and really enjoying it. So come check us out on Facebook. The other thing I wanted to mention is that beginning January 3, I’m going to open my monthly coaching group. This is my signature program, which here’s what I’m doing.
I’m combining the monthly coaching group, which I had started recently, and the online weight loss training course for runners that I created. So I’m taking those two things, because here’s the thing. If you want these amazing results, you want to learn exactly how to transform yourself into an efficient fat burning machine, you need the knowledge, right, you need that training course that’ll tell you exactly how to do all of that. Okay.
The other part, though, that is so important, I think is missing from a lot of programs like this is the accountability piece, the showing up. And you know, talking to people that are going through the same thing with you getting help from me. And that’s what the coaching group is. So I’ve got the online training course and the monthly coaching group, I’ve just kind of combined it into one thing.
So when you join the monthly coaching group, you get access to the online weight loss training course for runners. And this is the combination that will get you the results that you’re looking for. I promise you, it’s gonna be awesome. So just check it out, it’s going to launch January 3 of 2021.
In the meantime, if you want to get on the waitlist, you can go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. I want you to make 2021 your year, let’s put 2020 behind us, shall we? I want you to become the badass runner that you’ve always always wanted to be. And joining the monthly coaching group is gonna get you there. Cool.
So just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. Okay, so how did I run a 50k on zero calories? And why did I do this crazy thing? So let’s talk about the why first, because I think it’s important to let you guys know why I decided to do this. Okay, it wasn’t just a whim. This is something I’ve been planning for some time.
I did it for a bunch of different reasons. But mainly, you know, I talk about this all the time. I want to be an example of what’s possible. And so I want to show you that when you become I’m a fat adapted runner, which means you can burn fat very efficiently. That you can do, you’re capable of running much longer than you ever thought you could.
I want to just show you that you can do something like a marathon or a 50k. And you don’t have to use fuel. If you don’t want to, you can still use fuel if you want to. But I’m just saying, when you’re an efficient fat burner, you don’t need it. You got plenty of fuel on board, which is super cool. I did it because I wanted to be an example. But also because I wanted to prove to myself that this stuff really works.
You know, I wanted to test the limits of my own fat adaptation, I wanted to see how far I could go and still feel good. How far can I go? How far can I run without any fuel and still feel good? Well, the answer is at least 32 miles at this point, probably further.
But you know, I really wanted to do something that was that was going to challenge me that was going to push me outside of my comfort zone, I talk a lot about getting out of your comfort zone, I talk a lot about embracing discomfort and how when you embrace discomfort, and you get out of your comfort zone, that’s where all the good stuff is. Right?
Everything you have already is what you have, it’s in your comfort zone, it’s comfortable, it’s the known. But when you push yourself outside of the known into the unknown, that’s where the growth happens. That’s where the cool stuff happens. That’s where you, you change, and you can transform yourself physically, mentally, emotionally.
And so I wanted to push myself, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, this was out of my comfort zone. I’ve never done a 50k I’ve done a bunch of them before, but I’ve never done one with zero calories, you know, not taking any fuel and during. So this is something that was like, I don’t know if I can do this or not, I don’t know if this is going to work.
But it did. And I’ll tell you all about that in just a second here. But the main reason why I did this is to show you what is possible, right? You don’t have to want to do this. But just knowing that that is possible, is is something I wanted to share with you.
And I want you to see that fat adaptation is is a pretty remarkable thing. And that you can do some pretty amazing things, you know, running off of your own body fat. Cool. So how did I do this? Like, what was the process I went through?
So first of all, you have to understand that I started my journey to fat adaptation this year, earlier this year, let’s just call it like, you know, January, February of 2020. And I’ve done this before, a few years back, I did the same thing. I didn’t quite do it, right. I didn’t know then what I knew now. And I had some good results in the past, but it wasn’t sustainable the way I was doing it. And let’s just leave it at that.
Like, you know, it doesn’t matter what I did wrong in the past, I just I didn’t know what I know now, especially the mental piece, right? It’s such a big part of this. So I started my fat adaptation journey again this year earlier this year. And I’ve trained for many months, you know, to become fat adapted, it was a challenge when you get off of sugar as your primary source of fuel.
So you’re a sugar burner. Most of us are sugar burners, our body’s like burning sugar for fuel, it’s very efficient, right? It’s a very easy fuel to get to and it’s very abundant. We eat a lot of sugar and carbs. And so that stuff is really available for our bodies to use as fuel. The problem with that is that, you know, you’re most of us, as runners tend to overdo it with the sugar and we tend to be storing a lot of that energy as fat instead of using it as fuel.
So we’re just constantly shoving sugar into us, and it’s being stuffed into our fat cells instead of being burned. Right. So, you know, when I got off to sugar, and started this process of becoming fat adapted, it was a challenge. It was, you know, six to eight weeks of me, you know, kind of struggling to run like running was a bit of a challenge for me.
I didn’t enjoy running very much it was it was hard because your body has to shift from having this one source of fuel that it’s used to using to switching over to fat, which is what it’s really not used to using typically as fuel because we just don’t ever allow that to happen. We don’t allow our bodies a chance to eliminate all the glycogen from our, from our cells from our muscles.
And we don’t just we just don’t get into the fat burning zone, the way we we do when you get off of sugar. So that process is a challenge and it’s uncomfortable and it doesn’t feel good. And I talk about this a lot. Like you just have to get through that part. Right.
So I got through that part. And then for the rest of this year, I made a commitment to really doing all my runs in a fasted state, meaning really not getting any fuel before I run, I drink coffee in the morning, that’s it. And then I do my workout, whether it’s a strength training, workout speed work, long runs, whatever it is, I just do it all without fuel. And I do that because when you do that, it makes you a more efficient fat burner.
Okay, so I kind of prepared for this for many months, and became a very efficient fat burner. So that’s kind of step one is you got to get good at burning your own fat and using your own fat for fuel. Once you get to that place, though, it feels so good. Because you really do feel like you can run forever.
And then I decided since I was feeling so good in the summer, I decided I was going to run a marathon in October. And so at the end of October I trained for and ran a marathon with some friends. And we had a lot of fun. It was a success, I did that unfueled as well. And that got me thinking that I was going to I wanted to do this 50k. And I wanted to do it unfueled.
And I had originally planned on doing this next spring like spring of 21. And I felt so good after that marathon, I was like, hmm, maybe I can just push this up and do it now like train for five more weeks, and then use that momentum to carry me into this 50k in December rather than waiting till, like April or whatever. And so I made that decision. And once I made that decision, I was like, I’m just going to do it, I feel good. I feel trained up to increase my mileage at that point wasn’t going to be that big of a deal.
Once I made that decision, I was like all in. I was like 100% committed, you know, I wrote out a five week training plan. And then I just worked the plan. I stuck to my plan. I did some, some long runs. On the weekends, I increased my long runs, you know after the marathon, usually I would take some time off after a marathon few weeks or something like that. But I got right back into the long runs the following weekend.
You know, I think I did something like 16 on Saturday, and then Sunday, I would do like 10. And then my peak week I ended up doing something like 45 miles or something like that. But the weekend, I did 18 on Saturday and 12 on Sunday. So over the two days, you know, we’re talking 30 miles, instead of doing a super long run one day, I decided to split it up into two.
And that was a good training plan for me like that worked really well that kept me from getting injured after a marathon, you know, you do have to kind of be careful of that kind of thing happening. But instead, I kind of broke up that that long run over two days. And you’re still running on tired legs the next day, like 18 miles on Saturday and 12 miles on Sunday is still a lot of running. Okay.
But that kept me from like doing like a 24-25 mile or something like that, and kept me from getting injured. So I felt good about my strategy. And I kind of use the same strategy for other Ultras I’ve done, like my 50 mile 100 mile, you know, you don’t really run 80 miles on one day or whatever.
But you know, over the course of a week, you might do 80 or 85 miles. On the weekends. I remember training for my 100 I would do like 30 miles on Saturday and 20 miles on Sunday. So you’re running 50 miles in a 24 hour period, you’re totally running on tired legs, it does really build your aerobic base without the risk of injury. So at least that reduces the risk of injury. So that’s a good good plan that I kind of have adopted in the past. It’s worked well for me in the past and I thought I’m just going to do this again.
So that worked really well and I just stuck to this plan for the last five weeks or so. And really here’s the thing, there’s three parts to a successful event like this. Really there’s three parts to successful running, right? There’s the training, there’s the nutrition, and then there’s the mindset.
The training, we understand, you know, do your long runs, do a few shorter runs during the week, do some strength training, all that stuff, we all kind of get that the nutrition part, you know, I trained very low carb, and, you know, I might do 50 grams of carbs a day or less, most days, I don’t really count carbs and stuff, I don’t count macros, I don’t enter food into an app or anything.
Like, I just, I’m at the point right now where I stay away from sugar and flour and other refined carbs. And I just eat real food. And I have put my food, entered it into apps just to see kind of where I was. And I’m usually somewhere around 30 or 40 grams of carbs. And that’s mostly in the form of vegetables, maybe some full fat, Greek yogurt, some strawberries and stuff like that. So I do train very low carb.
And then the mindset piece is so important. Like you, you have to be all in on something like this, you know, you have to have that mindset of like, I’m going to make this work, I’m going to figure it out and make it work. And you have to be committed, you have to be motivated, you have to be self motivated, you have to have a certain amount of confidence to do this.
Okay, so we got the training, the nutrition and the mindset, and they’re like three legs of the stool, they all have to work together. So after that marathon, I decided I was going to, you know, kick these things into high gear, I did a few weeks of some longer runs, and then tapered, you know, so I did a couple of weeks of tapering, and ended up doing one run on trails in that period. So I haven’t been running on trails a whole lot.
I kind of went out one weekend, I scouted the course, you know, I typically would do a lot more running on trails before an event like this. Because the 50k that I did was all trail. And normally I I really adhere to this principle, that specificity of training is very important. So if you’re going to do a trail 50k, you should be running a lot of trails, I did not do that.
So this is like a lesson learned for me is like do more trail running leading up to a big event like this. So I’ll tell you why in a minute. But just understand that you always want to do you keep your training specific to the event that you’re going to be doing.
And another thing to keep in mind here is that we’re doing this running challenge right now is running through the holidays. And I decided I was going to run not just a mile every day, but I was going to do at least a 5k every single day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. And so I’ve been keeping up with that. The problem I was worried about was that this was adding to my weekly mileage and that I was worried I was going to burn myself out before this event, I was worried I was going to be like overdoing it overtraining, you know, especially in the day or two before an event like this.
Normally, I would take the day off, I wouldn’t do anything. But I was running a 5k every single day. I was also worried about the day after my 50k like, can I go out there and run a 5k? Is this even a good idea or not? How am I gonna feel. So we’ll talk about that in a minute. But I ended up you know, running and keeping up my 5k every single day.
But that was something that was like definitely different than I would normally do in training for something like this. So this is all like leading up to the week of the event, right? I was like, you know, I had become fat adapted. I had, you know, run a marathon at the end of October, which is perfect for something like this. You know, you want to have an event like that as part of your training plan. And then I increased my mileage and then dipped it back down again. And I felt ready.
So the week of the event I took it easy. I still did my 5k every day, but I was getting a little bit more rest. I was getting some good nights’ sleep. And especially in the couple of days before the event I was eating more food like I was just getting more calories. Right and a few more carbs. Right.
So I wasn’t as concerned about like keeping carbs super low in the day before especially. I probably got I probably doubled my carbs. Like for the day before like maybe around 100 grams. Again, I don’t really count this stuff. But I was just giving myself a little bit of extra in the tank, you know.
And so that’s something that you can definitely do leading up to something like this is increase your carbs, and that those carbohydrates when you eat them, if you’re not eating a lot of them, they become readily available to your muscles. So instead of like being processed by the liver and being stored as fat, you know, some of that energy being stored as fat, most of the energy from eating those carbohydrates, almost all of it, in fact, will go directly to your muscles to be used as energy.
So when you’re an efficient fat burner, and you do add some carbs, it actually will not throw you off, you know, it will give you the glycogen that you need to, you know, just have a little bit of extra energy for a big event like this. So I adopted that strategy. And again, I don’t eat a lot of carbs. So like doing this the day before, it gave me a little bit of extra gas in the tank, so you know, why not do it.
And then, the day of the event, I started it, just like I do, every other day, I got up early, I made some coffee. And that’s all I did. I drink coffee in the morning. And that’s it, I headed out to the trails, got out there, met a couple friends out there. They were setting up a camp, they were setting up a – we had a trailer and a fire pit and all this stuff. So they were like we’re gonna set up this camp, you can go to your first loop on your own, I was like, cool headed out into the woods, it was still dark.
And I got my first loop done, you know, in 40 minutes or so. So the course I had set up was a looped course, there was actually two parts to the loop, there was a three mile section and a five mile section. So add those two together, and that’s eight miles. And that would be one full loop. And so I did that full loop four times to give me 32 miles. So it was actually farther than a 50k little bit about a mile further.
And that first loop was fine. You know, I felt good. It was cool. It was supposed to rain all day. Supposed to rain, like super hard all day, it really didn’t rain off and on. But the the weather was really cooperating. It was awesome. wasn’t super cold, it wasn’t warm, it was like mid 60s, cloudy, everything was just perfect, right.
And so, as the day went on, I just settled into this all day pace like, my typical kind of trail pace, slow and easy. Listen, I am not trying to break any records, I really don’t care how fast I run, I don’t even look at my watch, other than just to see like, how far I’ve gone. It doesn’t matter to me, I took a lot of breaks, you know, we had this camp set up.
And so I would come back, maybe change my shirt, you know, have something to drink, get some coffee, you know, one of my friends was making coffee. For me, I was like this is amazing. So I was not in any hurry to get this thing done. All in all, it took me around eight hours to finish this thing.
And I could have done it faster, I could have taken fewer breaks or shorter breaks. But I was feeling so good. I was just having fun. The whole thing was just about having fun out there. So I don’t know about halfway through my watch died. So I use an Apple Watch for all my training. And I love it for a lot of reasons. It just doesn’t last very long.
And so here’s a good lesson that I learned. Next time, bring the Garmin just use my Garmin watch next time, it lasts forever. So that was a good lesson to learn right there. But I had these friends that came out to support me and run with me.
And I have to tell you, this made the day so much more fun. Leslie, Brandon, Jake, all amazing, good friends. We were cracking up out there running on the trails, laughing, smiling. I was just beaming all day. It was really just so much but it made the whole event so much more meaningful for me.
So I have to tell you, if you have friends that will run with you and help you and support you in something like this. They didn’t run the whole thing with me. But they they ran a loop. You know, each of them ran a loop with me. And I only ended up doing, I didn’t have to do that much on my own. And it just made it so much more fun. And Brandon kept telling me he’s like we got a surprise for you at the finish and he wouldn’t tell me what it was.
And I was like, huh, I’m very excited about this. So he just kept teasing me with this surprise. I was like I wonder what it is. I hope it has something to do with like bacon but we’ll see. And then. But anyway and just, it was so much fun. So much fun. It was actually the most fun I’ve ever had doing any any kind of race, I don’t really want to call it a race, it was an event, you know, because it was just me. I mean, I won, right?
But I just had so much fun. The way I look at it is like this, the training is the hard part. You know, you train for something like this, and you put in weeks and weeks, sometimes months of work, that’s the hard part. The actual event is like your victory lap, just go out there and have fun, smile, laugh, enjoy it.
And that’s what I tried to do. That’s my attitude around all kinds of all the events that I do like this. So I just felt really good. So here’s the thing, I was feeling so good, I had so much energy. And this is one of the benefits of being a very efficient fat burner, you have a lot of energy, your body uses the your own body fat and your produce ketones and stuff like that, too.
But your body can use your own body fat for fuel, and it is a very efficient source of fuel. This fuel will last you all day long. And I remember coming in after one of the loops, and it was like mile 27. I came in and these guys were sitting around and I was like bouncing off the walls. I was like, I had so much energy.
And they’re like what is wrong with you? What is the matter with you? Why are you so full of energy, you should be tired, and I was like, I am not tired? I feel so good. And that last loop that I did last five miles loop that I did, it was I felt just as good as the first loop, honestly, which was really weird for me, normally I’d be dying. At that time, I still had gas in the tank. When I was finished, I came in finished, I felt so good still I could have kept going.
I could easily see doing a longer than than 50k I could easily see doing like a 50 miler unfueled. And maybe I’ll try that I’m not going to commit to that at this point. But 50k, man, easy, easy to do if you’re an efficient fat burner. So I finished very strong, I felt really good. At the end, I had tons of energy still. And I would call this whole thing a huge success.
Now, again, I don’t really care about the time, this thing took me roughly eight hours, right? And it doesn’t matter. If I wanted to run it faster, I could, if I did that, or if this is like something that you’re interested in, if you’re interested in becoming a fat adapted runner, and you want to, you know, smash a PR and like you know, try to win something or whatever, then just add more carbs in during your event, you don’t have to do it unfueled.
But when you’re an efficient fat burner, and you add more carbs, you’re gonna get that extra gear, you know, you’re gonna get the, you’re going to be in your anaerobic zone for longer periods of time. And so you will want the carbohydrates to help you get there. So you can definitely do that. That can definitely be part of your plan. It’s a tool that you can use, if you want to, you know, even run faster or have even more energy.
For me, though, I feel like I really don’t even need to do that. Because I’m not running fast, first of all, but I also I feel so amazing running in this fasted state. I feel so amazing running on fueled, why would I change that? You know, I’ve done all my long runs this year, including a marathon and a 50k unfueled, you know, I drink water and I take electrolytes, that’s it, you gotta have the electrolytes, especially for long events like this.
So I wouldn’t change that for myself. But if I wanted to crush a PR, I would just add some carbs. You know, but some of the things that I experienced was, which were surprising to me was, number one, no GI issues. I did not have any stomach issues at all.
And normally, on a long endurance event like this, I would not feel like my stomach would be bugging me. No problems at all. I felt great the whole time. No bonking I never lost energy not even close. I was feeling amazing and energized. The whole time. I had tons of gas in the tank at the end, right? This is like the most fun I’ve ever had running an ultra tons of energy.
And I just felt so good. So after the after I finished I get back to the camp area. These guys have got a fire going and then they break out the surprise for me which was ribeyes so they were grilling some ribeyes. And so we sat around for a few hours and ate some food. And I felt so good.
And the funny thing is, is normally, if I were to just finish a race like this and sit around for a few hours, getting up would be miserable I could be so my legs be all tight and sore, and they really weren’t. One of the benefits of training in a fasted state is that your body produces more growth hormone, which helps your muscles to repair faster, you know, cells will regenerate faster. So your recovery time is a lot faster.
So, you know, I wasn’t as sore afterwards. And, you know, went to bed that night, feeling pretty good, still woke up the next day, when I woke up the next day, the only thing that was really a concern was my feet hurt.
And this is what I was kind of alluding to earlier, when I said I should do more specificity of training on the trails, because my feet hurt from all the undulation of the trails, you know, jumping over rocks, and roots and logs and stuff like that juking back and forth for eight hours out there on the trails, like my feet were sore, the bottoms of my feet, especially, were getting pretty sore.
And that was about the only thing that I really noticed the next day, I could still, you know, when I got up the next morning, normally, I would just be the wreck, but I wasn’t, you know, my feet hurt. But I could still like do an air squat, you know, I could still squat standing up.
In fact, I was like, well, I gotta run a 5k today. And so I laced up my running shoes, and I headed outside, and I started running, and I was slow. But I felt fine. I mean, I was tired. But I felt fine.
And, you know, by the end of that day, by the end of the next day, I really felt a lot, lot better, my feet had stopped hurting and stuff like that.
And then so that was Sunday, and then Monday morning, I got up to do another 5k. And then I felt amazing. And I almost felt like I was back to 100%. Like my recovery time is just so much faster. And I have you know, I know that that’s has a lot to do with the fasting and the in the low carb way that I eat.
Also, my fitness level has increased, you know, I’m definitely more fit now than I was at the beginning of 2020. You know, because I’ve, you know, consistently trained for events. I’ve trained smart, and I’ve kept up with my strength training. I think that’s a big part of this, too. So the bottom line is that I wanted to do something hard. I wanted to be an example of what’s possible, I wanted to prove to myself that I’m capable of doing something like this, I wanted to push myself beyond the limits of my comfort zone.
You know, I wanted to show you that this is possible that if I can do it, so can you, you know, I wanted to show you and show myself and prove to us all, without any shadow of a doubt that being fat adapted is a real thing. And it is pretty dang incredible. It feels so good. It makes running so amazing. Honestly, you feel like you could run literally all day. Prove that, without a shadow of a doubt.
This is a very powerful way to live your life. Also, there’s this very cool side benefit of being an efficient fat burner, you lose weight. Becoming an efficient fat burner is what got me to where I am today. I’m basically at my goal weight, and I have no problem staying here. You know, I’m very lean, but I still have enough body fat on me to power me through a full day of running, you know, at least a 50k a lot more I’m sure.
So just know that when you change your, your nutrition plan when you change what you’re eating, you can become such an efficient fat burner is so amazing. It really makes running a dream. And it can help you to get to your natural weight, whatever that is for you. So what’s next for me? People have been asking me like, what’s your next goal? What are you going to do? And seriously, I have no idea.
But I know that for me, I like to have something on the calendar. I like to feel like I’m training for something I have something out in the future that I’m working towards. It gets me motivated. You know, I don’t know if you guys feel that way or not. But for me, the having something out there helps me to get get motivated.
So I don’t know what that’s going to be yet. I’m not ready to commit to anything just yet. But I’d like to do another ultra sometime in the spring. So probably a spring marathon and probably some kind of an ultra sometime after that. So I’ll let you know. I’ll keep you posted on that.
Okay, so that’s my recap, I hope this has inspired you to consider becoming a fat adapted runner, I think it’s an amazing way to live your life. Remember that the Running Lean monthly coaching group is going to open on January 3, make 2021 your year become the badass fat adapted runner you’ve always wanted to be. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join, get on that list. And I’ll see you in the coaching group. Starting January. You guys are awesome. Lots and lots of love to each and every one of you. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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There seems to be a lot of misleading information out there about intermittent fasting. People think it will mess up your metabolism, or it’s unsafe, or it’s just plain crazy. The truth, …
Continue Reading about 36. The Myths and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 36 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And there seems to be a lot of misleading information out there about intermittent fasting, people think it will mess up their metabolism or they think it’s unsafe, or they say it’s just plain crazy. The truth, however, is very different.
Intermittent Fasting is not only safe, but it provides some pretty amazing health benefits, especially when combined with a low carb diet. So today, I’m going to separate fact from fiction and share with you all of the incredible positive health benefits that intermittent fasting provides.
And if you liked this podcast, you should come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It is a fun, positive, energetic group that kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. It’s full of fun, like minded runners who all have a common goal, we all want to lose weight, we want running to be easier. We want to live a more vibrant life.
And I do weekly trainings in there on a bunch of different topics. This month, we’re talking all about intermittent fasting. So you gotta come check out the group.
Here’s a recent review from iTunes from somebody that found me on Facebook, and this is from Tinkerboom. And Tinkerboom says, “For a long time I asked myself the same questions, why can’t I lose weight if I run every day? I’ve talked to trainers, doctors, etc. And not one of them told me or suggested that it could be my hormones. I found Patrick on Facebook and started listening to his podcast and found incredible information. And I found that I am not alone in this struggle. Patrick’s information is on point and has worked for me and I am on my way to being a fat adapted runner. Thank you, Patrick, you are amazing. I look forward to listening to all your information. #youarealifechanger.”
Well thank you Tinkerboom. I just want my message, this message I’m sharing with you today. And every day, I just want this message to resonate with runners like you, because I want you to become that badass lean running machine that you’ve always wanted to be.
Okay, so I’m talking about the Facebook group, we’ve got a big challenge going on right now, September is intermittent fasting month in the Running Lean community on Facebook. And just to be clear, it does not mean we’re fasting for the entire month of September.
But you’re gonna learn what intermittent fasting is, what it isn’t, how to do it safely, how to incorporate this into your training as part of your not only nutrition plan, but your training plan. And you’re gonna learn all about the amazing health benefits of intermittent fasting especially for running. And I’m gonna be sharing some of those with you here in this episode. So just search for the Running Lean community on facebook and join us.
Also, if you are interested in losing weight and becoming a fat adapted runner, it can be hard to do on your own, I totally get it. That’s why I offer one-on-one coaching. We’re all different. We all have different goals, different needs, different lifestyles, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for somebody else.
So when you work with me directly, you will learn exactly how to become a lean fat burning running machine in a way that works for you. So I’ll help you determine the right plan and the right system that works for you. I help keep you accountable. I make sure you’re reaching your goals and I help you to get results if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life.
If you’re ready to reap all the benefits of a low carbohydrate diet and intermittent fasting, then just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, that’s all one word, and apply. Apply for a one-on-one coaching with me. Do it now, I promise you it is life changing, you will not regret it.
Okay, let’s get into the topic today. So today I’m talking about the myths and benefits of intermittent fasting. And like I said there are a lot of myths in information out there. Some people think this is just crazy, you can’t do it. I’m going to address a bunch of these different myths here in a minute. But I want to back up just a little bit and explain how we lose weight.
Okay, so one thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that there are systems in place in our bodies that either promote fat storage, or promote fat burning. Okay, if we want to lose weight, we want to do that whole fat burning thing, right? We want to burn the fat, we don’t want to hold on to the fat.
So our body, we have two primary sources of fuel, we have glucose and we have fat. Glucose comes from eating carbohydrates, mainly, okay, you eat carbohydrates, any carbohydrates, you turn into glucose in your system, and they get stored as fuel as glycogen, or they get stored as fat. Okay, so that’s carbohydrates.
And then we have fat. This is our own body fat that we can use for fuel. The problem is, we can only use one of these fuel sources at a time, pretty much okay. Like in order to burn fat, you basically have to burn through the available glucose first, okay, so if you are eating a diet high in carbohydrates, then you know, getting that glucose out of your system is key, so that you can actually access your own body fat for fuel, okay?
Eating a diet high in carbohydrates, makes it very difficult to lose weight. If you’ve been listening to me for a while you understand this. We’re always going to want to use the available glucose as the primary fuel. That’s just the way our bodies are designed. Okay, we’re designed to use available glucose and glycogen first.
So when you have high glucose levels in your body, when you’re eating a lot of carbs and sugar, then you cannot access your fat stores, you know, maybe a little bit but not really. When glucose is high, insulin is also high. Insulin is produced when our blood sugar goes up insulin, its job is to bring blood sugars down. But when insulin is high, it puts our body into this fat storage mode. We hold on to our body fat when insulin is high.
When glucose is high, insulin is high, we’re in fat storage mode, when glucose is low. When we don’t eat a lot of carbohydrates, when we don’t have a lot of high blood sugar. When glucose is low, insulin is low, then our bodies are in fat burning mode.
Okay, so the key to this whole deal is keep insulin levels low, keep them low. And the way we do this, there’s two ways that we lower insulin to keep it low. We don’t eat carbohydrates, and we don’t eat. Insulin will remain low. As long as our blood sugar is low, as long as our blood sugar is normal, okay, it’s not elevated. Blood sugars go high when we eat a lot of carbohydrates, especially highly refined carbohydrates, the higher refined the carbohydrate, like pure sugar will spike our blood sugar like crazy, which spikes our insulin like crazy.
And then we’re in fat storage mode like crazy. All right, when we don’t eat carbohydrates, it keeps our blood sugars normalized. Another way of keeping blood sugars normalized is to not eat anything at all. Because every time you eat some food, your blood sugar goes up a little bit. So if you eat, you know, a pile of broccoli, and a steak, your blood sugar is going to go up a little bit, which is normal.
Insulin will get produced a little bit, which is normal, and it’ll come back down pretty quickly, which is normal. Everything is like working the way it should. But if you ate a big bowl of, you know, sugary cereal, and a glass of orange juice, your blood sugar is going to go up like crazy. Insulin is gonna go up like crazy. And then we’re in that insidious fat storage mode again, okay?
But anytime we eat any food at all, blood sugar goes up a little bit. So one awesome way of keeping blood sugar down, keeping insulin down, and getting us into fat burning mode is to not eat anything at all. And I’m not talking about you know, going on a 12 day fast or something like that.
We’re talking about intermittent fasting. I’m gonna break this all down in just a minute but I just want you understand that, for example, your blood sugars are very low in the morning, because you have been fasting all night long. So anyway, when we combine these two things a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, with intermittent fasting, both of these things work to regulate our blood sugars to keep our insulin levels in check, and to put us into fat burning mode.
So when we combine these two things, it’s like rocket fuel for your overall health and for your weight loss. This approach will keep blood sugars normalized, it’ll keep insulin down, and you’ll be able to access your own body fat for fuel. So what is intermittent fasting at its simplest?
It just means this. Don’t eat anything. It’s just like not eating for periods of time. Okay? The intermittent part means we don’t do it all the time. We do it intermittently, sporadically or periodically. So it’s basically, periodically we don’t eat. That’s all that it means. Okay.
A little bit about fasting in general. So fasting is something that is in our DNA. It’s something we’ve done as humans for millions of years. It’s not some new thing that was created by the CrossFit community or anything like that. Okay. I love the CrossFit people, by the way, I think they’re awesome.
But they love the whole low carb, high fat diet, they love their intermittent fasting. But people just have some notion that this is like all new. It’s not. We’ve been doing this forever. We didn’t evolve as humans by eating three meals a day, two snacks a day and dessert. We didn’t.
We didn’t have that much food available to us. We scavenged. We hunted. We foraged and we ate. And then we fasted. This is the way we’ve evolved as humans to get to where we are today, we feasted. And then we fasted. This was beautiful, everything was working beautifully for us. You know, we didn’t have ways of preserving foods until much later in our evolution.
So when we had food available, we ate it, right? Another kind of historical part of fasting is that cultures around the world today have been practicing some form of fasting for many 1000s of years.
Fasting has been used therapeutically since at least the fifth century, when the Greek physician Hippocrates recommended to his patients abstinence from food or drink, if they had certain types of illnesses. So, you know, back in the fifth century, Hippocrates was saying like, Hey, you want to get better, don’t eat or drink anything.
Religions have been practicing fasting for millennia. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Jainism, Hinduism have all been practicing some form of fasting for 1000s of years. Hindus, for example, are used to fasting on Ekadashi, which is the 11th day of the lunar cycle.
So they fast every 11th day. During the season of Lent, Catholics give up certain foods or practice fasting. In Judaism, they observed fasting on six different days of the year, like Yom Kippur, for example. The entire month of Ramadan and Islam as a period of penitence, sorry, and total fasting from dawn to dusk.
And then arguably three of the most influential people in the history of the world, Jesus, the prophet Muhammad, and the Buddha, they didn’t all agree on a whole lot, but they all agreed on one thing, the power of fasting.
And here’s something else that I just want you to understand about fasting. You are already doing it. You fast every day, you know, unless you eat while you’re sleeping. Like if you get up in the middle of the night and eat something and go back to bed. Most of us, I would say almost all of us fast for around seven or eight hours a day or more.
You know, you don’t you probably don’t need a couple hours before you go to bed. And maybe you don’t eat as soon as you wake up in the morning. So it might be 10 hours a day that you’re fasting anyway. Okay. And the word itself, breakfast means to break your fast, right? So this fasting is not something that is harmful. It’s not something that is weird. And it’s not something that is new. We’ve been doing this for a long, long time.
So I want to talk about some of the myths that people have around fasting and tell you what the truth is around some of these things. So here’s one of the first myths that people have: they say it’s not safe fasting is not safe. Well, like I just said you’re doing this every day, is that not safe?
And we’re not talking about going weeks without food here. This is intermittent fasting, this is sporadically not eating. You can safely go for days, weeks, probably even months without any food depending on how much body fat that you have on you.
And I’m not suggesting you do this. I’m not suggesting you try to go weeks or months without food. But you could easily go a couple of days without food without, you know, any deleterious effects. Okay? Can fasting be dangerous? Yes, if done recklessly, sure, just about anything can be done with reckless abandon and get you into trouble.
And consider the story of the marathon. According to legend. In 490 BC, the Greek soldier Pheidippides ran approximately 26 miles from the battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens, he’s delivering a message on the news of the defeat of the Persians.
When he got there, he shouted Nike, which means victory. And then he promptly keeled over and died. And people say, well, yeah, you shouldn’t run marathons, they’re not safe, look what happened to this guy. And like, if we look at this, in today’s terms, if, if you took a sedentary middle aged out of shape person, and said go run of Marathon right now, as hard as you can, you know, at your maximum speed, without any type of preparation or knowledge, that person might very well keel over and die to okay.
But here’s the thing, just about anything can be done recklessly, can be done in a way that is not safe. But millions of people practice some form of fasting every single day on this planet and have zero problems. We have been doing fasting as a species for millions of years without any problems. Okay.
But just to address the safety issue, one step further. So there was this guy back in 1965, his name is Angus Barbieri, Scottish dude. And he was very overweight, he is obese at the time, you know, 1965 people weren’t this big, he weighed 456 pounds.
And his doctor suggested he’d go on a fast and so he fasted for like 10 days or something like that. And he loved it, he felt great, he was losing some weight. And he decided to keep going. And with his doctor supervision, he went on a total fast for 382 days. Think about that. This dude went over a year without eating any food.
He was living on his own body fat that whole time. Now, he was drinking water, obviously, coffee, tea, he had to take vitamins and electrolytes, you got to have, you know, some kind of nutrition coming in. But he lost like 276 pounds by living off of his own body fat for over a year. This is crazy, right? And I’m not suggesting again that anybody try this, but I just want you to see that, you know, this guy had doctor’s supervision, but you can go for a long time living off your own body fat. Okay.
So our fat is a great source of fuel for our bodies and for our brains. And, and this is the way we’re designed as people. So that’s kind of Myth number one that fasting isn’t safe. I think we can all agree that fasting is perfectly safe and something we do all the time. Another myth is that fasting makes you go into starvation mode.
I mean, get this. It’s not starving yourself. You don’t go into starvation mode when you fast. Your body has plenty of fuel onboard in the form of your own body fat. We all do. Even the leanest marathon runners have like 8% of body fat, plenty of fat on them to to last a long, long time without eating anything.
Calorie restriction diets actually will put you into starvation mode. And they did these experiments which sound horrible, the Minnesota starvation experiment where they took a group of men and they gave them a very, very limited calorie diet and they went into starvation mode. They became extremely weak, lethargic, emaciated, and were literally starving to death.
But here’s the thing, there’s a big difference between calorie restriction, severe calorie restriction and zero food. Something hormonally changes when you don’t eat anything, calorie restriction puts you in a starvation mode. Because your body can’t make the necessary hormonal adaptations that you get when you’re fasting when you have zero calories coming in, so you’re never actually getting to the point where you’re using your own body fat for fuel.
Everything changes when you go to zero calorie. So fasting the body switches from burning glucose to burning your own stored body fat. And this is exactly what your body fat is there for.
Our body fat is not for looks. It’s not there to make us look good. Right? It’s there, it’s used for food when no food is available, our stored body fat is used to nourish us when no food is available.
It’s a very well designed system and works very, very well. Again, humans have been feasting and then fasting for millions of years. If not eating for short periods of time would put us into starvation mode, we’ve become extinct a long, long time ago. Okay, so when you fast, you do not go into starvation mode. Okay.
Another myth is that when you fast you will lose muscle. So, consider the consequences of burning muscle for energy. During long winters, you know, back in the caveman days, there would have been many days where no food was available. After the first episode of like a period of no food available, your body was actually consuming muscle as fuel, you would be severely weakened after a couple times of this happening, you’d be so weak that you’d be unable to hunt, you won’t even be able to stand up.
Humans would never have survived as a species, if burning muscle happened when we didn’t eat. So your body, here’s the way your body works, you burn glucose first, then fat. And then when there’s no fat available, your body will start to use muscle as fuel.
But it’s a terrible source of fuel for your body. So it will not do that it won’t break down muscle until all the fat is gone. And I gotta tell you, it would be almost impossible for you to lose that much fat, think of Angus. He had so much fat on his body he was able to you know, use that as fuel for over a year. When you fast you burn fat that your body will only use muscle if there’s no more glucose, no fat available.
So you’d literally have to be at that point of like starving to death for your body to start using muscle. And studies indicate that intermittent fasting is actually better for maintaining muscle mass. In fact, intermittent fasting is very popular among bodybuilders because they find it helps them to maintain muscle alongside a low body fat percentage, right? So they’re lean, and super muscular. So you don’t burn muscle when you fast.
Another myth that I’m trying to bust here today is that fasting will make you tired, and lethargic. Oh, if I don’t eat all the time, I’m gonna be super tired. I need the energy. Well, have you ever been tired after eating a meal? Of course you have, everybody has. This is what happens when you eat.
There’s this moment of like drowsiness afterwards, lack of concentration. That’s your system like your stomach, your liver, your digestive system all working to process the food. When you fast, you don’t have these kinds of problems. Fat is a far superior source of fuel for your body and for your brain.
So when you fast your body can actually produce ketones, which is an amazing source of energy. And ketones along with your own body fat, actually increase your energy levels. Right? You get tired and lethargic when you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbs. And you have that crash after you eat.
Like if you’ve ever had a big lunch and then you want to go to sleep around two o’clock in the afternoon to three o’clock you’re just like dead. And you need your Starbucks, triple Mocha, caramel latte or whatever to get you through the afternoon. That’s because of you know, eating all that food, especially the sugar and the carbs.
But when you’re fasting this doesn’t happen. You don’t have those energy spikes and crashes. You have this like consistent energy throughout the day so no crashes at all. And I gotta tell you, my clients report a lot of increased energy and sustained energy when they become fat-adapted
When they stop eating the sugar and the carbs and they, their body is starting to burn fat. And then when we add in some intermittent fasting, their energy levels actually go up, not down. Okay? So fasting does not make you tired and lethargic actually gives you more energy. People think fasting will slow your metabolism.
And no, this is not true at all. It actually boosts your metabolism. When you fast it puts your body into fat burning mode, okay, which is boosting it actually boosts your metabolic rate. This is due to a drastic increase in blood levels of norepinephrine, which stimulates your metabolism and instructs your fat cells to break down body fat. And then you can use that body fat for fuel.
Studies have shown that fasting for even up to like 48 hours will boost your metabolism by something like 3% up to 14%. Fasting does not slow your metabolism. And there’s this misconception out there that you need to eat like six times a day, you know, to boost your metabolism. And it’s the opposite.
When you eat six times a day, you slow your metabolism down. Because you’re always hanging on to all that extra body fat. All that extra food is going into your fat stores. Okay, your your blood glucose is always elevated, insulin has always elevated and you’re holding on to all that extra fat. Okay, so you’re actually not burning fat when you do that. So eating less often or eating nothing at all for periods of time will actually speed up your metabolism.
Another myth is that fasting deprives your body of nutrients. So some people have concerns that fasting will lead to some sort of malnourishment, right, you’re not getting the right vitamins and minerals. And it’s been shown that fasting that lasts under 24 hours, like what we’re talking about here, intermittent fasting, there’s no real need to be concerned with missing vitamins or minerals, mainly because we replenish anything we lost.
When we eat food later in the day, like you’re not you’re you’re eating every day, okay? But for longer fasts, if you’re doing like a 24 hour or longer fast, doctors recommend supplementing with electrolytes. So sodium, potassium, magnesium, which is very easy to get in a supplement, right? I actually take these when I’m running in the heat, just because we all need electrolytes when we’re running, especially longer distances, especially when it’s super hot outside.
And so I take a supplement that’s just sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and no sugar or anything like that, and gives me everything I need. And I do all my runs fasted. And we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second here. But actually, fat is one of the best things your body can use for fuel, right, it’s one of two essential nutrients that we have to have.
And so, you know, you’re not depriving your body of nutrients when you fast for short periods of time at all. Okay, if you’re concerned, just make sure you’re getting enough salt on the electrolytes. But other than that, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to get all the food, all the nutrients you need from the food that you eat. Okay.
And then the last myth I want to just talk about here, as people say, fasting is just crazy. And at this point, I want to say isn’t eating six times a day crazy? Yeah. Keeping your insulin levels elevated all the time. So your body is constantly in fat storage mode, you become insulin resistant when you do this. You know, you get fat, you can’t lose the weight. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, I think so.
You know, think about all these millions of people around the world who have been fasting for 1000s of years. Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, Hindus, are they all crazy? No. What about all the human ancestors who feasted and fasted millions of years of evolution and we thrived as a species? It’s not crazy. It’s perfect. It’s how we’ve evolved is how we’re designed to function optimally.
And I just wanted you to think about this. Think about animals, the animal kingdom Okay, so bears hibernate every winter, right? They gorge themselves on salmon and berries, which sounds delicious, by the way, and then they live on their own body fat all winter long when they hibernate, right? Are they crazy? Are they just you know, insane? No, is the way they’re designed.
And just a little sidebar here humans were like the only animal on the planet It eats foods that we’re not designed to eat. So all the sugar and the highly refined carbohydrates, we’re not supposed to eat that stuff. That stuff makes us fat. It makes us obese. It creates all kinds of health problems for us. But we eat tons of that stuff. No other animal on the planet does this.
Humans are the only overweight animal on the planet. Think about that. No other animals get fat and obese. You know, obviously, there’s fat animals, like Wallace’s and elephant seals, right? They have a lot of body fat, but they’re not overweight. That’s the way they’re supposed to be. They’re designed to be this way. But it’s perfectly healthy for them. That’s, that’s optimal for them. But it’s not perfectly healthy for humans to be as fat as a walrus. To me, that’s crazy.
Okay, so I hope you understand that fasting is not crazy, it’s perfectly normal. So let’s quickly I’m gonna talk about some of the benefits of fasting, sorry, I get all worked up about this stuff. And I crack myself up sometimes, okay, the benefits of fasting, especially for runners.
So here’s the benefits we can experience. And I’ve kind of talked about some of the stuff already. But I’m gonna reiterate a few things and tell you about a few things I think are kind of cool here. So what happens when you do some fasting? What’s good about it, especially for runners?
Well, number one, glucose levels go down. So when our blood sugars, you know, normalized insulin levels go down, it improves insulin sensitivity, which means our bodies can react to insulin the way they’re supposed to, we get out of fat storage mode, and we get into fat burning mode, right, so we have this boost in metabolism. And our bodies can actually get out of fat storage and into fat burning mode. So there’s a huge benefit for everybody right in it.
The second benefit is that it induces weight loss, because our metabolism is speeding up, not slowing down. It speeds up weight loss and fat loss and fat adaptation. So if you want to become a fat adapted runner, one of the best ways to get there is obviously you have to stop eating sugar and carbohydrates. And then number two, start doing some intermittent fasting.
And when you do it, you will get your body into fat burning mode faster, you’ll lose more weight, obviously, but becoming a fat adapted runner will happen quicker if you include a little intermittent fasting along with the low carb high fat diet.
Another benefit is that intermittent fasting helps you to break through weight loss plateaus. So with all my clients, invariably, at some point, weight loss kind of stalls a little bit, this is perfectly normal. And we anticipate this happening.
And there’s all kinds of tools that I help us and we implement to help my, my clients break through some of those weight loss plateaus, and one of them is intermittent fasting, it’s a great way to bust through when you get stuck at a certain weight, especially when it’s done intermittently. So not all the time, but periodically.
Because here’s what happens when we do the same thing over and over again, our bodies adapt, our body’s very good at adapting, right, so what we want to do is we want to kind of shake things up a little bit every now and then we want to cause our body a little bit of stress so that it can adapt in a different way and change things. Okay.
This is why we don’t work the same muscles at the exact same workout at the gym every single time we go if you want to actually build muscle because your body will adapt, and it’ll stop seeing that as a stressor, and it will stop building the muscle, right. So that’s why if you follow any kind of workout routine or a plan that somebody put in place for you, then you know, they always want you to be doing different things and mixing it up.
And that’s how you get stronger and build muscle. Also, this is why we don’t run the same distances and the same pace. Every time we go out and run right you got to mix things up. We want our bodies to adapt to some super hard super fast running like sprints or hill repeats. And then we want to do some really slow long running.
And then we want to do some stuff in between and then we throw some fartleks in there. I just love saying fartleks and then we want to do some interval training in there. Right? Well, we want to just keep mixing things up so our bodies can respond to these changes of stressors. Same thing happens with fasting it helps us to respond to changes in a different way and really helps to break through some of these weight loss plateaus that we get.
Another huge benefit of intermittent fasting is increased mental and cognitive abilities. So our brains love fat and ketones for fuel is an amazing source of fuel for our brains. And when we do intermittent fasting fat and ketones are produced, we get this flood of amazing fuel for our brain.
It helps improve our mental clarity or concentration, you’ll think more clearly, you’ll be more focused, you’ll be smarter, you get smarter when you do intermittent fasting. FYI. Another amazing benefit is that intermittent fasting enables cell regeneration, including immune cell regeneration, which is very important during things like global pandemics. Okay?
Intermittent fasting also helps to lower blood cholesterol levels, it helps to decrease inflammation in your body, which is amazing, especially as runners, we don’t want to be inflamed, we want to decrease inflammation, right. And intermittent fasting will help with that.
Intermittent fasting helps to lower blood pressure, so reducing hypertension. And then studies have shown that intermittent fasting can also help to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, it helps to extend your life by reversing the aging process. So fasting actually provides some anti aging benefits.
And studies have actually shown that intermittent fasting helps to lower the risk of certain types of cancer. Now, here’s some benefits that are particularly interesting for you as a runner, number one, increased energy, not a loss of energy, but an increase of energy.
So when you practice some intermittent fasting, Adrenaline increases, you actually have more energy, so you can train harder, you can run harder, you can do some more intense workouts, you know, if you’re lifting weights at the gym, you can lift a lot more, because you have all this increased adrenaline and energy. And you’re gonna get some pretty amazing results. Because you have more energy.
Also another huge benefit is there is an increase in growth hormone production during those fasting periods. When you have more growth hormone being produced in your body, this helps to increase your bone density. So this is good for people over 40. I don’t know if there’s any of you out there, well, it’ll help to increase muscle mass. So this is good for everybody.
Right, you can build more muscle because you’re producing more growth hormone. When you’re producing more growth hormone, it also allows you to recover faster from these harder runs and workouts. So intermittent fasting allows you to train harder, and recover faster.
And then one of the big benefits I want to talk about here is that and I kind of mentioned this already, but this is that intermittent fasting helps to speed up the fat adaptation process. The key to fat adaptation, becoming a fat adapted runner, is to get your body used to using your own body fat for fuel.
And the best way to do this, is just don’t eat anything. That way, your body will not have any glucose available for energy. So it will have to go into your fat stores for energy, this is good, this is what we want. And this process of switching from burning glycogen to burning fat, is what we call the fat adaptation period.
And that takes a couple of weeks, you know, two to six weeks depending on how you do it, and your body type and all kinds of other factors. But it’s kind of different for everybody. But generally speaking, it’s somewhere between two and six weeks to get to that point of where you become fully fat adapted. Fasting really helps to speed up this process, okay? It’s an uncomfortable period, because running really sucks during that period.
So when you combine low carbohydrate, high fat diet, along with intermittent fasting, it helps to shorten that uncomfortable fat adaptation period. Okay, so all of these amazing benefits that I just listed. You get all these amazing health benefits without taking any kind of medications without buying any kind of supplements, without any cost at all to you without doing anything at all, except just donate. I think that’s pretty freakin amazing if you ask me.
Okay, so we will be continuing this conversation. We’re talking all about intermittent fasting this month over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So here’s a little preview of what’s coming up in the Running Lean community. September intermittent fasting challenge.
And so over the course of the next several weeks, talking about how to do intermittent fasting is a lot simpler than you might think. I’m going to be offering tips on how to succeed with intermittent fasting, like how to make sure we’re getting enough electrolytes, what electrolytes should you take? When should you take them?
And what to do when you feel like, when you feel like eating something because like when we’re intermittent fasting, one of the things I talk about the first thing we’re doing this week is no snacks, right? Not eating between meals. And people are like, well, I feel hungry. And I’m like, Well, what did we do about that? You know, that never happens, people never feel hungry between meals. So I’ll give you some tips on how to deal with stuff like that.
So it’s like about how to curb the cravings between meals, how to deal with those urges and stuff like that, okay. I’ll be going over all the different types of intermittent fasting. So there’s different ways of doing this. There’s something called time restricted eating. There’s something people do called alternate day fasting.
There’s some advanced fasting regimens like a 36 hour, 48 hour, 24 hour fasts, one meal a day that people like to do. So there’s different ways of doing this. And I’ll just be giving you some information on all these things, and how to do some of them safely.
And then one of the big things I’ll be talking about over in the Running Lean community on Facebook is training in a fasted state. I call it running on empty. So this is where you don’t need fuel before, during or even after your runs. What? I know it sounds crazy, right? But I gotta tell you, it’s pretty amazing. I have not used fuel.
For months, I do all my workouts, all of my runs in a fasted state. So I haven’t eaten anything for like, at least 12 hours before running, just do some coffee, you know, I gotta have my coffee in the morning. Just honestly, I take electrolytes with me on my runs. And my runs have been amazing.
I’m up to about 15 miles doing this, alright, and I don’t need to have fuel with me. It’s kind of an experiment I’m doing. You know, I could take some fuel with me if I wanted to, but I don’t need it. And that’s the point I’m trying to get out here is like, you don’t have to have it. And when you train this way, and you train in this fasted state you’re building, you’re producing all this growth hormone, and you’ve got an amazing amount of energy. So you can actually run harder, run faster, run longer, and recover faster. So amazing, right?
So honestly, becoming a fat-adapted runner, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. We’ll talk about how we do all that. So join us for the September intermittent fasting, and see what not eating can do for your overall health, energy, weight loss, and running. Cool. That’s all I got for you guys today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you. Keep on Running Lean will talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
Fruit is one of those things we all just assume is good for us, right? Everyone agrees we should be eating more fruits and vegetables. But should we? We check the label on something and we’re like, …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is the Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 29 of the Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray and I am the weight loss coach for runners. And I just noticed that the Running Mind podcast is currently ranked number 31 in the iTunes podcast directory in the sports category.
And that is really, really cool. It’s right up there with like a couple of CBS Sports and fantasy football, podcast and ESPN podcast. So I am very humbled by this, I’m very grateful. That’s really cool. It’s not something I’m trying to do. It’s just, I think this message is resonating with a lot of you guys out there. So thank you for checking it out.
And if you have a chance, if you want to leave a review in iTunes, do that. I would be really eternally grateful for that just to say hey, you know, love it, give me you know, some stars, whatever you think is good. I’d appreciate it. But that’s really cool. We’re getting up there.
Okay, so today I want to talk about fruit, we’re talking about all things. Fruit. Fruit is one of those things that we just assume is good for us. And we should be eating a lot of fruit. Eat your fruit and vegetables. That’s the message we get told all the time. But should we be eating all those fruits?
You know, we check the labels on something. And we’re like, Hey, check this out. It’s got fruit juice in it, this must be healthy. But is it really healthy? How much fruit should we be eating? And what role does fruit play in this whole long distance running thing? You know, what about all those vitamins and essential nutrients that we need in fruit? Don’t we need those? Does fruit help us or hurt us if we’re trying to lose weight?
So all these questions I’m going to be answering today in the ultimate guide to fruit. And if you haven’t already, be sure to come and check us out on Facebook, we got this really engaging community on Facebook, the Running Lean community. It’s a group that goes hand in hand with this podcast.
And right now we’re in the middle of July. And we are doing a no sugar challenge for the month of July. And people have been getting a lot of great results from that. And it’s been a lot of fun. The questions that people are asking are great. The results people are getting have been great.
People are actually saying they’re losing weight just by cutting out the sugar, which is amazing. I mean, that’s kind of the way it works. I know it’s crazy, right? But you know, people are asking questions like what kinds of fat should I be eating? You know, how do I fuel my long runs without all the sugar or how much fruit should I be eating? Hey, we’re going to be talking about that today.
And the best part is the community aspect of it. So we all support each other, encourage each other and it’s fun. And here’s a recent comment from someone in the Facebook group from Libby. She says, “Your Facebook Lives and your podcasts are a bit blessed. Your Facebook Lives and podcasts are packed full of information I never knew. And I’ve done a crapload of challenges. Thank you for giving me skill power.”
Love that. Thank you Libby. Thanks for being a part of the group. You are amazing. You’re doing all the work I’m just over here yep on my gums and barely able to even form a sentence apparently. But there are many amazing people just like Libby in the Facebook group. So come check us out. It’ll be fun. Just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. Okay.
Also something is very important want to talk to you guys about which is that our next masterclass begins in just a few weeks here. So starting Monday, August 3, the next Running Lean weight loss masterclass for runners begins.
It’s a six week intensive training to teach you exactly how to become a fat-adapted runner, which just means getting off the sugar and running on fat which you can run on forever. It’s an amazing, transformational program. You will become leaner, you will get stronger, you will learn how to be able to run faster, and run longer.
You’re going to learn how to change your whole relationship with food, what you eat, how you eat, and running is going to be fun again for you. And if you want more information about that just go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass.
I only accept a small number of people for each class but I want to keep it small and intimate. So if you want in on this go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass and apply you have to apply for this program. It’s not something I just, you know, sell. It’s something that I want to talk to you about and see if it’s a good fit for you. Okay, so before it sells out though, definitely go over to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass.
Okay, let’s get into fruit, The Ultimate Guide to Fruit, that’s we’re talking about today. So first of all, what is fruit? Fruits are seed bearing the seed bearing part of a flowering plant. So it’s the structure of a flowering plant that actually holds the seeds for that plant. So fruit is how flowering plants spread their seeds.
Fruits are typically semi sweet, they’re delicious. They encourage animals to eat them. And since they don’t really digest the seeds, the seeds are then dispersed by the animals. And then the plant has successfully reproduced out in the wild. So that’s the purpose of fruit. The purpose of fruit is to propagate the plant species, okay.
They’re delicious because we want to encourage animals like us to eat them. And so what are some of the different types of fruits so, some of the fruits that you can get would be pom fruits and these are like apples and pears. These are different like fruit categories.
Okay, another category would be citrus so we know all about that lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, clementines and so on. Then we have melons which are like watermelons, cassava melons, honeydew, cantaloupe, those are all the melons.
There are stone fruits, otherwise known as drupes, which are peaches, nectarines, cherries, qualms, apricot, mango is a stone fruit. Coconut is actually considered a stone fruit. And then we have berries, berries or blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, loganberries, strawberries, gooseberries, cranberries.
And then here are some that I did not know were berries, tomato is actually a berry, avocados are considered a berry, bananas are considered a berry, grapes, cucumbers, eggplants, papaya, and those are all berries and then pineapple, which is considered a whole group of berries that have been fused together. Which is fascinating. So berries can, you know consists of a huge swath of different types of fruits.
Okay, so those are like all kinds of different types of fruits and there’s many many more I’m just like going over some of the high level ones here. But let’s get into kind of the history of fruit so the fruit that we know today is very, very different from what it used to be.
Fruit has been modified extensively, really just in the past few 100 years and it’s been modified to make it sweeter you know. Fruit has been selectively bred to contain more sugar and to make it denser, and include more of the sugary part of the fruit itself. Okay, so fruit didn’t used to be so sweet. It didn’t used to be so dense and it didn’t used to be so big either.
So fruit used to be pretty sour, some of it kind of bitter, and a lot smaller. So some of the very interesting research I did looking into this was some of the way the fruit has evolved over time. So for instance, the peach you know, just a few hundred years ago, peaches were like the size of a cherry, very small.
And the stone inside was you know, rather large compared to the size of it, even larger than a cherry seed would be. And so there was very little flesh and they were somewhat bitter. And then you know, over years we’ve bred them into what we know today, which is juicy and a very sweet thing, right?
Bananas are another one. Bananas used to be these short, stubby little things, and full of these very large seeds with very little edible flesh on the inside and they weren’t super sweet. The bananas of ancient times were way different than what we know today. Like we selectively bred these things to be elongated. And for, you know, the seeds that have become teeny tiny, and they are incredibly sweet.
Now, watermelon is another good one. So watermelon in the old days used to have a lot of this white inedible structure on the inside. So if you cut up on a watermelon, you know, today, it’s like all red, right? And then you got some black seeds in there. But in the old days, you could open a watermelon and there was like mostly this white structure with these small little pockets of edible red flesh, and lots of large seeds. So very, very different than what we know today. O
ne of the most fascinating ones, though, is corn. So the corn kernels are actually considered fruits. And corn was first domesticated, like 7000 BC. So corn has been one of those things we’ve been dorking around with for like thousands of years, literally. Okay.
But back in those days, corn kinda looked like a green bean, it was like an elongated little thing, it was about the size of your finger, maybe your little finger like really kind of narrow and long. And it had like five to ten of these hard kernels that were dry, then they tasted like a raw potato.
So they were like very, very different, kind of the starchy fruit or vegetable back in the day. But very different than what we know today. The average year of corn today has around 800 kernels. And we’ve, you know, genetically modified this corn over the thousands of years to contain tons of water and tons of sugar.
So corn is incredibly sweet. And obviously, they use it for all kinds of things now. But those are just some examples of how fruit is not fruit today, it’s not what it used to be. And I mentioned all this because the way we evolved to eat fruit was very different than what we’re eating today.
The fruit they were eating just a couple of hundred years ago had way less sugar in it. Okay, the high sugar content in fruit is a relatively new thing. It’s like a modern invention. It’s not unlike Coca Cola.
And here’s the thing, the food industry is going to do whatever it takes to sell more food. And they’re very good at this. So they do whatever they can to make food as pleasurable as possible. To the point of, you know, creating something like that peach we’re talking about, which is so sweet and so juicy and so large, where just a few hundred years ago, it was just a tiny little thing that wasn’t that sweet, but they make this food, they modify it until it becomes so desirable that we crave it like a drug.
You know, we do and, and fruit is basically you know, it’s got a lot of sugar in it. And so when you tell somebody like hey, you may want to like cut back on how much fruit you’re eating. It’s like saying Christmas has been canceled this year. You know, people don’t want to hear that, you know, they love their morning smoothie with their strawberries and banana in there.
Or, you know, they like their glass of orange juice or whatever. And here’s the thing, I’m always advocating for eating real food over anything processed, or anything modified. I want to eat real food the way we did, you know, even as early as a few hundred years ago.
You know, you can get into the whole debate about, you know, the Paleo thing and how we evolved over thousands of years. And there’s a lot of truth to that. And I do adhere to a lot of that as well. Like I believe that we evolved as humans to eat all kinds of different foods. And I think in the last couple of hundred years, we’ve changed so much.
The food has changed so much that we are no longer eating the food that we evolved to eat or eating something that is completely new and different and not always good. Okay, so I’m always advocating for eating real food over anything that’s been highly modified or heavily processed.
And I would say that fruit falls into this, you know, heavily modified category If I just do, so yeah, I’m canceling Christmas this year. Okay, so what about all that nutrition and food, Patrick? Don’t we need to eat fruit to get the nutrition that we need? An apple a day and all that, right?
Here’s the thing, most of the calories and fruit come from sugar. 5 grams to 20 grams of net carbs, or sugar is pretty typical and most fruit per hundred grams. Okay, so fruit is basically between 5% and 20% sugar. And this is not necessarily a good thing. It’s not terrible, but you know, it’s not like eating, you know, table sugar.
But you know, let’s say you eat five servings of fruit in a day, that’s roughly like a 16 ounce can of soda. If you follow this podcast, and you’re into this low carbohydrate, high fat kind of living, you probably don’t drink soda, I would imagine, I’m guessing. And so eating that much fruit is the equivalent of, you know, drinking a can of soda.
So I would say that the nutrition you’re getting from that is not going to be all that awesome. So what about the fiber? Well, fiber is often touted as one of the reasons why we need the fruit we need the fiber, right? But there’s lots of other sources of fiber, like we can get fiber from nuts and seeds and things like flaxseed meal and psyllium husk.
And then all sorts of vegetables like dark green veggies, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, dark leafy greens, like spinach, and kale, all kinds of ways of getting fiber. And here’s the one that people always throw out. They’re like, well, while we do have to eat fruit for the vitamin C, though, right?
It’s like no, you really don’t. You know, you’re not gonna get vitamin C deficient. Like, do you know anybody that has scurvy? No, I think we’re gonna be okay there. But there are tons of sources of vitamin C out there. Like from the animal kingdom like organ meats, like liver and kidney, huge source of vitamin C, tons of vegetable sources, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, like green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, cabbage, kale, all this stuff has tons of vitamin C.
And then the other essential vitamins that we need, as humans, you can get from things like meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and these are actually, these sources actually provide more essential vitamins than most fruits and vegetables. So you’re not going to miss out on, you know, vitamin C, you’re not gonna get scurvy, and don’t have to worry about that.
And you’re gonna get, you can get all the nutrition you need, with really not eating any fruit, if that’s the way you want to go. Some of the problems with fruit is like, number one is the sugar content, you know, especially when you take fruit and you turn it into juice. So that glass of orange juice that people drink in the morning, I’ve never fully understood that. It is like pure sugar. So let’s say you take an orange, you know, so you’ve got an orange, let’s say it’s a big, you know, juicy orange, and you peel that orange, let’s say you take four of those oranges.
And you say, here you go, eat these four oranges, I think people would have a hard time knocking back four oranges. Like it’d be hard to eat that and kind of fill you up, right, and you get the fiber and all this other stuff, you get the same sugar content or whatever. But you know, you get all that fiber, you’d be pretty full.
But if you take a glass of orange juice, which is like four to six oranges and the juice of four to six oranges, the sugar of four to six oranges without the fiber. People can knock that back in 10 seconds. No problem. And your body just doesn’t really see those calories, it doesn’t recognize those calories. And you know, it spikes your blood sugar like crazy.
Insulin goes up and you start storing fat, like it’s a bad thing. Like the the fruit juice is, is really bad. And so stay away from anything that says fruit juice, especially if you’re looking on ingredients and it says contains real fruit juice. You know, like they’re trying to tell you that this is healthy, but it’s the way they hide sugar.
They’re basically saying this contains sugar. And so they use the word fruit juice to make it sound healthy when all it is is just pure sugar. And since fruit contains so much sugar, it will increase your hunger just like eating any other carbohydrates. You know fruit is a carbohydrate. It’s a type of sugar. So, sugar turns on the hunger hormone ghrelin, like it doesn’t turn that off, like, so you’re going to be, your hunger is going to increase when you eat more fruit.
Eating a lot of fruit increases cravings for more sugar like it increases your sugar cravings, because it does this thing where it like kind of releases dopamine, it turns on that part of your brain that makes you feel good that’s kind of wired for addiction. And if you haven’t listened to my last podcast on whether or not sugar is addicting, definitely listen to that, because it’s pretty eye opening.
But you can get into this vicious cycle of eating fruit and then craving more sugar, whatever that looks like for you. More carbohydrates, and then you’re in that cycle of high insulin and all that eating a lot of fruit slows fat burning, because you can’t burn fat when sugar’s in your system.
So when your sugar is high, when you have a lot of glucose in your system, your body cannot access your fat for fuel. If you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And you can either burn one or the other, they don’t work simultaneously. So you got to blow through all that sugar. And then you can start losing, you know losing weight by burning the fat.
So eating a lot of fruit will slow down the fat burning, which will mean it will take longer for you to lose weight, if at all, you may even gain weight if you’re eating too much fruit. And then, of course, it takes longer to become fat-adapted. And if you want to become a fat-adapted runner, which is an amazing thing, let me tell you, this is like life changing, you’ve got to get the sugar out of your system, you cannot keep eating the sugar and the carbs, you just can’t.
And then the sugar makeup of fruit is very similar to drinking a can of Coca Cola. So Coke is like 50% glucose 50% fructose, that’s the ratio of glucose to fructose in that, and fruit is very similar. It’s like exactly the same, you know, it’s a one to one ratio of glucose fructose.
And just for comparison, like high fructose corn syrup is basically just a little bit higher. It’s like 55% fructose to 45% glucose, so it’s just a little bit higher. So for the most part, when you eat any type of sugar, any type of carbohydrate, your body kind of reacts the same way, whether it’s table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, french fries, or an apple, that sugar, the carbohydrate gets turned into glucose, your blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up, your body goes into this fat storage mode where it’s, you can only use so much of this glucose for energy. So stores most of us fat for use later. And then you start gaining weight.
And this is just the way our bodies work. You know, our bodies were not designed to eat that much sugar, they’re just not. We didn’t evolve over the last 10 or 50,000 years to eat this much sugar. You know, this is a new thing. So, again, it’s like if your goal is to lose weight, if your goal is to become a fat-adapted runner, then you’ve got to stop eating all the sugar.
And that includes fruit. And I know it just you know people love their fruit, they love their blueberries, they love their bananas. And I’m just telling you like, you got to choose one or the other. You can either eat their sugar or you can lose the weight, but it’s really, really hard to do both.
Okay, so what fruits are good and what foods are bad like this is probably the part you’ve been waiting for. Okay, so, in a simple, in the most simplest way here, like the best bets for you would be berries: strawberries, blackberries, raspberries. These are going to be fruits if you have to eat fruit, you want to you know go down that path.
Go ahead, eat some fruit. Stick with strawberries, blackberries, raspberries. Those are gonna be your best bet. The highest sugar content fruits or like the worst ones, the ones you should probably just stay away from would be things like apples, bananas, grapes, mango, kiwi, pear. All those are very high in sugar, and blueberries. I didn’t know this. But blueberries have about the same amount of sugar as pineapple pineapples, very high in sugar content too.
And if you guys are interested, I have a graphic that I will put on the show notes for this episode, which you’ll find at therunningmindpodcast.com/29. And I’m also going to share this graphic. I actually did share it already in the Facebook group of which fruits have you know how many carbs per 100 or grams, or whatever.
So it kind of breaks down which fruits are better to stick with and which ones you want to stay away from. But blueberries really surprised me because I’ve always heard the blueberries are like one of these low glycemic fruits, you know, and they’re fine. And so I was eating a lot of blueberries. And, and then I realized that it’s like basically eating pineapple, which is like one of the highest in sugar. So blueberries are actually not awesome.
Okay, strawberries are a good go to and this is what I do. So every now and then, I eat a little bit of strawberries. So I did cut up some strawberries, and I put a little dollop of this full fat, plain Greek yogurt on top and maybe throw a handful of macadamia nuts on there. And this feels like an indulgent, satisfying dessert.
You know, it’s got a little bit of sweetness, but not a lot. It’s not a lot of sugar content, it might have something like 10, or 12, net carbs of net carbs of sugar or whatever. It’s a, it’s mildly sweet and the fat in there, when I throw a little bit fat on there, it helps me to not overeat. And it actually can kind of reduce the glucose response a little bit.
And anytime I eat fruit, I do it with a meal. Or like right after a meal, I don’t do it as a snack. I don’t ever snack on anything, maybe once or twice a day. And that’s it. And then all eat this kind of thing, this little strawberry yogurt, macadamia nut, little treat, I’ll do this as like part of my quote unquote carb loading the night before a long run, where I might eat like 200 grams of carbs, which is not a lot.
But this helps me to, you know, it provides a little bit of glycogen. But it’s nutrient dense glycogen and, and nutrient dense carbs, which gives me the kind of glycogen that I want for a long run the next day. So I might eat a few sweet potatoes, wild rice, quinoa or something like that, that lasts longer. It’s slowly released. It’s not a ton of glucose.
So you’ll kind of burn through it quickly, and it’ll help you to maintain the fat-adaption. So if you’re one of those kinds of people that’s like, you know, I just have to have something for my long runs, I just have to have some sort of fuel for my long runs, then fruit is really not a terrible option.
You know, I would say it’s better than drinking Gatorade or sucking on all those gels, which are just pure sugar. So some options for you, if you have to take something on the long run would be like bananas, dates, oranges, grapes, like I’ve done all those things before, and it’s fine. But just keep in mind that when you do this, when you’re taking in the sugar while you’re out there running, you won’t be accessing your fat for fuel.
So you’re always going to have to, like keep taking more sugar basically, or more fruit or whatever it is that you’re doing. So, you know, let’s say you’re running a 50 miler,you’re gonna have to grab a banana at every aid station, you know, every couple of miles so that you can keep that sugar, keep your glucose levels tapped up, or else you’re going to kind of end up bonking.
And, and then eating this stuff, like while you’re running can cause GI issues with people too. So it’s better not to eat anything when you’re running. You know, if you can do it, you know, use your own fat for fuel. This is the whole thing about becoming fat-adapted and why it’s so amazing.
But when you have all this when you have to keep eating stuff while you’re running, your blood will move to the stomach to help in digestion and it moves away from your extremities where you want it. You want it in your legs and your arms. And you don’t need to waste all that energy digesting all these sugary fruits.
Actually fat and protein are better sources of fuel when you’re running, especially once you become fat-adapted. You know I’ve done 50K’s on nothing but almond butter. And it’s amazing. So the bottom line – fruit is not what it used to be. It’s changed a lot in like the just the last couple hundred years a lot more sugar. And it’s basically fruit is basically just like eating sugar now. Okay, so it is sugar.
Is fruit a real food? I would say no, I think it’s something that’s been highly modified recently. And I don’t think it’s something we’ve evolved to eat the way it is today. For the most part, you don’t really need it. You can get your vitamins and your fiber from better sources. If you do eat some fruit, just do it sparingly a little bit here and there. It’s fine. It’s kind of a nice treat every now and then if you do want something a little bit sweeter, that’s not too bad.
You can do something like I suggested with some strawberries and some Greek yogurt. And you can use fruit as part of your kind of carb loading that you do the night before a long run, which could help a little bit, I would stick with low sugar fruits like, you know the strawberries, blackberries, raspberries.
But here’s the most important thing, experiment, do it, try something and see if it works for you or not. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t change it up, but there’s only one way to find out. You know, the stuff I talk about on here is all suggestions. And it’s all up to you to kind of try and see what works for you.
So you might be one of those kinds of people that does really well by eating, you know, a lot of fruit on your long runs, and all through the week. And this is the way you do it, and it’s fine and you’re losing weight, you feel great, you’re super lean, you’re super fast. Awesome.
But if you’re one of those kinds of people that’s trying to lose weight, or you have a lot of GI issues or you know, you’re you’re just not feeling it, you can’t go as far as you used to be able to go or you want to try to, you know, complete this ultra run and you just can’t do it like, you know, cut it out and see what happens. You know, let’s, let’s stick with the path.
Okay, so experiment. See what works for you. There’s only one way to find out and that’s to try it, see what happens and then let me know. So join us over in the Facebook group, the Running Lean community on Facebook, and then remember, our next masterclass begins in just a couple of weeks, you’re going to learn exactly how to become a fat adapted runner in just six weeks time, you’ll lose weight, you’ll run faster, you’ll become a stronger runner, you’ll become bonk proof, you’d be able to run those long distances without ever having to worry about taking all this sugar or about bonking.
So to find out more about that just go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass. Well, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
Sugar has been the subject of controversy since as far back as over 2,000 years ago when Hindu physicians wrote about sugar that it “promotes nutrition and corpulency” (meaning fatness or …
Continue Reading about 28. Is Sugar Addictive or Do We Just Act Like It Is? →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is the Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 28 of the running mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about whether or not sugar is addictive, or do we just act like it is? Sugar has been the subject of controversy since as far back as over 2000 years ago, there was a Hindu physician who wrote in I think it was like 78 AD.
And he wrote this, “Sugar promotes nutrition and corpulent c.” which is just an Old World word that means fatness or obesity. So he wrote that, “Sugar promotes nutrition and fatness, basically.” So we’ve known about this issue for quite some time now. Today, I think we all can agree that eating sugar, especially too much sugar, is bad idea.
Yet, the average American is consuming around 150 pounds of sugar a year, it’s crazy, we find it almost impossible to just say no to our favorite sugary treat. Willpower just doesn’t work here, it seems. So the question on the table is, is sugar addictive? Should sugar be treated more like a drug than a nutrient? Do we even need to eat sugar? I’m going to get into all of this, in this episode of the podcast is chock full of goodness here.
Which is a good transition into talking about our July no sugar challenge in the Facebook group. So if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It’s a group of like minded runners and people who want to get lean and become lean running machines. And it kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast.
And for the whole month of July. I’m doing some extensive training around the topic of sugar. Not eating sugar, the benefits of not eating sugar. And in the group, we are doing this together. So we’re on like day eight or nine right now. The day this comes out, I think we’ll be on like day 10 of no sugar.
But in the group, I’m doing some weekly trainings and answering questions like how many carbs should I be eating? I’m feeling lightheaded, I’m feeling a little lethargic. What do I do about that? How do I fix that? How many beers can I have a day? Very important questions we’re talking about in the group.
But anyway, the best part of this group is that it’s fun. It’s the community aspect of it. It’s supportive. It’s encouraging. In fact, here’s a recent comment from one of the members in the group, Leslie, and she says, “I need to thank you for this group and your podcasts. When I first heard about the challenge, I thought to myself that I could never do it. But I followed all of your posts and podcasts and I’ve done really well this week. I’ve had some crabby moments, but I’m down four pounds, which is extremely motivating. Now, I know I can do this for the entire month and more. Thank you for all your guidance and support.”
Leslie, thank you. Thanks for doing the work. I’m just here as your guide. You’re doing the work. Leslie you are kicking butt and a bunch of other people like Leslie are kicking butt to several people are posting that they’ve lost four or five pounds in the first week alone. So many amazing, amazing fun stories. So many strong courageous people in this group. Definitely come check it out. Just go on Facebook and search for the Running Lean community.
And it’s not too late. We’ve just started we’re only you know, eight or 10 days into this okay. Honestly, you can quit eating sugar anytime you want. Why not just do it now and do it with some friends to wisdom support. It’s awesome.
Okay, so the question on the table is sugar addictive? Or do we just act like it is? So I want to go back and give you a little bit of history about sugar and how this kind of all started okay, I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about this but there’s a couple of things that are kind of important.
So you know sugar came mainly from the tropic regions. And it started to make its impact in the world and back in the 16th century. And these tropic regions were producing what are kind of known as the drug foods. So these are foods like coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, rum, which is just fermented sugar cane juice. And then, of course, sugar itself.
And many European empires were built upon these drug foods, you know, they used the trade of chocolate and tea and rum and tobacco, and sugar, to build empires. All of these foods have something in common, they are all considered powerful psychoactive substances. And most of them are considered somewhat addictive. Carbs, coffee, tea, chocolate, and tobacco were unique.
And that they became even more desirable and more powerful with the introduction of sugar or with the addition of sugar, so people would sweeten their tea with sugar. And this became the way that Europeans love drinking their tea. Same with coffee. Chocolate was one of those things that wasn’t really sweetened at first, but then when you, you know, throw some sugar in there, and you know, tamp down the bitterness with some milk, oh my gosh, it became wildly popular.
And so sugar consumption then increased throughout the colonized world as well. So anywhere where you found these items, your sugar was right there with them. Okay, so sugar just was like, boom, it just exploded in the world. And I want to talk a little bit about tobacco in particular, because there’s something that most people don’t know about tobacco.
So when you cure tobacco leaves, the way that they normally do it is they use a process that’s called flue curing. And what they do is they hang up the tobacco leaves in these hot barns. And they control the heat inside the barn by a fire that’s, it’s not inside the barn.
It’s actually outside, but they have like a flue that runs through the barn so they can control the temperature inside the barn. And what happens is the leaves dry out, they go from green to yellow to kind of brownish. And during this process, the leaves actually release some of their natural sugars. So they kind of turn some of their starches into sugars, like all most plants do.
Interestingly, when you cure tobacco in this way, the sugar in the tobacco actually makes it easier to inhale the smoke. Because if you wouldn’t, if you didn’t have the sugar in this in the tobacco, that sugar content, it makes it a lot harder to inhale so you can’t inhale as deeply. Cigars and pipes typically, were not cured. The tobacco wasn’t cured in the same way and so they weren’t as easy to inhale the tobacco in pipes and cigars.
But then they started doing something really ingenious. They started soaking the leaves in a sugar solution, or they called it a sauce. They called it saucing the tobacco. And so they would soak the leaves in this sugar. And then after they were cured, they would absorb all this extra sugar. And this is like back in in the early 1900s.
And then like around 1913 RJ Reynolds they came out with a Camel cigarette. So it was like the first commercially successful sugar sauced tobacco blend and it was a big hit. Right? It’s like the most popular cigarette out there. People couldn’t get enough of the Camel cigarette. And mostly it was because of the sugar.
Also when you burn sugar caramelizes and it actually produces a nice sweet flavor. I know for me as when I was a sugar addict. One of my favorite things was carmelized, like that burnt sugar like when you burn sugar just enough Oh my god. It’s like the most amazing thing in the world for me.
So this sweeter flavor made the tobacco even more pleasing. And they actually noted, the cigarette industry, noted that this more pleasing, sweeter flavor appeals more to women and adolescents. I know it’s crazy, right? But they were actually marketing their products to the you know, they wanted more adolescents and more women smoking so they added more sugar to make it more appealing.
And they actually used this soft tobacco in chewing tobacco as well and all that. So here’s what happens. You add all this sugar to cigarettes, cigarettes become even easier to inhale. Have you ever smoked cigarettes? I smoked cigarettes. And it’s so very easy to inhale smoke from cigarettes.
I also have smoked cigars. And I’ll tell you what, you cannot inhale cigar smoke. It will, it hurts, it makes you start coughing, it’s just it’s terrible experience but cigarettes are nice and smooth, right? It’s because of the sugar. So it makes it super easy to inhale super deeply, which means that more nicotine is getting delivered to your system.
So you get this more potent dose of the drug, the nicotine drug, you get this bigger rush. The problem with that is that the rush, you know is very temporary. So it makes you go back for more so you get this huge rush. And then you come down off of that and you need more. So you go back and smoke another cigarette and it’s insidious the way this works. It’s not the same with like cigars and pipes, like people don’t have the same sort of, they’re not as addictive because you’re not inhaling as deeply. Okay, it’s all thanks to sugar. Good job, guys.
Okay, so that’s kind of like one of the areas of study that’s, to me, it’s just really fascinating, and how we’ve kind of, you know, treated sugar as a drug or how it is, affects us as a drug. Also, as children, we have conditioned our children to see sugar as something really special. We use sugar as a reward for our kids, okay, if you get good grades, or if you have good behavior, you’ll get to eat some sugar, we’ll give you this candy bar.
Or if you eat all your dinner, you can now have some dessert, something sweet. Which never really made sense to me at all. It still doesn’t make sense. But we all know that sugar is, you know, we shouldn’t be eating a lot of it. So we ration sugar to our children, right? So we teach our kids at an early age that there’s something very special about sugar. It’s very special, you can’t eat too much of it. And this is weird, right? It’s like it’s unlike any other food. We don’t ration you know, carrots or Brussels sprouts, or anything else, or cheese or eggs to our kids.
But we ration sugar, why do we need to ration sugar to our children? Because we know it’s not good for them. And we know that there’s something about it that causes this craving, which I’m gonna get into in a minute with cravings and stuff.
But as adults, you know, as we grow up, we start to condition ourselves that sugar is somewhat synonymous with love. You know, we celebrate special occasions with sugar. We celebrate holidays with sugar everywhere, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, even funerals, there’s all kinds of sugar there.
And anytime we go on vacation, you know, if we’re eating sugar, it means we’re having fun. You know, it means we were happy. You know, if there’s sugar around we know we’re having a good time. Feels good. We’re happy, right? We even use sugar as affectionate nicknames for our loved ones we call them sweetie. And sweetie pie and honey and sweetheart. Even just hey, sugar.
You know, so our whole lives we’ve been conditioned to believe that sugar equals love and who doesn’t want to be loved, you know, who doesn’t want to love and be loved? So we have this fondness and this affection for sugar. That’s unlike any other nutrient, any other food out there. Why is this? Why Why? Why this fixation on sugar?
Well, one reason is because sugar makes us feel good. It feels good to eat sugar. So when we eat sugar it affects these reward centers of our brain. You know we eat some sugar, and it stimulates the release of this neurotransmitter called dopamine and dopamine makes us feel good. It lights up the same place in the brain that alcohol and nicotine cocaine, even heroin light up. Here’s an interesting thing though.
Powerful psychoactive drugs like cocaine and heroin, they only stimulate and light up like this one spot in the brain and sugar lights up that same spot to one reward center. But sugar, unlike those other ones, lights up areas all over the brain, one doctor said, it lights up the brain like a pinball machine. That’s sugar, that’s the difference.
So it makes us feel good, lights up all these receptors in our brain, it turns on our brain, we feel good. And we want more of it. And the more refined the drug, the bigger the hit of dopamine it so when you refine something, you increase the surface area for the drug to have an effect.
For example, chewing on coca leaves will give you a mild, it’s a mild stimulant, versus grinding those up into powder, like for powdered cocaine is a very powerful stimulant, versus then taking that and smoking it in like crack cocaine, which is an even more intense experience.
It’s very similar with sugar, so you could like chew on sugar cane, which people used to do back in the day. And sugar cane is just like it’s a big grass, you know, it’s part of the grass family. So you could chew on sugar cane, you’d get, you know, a little bit of a hit of dopamine or whatever.
But then you refine that sugar into crystals or even a fine powder. And you increase the surface area, and you increase the amount of dopamine that gets released and you increase the pleasure of the substance. And then what happens is just like other drugs, like alcohol or heroin, the more you do, the less dopamine gets released.
So dopamine actually down regulates when you continually drink alcohol or do cocaine or eat sugar. So the more you have, the more of the substance you eat, or ingest, or smoke or shoot or whatever. The more at first, the more dopamine gets released, but then dopamine starts down regulate and you become what they call like dopamine resistant.
And drug addicts and alcoholics know this very well, it takes more and more of the drug to get the same rush. And so we end up eating a lot more sugar to get the same sort of feeling the same experience that we used to get, so it takes more sugar to feel good.
And we all know, and I’ve talked about this extensively how, you know, eating sugar, you know, creates glucose, excess glucose in our system, which, you know, makes us produce more insulin, which is the fat storage hormone. And that’s why we get fat because we’re eating sugar, and our insulin is always high.
And the same thing kind of the same thing happens with insulin. So as our body’s producing insulin all the time, our bodies become insulin resistant, meaning that we can’t produce enough insulin to bring our blood sugar down. So our blood sugar continues to go high. And so more and more insulin keeps getting produced, but it’s not doing anything.
And so we’re just in this massive cycle of storing fat, and we just become fatter and fatter and more obese. And we get diabetes and all kinds of things. Very similar to the dopamine resistance in our bodies that happens with consuming sugar or other drugs over long periods of time.
And they’ve even found, they’ve done these studies on rats that show that rats actually prefer sugar over other drugs. They prefer sugar over cocaine. So they did these experiments and these poor rats, I gotta tell you, you know, what did we ever do? What did they ever do to us? We’re so we do all these terrible experiments on rats.
But anyway, that’s another episode altogether. Anyway, so they do these studies on rats, where they got them addicted to cocaine for like, several months, okay, that’s why I’m saying poor rats. They get them addicted to cocaine for several months.
And then they’re like, hey, try this sugar and they give them like sugar water. And within two days, the rats switch over from preferring the cocaine to their sugar water. They like prefer sugar within two days of being completely addicted to this very powerful psychoactive drug cocaine.
Rats also preferred Oreos. Apparently, rats preferred Oreos over cocaine and morphine by what they call “a significant margin”. Okay, so they gave him like they got these addicted cocaine addicted rats. And they’re like, hey, what about Oreos? What do you think about these? And they’re like, heck yeah. Bring on the Oreos.
I want more of that cocaine. No, no morphine, not interested. But Oreos? Heck, yes. Give me more of those. So for rats anyway, I know we’re not rats. But just for rats anyway, sugar is more pleasurable than these powerful psychoactive, highly addictive drugs. And some studies suggest that sugar is actually around eight times more addictive than some of these drugs like cocaine, eight times more addictive. Which is crazy.
Now that that number may be high, let’s just say it’s, it’s five times more addictive, or four, or three or twice, or even the same. Oh, my God, that’s still too much. It’s crazy. So when it comes to addiction, I have some extensive knowledge in this area. I’ve been sober for 13 years, I was addicted to alcohol, I had a problem with drinking.
I have extensive knowledge of this disease, the disease of alcoholism, and this world of addiction and recovery. And there are some glaring similarities between sugar and alcohol, and the effects that they have on our brains and our bodies.
So some of the traits of alcohol addiction are that it is something that you crave all the time. It’s something that you can never get enough of. And for me, like when I was drinking, I was obsessed about it. I was thinking about it all the time. If I wasn’t drinking, I was thinking about drinking.
And I knew it was bad for me, but I kept drinking anyway, I knew it was having negative consequences on me physically and in my life. I knew that drinking alcohol was slowly killing me. But I didn’t care. The feeling that I got from the alcohol from being drunk was more important than my health.
And it got to this point where this is not a good place to be where I couldn’t, I couldn’t drink anymore. I couldn’t not drink. I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live without it. And sugar is incredibly similar. You know, not too long ago, just a few months ago, I would tell myself, I gotta stop eating sugar. But I was thinking about it all the time.
You know, I was going through a divorce. And you know, we started with this whole COVID thing. And, you know, there’s a lot going on, and I was you know, having a hard time getting through the day. But I was always thinking like, okay, at the end of the day, I’m going to eat my Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, because this that was my go to Ben Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, or anything with caramel in it is just amazing.
And when I think about it all day, like I just got to make it through the day so I can get to the ice cream. And, but I would tell myself, like I got to stop doing this, I’m gaining all this weight, I’m having all these negative consequences. I know it’s bad for me, but I am doing it anyway. It’s having negative consequences on me mentally and emotionally and physically.
I’m gaining a lot of weight, I’ve gained a lot of weight, put on like 40 pounds. And I would find myself at the grocery store, you know, doing my shopping and like I’m not buying any ice cream and then I’d go down that aisle and I just throw three or four pints of Ben and Jerry’s into the cart without even like thinking about it was like uh, it was like a subconscious habit almost.
But like, there was almost like a screw it attitude. Like, you know what, I know, this is bad for me, but I don’t care. The feeling I’m gonna get from this is more important than, you know, the fact that I’m gaining all this weight. I don’t care about that. You know, the promise of the sugar high was more powerful than any willpower that I had.
And I got to this place, just like with alcohol where I was like, I gotta stop doing this. I can’t. I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live without it. So similar. It’s eerie. And both alcohol and sugar. They’re hard to quit, man. I’ll tell you what is hard. Do come to the place where you’re like, I gotta stop doing this. You know, they both have withdrawal symptoms. You know, with alcohol, it’s it can be pretty intense. You know, your body goes through some, some crazy, crazy stuff.
It depends on how much you’re drinking a day. But that can be you, some people need hospitalization to get through alcohol withdrawal. And the sugar withdrawal can be bad too. You know, with sugar withdrawal, you’re going to experience headaches, lightheadedness, nausea, lethargy, just massive lack of energy, which is really troublesome.
As runners, it can be really hard those first few weeks, you can just be just feeling like you just have no energy and running is so hard your legs just feel like you’re you’ve got cinder blocks attached to them. And that’s all part of the, you know, withdrawal from sugar.
And the Alcoholics Anonymous has this book, it’s their Bible, it’s called The Big Book. And they even suggested there to use sugar and sugary foods like candy and chocolate, to help soothe the cravings for alcohol to help people wean themselves off of alcohol. And it kind of helps ease the severity of the withdrawal symptoms for alcoholics. Which, you know, it does help with that. But then there’s people that like start getting addicted to sugar when they get sober, because they eat all this chocolate, I’m not drinking alcohol, but then they eat all this candy and chocolate and stuff like that.
And again, a bunch of weight, but they use sugar as a way of like, increasing the dopamine that they’re getting. So they continue to kind of feel good, without the super negative consequences of you know, of alcohol. And then, you know, both sugar and alcohol, they’re both socially acceptable to do in public, and they’re perfectly legal, right?
Unlike cocaine, or heroin, which you know, those drugs are bad. We all know that those drugs are bad. But sugar or alcohol, no big deal. I mean, you’re kind of considered weird. If you go to a party and you don’t drink or you don’t eat cake. Right? I mean, you’re almost like an outcast.
When I stopped drinking, I had people telling me like, why not just have a drink? It’s no big deal. I’m like, no, you don’t understand I got, I can’t do this. Can’t do this at all. And it’s kind of like with sugar, too. There’s a lot of peer pressure. People are like, well, I made this cake. You really have to, you have to eat some.
It’s like no, I don’t, back off. So do we even need sugar? Do we even need to eat sugar? The answer to that is no, we don’t, we don’t need to eat sugar. As humans, we don’t need it, we only need to consume two nutrients. We only need to consume two things that our bodies don’t naturally produce.
Our bodies are really amazing. They produce all these natural nutrients that we need to live very healthy lives. But there’s two things that we have to eat, we have to get our essential amino acids from externally, we don’t produce those ourselves. So we need to eat those. And we get all those from eating protein. And we also need to eat fat.
Because our body does not create essential fatty acids, we have to eat fat in order to get those. So those are the only two things amino acids and fatty acids, so fat and protein. If you don’t eat any fat, or you don’t eat any protein, you will die. But if you don’t ever eat sugar or carbohydrates, again, you’re going to be fine.
And actually your liver produces all the glucose you need because you do need glucose sugar in your system, your brain needs a certain amount of glucose, and your liver produces all the glucose that you need. So you don’t have to worry about it. Your body is fine. producing its own glucose even as an endurance athlete, even as a runner. So this is fascinating. You’re gonna like this part.
How does this all apply to running and runners? So they did this study called the faster study and the title of the study is this metabolic characteristics of keto adapted ultra endurance athletes. And so what they did was they took 20 elite, ultra endurance athletes, so marathoners, ultra marathoners, Ironman Distance triathletes, and they divided them up into two groups. One was a traditional group eating a high carbohydrate diet, right? Pretty traditional ultra athletes. The other group, so there’s 10 athletes in each group, the other group were on a low carbohydrate high fat diet, and they had become fat-adapted.
And one ofthe runners that was in this fat-adapted group was Zach Bitter, and Zach Bitter is a badass. Zach Bitter holds a world record for the 100 mile run, which he did on track. And he ran 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes. And he also holds the world record for the 12 hour run where he ran 104.8 miles. And just to give you an idea of what that looks like, 100 miles at 11 hours and 19 minutes is his pace was 6:47 for 100 miles.
Now Zach Bitter follows a low carbohydrate, high fat diet. And he is a fat adapted runner, meaning that he uses mostly his own body fat as fuel. Okay, so they had these two groups of athletes, I just wanted to give you that heads up, like he’s an amazing dude. And he was in this study, I think that’s really cool.
So they had these two groups, one eating the traditional low carbohydrate, high fat diet, so they had already become fat adapted, and then the traditional high carb group, okay. And they had them both perform the same intensity, I think it was like a 180 minute run on a treadmill. And they’re measuring all this stuff.
And, and all these people, like have similar pedigrees, you know, they have similar experiences, and they’re ranked and they do similar, you know, types of events like they’re very, very similar. Anyway, at the end of the day, they found basically no differences in glycogen utilization, storage, or repletion, between the two groups.
So the high carb group, and the low carb group looked basically the same. When it came to the amount of glycogen their muscles were using, it was available to their muscles before, during and after exercise. One group’s eating a ton of sugar and carbs, the other is virtually eating, no sugar, and no carbs. So to me, that’s really fascinating.
And it’s just, you know, further proof that you can be an incredible, incredible endurance athlete, and not have to eat sugar at all. I’m going to link to this study in the show notes notes for this episode, which you can find at therunningmindpocast.com/28.
Because it is fascinating, it is really, really interesting. And if you want to geek out on a ton of science, it’s all there for you. And I read through it, and it’s oh my gosh, it’s really, really cool. But basically, your body will produce all the glycogen you need.
So you don’t need to eat sugar, we just don’t need to eat it. And when you use your own fat for fuel, you’re gonna get more energy. So you get four calories of energy from glucose, nine calories of energy from fat, so you get basically more than twice the energy from fat than you do from glycogen.
And you can only store so much sugar in your body when you’re running. But you’ll basically never run out of fat for fuel because, hey, runners, on the whole, we carry around too much body fat. And I think it’s because we consume way too much sugar, way too many carbohydrates.
And runners rely on sugar and carbs for fuel. So we can never get enough. So we need more and more and more. But there’s so many benefits of becoming a fat-adapted athlete, and that’s, you know, the big picture, but I’m trying to teach here. But are runners addicted to sugar? I think it’s highly, highly possible. I think it’s worth somebody looking into, I would love to see some studies on this, but I hear about it all the time from my runners. I mean I hear it every day, people talk about how they need to get off the sugar addiction. It’s crazy. So is sugar an addictive substance? Or do we just act like it is?
There’s a journalist and historian Charles Seaman. And he posited this question he wondered whether sugar is actually an addictive substance or if people just act like it is. And my thing is like if everyone’s acting like it is and the evidence is pretty clear. The answer to that question becomes pretty clear as well.
And you know, scientists have concluded that sugar is both a nutrient and a carbohydrate and a psychoactive substance with addictive characteristics. At the end of the day, you got to make the choice. Do you want to continue to eat sugar or not? It’s up to you. And don’t look to the food industry to like help you make this decision because they’re going to fight against this idea that sugar is addictive with everything that they’ve got.
And of course, the reason is that there is sugar in everything. And if you haven’t listened to the last podcast, you got to listen to that one for sure. It’s called there’s sugar in everything. So don’t think you’re gonna start seeing health warnings on foods that contain sugar anytime soon.
Now, like you see on packs of cigarettes, because calling sugar evil or saying sugar is bad for you is the equivalent of like stealing Christmas, you know, and taking all the love out of your life. So don’t wait for the government to issue warnings on labels, just quit, just stop eating sugar, you can do it.
And if you’re ready to stop now, if you’re ready to become a fat-adapted runner, come join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, the sugar, the no sugar challenge is on member we’re just about 10 days into it. So come join us. Grab a few friends to do it with you. It’s really fun. We’re having a good time.
Lots of interesting questions and answers in the group. Just go to Facebook and search for the Running Lean community and join us. So that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
I think we can all agree that sugar is not good for us. And yet, there seems to be sugar hidden in just about everything we eat! And I’m not talking about the sugary cereals or the soft drinks - we …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 27 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about sugar. In fact, there’s sugar in everything. And I think we can all agree that sugar is not good for us, right? And yet, there seems to be sugar hidden in just about everything we eat.
And I’m not talking about the sugary cereals and the soft drinks, because we all know about that stuff. We all know there’s sugar added to all that right. The real problem, I think, is all the sugar hidden and foods that normally we wouldn’t think would have added sugar. From crackers to coffee drinks, pasta sauce to peanut butter, salad dressing, and salsa, you can find sugar virtually everywhere you look.
So why is this? Why do they have to add sugar to everything? And why is this such a big problem? In this episode, I’ll be answering all of those questions, and offer a few tips on how to avoid all that added sugar in your life. So this whole month we’re going to be talking about sugar is like sugar month, okay, or maybe we should call no sugar month.
But over the next few episodes, I’m going to be talking about the addictive nature of sugar, how to make the switch from sugar to fat as fuel for running, which is amazing, by the way, how you can possibly have a life without sugar like, oh, we’re gonna answer that question. A lot of people are like, how can I live my life without all the sugar?
So we just started the July, no sugar challenge over in the Facebook group. So the Facebook group is the Running Lean community on Facebook. And if you haven’t already checked it out, go to Facebook, just search for Running Lean community. And click the button that says join, ask to join, or whatever. It says join the group.
And then you can join us for the no sugar challenge if this is something that you’re interested in. So for the whole month of July, we’re kind of doing some extensive training on the topic around sugar, how to give up sugar, how to eat less of it. I’m answering questions like what am I supposed to eat now that I’m not eating blank, questions about fruit, about grains, and about alcohol. So we’re answering all those questions.
The best part is the community aspect of it. So when you do something like this, like when you take on a challenge, like stopping eating sugar, it is challenging, but it’s more fun and more supportive, and a lot easier to do with an encouraging group of people to do it with you. So when we’re all doing it together, we all support each other, it’s a lot easier.
In fact, here’s a comment from Tammy in the group. She said, “It feels great to have support and doing this with a group that makes me feel like this time I can make cutting sugar happen, which has felt like an impossible feat in the past. I’m thankful to have connected with Patrick and his group, we’ve got this.” Absolutely, Tammy.
And by the way, she’s a little bundle of positive energy. And I love that. But there’s lots of amazing people, just like Tammy in the group. So come check it out. So if you’re ready to get off the sugar wagon, and actually by the end of this episode you might be. Please join us in the Facebook group.
Remember, just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community. And it’s not too late, you haven’t missed anything we’ve just started. It’s the beginning of the month. So jump in, you can jump in any time seriously and join us and you’ll get a lot of great information. Okay. So we’ll see you over there in the Facebook group.
Okay, so today’s topic is all around how there’s sugar in everything. And I want to just kind of lay out why this is a problem. So what’s the problem with sugar? Like why are we so concerned about sugar? So here’s a few things that you might know already but I’m just going to go over kind of some of the issues around sugar.
Okay, so the way sugar works in our body is that sugar raises our blood, our blood sugar, okay, so anytime you eat sugar that gets turned into glucose on our body which raises As our blood sugar, and then insulin gets produced to bring the blood sugar down, anytime insulin goes up in our body, we start storing fat. So when insulin is consistently high, in our body, when our insulin levels are always really high, we are always storing fat, we can’t burn fat. Okay?
That is, that’s the biggest problem right there. In order to burn fat, or I’m sorry, in order to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And you can’t do that when insulin is high. So basically, if you want to lose weight, you got to stop eating sugar. It’s very hard to lose weight when you’re eating sugar in all its forms and I’m talking about, you know, sugar, fruit added sugar.
You know, a lot of fruits that are really high in sugar, and a lot of grains that turn into sugar and starchy vegetables, like white potatoes, or rice, those kinds of things will get turned into glucose and spike your blood sugar quite a bit. And so when that happens, you’re going to produce a lot of insulin. And you’re going to be in that fat storage mode.
And it’s really hard to get out of that, while you keep eating those kinds of foods. And here’s the thing. Obesity is up in this country over 30% in the last 30 or 40 years, like since the early 80s. And a lot of that has to do with how much sugar we’re consuming. Type Two Diabetes is up. High blood pressure, obesity, excess body fat around the waist, heart disease, stroke, even cancer.
In fact, according to the World Health Organization, as much as a 40% of cancer is diet related. 40% of cancer is related to diet. So, all of these things are kind of tied back to consuming sugar. Okay, so other side effects of eating sugar, other negative consequences of eating sugar. So when you consume sugar, your appetite actually increases.
You know, it releases these chemicals into your body, it produces certain hormones that block certain hormones, but it increases your appetite and you feel hungry all the time. And you never really quite feel full. Your body doesn’t really process sugar calories the same way it does, you know fat calories for instance, or protein.
So you feel full or you never feel full, you feel hungry all the time. And you end up craving more sugar. So you have this like sugar rush where you feel some energy but then you kind of crash from that you’ve all experienced this. I’m sure a lot of people do this in the afternoon, they’ll have lunch maybe you know some kappa Frappuccino, whatever they call it at Starbucks, you know, with all the, you know, sugar and the whipped cream and the caramel sauce and everything.
I mean, it’s amazing in the caffeine and it gives you this amazing rush but then you’re going to like crash hard after that you need a nap. I used to do that. So I’d be like, oh my I need to take a nap now. So and what happens is when you crash like that, the only thing it’s gonna bring you back up is what? Yeah, eat more sugar, because then you’ll have more energy again, right?
So anyway, you get these sugar cravings, these very powerful, uncontrollable cravings for more sugar. There’s mood swings that happen, you know that you can get very irritable from eating a lot of sugar. There’s lethargy, you know, you just feel a lack of motivation. And people say they feel more of a lack of motivation to exercise when they’re eating a lot of sugar.
And which actually kind of compounds the whole issue, right? So there’s all these negative side effects and all these negative consequences of eating sugar. And these should alone like what I just mentioned, should be enough for you to just say like, okay, maybe I should probably just stop eating sugar altogether, pretty much right?
But as a runner here, here’s a couple things I want to mention that really directly have to do with us as runners. So in general, runners carry around too much body fat. And the reason for this is that runners, most runners, are pretty much addicted to carbs and sugar. So, I mean, we rely on this for fuel. I’ve done it for years, you know, I just carved up all the time. Tons and tons of carbs, tons and tons of sugar.
The issue though is that that puts you into fat storage mode. And you’ll actually gain weight as a runner. And you think running is going to be the cure all for that and like counterbalance it, but it really doesn’t work. Because when you run a lot, you increase your appetite. When you run a lot and you increase your appetite, you tend to overcompensate by eating way more calories than you would had you had not been running all the time. So that actually kind of works against you.
And because we’re so addicted to carbs, we know we’re relying on this for fuel, especially if we’re doing any kind of long distance running, right? And when we do that, we have to have the carbs and we have to have the sugar all the time. And we can’t do a five mile run without a couple of energy gels, we can’t do a 15 mile run without a whole bunch of you know, energy gels and sports drinks and all this stuff, right.
And this causes a lot of GI issues for people I know a lot of people have a really hard time ingesting all these carbs, but they kind of forced themselves to do it, which causes a lot of GI distress call causes a lot of difficulty running actually, it’s kind of counterproductive for you actually, you tend to hit the wall faster, when you’re doing all these carbs, you kind of get burned out faster.
And so you can only burn so much sugar, so you only have so much sugar in your system that you can use for fuel at a time for a couple of hours, maybe at most, and then you have to keep resupplying that sugar. And when you do this, you’re constantly filling your belly with something that your body has to digest and something that you have to process.
And so all the blood and all the energy that you would want to be in your muscles and your legs, is being used to digest all this sugar, basically. So the alternative, though, is that you can use fat for fuel, all that body fat we have carrying around with us, you can run for days and days on your own body fat, okay, you don’t need to kind of replenish it the way you do sugar. You can run easier and farther when you become fat-adapted.
And so you can use your own body fat as fuel. And you know, one of the things that’s kind of cool about this is when you can get to the point where you become fat adapted and you are accessing your own body fat for fuel. Fat is a better fuel source than sugar. It’s not as easily accessible.
And that’s why you’ve got to get all the sugar out of your system first in order for your body to start using the fat because it’s not used to using fat as fuel. Especially if you’re carrying around a little extra weight. If you’re 20, 30, 50 pounds overweight, your body is definitely not used to burning fat.
And so in order to access that fat, we got to get all the sugar out of our system first. But granted, yeah, a gram of sugar can produce four calories of energy. Whereas a gram of fat can produce nine calories of energy. Now what’s awesome about that is that you’re gonna get basically twice as much fuel from fat than you would from sugar.
And you have hundreds of thousands of calories of fat just hanging around on your body. Even if you’re a pretty lean runner, you have so much fuel on board that you really don’t need to even like bring fuel with you on long runs I’ve done.
I did a 50K a couple of years ago, I did a couple of 50Ks, where I just brought some almond butter as fuel, so just some fat little protein and was doing some electrolyte drinks. So you definitely want to keep your salt and your electrolytes in. But you don’t need all this sugar and stuff. And I gotta tell you, those were a couple of the best really long runs I’ve ever done. I just felt amazing the whole time. Tons of energy.
I mean, it’s still hard, you know, running 30 miles is still hard, but it was way easier than the ones I did when I was sucking down all the energy gels and stuff like that. Okay. So those are some reasons why as runners, we might want to consider just getting rid of the sugar and becoming fat adapted.
Okay, so just think about that as I’m going through some of the stuff we’re talking about here and sugar, you know, and I get it the hard part is when we say like stop eating sugar in his runners. We’re like, nope, not doing that. It’s too hard. It’s too hard to give up. I love it. I love my sugar, and I get it 100%. I was a huge sugar addict completely addicted to sugar, grew up on carbs. And I’ve, I’ve changed my habits. And you can do it too.
But we’ve like been conditioned to love sugar, we’ve been conditioned to crave sugar. And that conditioning, it all kind of started back in the late 70s, early 80s, with the whole low fat diet craze, you know, they decided that fat was bad. And we needed to start eating a low fat diet, which is weird because we had survived as a human beings for a couple thousand years, just fine eating lots of saturated fat and animal products and butter, you know, and meat, and, you know, lard and then all of a sudden they’re like, nope, this does not good for us.
And it’s like, huh, nobody really questioned it. And the science they had to back it up was marginal. There was very, it was, it wasn’t really good science. Alright, we know that now we know that the science was not good. We believed it. I mean, we’re doing the best we could with what we had available to us. But now we know that science was not very good.
And we know better now. So anyway, they were like stop eating fat. You know, start making foods lower and fat. And everybody’s like, cool. Well, we’ll get on board with the no fat thing. We’ll make everything low fat or no fat or nonfat. But what do we use instead? Because when we take all the fat out, the food doesn’t taste good anymore.
And the USDA was like sugar, just put sugar into sugars, fine, sugar’s not a problem, just start using that. And so the food industry was like, Cool, man, we can put sugar in everything. And so they started putting food in all kinds of herbs, starting putting sugar in all kinds of food to make it taste better. You remove the fat, the food tastes terrible. So they just started putting sugar in everything.
So they would start putting sugar in things like pasta sauce, and yogurt, and crackers, and granola and like healthy cereals, oatmeal and salsa and potato chips and processed meats and cheeses, juice, salad dressings, non dairy, milk, bread, all these things they started adding sugar to they never had put sugar in bread.
You know, prior to this vitamin water, hey, lots of sugar in their iced tea, beef jerky, sports drinks, energy bars, protein powder, even vitamins themselves are loaded with sugar. And these are all products that we normally wouldn’t assume would have any kind of added sugar. You know, we know about cookies, we know about ice cream, we know about the sugary cereals. But when it comes to like bread or crackers or yogurt, we think we’re eating something healthy.
And we’re not, a lot of times we’re not. And they hide the sugar because they know, you know, over the last 10-20 years, things have started to shift a little bit. Food labeling laws have changed. They have to list added sugar. And they have to list the ingredients. And then if you notice something they put the ingredients in the order of like how much of a certain substances in things. So if you look at a thing of salad dressing, let’s say let’s say it’s like olive oil based or something like that, which they really don’t make much olive oil based salad dressing, which is a crime, I’d pay for that. But they don’t. They use these cheap seed oils that are just toxic for us. Anyway, different topic. That’s a topic for another day.
But the labels have to list the ingredients and kind of the order. So if you had a salad dressing those olive oil based the first ingredient basically should be olive oil, right? And then they go from, you know, the most prominent to the least prominent. Well, sugar is very prominent in a lot of foods, but they don’t want you to know that.
So what they do is they call sugar, a bunch of different names and they listed in there six or seven times. So it kind of confuses us as to how much sugar is actually in a product. So instead of listing just sugar one time at the very beginning, and we would all look at that and go oh my gosh, there’s a lot of sugar in this thing.
They’ll use names like agave nectar, or maltodextrin or fruit juice. Hey, it’s got fruit juice in it sounds healthy, right? It’s just another name for sugar, or dextrose or barley malt. Barley malt, that sounds delicious. That sounds like what is that oatmeal? No, it’s just sugar.
All of these things sound innocent. They don’t they don’t sound anything like they would be sugar but they are. They’re just sugar. There’s actually something like 98 different names for sugar that they include in food labels. So you gotta be you got to know what you’re looking for. Have, you got to be an informed consumer? Okay.
Here’s the crazy thing though, if you went into the grocery store, and you removed all the products that contained added sugar, you’d be left with only around 20% of the products in the grocery store. 20%. So 80% of every food product, everything that you could possibly buy at the grocery store contains added sugar.
And most of it is highly processed, and most of it is hidden. You know, what you’re left with is things like meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, cheese, eggs, some full fat dairy products, like there’s, you know, there’s quite a bit left, but 20% of the store is what you’re left with. That’s crazy.
So here’s a here’s a good example. Like, let’s say you’re, you’re trying to eat healthy, right, and so you sit down, you have a breakfast, you’re like, I’m just gonna have a nice healthy breakfast, I’m gonna have a glass of apple juice and some granola and some fat free yogurt because this is healthy, right?
Well, in that little simple little breakfast that I just mentioned, there’s more than 20 teaspoons of sugar. Now, if I said to you, here, I just put 20 teaspoons of sugar in this glass, just drink this down just like, eat the sugar, you’d be like, no way. No way am I gonna eat that much sugar. But when we sit down with some apple juice and some low fat for yogurt, that’s exactly what we’re doing. If you want to good, if you want a really eye opening look into this, there’s a movie that I would recommend you watch. It’s called That Sugar Film. And you can watch it free on YouTube. Or if you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it there too. But he lays out just how much sugar is hidden in foods at the grocery store. And it is very, very eye opening. You’ll get some good visuals on exactly what I’m talking about here.
Here’s another issue. You know, I talked about the kind of addictive nature of sugar or how we’ve been conditioned to crave sugar. And one of the reasons is that scientists like food scientists over the last few decades have worked really hard to produce the food that creates the biggest desire and the biggest, like, feel good sensations within us that produces the best, like dopamine hit.
So when you eat some sugar, you get a little hit of dopamine, you get a little serotonin release, you know it feels good, right, you get all these chemicals going through your body, much like somebody gets when they do drugs, or drinks alcohol, it’s very similar kind of thing and effects the same area of the brain. So food scientists have created this thing they called the bliss point.
And they work really, really hard to combine the right kinds of ingredients to make our food hyper palatable, and to produce this incredibly unnatural high within us. So they’ve been doing this for decades. And we have consumers who are, you know, now conditioned to want that rush.
We kind of crave it and we kind of need it there’s a psychological addiction and there’s a physical addiction I’m gonna get into more of the addictive nature of of sugar in a in a upcoming episode here, but I just want you to understand that they’re doing this they know that this is a highly addictive substance and they’re kind of doing this on purpose. So it’s a little insidious, if you ask me, it’s a problem.
I was reading a book recently, and there was a quote in this book from a guy named Howard Moscowitz. And he’s an expert on consumer behavior and studies. The way the food industry creates these highly, hyper palatable foods and stuff like that and, and of the, of the science of creating foods. He said that, as he’s said, “If you can find that optimal point in a set of ingredients, you may be well on your way to converting that array of chemicals and physical substrates into a successful product.” Wow, an array of chemicals and physical substrates.
This is the way that the food industry looks at creating these hyper palatable foods for us. Yay. You know, they’ll just look at it as like how can we make this as addictive as possible? This pile of garbage we have here, how can we, like combine these ingredients in such a way that make people crave it like a drug. And they’re very successful at doing this. The food industry is very successful at this.
Okay, so here’s something I really want you to understand. And this is an important point, we actually really don’t need sugar to survive. We, as humans have lived without sugar without eating, you know, pasta sauce with added sugar and yogurt with that, and sugar. And even with a lot of fruit, you know, because the fruit we have today, here’s just so you understand, like, the fruit we have today is so different from the fruit that was available to us a couple thousand years ago, even a couple of hundred years ago, you know.
We’ve genetically modified our fruits, and made them super sweet, like a banana today is not what it was a couple hundred years ago. Apples, watermelon, all these things have been, you know, the sweetness factor has increased a thousand times over the years, you know, so the fruit we’re eating, that we are eating for centuries for millennia, was very different and did not contain the kind of sugar it does today.
But we’ve lived for you know, thousands of years without all this sugar, okay? Our bodies actually produces our own sugar, we produce all the sugar we need in our liver through a process called gluconeogenesis. And this is a process where our liver produces glucose, because we need some glucose to survive, but we don’t need to get it from externally. Okay.
There are some cultures out there that still today they don’t eat sugar at all. They don’t eat carbohydrates at all. They don’t even eat vegetables. You know, there’s like the Maasai tribe in Kenya, who, you know, subsist on mostly high, high fat, raw dairy, like milk and blood, animal blood. And they don’t eat vegetables or carbohydrates.
There’s the Inuit Eskimos that eat nothing but fish and you know, seal meat and blubber. So they survive on protein and fat mostly. And they don’t see vegetables. They don’t eat bread, they don’t eat pasta. You know, they don’t drink frappuccinos from Starbucks or whatever. And they’re fine. They’ve lived for thousands of years like this.
And here’s a couple of facts that I thought kind of blew my mind. So just a few 100 years ago, let’s go back to like, the 1700s. So not even like caveman days, just 1700s you know, Americans were consuming something like four pounds of sugar per year. And that’s naturally occurring sugar and fruits and grains and added sugar as well. Four pounds a year. It’s not bad, right?
Today, though. We as Americans consume over 150 pounds of sugar per year. This is mind blowing. That’s like three pounds of sugar a week. Again, this is total sugar. This includes naturally occurring sugar and fruits and grains and starches and things like that. But a lot of this is added sugar as well.
There’s some we consume something like 66 pounds of added sugar a year, which is a pound and a quarter a week of added sugar. But that is a lot, a lot of sugar. Okay. And here’s something else we have to understand that sugar is sugar, your body kind of treats sugar, all the same, they all raise insulin. They all put you into fat storage mode.
So if you’re if you’re eating grains, if you’re eating starchy vegetables, like you know, white potatoes, if you’re eating sugary fruits like bananas and apples, you know, your body is just like, Oh, they’re sugar and they kind of treat kind of treats that the same way. And I tell people like you know, if you have to choose between eating a chocolate chip cookie, and an apple, I would say, you know, obviously choose the apple, you know, you’re gonna get some good fiber.
There’s a little bit of you know, there’s about a 15-16 grams of sugar in there. And you know, it’ll, it’ll spike your blood sugar a little bit. You’ll get a little bit of an insulin rush and if you’re eating apples all day long, that would be a problem but every now and then, eat an apple. It’s totally fine.
You know, and if you’re one of those people that likes to have oatmeal with bananas, like I used this used to be my favorite morning thing. I used to eat oatmeal and bananas all the time, I loved a huge bowl of oatmeal. I even put some granola on there because granola is all healthy, right? This is all very healthy right? This was causing me a lot of issues, though, like I was just gaining weight, I could not lose the weight, I just couldn’t understand why either. Because sugar is kind of sugar.
And so just know that if you want to do the oatmeal, and bananas, if you want to keep eating all the fruit, it will kind of slow down your weight loss progress. More than likely, it’s gonna put you in a fat storage mode. And you might start gaining weight. And so it’s just something to be careful of, you know, you know, once you get to where you want to be when you get to your goal weight, you can always add in more fruits and some grains and things like that.
But at the beginning, like if you’re trying to get off sugar, just get off sugar, just stop eating it altogether. Okay, so how do you do that? Like, what is the answer here. And this is where I got a really easy tip for you. Are you ready? Here it is.
Eat real food. That’s it. I’m just like, so passionate about eating real food and kind of going back to eating the way our kind of recent ancestors ate. So this is eating just a lot of whole food, with saturated fats with good fatty meats and fish and fresh vegetables, and very little sugar and very little refined grains and not much fruit.
You know, so this is like my main focus of my programs. And the main focus of the work that I do with my clients is teaching them how to just go back to eating real food. One way you can do that is the simple first step is just kind of eliminate the packaged and processed food from your life.
You know, it actually makes your life much easier when you just get rid of all this packaged and processed food, you know, you got to get into a routine and you may have to prep a little bit ahead of time. But once you do this, life becomes easier for you actually.
So just stop buying food in packages. Okay, now I get it, there’s going to be some exceptions to that rule. And I have exceptions to that. I love my riced cauliflower. Because I use this as a substitute for rice, I make pizza crust out of it. It comes in a bag, it’s pre riced, all it contains is one ingredient: cauliflower. But it’s just simple. Like I don’t want to my half my day shredding cauliflower into rice, you know what I mean? But, so there’s, there’s obviously exceptions, you know, I want life to be easy for me for you to, but pretty much stay away from packaged food.
You know, if you do buy packaged food, though, read the labels carefully. Know what you’re looking at, you know, look for the hidden sugar, I’m actually posting a picture that I found that lists all these like 98 different terms for sugars, that would be something helpful for you to check out.
And I’ll put that in the show notes for this episode. So you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/27. Or I’ll post it in the Facebook groups, just join the Facebook group, the Running Lean community. So watch out for all that hidden sugar. So read your labels carefully. And then just shop the perimeter of the grocery store. You know, avoid those aisles with all the packaged foods in them, right just you know shop in the produce section.
Eat tons of edge, you know, shop in the meat and fish department, you know shop in the dairy section, get some real butter, like just go back to eating the way that our grandparents and their grandparents ate. And I guarantee you’re going to start to see a lot of significant changes in your weight in your mood, in your energy levels. And we just got to get off all these refined pseudo foods with all the added sugar in them, okay.
So I’m going to be continuing this conversation in the Facebook group over the Running Lean community on Facebook. Remember, we’re doing the July no sugar challenge we just got started. It’s not too late. Come join us grab a few friends to do it with you. It’s more fun with friends. And let’s do this. Let’s just, let’s stop eating sugar.
And let’s start using our own body fat for fuel. We can survive for days and days and days on our own body fat. And we’ll lose a bunch of weight and we’ll become those lean running machines that we want to want to be right. Awesome. All right, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of my friends and keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
Chris Wissman is co-founder and Director of Fitness Programs at Real Human Performance here in Cincinnati. Chris considers himself more of a holistic health coach than a personal trainer. His …
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Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 26 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today, I have something very special to share with you. It’s an interview I did recently with Chris Wissman.
Chris is one of the cofounders of Real Human Performance here in Cincinnati. And he’s the director of their fitness programs. Chris considers himself more of a holistic health coach than a personal trainer though. And his approach to health and fitness is a lot like mine.
So for him, it’s not just about lifting weights or eating right, there’s so much more going on, there’s so many more things to consider. You know, if you want to get to your ideal body weight, or maintain peak performance as a runner, you have to consider the whole human. And that’s what Chris does.
And I say this is an interview, but it was more just like a fun conversation that he and I have. So we work out together. And he and I have these awesome conversations while we’re working out. And one day, I was like, do we need to record these conversations, I think people would get a lot out of this. So that’s kind of what we’ve got going on here. You’re gonna dig this, promise.
And if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a Facebook group that goes hand in hand with this podcast, we take a deeper dive into these topics. You get to ask questions and get answers totally free. But if you listen to the podcast, you have to come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, and starting July 1.
So that’s coming up very soon here in a matter of days, starting July 1, we are doing a 31 day no sugar challenge for the whole month of July. The challenge is for you to stop eating sugar. Sugar is just so terrible for you. Really is the first step if you want to lose weight. If you want to become a lean running machine, you’ve got to stop eating sugar.
So all during July, we’ll be talking about sugar, you know, all the reasons why you need to get off of sugar. I’m going to be walking you through this step by step. So each week I’ll be offering support, some tips, some q&a sessions, some coaching, I’m going to be talking about it here on the podcast, I’m going to do everything I can to help you make that transition off of sugar, and into becoming a better human and lean running machine.
So grab a few friends to join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, you can just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. And you can find it there but join us for the no sugar challenge. It’s going to be amazing.
Okay, so in the interview, Chris and I talked about a lot of cool stuff. So we talked about what chronic cardio is like the cycle of chronic cardio and what runners need to do to break out of it. We talked about why we should be adding in some more high intensity workouts like sprints, we talked about how running slower (sounds counterintuitive) will actually help you to run faster.
We talked about sure sugar burning versus fat burning, and the benefits of becoming a fat adapted runner. We talked about what happens when you don’t get enough sleep, the importance of managing stress as an athlete. Why you might want to rethink sucking down all those energy gels during a race. Talk about intermittent fasting and the surprising benefits of when you work out in a fasted state.
Why athletes practice periodization and why you should too and a bunch of other stuff. So this is a really, we talk about a lot of stuff in here but it’s a really fun interview. And Chris, he’s just an all around awesome human and a good friend. I think you’re really going to dig this conversation. So here it is.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, today I’m talking with Chris Wissman. Chris is a holistic, functional health coach and movement coach. How’s that, Chris?
Chris Wissman
That sounds perfect, man.
Patrick McGilvray
We were just talking about what do I call you and Chris was like, here’s some words you can use, you know, but what Chris does is he helps people to become the best version of themselves, you know, through functional fitness through coaching. And he does it with a really cool approach, something that I try to, you know, mimic in the way that I coach people, which is taking a holistic approach, like looking at this from a bunch of different angles.
It’s not just about work. Now, it’s not just about lifting weights, it’s not just about eating right, you’ve got to like factor in all these different things. And one of the things that Chris and I are going to talk about today, I hope we get into this, I’m sure we will, is about stress and the amount of stress that we put on our body on a regular basis.
So we as runners are really notoriously bad at resting. And we’re notoriously bad at overworking ourselves, and not listening to our body and not being like aware of, you know, how we’re feeling and then adjusting. We’re just like, hammer on all the time. So I want to talk about that a little bit today. So we got a few things we’re gonna talk about. Chris, how’re you doing today?
Chris Wissman
Good, man. Good. It’s good to be here. I’m really excited and excited to see you back in the gym. And I’m stoked to talk about this stuff as this is the stuff that I I love to research all the time and just keep up with.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and Chris and I work out together. And he’s my coach, you know, when we’re at the gym, and we have these conversations about, you know, about food and stress and running and all this stuff. And, and I’m like, dude, let’s just put this, let’s just record our conversation. So that’s what we’re doing. So cool.
Chris Wissman
Yeah. I love that you mentioned the running and the chronic state of running. And I think you mentioned to me not too long ago that people jump into a running protocol to maybe lose weight, and where that it can help. But if we’re in that kind of chronic state, the black hole training model of just some people refer to it as the stage three training model, the level three, it just becomes like a chronic stressor. And like you’re saying with the stress, and it’s, it becomes really hard to if your goal is to lose weight, it becomes really hard to lose weight. While you’re chronically stressed, the body actually wants to hold weight in that state to survive. And certainly, it gets confused.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I was just talking about this with a client yesterday about what stress does to your body. So what stress does is it releases this hormone called cortisol. And cortisol is a stress hormone. And but when you’re when your body releases cortisol, it like floods, your system with glycogen, you know what I mean?
So glucose levels go up, your insulin levels go up. And we all know that, you know, when insulin is high, you’re in this fat storage mode. So people that are chronically stressed out whether it’s because of their job or their, you know, family situation, or because of what they’re doing to their body, the way they’re running or working out, find it very difficult to lose weight because their body is constantly in that fat storage mode.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, that’s exactly when cortisol is a great thing. It’s a survival mechanism. But we can’t be chronically releasing cortisol, we kind of get, at some point in time, you can’t produce it as well. And that becomes really problematic.
It’s what you were talking about when you discovered Mark Sisson, and probably a long time ago, but recently, when we’re kind of connecting the dots, with Sisson’s approaches, what he does is a lot of sprinting, and then a lot of low level like aerobic state movements. If I’m not mistaken, I’d love to do stuff in quite a long time.
But if I, if I remember correctly, that was his approach, and then maybe strength training first. And that kind of system, which helps people not have to stand up again, and that black hole, right, and that and that. There’s no real intention. I think that’s the underlying factor to all these things.
Like, why are we running? What’s the intention? And then if the intention is to lose weight, cool, if the intention is to I want to run a marathon, that’s a different story, if the intention is, you know what I mean? So for me, it just, everyone has to know why they’re doing what they’re doing, before they just jump into it for kind of haphazard reasons.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and honestly, like marathon runners were really great at like, following a plan, you know, following a training plan. Yeah, it’s like run five miles today. And you’re like, well, I don’t really feel like it but just do it anyway, or I’m really sore. I’m really tired. Just like do it anyway, and then do it tomorrow and do it the next day and do it three days from now and like this, just that what we do, you know, and we think we’re like, really, like, we’ve got this like, amazing work ethic.
And we’re like, yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah, the problem is you’re just always, you know, in that you’re stressing your body and you never give it a chance to kind of calm down. And, you know, going back to the cortisol thing, it’s like, that’s a great thing to stress your body sometimes, but then, you know, you want to like, then not stress your body, because that’s correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that’s how we grow. You know, when we lift, we lift weights at the gym, we stress out our muscles, we break them down, we tear them apart, and then we gotta rest so that they will grow.
Chris Wissman
We can’t be catabolic all the time. Catabolic is muscle destruction, you gotta, you gotta go through that healing process. At some point. It’s a guy that I trained through, I always go back to the yin and the yang cycle with all of these things like the balance is so important. Yeah, catabolic, you’re gonna, you’re gonna start rippin’ some muscle, but then you have to rest, you have to come out of that, that a lot of these really high intensity, high functioning athletes are 80%, anaerobic, and that 20% of the time and they’re in that catabolic state.
So it’s not like a 50/50, which is very interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah, they pick very specific times with very specific movements to go tear it up. And on their other training days, their way in low there, they’re getting their mileage in if they need to. It might not be Grace mileage, but you know what I mean?
So they’re staying at that slower pace, like you and I were talking about, and all the other life elements that we experienced that make us not only like, from muscle, musculoskeletal standpoint, catabolic is stressors from every other element is, again, mimicking catabolic activity in our, in our, in our body. And so we’re really struggling to heal. So that rest process is like, dude, sleep is sacred. It is, it is free, you don’t have to pay for it. And if you set it up, right there, there is nothing. That I mean, there are some things but it affects your life so positively. But yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
Sleep is such a key factor here. Like, I just read this study where they tested people, and they like limited the amount of sleep they got, and the like, by an hour or two. And they you know, in this, you know, clinical trial that they did with these people. And all of them started gaining weight just from like reducing the amount of sleep there again, because of the cortisol.
Chris Wissman
It is. Yep. Yeah. There’s a really cool chart that I’ll send over to you. It shows the the graph on the cortisol rise in relation to the sunlight and all of this. It’s it’s a really unique sequence that has everything to do with balancing your rest and recovery cycle. European some people call it your circadian rhythm. Yeah. And so if I had any advice to people, if it was like, the freest thing you can do is to structure your sleep as best as you possibly can.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, for sure. We can get enough sleep, for sure. But going back, you mentioned something that was kind of cool, talking about the intensity of the workouts. And so one thing I’ve been doing lately, and I’ve been having some good luck with this, in fact, I just did this this morning. I did some sprinting.
So yeah, go out for and I try to do this once a week. And I go out for it’s like a 20 minute run. It’s really short, but incredibly intense. Like I do just a half mile jog, just to kind of warm up a little bit. Then I stop and get my heart rate down. And then I run as hard as I can for like 30 seconds.
And then take about a minute off until my heart rate comes back down again. And then just repeat that so I’m running full on as hard as I can for 30 seconds. resting for a minute and I do that like six times. And then through interval training. Yeah, then a short jog to finish up.
Okay, so that’s what that looks like. The rest of the week. I do a couple other runs, where I’m going really slow. So it’s almost painfully slow sometimes. Yeah. And to keep my heart rate down to stay in that aerobic zone. Yes. You know, the fat burning zone, the, the place where you were like build your aerobic engine you oh my god, this is like the best way to build endurance is to run really slow. It’s really hard for people to do that though. They freak out because they’re like, man, I can’t run that slow all the time. But if you if you can get good at running in that aerobic zone, do your endurance, it just goes through the roof,
Chris Wissman
Especially if you regulate breath during it. And the yogis figured this out a long time ago. Like really anaerobic is just like a symptom of not being aerobic don’t I mean, iit’s not like a different state. It’s just like, oh, I’ve become anaerobic now.
Like the aerobic if you can control the breath during the aerobic process, the more you’ll be able to regulate your O2. And there’s a term I’m looking for specifically, Brian McKenzie talks a lot about this. And I’m excited for you and Jen to, to talk about the breath and maintaining our aerobic zone. Because when you come out of it, that’s that 20%, right that, that more chest breathing and more needing for more oxygen. It’s really, it’s a fascinating topic. There’s a lot of really awesome experts out there in regards to in regards to that. And Brian would encourage you to if you’ve never heard of him, check out Brian Mackenzie. He’s an awesome, dude.
Patrick McGilvray
Definitely, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for this episode, too. And, and just so people know, Chris is talking about Jen, who is your partner at human performance. And Jen and I are gonna be having a conversation about breathing soon, Jen is a breathwork expert. And she’s going to be talking about, she and I are going to have a conversation about breathing and running and how to kind of reduce stress using breath work, you know how to, you know, stay in that aerobic zone, using your breath as a tool for that. And some other things that blow she blows my mind when she started talking about breathing.
Chris Wissman
It’s really wild. Every time somebody comes out of her office, they’re like, dude, who is that? What in the hell, how does she know these things?
Patrick McGilvray
So I found that, like, the slowing down has been one of the best things that I can do to improve my endurance, you know, and, and here’s the thing that runners struggle with, they’re like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to be a slow runner, I don’t want to run that slow. But the thing is, in order to get faster, you got to start slow, or you got to really slow down, you can, as you become, you build that aerobic engine, and you become super efficient at that slower speed, and you’re incorporating some really explosive speed work. You can start ramping up your speed. Exactly, it’s going to be so much easier for you. Yep, oh my god, yeah,
Chris Wissman
Without a doubt, you know, you know, that threshold will get higher and higher and higher and higher than your, your efficiency of breath will be the same at a faster pace. And it will seem just as easy if you’re smoking be able to being able to push that envelope, which is it’s really cool.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so one of the issues that people have when they do this, but you know, Mark Sisson calls chronic cardio, it, you know, they get just into that anaerobic zone, and they just stay there all the time, every difficult is, or every workout is like, you know, moderate to difficult intensity, like every single workout is the same, there’s not enough rest and recovery period in between there, this leads to burnout, it leads to chronic stress, it leads to inflammation…
Chris Wissman
That’s the hardest thing ever, when it comes to developing a workout program for the general population, because most people are chronically stressed, right, we go as you know, we go through at Real Human Performance, we go through cycles, right, we’ll go through a heavy phase will go through an endurance phase, we’ll go through a rotation and a power phase and, etc, etc, with and they’re very strategically placed. One after the next so we can lead in these different zones.
But the problem is the the capacity takes takes quite a bit to get if that makes any sense to have the capacity to say do a heavy set of three on like a trap bar, squat deadlift, whatever you want to call it, or a heavy set of three on a push press, or a heavy sled boy, you have to be really a balanced human being to be able to go in there and, and push it like a corporate athlete, if you will. So that’s why my passion is really helping people understand their life stressors. Like you said, it’s easy to build on that. The foundation, like we’re talking about, has to be laid. And sometimes that’s hard to convince people to take the time to do. If that makes sense.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and yeah, and it’s building the foundation. It’s like the, it’s the foundation. It’s like the most important part. It really is. And then there’s this idea of like, periodization, you know, or like, you know, you know, just, you know, following like not only listening to your body and kind of like, if you need a rest day take it but also like, like a professional athletes, for example.
They go through these training seasons, you know, so they’ll have a season where they start out really slow, and then they gradually build in intensity. And then they, you know, get to this critical point they do whatever event they’re going to do and then There’s this period of rest, you know, where they’re not doing any, hardly any training at all.
And, you know, that gives your body a chance to, like, you know, rebuild on the inflammation to come down. And you get to do other things like spend time with your family and connect with your friends and you know, do hobbies and all these other things that you like to do that make your life worth living, you know. But again, there’s like this idea in that a lot of runners follow this, which is like you’re always training. So you’re always at, like, this intensity level of like, a seven or something seven or eight, you know, and just like, that’s how you do like, 100% of the time.
Chris Wissman
There’s a reason that athletes pay coaches a lot of money to design them periodization protocols because it’s keeping them from getting injured. It’s, it’s lengthening the lifespan of their sport, and, and then making money, right. So it’s, that’s the professional, I guess my point is the professionals do it like that for a very good reason. You don’t have an option, but everything is very crucial in that world. It’s there to make a living.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I can’t, I’m not a professional athlete. Yeah, no, right. But I can say from my own experience of years of like, just pushing it all the time, that I was stressed out, I was always I was inflamed.
I was, you know, addicted to carbs, carbs and sugar, like and glucose, like I was running on on sugar, you know, and I became, you know, I started gaining weight, and I started becoming, you know, pretty stressed out and inflamed. And just like, unhealthy as a runner, which is a crazy thing to think about, you know, because most people think, Oh, you run marathons, you’ve got to be like, the healthiest of the healthy. And it’s just not true.
There’s plenty of people out there that are just like me, like I was, which is like, just, you know, totally addicted to carbs and sugar running on glucose taking 18, you know, gels with them for a long run, whatever, right? And just like never, you know, always gaining weight, always under stress, and not understanding why they aren’t in perfect health.
Chris Wissman
Intention, man. Yeah, that’s exactly it. What is the what is your intention here? And then if it’s not, pure intention isn’t lining up. The results are lining up with the intention. There’s something wrong. And that sounds like that you’ve discovered that.
I had a similar thing. A couple years ago, on my birthday. I guess it was my 30th birthday. I started feeling really dizzy in a restaurant. I don’t know if I mentioned this in the last podcast, did I? I don’t think so. Anyway, because it was kind of a, like a eye opening experience. Got really dizzy at a restaurant on my birthday, I was under a lot of stress.
At the time, I was sleeping probably four or five hours a night, probably four coffees a day. Any element of life that I could think of I was getting stressed from I was trying to make a pretty extreme diet change. I was heavy, heavy strength training. It wasn’t like an 80/20. For me with a 20 strength. It was like probably four days a week of heavy lifting and very little aerobic activity.
So I ended up passing out in this restaurant and what looked like I wanted to anaphylactic shock. And no one was really, ever really able to give me any answers. I went to the hospital and got all the scans and the tests. And I believe that I just have had a total shutdown of my nervous system. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
But it was just from chronic stress, right? It was just without recovery. And the body perceives stress. Perception is almost all the same, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional, or nutritional, or dehydration, all these things equal kind of the same thing at the end of the road.
It’s a hormonal dysregulation. It’s an end you can’t recover without setting down, getting out of that catabolic lifestyle, getting out of a catabolic state and resting. And so once I understood that, I didn’t really I, I kind of had to make a lot of changes. And that’s kind of why I was making mentioned on my being very cognizant of my caffeine consumption because I can become addicted to that very fast and I noticed my cortisol getting jacked up.
If I break that one coffee in the morning, and I start doing two a day. I know, like a weekend I’m like, oh, your mind tries to play tricks on you. It’s like yeah, it’s alright, you’re running low. Today, you’re gonna do a X, Y and Z, you should get a little extra energy and it’s fake.
And at that point, it’s not I’m borrowing and borrowing that energy. So and everyone’s different in that regard. So it’s just that the stress element of all this is, is, is of the utmost importance, utmost importance if you’re going to be doing any kind of activity, and it’s hard, man, that’s life right now, like, people have kids, and they’ll have really intense jobs, and they have to maintain relationships at home and at work and with their family. And so that the balance, yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, man, I mean, you’re talking about so many important things there, you know, and, you know, the stress that we put ourselves under. Even if we’re, quote, unquote, like, super healthy, like, you were like, I thought I was, you know, like, you can, that stress can really cause a chain reaction, and lead to all kinds of health issues, you know, you passed out in a restaurant, basically, because your body was just like, shutting down, you know, yeah.
And for a lot of people, like, I know, my experience was that I was, like, really inflamed, and just gaining weight, like crazy. And I couldn’t figure out why. And, and part of it, you know, was diet, but you know, another big part of it was, was stress and constantly putting myself under stress, whether it was from, you know, work or from relationships, or from, you know, the kind of workouts I was doing, it’s all related.
And that’s where you know, what I started talking about what you do and how you help people, Chris, you know, I mentioned, you take this approach, where we look at all these things. And that’s what I love, like working out at Real Human Performance. And I love your approach is because we talk about these things. And it’s not just about lifting the weights at the gym. Yeah.
Chris Wissman
I try to explain that to people that haven’t been in there. Like, how’s the gym? I’m like, wow, and it’s not really just a gym. I try not to get frustrated.
Patrick McGilvray
They’re like, well, you know, LA Fitness is cheaper, you know? Yeah. I’m just like, Yeah, I’m
Chris Wissman
Like, whatever. Just come in for a month and tell me what you think.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And so like, yeah, you’ve been such a big influence on me, honestly, like, this has been really, I’ve had an amazing health journey and health transformation over the last few months, in part by, you know, some of the things that you and I have been talking about some of the things that you have taught me, you know, I mean, a few years ago, I ditched the sugar and the carbs.
And I like, kind of went more of on a like a ketogenic type of diet. And, you know, and you and I talked a lot about that at the time, and I had a lot of great results from that, you know, and I remember one of the biggest results I had was that I was training for these ultra marathons at the time, and I’d really slow down my running.
But dude, I could run all day, because I was just running on fat. I was completely fat adapted. I was fueled by fat. And I could literally run, I would do these ultra marathons in the summer 30 mile trail races, you know, and I wasn’t breaking any speed records. But dude, I could run all day. And I was just doing like, for fuel. I was drinking water. And eating almond butter.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, like that was about you gave me some of those coconut balls that you had made back in the day. Yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
And so I was doing these fat bombs and coconut oil and stuff like that. So I learned all that. But then it got I didn’t I didn’t have the whole I didn’t have the whole picture. And I went back to like, you know, doing the carbs again. And, and that’s when things started to go kind of slippery, slippery slope, you know, started going downhill for me.
I started becoming more stressed out, more chronically inflamed, and started gaining weight. And the last few years have been this low decline of my health. And I finally had to just be like, dude, what is going on here? So thinking back to what we did before I’m like that worked for me and I had amazing results. I remember feeling so good. Back then I’m like, I gotta get back into it and become fat-adapted again. So that’s where I am today. And these last few months have been amazing, you know, I’ve lost like 35 pounds, dude. Yeah, dude, I’m not inflamed anymore. Like I can see my abs again.
Chris Wissman
So happy I can be a part of that. That’s frickin cool.
Patrick McGilvray
But one of the things that I really had to wrap my head around is that, you know, running is not a really effective way to just lose weight. You know what I mean? I was trying to use running to lose weight and I kept running more and more, and it wasn’t working.
But now I understand it’s more of a hormonal issue, you know, and, and once I figured that out, and then figure it out some of the stressors that I was putting my body under the weight, you know, just started melting off. Yes, and then you know, then there’s that period of time. After adaptation, you know where as a runner running on sugar, you got to switch over to being fueled by fat. So you got to get the sugar out of your system takes a few weeks. But then once you get to that point to that’s where the magic happens. And that’s kind of where I am today. And I love it.
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah, without a doubt I, under that that stressful state that I was in I was I was fat-adapted, and I had all these benefits from it as far as like, no brain fog. And I just didn’t get hungry all the time, like you would in a normal eating scenario. But one thing I found out about myself with that situation was that my liver was under a lot of stress, and it wasn’t able to keep up because we can produce our own glycogen, theoretically, we don’t have to have a healthy individual doesn’t have to have carbohydrates, or sugar.
We can do all of that on our own. What I found out through one of my friends, Jared Ziegler to the living proof Institute, and that dude’s on another level, but that I wasn’t, I just, he just pointed me in a couple of directions.
He didn’t tell me very much, but I intuitively discovered them that I was not producing glycogen, my liver was really stressed. So I had to back off a little bit and then then really slowly reintroduce, and find what my kind of we talked about last time and metabolic type was. And I mentioned last time that I was more of a carbo type.
And I think that I’m more of a carbo type when I’m stressed, if that makes sense. Because, and I didn’t have the availability, I don’t have, I didn’t have the full life force to have all my systems working in synchronicity, when I’m under a lot of stress. And now with this recalibration of sleep after the break, and coming back, and then having a consolidated schedule, I can really tune all these things in.
So I guess that it kind of leads back to what we were talking about the ancestral eating type, you know, is understanding that and understanding that it matters, how we evolved, in what our ancestors had availability to eat. That is literally how our genetics are made up. And now, there is epigenetics, where you can change slightly, but we still have some kind of hardwired things, if you will. So that’s where it all goes back for me. And the majority of the people have access to heavy fat dense fuel. A lot of the times, you know what I mean? So whether it be wild game, or you name it, you know what I’m saying?
Patrick McGilvray
So, and I’ve been like, really fascinated by that whole topic lately of ancestral eating, which is yeah, basically eating what your particular ancestors ate, you know, like, when you just say like, the Paleo diet or something like that, that’s kind of a one size fits all for everybody. And everybody has their own interpretation of it.
Some people it means just eat bacon all the time. Some people just like just eat cheese, or whatever now. Yeah. So but if you can, if you can look at your particular genetics and your particular ancestral eating patterns and the things that your particular ancestor did. My ancestors come from Western Great Britain, Ireland and Scotland, mostly. Yeah, and so they were eating a lot of fish. And a lot of, they eat a lot of oats, they have these like oat cakes, which is something that they’ve been eating for, you know, a couple 1000 years.
Julius Caesar actually makes note of this in a document where he you know, he ended up in, in Great Britain, you know, any any came across the Britains. And he made this note of them eating these oatcakes. And so that’s something that my ancestors used to eat. And then, but obviously, it wasn’t highly processed, like that kind of stuff is today. And then, you know, certain game animals too.
Yeah, you know, so anyways, so there was this. So those kinds of things like you can actually look to your own history. And even within the last 500 years or so, is a good way to look your great grandparents or their great grandparent, you know, somewhere in that lineage there and see what they were eating, because we have some good records of that, you know, we even have, like recipes that people have handed down, you know.
Chris Wissman
And it’s worth testing. You know what I mean, to see how you do on that there is a good old brand out there, it’s called One Degree, they actually have a barcode on their bag, and it tells you exactly what farm their oats came from. So it’s like guaranteed glyphosate free. Cool, really cool brand, just side note, but yeah. So once you gain that knowledge, then you can look back and think about what they’re eating like you did and test it out and see if it works for you. A lot of times it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but it just depends on where you’re at. And your your journey of making these these changes. So I think it’s fascinating nonetheless.
Patrick McGilvray
I mean, it’s totally worth experimenting with, you know what I mean? Yeah, like if you’re if your ancestors are from, you know, the tropics, they’re gonna they’re gonna eat a much different diet and you’re, you’re going to be predisposed to, to thrive on a much different diet, then, you know, the Inuit Eskimos and the Arctic, you know what I mean? So yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s, that’s, that’s really cool. And those people are probably exposed to, they’re probably eating fat, fatty fish, and then tropical sugars. So I think one of the misconceptions with fat adaptation is that we no longer use sugar. And that’s not that’s not the case really, at all, because we’re producing our own and we’re converting proteins, and we’re really in the training zone into sugars, right.
And especially for super catabolic, even our muscle. So it’s not like it’s this direct gear shift from sugar to fat, you know what I mean, it’s a constant mesh of different types of fuel. But just having the availability, to get the most efficiency out of that fat is what I think is important to understand. Because before we didn’t, we weren’t able to use it unless we were like, in this starvation situation, and you were just out in the wilderness forever, and you would have to burn your stored body fat. So forcing yourself to start using that is really, really cool.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and that fat is, is such a great source of fuel. It’s like a, especially if you’re an endurance athlete, because, you know, it’s, you know, glycogen is great for short bursts. If you’re a sprinter. You know, if you’re Usain Bolt you want to be you want to have those glycogen stores filled up, you know, but if you’re a long distance runner, or an ultra runner, you don’t need to have that added glycogen, you can get all the energy you need for that long distance running, just from your fat, it’s such a clean burning type of fuel. And you can you know, we have hundreds of 1000s of calories of fat just on our bodies, even the leanest of us. So we don’t really need to bring all the gels and sports drinks and all that stuff for those kinds of events.
Chris Wissman
Especially if you’re not going to train right the next day, like the majority of us are not, like you said are not professional athletes, right. So after you train, a healthy body can go without fuel immediately. And we’re you mentioned fasted workouts. I know a little bit more on waiting after the workout regards to, again, a healthy body, if you do your exercise or your run, you can wait a little bit and let the body do its natural hormetic process.
When we interrupt that hormetic process with immediate fuel, or immediate cold shower to blunt inflammation, then our body gets assistance. So you’re, you’re essentially taking away from that workout or that recovery of that workout a little bit.
If you’re able to wait a little bit, you know, take a walk after you’re done exercising, or if you’re done running, and then cooled down. And maybe that 60 minute mark could start replenishing. And if you’re gonna go right back at a hard one, the next day after training or something really serious, then you might consider the glucose then.
If you’re not going to train the next day, or if it’s going to be an aerobic day, a light day, you don’t necessarily need it, you know what I mean? So that’s a really interesting thing to think about as as people progress with their training as the as someone like me might be a little different because I struggle I have the opposite of struggle where I really don’t want to put on so I might need to go replenish right after and that seems like peachy rosy but it’s it’s a pain in the butt.
Sometimes they have to worry about how much fuel to put in. Before Patrick and I just got started was talking about since we’ve opened the gym back up. I’ve lost like 12 pounds and just sheer movement and activity. And so everyone’s going to be unique with generally speaking you don’t have to refuel immediately after.
And sometimes from what a lot of these guys are saying there’s huge benefits to going into a workout. Again, I want to keep stressing a healthy body going into a workout fasted. We’re talking all sorts of anti-aging effects, and then and then being more sensitive to insulin again, and tons of things, which I think is fascinating.
Growth factor and hormone regulation and testosterone production. And it’s really wild. And to be honest, you mentioned that in our note overview. I hadn’t looked at that a lot in a long time. And I thought it was fascinating when I when I started pulling this stuff back up and I was like, dang, I wasn’t sure I didn’t know about all that at least anytime recently. I wasn’t I wasn’t up on the research there. It’s pretty cool.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, a couple of things that I love about working out in that fasted state is number one, you produce more adrenaline, which means you actually work out a little harder. Then if you are working out in a fed state, okay, so number one you can, you can intensify your workouts and do some good explosive training. And it’s good for the long distance training too.
Number two, you produce more growth hormone when you’re in that fasted state. So you could actually like, you’re gonna get better results from your from your workout, and the recovery time will be shorter, because of that growth hormone that’s being produced.
Chris Wissman
It’s kind of like that hormetic response I was talking about, right? Like you’re not assisting your body in this process that it has to do. And it gets better at it, slowly.
Patrick McGilvray
And if you’re like trying to lose weight, working on a fasted state is a great way to really access those fat stores and start to use the fat for fuel, meaning you’re burning body fat while you’re working out. So it has all these amazing advantages. And it’s almost like cheating in a way. Because like, I know that there’s some professional athletes that did train in a fasted state now because it gives them that same kind of edge as if they were taking performance enhancing drugs. Yeah, without any of those crazy side effects.
Chris Wissman
It’s, you’re exactly right. I mean, the clarity you get sometimes on a fast is like, your body’s not working, it can focus on what your task at hand, you know, you’re not digesting food. And that’s like the big thing with going to bed. Without food in your stomach, the body gets a chance to do its thing gets a chance to physically and emotionally recover.
From all the standpoints of life, we always have food in our system, then we’re just constantly having to spend a ton of energy, I forget the percentage of energy spent on digestion versus what you think like, say you had 100 calories, I think 40 of them go to digesting the food. I’m not a big calorie person.
But just to give you an example, it is a huge working process to metabolize food, and to turn it into fuel. And the body gets hot. When you’re eating a bunch of food, like my body temperature will go way up. I can just physically feel like radiating heat when I have a lot of food to process. So just think about how much work that is.
So there’s a reason that all the ancient ancient traditions and religions have incorporated fasting for it since the beginning of time. Yeah, something we had to deal with, like the feast famine cycle, and we’re out in the wild. Like there might be times when we didn’t get it, and everybody talks about that. But it’s, it’s real. Like, there’s times we went without food for a long time, and are fine. Fine, totally fine.
Patrick McGilvray
You touched on something though, that’s really important too, also for long distance runners, that when you are constantly shoving food into your stomach while you’re running, especially doing these longer events, you’re spending a lot of energy digesting that food.
So energy and blood gets pulled away from your extremities from your muscles to work in digesting, especially for the ultra runners who are actually eating a lot of food like pizza, potato chips and stuff like that out there. So instead, if you can work out and do these longer runs in a fasted state, you don’t need to constantly be fueling your body. You’re not using all this extra energy that you need for your legs to be digesting all this food. I mean, it makes sense, right?
Chris Wissman
You know, it’s, it’s right. It’s exactly right. Yeah, I noticed I would watch I watch a lot of Ultras. I’ll watch the ones in Colorado, and in Meadville, and just something that I don’t I’ve never done one I’ve always wanted to so I end up watching him and these guys are like at breaks eating big pieces of pizza. I’m like, what are you doing?
Patrick McGilvray
I mean, I will totally tell you like I was eating so much. Like when I did my 100 miler, I ate so much food. And honestly, looking back on it, it was probably a lot harder than it needed to be for that.
Chris Wissman
You think there’s a better way to fuel what these breaks for people. And I don’t, I’m not trying to be judgmental, but I just assume there’s got to be some. Why is it that we just resource to junk at the brakes might excuse the excuses that I’ve heard is that we burned it so fast that it doesn’t matter. I don’t I mean, like you get a cellular response from everything that you’re putting in. So it’s like, is there something better we can be doing for these guys and you guys and gals at these checkpoints to not have to have all the garbage?
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, like I was under a lot of GI distress during that particular race for sure. A lot of Gi issues. In fact, eating anything became extremely hard like I had to force myself to just eat like salty pretzels or was just something to get the salt in and potato chips because everything else was making me like nauseous, you know? Yeah, and a lot of that has to do with just, you know, constantly having all that blood, you know, in your stomach trying to digest all this food that and it just it really upsets your stomach. So a lot, a lot of runners have issues with GI issues.
Chris Wissman
I wouldn’t doubt it. I mean, I touched last time, that idea of the disrupt somatic inhibition, and there’s all kinds of terms around it. But all that really means is all your organs are inflamed, so as a musculature, most muscular scope, musculoskeletal system around it, sorry. So you get a stress response in your gut while you’re in the middle of 100 mile race. I struggle with that.
Patrick McGilvray
And it’s kind of self induced, right? Yeah.
Chris Wissman
Yeah. Like you want everything on your side when you’re running 100 miles. Come on.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. I mean, and I don’t know what they I mean, there’s a different answer for everybody. But like, one of the things I experimented with, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, which is on these Ultras, I was doing almond butter, and I would get those like little packets of Justin’s almond butter, and they would be just be almond butter with some, like, maybe some maple syrup in there or something like that.
Yeah, so there was a little bit of sugar in there, but mostly, it was just like a lot of fat. And, and your and your stomach doesn’t have to work very hard to like, metabolize that. And almonds are already ground up. Yeah, but you’re using mostly your, your fat stores for energy.
Now, the sugar packets, you know, the gels like that are just like liquid sugar, basically do the same kind of thing. But they cause an amazing amount of distress and people in people. And but what they do is they you know, it’s like liquefied sugar, basically. And so you get this glycogen hit right away, you know, it’s like, your muscles can access that right away.
But that causes a lot of stomach distress for a lot of people. And so like on an endurance event like that, you can’t do that you can’t be sucking down this sugar all the time, because it will just, you will be sick to your stomach.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, then I did an adventure. I saw my Uncle a quite a while ago. But I remember I’ve never had one of those gel packs. And I remember tasting it. And I was like, whoa. Like the sweetness and the sourness from that it’s something I’d never experienced in my life, it was probably because I’m in the middle of this excruciating race. And my body hadn’t taken any calories. So it’s just like exaggerated. But nonetheless, I, I only had one or two during that race. And it was it was wild.
Patrick McGilvray
I mean, they work to deliver that glycogen like, you know, it gets turned into glycogen right away. And so it works to like, give you that quick energy. But that only lasts for 30-40 minutes, something like that. Yeah, you know, more like, you can’t do that for 24 straight hours, if you’re in long distance races, you know, or, I don’t know, maybe some people can. Like I said, it’s kind of different for everyone, you kind of got to figure out what works for you.
But once you become once you don’t need the glucose for energy, if you’re just relying on the fat, you don’t need to be putting all this sugar and all these carbs into your body. During these kinds of races. You could do some, like, eat some strawberries, you know, you could do Yeah, some some kind of natural forms of of, you know, dense nutrient dense carbohydrates, sweet potatoes as a great thing to have and something like that, you know, easy to digest tons of great nutrient dense carbs. And, and it’s more of a long lasting type of fuel.
Chris Wissman
Yes. There’s a couple of guys that are talking about and I’ve never experienced them. But I’ve heard really good things about something called ketone esters. I only found the production of them through like one company. This has been a couple of years back, but you really just rang a bell a fuel during races and I remember something called ketone esters. So I would maybe look at that. See what you think about that.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ll have to look that up because I have not heard that before.
Chris Wissman
The only thing I remember about them other than their name was how expensive they were.
Patrick McGilvray
I didn’t know that. Like there’s a way that you can like drink ketones somehow to like, kind of get your body into ketosis faster or something like that. But I haven’t really looked into that either.
Chris Wissman
The description was rocket fuel, so
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Anything else you want to talk about before we wrap it up here? That’s been really awesome, by the way.
Chris Wissman
I think that’s about it, man. And I always go back to making sure that everybody is under the least amount of unnecessary load possible. And I think that’s something that anyone could just take a look at any element of their life and see where they can get rid of unnecessary load, or, or address unnecessary load. But again, whether it be food or relationship or dehydration, or lack of sleep, or lack of movement, you know, you all everyone knows what they could be doing better, you just have to sit down, ask yourself that, and just encourage people to do it, you know. So I think that’s it.
Patrick McGilvray
I love it. I love that intuitive approach to not just eating I love the intuitive approach to eating to, you know, what fuels you eat, what sounds good right now. But I also love that intuitive approach to physical exercise.
You know, if I’m feeling stressed out, or I’m feeling tired, this is not the day to go, you know, push it extra hard as a day to like, slow it down. Take it easy, or just rest. Yes. So I love that awesome man. Back Yeah, well, as always, it is so fun talking to you. And having these conversations, Chris, like I said, we just sit down, we just start talking about whatever it is, or know where it’s gonna go. But it’s fun today. So where can people like reach out to learn more about you?
Chris Wissman
Well, so we have Real Human Performance, we’re going under a little construction in the background as far as like digitally and all that because we’re just creating some new programs, the website is going to look a little different over time, or social media will look a little different.
Personally, I had to get rid of one of my social media accounts, which is drawing too much energy from me. So I went and resorted just to Facebook. And I’m gonna start jumping back on health wagon on Facebook and helping people with that. So I’m not on Instagram, but Real Human Performance is on Instagram. You can also go to our website at realhumanperformance.com. And you can check me out on Facebook, and I think it’s just Christopher Whitman. And I’m gonna start being a lot more engaging on Facebook with the information that I help people with.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Love it. Thank you again.
Chris Wissman
Of course, man. Thank you.
Patrick McGilvray
So good, right. Good, good stuff. I just love these conversations with Chris. Remember, we will be continuing this conversation in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So I’d love for you to join the group. Chris is a part of that group. And you can ask him questions there too. And remember, starting July 1, 31 days, no sugar challenge begins. It’s just a few short days from now. So join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, grab a few friends, it will be fun. Just search for the Running Lean community and join us. Well, that’s all we got today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
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