Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
As runners, we’ve been told over the last 40 years or so that the only way to fuel for running is with carbohydrates. Loads and loads of carbs. Eat lots of carbs every day, carb load the day …
Continue Reading about 216. An Alternative Way To Fuel Long-Distance Running →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 216 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, an alternative way to fuel long-distance running. So as runners, we’ve been told over the last 40 years or so that the only way to fuel for running is with carbohydrates, carbs, loads and loads of carbs.
Eat lots of carbs every day, carbo-load the day before you run, carb up in the morning pre-run, consume ample carbs during your run. And then of course, you’re gonna want some carbs for recovery after your run.
This has been the standard approach since the 1980s. But it’s definitely not the only way to do things. The thing is, this approach just doesn’t work for everyone. Some people like me gain a lot of weight eating all those carbs regardless of how much we run. So in this episode, I offer an alternative way to fuel long-distance running one that doesn’t cause you to gain all that weight in the process.
But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about nutrition, weight loss, and improving your running. If you’re new to the podcast, it can probably feel a little overwhelming. And you’re like I don’t even know where to start with all this.
And if that sounds like you, totally cool, I got you covered. I created a free training. It’s about an hour long. It’s a video that you can watch, you can check it out anytime it’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronge Runner.
In this video, you’re gonna learn the basics of nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset, all these things that are geared towards you the long-distance runner. So if you’re ready to get leaner, and if you’re ready to get stronger, if you’re ready to become the most badass version of yourself that I know you are, then this free training is exactly what you need to get started. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training.
Okay, so let’s talk about an alternative way to fuel long-distance running. Why do I want to talk about this today? Because I keep hearing from runners and I keep reading articles online and social media posts for runners that talk about eating all the carbs.
And I’m like, gosh, are we still talking about this? Since the 1980s, the carb-loading approach has been the gold standard, so to speak for runners just eat all the carbs, and you’re going to find that most coaches teach this approach.
Most experts, quote-unquote experts, teach this approach. When I got my running, coaching certification, when I went through my coaching certification program, I was taught this approach. And this approach is fine. And it does work for some people. But it doesn’t work for everybody.
For some of us, like me, eating all those carbs caused us to gain a lot of weight in the process. You know, and I’m not against having carbohydrates. In fact, I think using carbohydrates strategically for running is a great tool.
It’s a really good tool that you have in your tool belt, why not use the carbohydrates as fuel, especially for the higher intensity stuff or races? But eating all the carbs all the time, is what we’ve been taught and it just doesn’t work for everybody.
You know, I’m one of those people that is very sensitive to carbohydrates. You know, I eat carbs and I gain weight. And so if I just take this standard approach to fueling for long-distance running, I ballooned up 40 more pounds, 50 more pounds, whatever.
You know, I’ve shared this before where I was training for ultra marathons, I was running all the time, I was doing a ton of mileage and gaining weight in the process. You can’t outrun the wrong diet, right?
So for me the all carbs all the time approach while I loved it. Who doesn’t love eating carbs all the time? Oh, pizza, sure. Ice cream. Yep, that’s going to, I mean, I’m a runner, so I gotta eat this stuff. Right? Spaghetti all the time. Like I was just I was eating tons of bread and pasta. And sugar, like this was my diet. You know, it was like a 90% carbohydrates, you know?
And I just kept gaining weight and gaining weight and I was like wow, even though I was running a ton, you know, I was training for ultra marathons and running ultra marathons regularly and then gaining weight in the process does not make sense, right?
You are supposed to lose weight when you start training. Well, the wrong diet won’t allow that to happen, right, so the wrong diet will cause the weight to continually stack up. So for me, this this all carbs all the time approach is one that I tried, and it just didn’t work for me.
You know, I also found that I would crash and burn during long-distance events. And I’m like, what’s going on here, because I’m using all the fuel. You know, I’m taking all the gels and I’m eating, I’m pre-loading with carbs and do all this stuff. But I keep crashing and burning and mile 18 to 22 of a marathon, you know.
And I was like this, this isn’t working, like there’s got to be a different approach here. Okay. And there is, there are, there is an alternative approach, there are probably multiple other approaches that you can take.
But there’s one specific that I want to talk about today, one that doesn’t require eating all the carbs all the time, and one that doesn’t require you to gain a bunch of weight in the process, if that’s you.
And listen, if you’re the kind of person that can eat all those carbs, and not gain any weight, and it works really well for you, then keep doing your thing. Keep doing that. My hat’s off to you. But if you’re somebody that’s like Patrick, that really doesn’t work for me, then listen up, because here’s the different approach you want to take.
You want to get yourself fat-adapted. So we’re talking about this concept of fat adaptation. Fat adaptation means that you train your body to burn your stored body fat as fuel for long-distance running.
When you stop eating all the sugar and all the carbs constantly, you give your body a chance to tap into your stored body fat as fuel. So the way this works, essentially, is think about your different fuel sources in your body as like a fuel tank, and the top layer of that fuel tank is what’s gets burned first.
And that top layer is going to be sugar, essentially glucose, glycogen, that kind of stuff. So that is going to be burned first. And as long as that’s available, that is what’s going to be constantly burned. Okay.
And so the concept, but behind all carbs all the time thing is like you want to keep that top layer of the tank filled at all times so that you’re constantly always burning that. The problem is that when you run out of that, maybe you get to mile 20 of the marathon and you just haven’t done a good job of keeping up with the amount of carbs that you need for that event, or you haven’t trained yourself to metabolize carbs that to that extent.
That top layer of the tank is going to run out and then you’re going to crash because you don’t, you don’t have access to that lower portion of the gas tank, which is the biggest portion, I’m going to say it’s probably like 90% of that gas tank is going to be your fat stores.
But you don’t have access to that because you haven’t trained your body to use that fat as fuel, like the pathways are not there. So what happens is that when you stop eating the sugar and the carbs all the time?
You start to train your body to use the alternative fuel source, the fat stores the stored body fat, you know, we all eat some, you know, we all eat food and some of that energy that we consume gets used towards working muscles, some of that energy gets stored as fat to be used later as fuel.
The problem is we’ve just gotten so far away from using our stored body fat as fuel, it’s kind of like we just constantly put wood on the woodpile, but we’re never burning the wood it just keeps stacking up that’s our fat stores just getting bigger and bigger.
So when you train yourself to tap into those stored to your stored body fat as a fuel, now you have this like almost unlimited fuel source for running. So that’s the concept of fat-adaptation, you’re removing the sugar and the carbs that that initial, like, let’s say 10%.
And I’m kind of making these numbers up but just think of it like you know, we only have the capacity to store like 2000 calories as of energy as glucose but we have our body fat can can store hundreds of thousands of calories of energy as stored body fat, so just know that yeah, it’s probably like 10% and 90%, something like that. It’s probably more like 99 and 1% or something okay.
Anyway, so we want to get ourselves fat-adapted we want to be able to adapt to using that stored body fat as fuel. Okay, now, people hear this and they’re like, oh, that’s crazy. That’s just some weird fringe thing, it’s probably a fad, and it’s gonna go away.
Listen, we’ve been doing this for millennia, as human beings, we’ve been doing it for more than millennia, for like millions of years. Fat Burning is our natural state as human beings. You know, we store some of that energy we consume as body fat, and we use it when we’re not eating.
This is the way the human body is designed, you know, there’s periods of feasting, and there’s periods of fasting during those periods of fasting, we should be tapping into our stored body fat as fuel. Humans are really good at this, we are naturally really good at using fat as fuel.
And we’re naturally good distance runners like we used to be hunter-gatherers, we used to be a persistence Hunter, so we would, we would chase down prey, and we would outrun them not from a speed perspective, but from a time perspective like we would, you know, cut an antelope out of the herd or whatever.
And they might be able to outrun us in the short distance, but over time, like over hours and days, we would run them down to where they just would die of exhaustion. You know, poor antelope. I know, but good for us, because now we have this nutrient-dense meal that would that would sustain us, you know.
So the human body is designed to use that stored body fat as fuel during those times when we didn’t have the other food coming in. Okay. So to say that, oh, you have to consume all the carbs, all the pasta, all the bread all the time, just to be able to run?
That’s actually the new thing. That’s actually the weird fad thing that we’ve only been doing for the last 40 years or so. Right? I mean, isn’t that interesting that people look at this fat-burning thing. And they’re like, oh, you know, that’s not the way you should do it.
And I’m like, well, listen, we’ve been amazing runners for millions of years as humans and we never had to eat all the pasta and bread and gels and stuff like that. Why now? Should we have to do that? Okay.
So not only is it not a fad thing, or some weird approach, like there are elite runners that have adopted this approach for years and years and years, and they’re at the top of their game, you know, I’m gonna mention a couple of them here.
And I’ve talked about these guys before on the podcast here. And there are countless others too, but these guys just are kind of like the top, you know, the top 1% or whatever. Jeff Browning. He’s an ultra runner. He’s finished nearly 200 ultra marathons in his career. He’s had over 40 career ultra marathon wins 29 of those at the 100 mile plus distance, making him second in the world for the most 100 mile wins in history.
Ranked seven times in the top 10 of ultra running magazines, North American Ultra Runner of the year, ranked third in Ultra running magazines, North American Ultra Runner of the decade. He builds multiple, multiple course records, including the Moab 240 course record, and he is a low carb, low carb, high-fat kind of he takes that approach to his training.
You know, he’s very vocal about his fat-burning approach, his fat-adapted approach to ultra running, you know, he doesn’t consume all the sugars and all the gels and all the pasta and all the carbs. All right.
And another one that comes to mind is Mike McKnight. He’s an ultra runner. He specializes in the 200 mile distance. And he posed several wins every year for different events. He’s kind of known because he ran 118 Miles while consuming zero calories, zero calories. He ran 118 miles. He was just relying on his own stored body fat for fuel and he’s a pretty, pretty lean guy. You know? He’s amazing.
And I actually tried this, I was like, hey, you know, I’m gonna I’m gonna give this a shot. I didn’t do 180 miles but I did two marathons and a 50k ultra marathon on zero calories just to say like, Oh, can I even do this? Yeah, I could do it and I was fine. Really no problems whatsoever.
And then of course, there’s Zach Bitter. He’s an American ultramarathon runner. He specializes in the 100 miler distance and he’s done like over 60 ultras. He’s known for his low-carb diet, which he uses for training and racing nutrition. He had the record for the 100 miler. One point of 11 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds. I’m gonna say that one more time because that is a crazy number, he ran 100 miles and 11 hours in 90 minutes. That’s insane.
He’s the holder of the 12-hour American record at 104.88 miles. He claims the 100-mile and 12-hour world records at the Six Days in the Dome event in Milwaukee in 2019. Competed for team USA world 100 Kilometer team three times.
So these are guys, these are just some of the guys who are benefiting and their, their elite athletes who are at the top of their game. And they’re taking this low-carb approach to distance running. They’re not consuming all the carbs all the time. Yeah, they do use some carbs for their events.
And they’ll tell you, you know, you can check them out, or their websites, check them out on social media, they have podcasts and stuff like that, you can totally listen to what these guys say. And they’ll tell you they do like maybe, you know, 30 to 50 grams of carbs per hour for these events, which is not a lot. But they’re not eating all the carbs all the time. They’re taking this fat adaptation approach to running and it’s working really, really well for them. Okay.
Another thing to consider here is that if your goal is to lose weight, then this is a great way to lose weight. Because listen, if you want to lose weight, what do you got to do? You have to burn a fat, right?
We’re not talking about weight loss, we’re talking about fat loss. So you have to burn the fat. If you are burning the fat, you are losing weight. And it’s really hard to burn the fat when you’re on that super high-carb runner’s type of diet, right?
Because of the whole fuel source prioritization, you know, you’re going to burn through the glucose first, then you’re going to tap into the fat but you gotta like, You got to eliminate that top 1% or whatever of your fuel tank.
So if fat burning is the key to weight loss, which it is, wouldn’t you want to do it? It that makes fat burning the priority? Yes, you would. When you eat for fat-burning, you’re running improves your endurance and improves and you lose weight in the process. Right?
So if you’re somebody who is interested in losing weight, this approach might work for you, it may be something you want to consider. Okay, and and listen, when we talk about a low-carb approach to fueling a low-carb diet, a low-carb, you know, nutrition approach; a lot of people think, you know, you’re talking about keto, or doing no carbs or carnivore or something like that.
No, it’s not about that. It’s about finding the right amount of carbs that keeps you burning fat, while also helping you’re running because carbs are helpful for running, right? You don’t have to be Mike McKnight and do the zero-calorie thing. But it’s cool that the human body can do that, you know.
That’s fat-adaptation. And it’s most impressive, like what that guy does, right? And by the way, this guy is not fat, right? You don’t need a ton of body fat, to be able to use your own stored body fat as fuel.
Even the leanest of athletes can benefit from fat adaptation as an approach. Okay, so this doesn’t mean that you’re never eating any carbs, you can still eat some carbs. I use carbs for fuel, and I encourage my clients to use carbs for fuel, but we prefer like whole food sources of carbs, you know, we might be talking about bananas or sweet potatoes or rice or something like that, right?
And obviously, everybody’s a little bit different. And you have to kind of experiment with what works for you. But there’s, there’s tons of great options just from the natural world like and sticking with whole food sources of carbohydrates is great.
Now I get it that when you’re in any event, like you can’t carry a bunch of sweet potatoes or bananas with you. I mean, it’s just really not that convenient. But what’s cool is that there are a bunch of brands out there that cater to the low-carb endurance athlete, and they have entire product lines that are geared towards helping you fuel for running while maintaining that fat-burning state.
So like Hammer Nutrition is one you can use. S-Fuels, Muir energy, and there are a bunch of other brands out there and new ones coming out all the time. So that’s a very encouraging thing that there are companies out there that are that are gearing their product lines towards the low carb endurance athlete. Okay.
Now, just like I said, at the beginning of this podcast that the high-carb approach isn’t for everyone, just like that, like the fat-adapted approach probably isn’t for everyone. So I’m not going to come out here and say that everybody should do this. And everybody will benefit from this.
Some people do really fine eating all the carbs and the sugar and the gels, and they never have to worry about gaining weight. And if that’s you, that is amazing. That’s definitely not me. But if you struggle with losing weight, and you love running, then this might be the approach that you want to try.
You know, the only way you can tell if it works through you, or if you enjoy it, or if you can do this as a lifestyle as to give it a shot, you might see the weight start to come off, you might experience running feeling easier than ever before.
You might see your energy levels are better all day long, no more afternoon crashes, you might begin to think more clearly be able to focus and concentrate better. And as always, if you want help with any of this, you can always reach out to me you can go to my website runningleancoaching.com.
Every day I help runners get fat-adapted, lose weight, improve their running performance and make all this a lifestyle. So whatever approach you take cool, but it has to be something that is sustainable for you. Because if it’s not sustainable for you, it’s not going to work because this stuff takes time.
You know, if you want to lose weight, and you want to improve your diet, improve your nutrition, improve your running and your nutrition for running specifically, then you’re gonna have to take a little bit of time to figure out what works for you. And it has to be something that you can do sustainably long term, right?
So I work with my clients, we work together to make sure whatever they’re doing is something that they can do on their own like for good, or it’s not about quick fixes, but lifestyle changes, right being fit and healthy isn’t a destination we’re trying to get to. It’s how we live our life. Okay. Consider the fat-adapted approach. I think it’s amazing. It works really well for me and countless people that I work with. Give it a shot. You never know. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and interested in getting the most out of your training, then you’ve probably tried a multitude of supplements. There are literally thousands upon thousands of health and …
Continue Reading about 213. Supplements Every Runner Should be Taking →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 213 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, supplements every runner should be taking. If you’re a runner and interested in getting the most out of your training, then you’ve probably tried a bunch of supplements, there are literally thousands upon thousands of health and wellness supplements out there on the market today.
And I looked this up – around one thousand new supplements are introduced every single year. So if you’re feeling a little confused, and a little overwhelmed by all of these options, rest assured you are not alone. Today on the podcast, I’ve got a few simple suggestions for supplements every runner should be taking that will actually improve your health and fitness.
But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about nutrition, weight loss, running strength training. And if you’re new, it may seem a little overwhelming and a little confusing. And that’s okay, I got you covered.
You may not know where to start with all this, but I’ve created a free hour long training that you can check out at any time, it’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. You’re going to learn the basics of nutrition, strength, endurance and the right mindset that is required for you to become your best self. And all this is geared towards you the runner.
If you’re ready to get leaner and stronger and become the most badass version of yourself yet, I hope you are, then this free training is exactly what you need. Just go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training and get started on your weight loss journey today.
Okay, supplements every runner should be taking. The reason I am talking about this today is because I just realized after looking back through 212 episodes that I haven’t really talked much about supplements. And it’s something that I talk about with my clients regularly.
But one of the reasons why I typically don’t make suggestions for supplementation, or even, you know, certain nutrition suggestions here on the podcast is because, you know, making these blanket suggestions for the general public is not the way I like to do things.
I don’t like to just tell you like, oh, everybody should be doing this, or everybody should be doing that. Because we are all different. And we all respond differently to different nutrition, to different exercises to different supplements.
But I feel pretty confident about these few supplements I’m going to talk about today and I’m pretty sure everybody can benefit from from these particular supplements, okay, these are pretty generally accepted, pretty generally beneficial to just about everyone, there’s probably going to be some exceptions out there. Which is fine. If that is you and you’re like, oh, this one doesn’t apply to me or I can’t do that one. That is completely fine. Don’t do it.
Don’t think that I’m telling you that you have to do anything, okay. Also, I think that these supplements will really help you if you are a runner, because they are geared towards, you know, building strength and hydration and helping you to become as to perform your best as a runner.
Okay, so if you’re a runner, and you’re someone who’s interested in improving your athletic performance, improving your body composition, then stay tuned, this is definitely for you. That being said, I do have to make a little disclaimer here that I’m not a doctor, we’re not engaged in any kind of a coaching relationship.
So please check with your doctor before taking any kind of supplements to make sure you don’t experience any adverse side effects and that there aren’t any interactions with any other supplements you’re taking or medications. Cool. Okay. Awesome.
So first one is and we all know about this one is electrolytes. And what are electrolytes? First of all, electrolytes are minerals that actually carry an electric charge. They’re found in your blood, your urine, your sweat, and they are vital to specific processes that keep your body functioning properly.
Some of the most common electrolytes found in your body include sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium phosphate and bicarbonate. These electrolytes are required for various bodily processing, including nerve and muscle function, maintaining pH balance, and keeping you hydrated.
Electrolytes are crucial to keeping your nervous system and your muscles functioning and your internal environment balanced. So your brain sends electrical signals through your nerve cells to communicate with the cells throughout your body. And these signals are called nervous impulses. And they’re generated by charges to the electrical changes to the electrical charge of the nerve cell membrane.
And these changes actually occurred due to the movement of the electrolytes sodium across the nerve cell membrane. So electrolytes, if you don’t have electrolytes in your system, you will die. This is something where you just have to get electrolytes in your system.
And we all get these in our in our body, you know, through our diet, you know, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium phosphate, these are all very common, and most people will get these in their diet.
I do think that as runners, especially if you are a heavy sweater or live in a warm environment, that it is very important for you to supplement with electrolytes, it can really improve your health and fitness and you’re running performance in a lot of ways. So let’s talk about some of these ways that taking supplemental electrolytes can help you.
Number one, it improves hydration. And this is the most common way we think of electrolytes, electrolyte water, electrolyte drinks, you know, energy drinks, you know, running endurance drinks.
Water is the most essential nutrient. And it’s very important that you drink enough water throughout the day, right> However, staying hydrated with water doesn’t really work on its on itself. Like you have to have electrolytes in the mix somehow throughout the day, okay, they play a key role in maintaining your hydration levels, by directing the flow of water in and out of cells.
So studies have actually shown that adding salt to fluids greatly improves improves your fluid retention, especially when you’re restoring the fluid balance after significant electrolyte loss, which happens after long runs when the weather is really hot outside when you sweat a lot. This is because both water and sodium need to be consumed in order to establish proper hydration levels.
Okay, so know that you cannot just drink tons of water by itself, that you have to have electrolytes in your water. When you are especially when you’re exercising. I like to start my day with electrolytes first thing in the morning, I hydrate what right when I get up with electrolytes.
And I feel like it’s a great way for me to start the day. And I feel like I’m not myself until I’ve had my electrolytes first thing in the morning. When you sleep you you kind of tend to get dehydrated. So it’s great to start the day with proper hydration including electrolytes.
Okay, another benefit of taking a supplement electrolytes is that they do give you energy so electrolytes support energy production, by ensuring the body is properly hydrated and fueled. So sodium in particular, plays a pivotal role in hydration, which is essential for maintaining high energy levels.
It helps regulate fluid volume levels and ensures that your muscles function correctly. So essentially, a well hydrated body is an energized body. And if you’ve ever been out on a long run on a hot day, and you’ve kind of, this has totally happened to me, I’ve kind of run out of water run out of electrolytes and just got a little dehydrated, my energy levels tanked really fast, you know so it is important that you stay hydrated and use electrolytes to maintain energy levels.
Another benefit it improves athletic performance. So sodium before a workout helps to increase blood volume. This means that more blood is available system wide. More blood volume means more oxygen is available for working muscles. So more oxygen means better performance.
So if you just want to do something to improve your athletic performance, salt before a workout is going to help get you there. You know you’re improving increasing blood volume, and you’re going to improve your athletic performance for that workout. So right there is a great reason to make sure that you’re doing electrolytes especially before workouts.
Another benefit of electrolytes it helps to promote good sleep. So quality sleep is crucial for just being an overall healthy human being. Electrolytes particularly calcium helped to promote REM sleep, which is a deep sleep phase allows your body to rest and recharge.
This is especially beneficial, beneficial for people who struggle with insomnia. Maintaining a proper electrolyte balance can significantly improve your sleep quality. So electrolytes support sleep without the need for stimulants or our caffeine or anything like that. So just understand that good quality sleep is important electrolytes play a role in that electrolytes also helped to reduce stress.
Magnesium, one of the electrolytes we talked about is an essential electrolyte has been shown to have a calming effect on the body in the mind. And this is often used to help with sleep as well. But it helps to alleviate anxiety too. And it helps to regulate the nervous system and promotes relaxation.
So maintaining a healthy electrolyte balance helps you to your body to function properly helps to reduce stress levels, and helps you to just to feel less stressed throughout the day. Good thing for all of us.
Another benefit of electrolytes is helps to strengthen bones and muscles. So now we’re talking about calcium and potassium. These are vital for strengthening muscles and bones. Calcium contributes to bone health, which is particularly important for those at high risk of osteoporosis. And potassium helps to maintain muscle health by preserving muscle mass and helps to prevent muscle cramps. All very good things for us runners right.
Electrolytes also helped to improve recovery. Studies suggests that consuming electrolytes like sodium can optimize water absorption, which yields faster recovery times, and probably is more effective at enhancing your performance and recovery than water alone.
So it’s encouraged for someone to focus on fluids and electrolyte consumption to facilitate proper recovery not just to improve performance. And it helps with tissue repair too. So electrolytes help to rebuild damage tissue by improving cell function and cell hydration. So better all around workouts and better all around recovery from workouts, which is super important.
And then we’ve all probably heard that electrolytes help to prevent muscle cramps. Yep, this is true. Studies have shown that to that there are two main types of cramping, there’s a overuse cramping, that means you’re just pushing a muscle too much too hard, too soon. And there’s cramping from electrolyte deficiency.
If you are a really salty sweater, temperatures are really high, you’re doing really long distance runs, consider using electrolytes before and during those long events to prevent cramping. And then obviously, you have to make sure you’re ramping up your training slowly and you’re not overdoing it.
A lot of runners experience cramping, you know, miles 18 to 22 into a marathon because they’re not used to running nonstop for that long. So a lot of people get cramps during their first marathon because, you know, they may have done a few 20 mile runs.
But they’ve done them where they stop and they take breaks and things like that. But you know, running nonstop for, you know, three hours or whatever is a little bit different and it causes muscle cramps. So the the overexertion tends to be the big contributor of muscle cramps, but the electrolytes will help prevent that as well.
Okay, so how much should you take? So the recommendations vary, but listen, we’re mainly talking about salt intake. That’s the one that you know people are concerned about. And the FDA says that we should only be getting 2.3 grams of, of salt per day maximum.
Interestingly, the average American gets around three and a half grams of sodium per day. Of course, the FDA would like to see that reduced. There is a growing body of research that reveals that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels, two to three times the government recommendations.
So if you eat a diet, low in unprocessed foods, less you’re getting less sodium right there. If you eat a diet low in carbohydrates, you’re gonna have less water retention. And then you probably need to add more salt in the way of you know, an electrolyte supplement into your diet.
And the sweet spot for most people seems to be four to six grams of sodium per day. That’s kind of recommended by new research and by experts, and the new research definitely backs this up as being the optimum amount. Of course, if you have high blood pressure or hypertension, you have to check with your doctor before adding more more salt into your diet.
And then just understand that you are if you are a low carb athlete, then your body will be not as inflamed and not holding on to as much water which means you’re processing more fluids processing more water and losing more electrolytes in that process.
So most low carb athletes tend to err on the side of more salt is better and they seem to feel much better doing more salt brands I recommend there’s a couple brands that I like one is called element LMNT and they come in little packets.
And the ingredients are pretty simple. It’s salt, in the form of sodium chloride, citric acid, magnesium malate, and then potassium chloride, natural flavors, stevia leaf extract. In each packet of LMNT there’s 1000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. This is a good mix.
These things are really good I’ve recommended these in the past. Another one that I really like is is by a salt brand called Redmond. Redmond Re-Lyte is the name of the product. Re-Lyte and they use ancient sea salt. These are the ingredients coconut water powder.
Coconut water is a natural has natural occurring electrolytes in it. Citric acid stevia leaf extract natural flavors 810 milligrams of sodium per serving and this stuff comes in a little tub so you can measure out your own servings but 810 milligrams of sodium, 400 milligrams of potassium, 180 milligrams of chloride, 60 milligrams of calcium, 50 milligrams of magnesium. So both of these have good electrolyte profiles.
I kind of like the Redman Re-Lyte just because it’s a little more convenient without having to have all these packets that you have to open, number one. Number two, it also includes calcium, which I think is important as an electrolyte. So, but they’re both great, they’re both great choices.
Okay, next supplement that I think every runner can benefit from is protein powder. So protein is probably the most important of all the macronutrients that we need for survive like we cannot survive if we do not get protein in our diet. Fat is the other one, we have to eat fat or will die, we have to eat protein or we will die. These are called essential macronutrients. If we don’t consume those in our diet, we will perish.
Interestingly enough, carbohydrates are not considered an essential macro nutrient. If we don’t eat carbohydrates, we’ll be fine. Like there’s really nothing that’s going to go wrong. Our liver will produce all the glucose that our that our brain needs for survival. So we really don’t even have to eat foods that are related with carbohydrates or sugars.
Okay, so protein is very important. Why should you supplement with protein? Why do you need to eat some kind of protein powder? Shouldn’t you just get enough protein in your diet? Yes, you can definitely get enough protein in your diet. But most people find it difficult to get enough protein by eating a protein.
You know, meat essentially is probably the best form of protein. But if you’re vegan, vegetarian, whatever tofu, beans, there’s legumes, there’s other sources of protein where you can up your protein intake. But I just find that most people I talked to struggle to get enough protein in during the day.
The recommendations from the government are like, hey, 65% of your calories needs to be coming from carbohydrate. So this right alone right there, if you’re following the standard American diet right there, it’s gonna make it really difficult to get enough protein.
And I think that the type of protein powder matters and that whey protein seems to be the best the safest, the most studied the most effective, the most bioavailable form of protein, it is a complete protein means it contains all nine essential amino acids. So whey protein seems to be the best.
Now, if you are vegan or vegetarian, you don’t want to do the dairy or you’re lactose intolerant or something like that. No problem. There are other good options out there. Soy is a good option. I know a lot of people are allergic to soy, but it does have all the essential amino acids, which is important.
Pea protein is the other one that has all the essential amino acids, so those are both considered complete proteins. And those are pretty good to do, but way is superior in a lot of different ways. So if you’re somebody that can handle, you know, eating the whey protein, then that’s your best bet.
Okay, so the for the focus of this conversation today, I’m going to be mostly focusing on whey protein as the protein supplement, but you can just, you know, plug and play the other ones into this same formula because they all have similar benefits. But there’s a couple of benefits that are specific to weigh as I’m going to mention here in just a minute.
Okay, so some of the benefits of whey protein or you know, taking a protein supplement. So muscle mass declines naturally as you age, unless you’re doing something to offset that, okay. For most people, this leads to muscle loss and fat gain, and raises the risk of lots of metabolic diseases right.
This adverse change in body composition can be slowed, prevented or reversed with a combination of strength training and getting enough protein in your diet. Strength training, coupled with the consumption of a high protein foods or a protein supplement has been shown to be an effective preventative strategy for muscle degradation, and weight gain as we age.
So particularly effective seem to be high quality protein sources such as weight. So whey is rich in a branched chain amino acid called leucine. And leucine is the most growth promoting or anabolic of the amino acids. And for this reason, whey protein is effective for the prevention of age related muscle loss, as well as for improved strength.
So for muscle growth, some studies show that whey protein may be slightly better than other types of proteins such as casein or soy, okay. Whey protein may also lower blood pressure, okay, so abnormally high blood pressure, or condition called hypertension, is one of the leading risk factors for heart disease. Numerous studies have linked the consumption of dairy products with reduced blood pressure, interesting.
This effect has been attributed to a family of bioactive peptides and dairy called ace inhibitors. And in whey proteins, that specifically, the ace inhibitors are called lactic acids and several animal studies have demonstrated their beneficial effects on blood pressure.
So one study in overweight individuals showed that whey protein consumption around 50 grams a day for 12 weeks lowered systolic blood pressure by 4%. And other milk proteins like casein had, casein had seen similar effects.
This is supported by another study that found significant effects when participants were given whey protein for six weeks. However, understand this though, blood pressure decreased only in those that had high or slightly elevated blood pressure to begin with. So it didn’t really have an effect on lowering blood pressure for people with normal blood pressure.
But that’s a good benefit of just doing something as simple as taking a protein supplement. Protein helps to reduce inflammation. So inflammation is part of the body’s natural response to damage and short term inflammation can be beneficial. But under certain certain circumstances, it can become chronic and this is not good.
Chronic inflammation can be harmful. It’s a risk factor for many diseases. And it may reflect underlying health conditions of or lifestyle habits that can be detrimental to your health. This large study done recently found that high doses of whey protein supplements and when they say high doses, they’re talking equal to or greater than 20 grams per day, that is not high.
That’s like less than one scoop of protein powder basically. But anyway, these particular doses of whey protein supplements significantly reduced reactive protein CRP, which is a key marker of inflammation in the body so good at reducing inflammation. If you’re a runner and you want to recover faster and not be so inflamed, whey protein is a great supplement for that protein in general will help with that.
Also understand this protein is highly satiating, it’s very filling, and it helps to reduce hunger. So when we talk about satiety, we’re talking about the feeling of fullness we we experienced after eating a meal.
It’s the opposite of appetite or hunger, and it should suppress the cravings for food and the desire to eat. So eating food that is more satiating will help you to not eat as much to feel more full throughout the day. And to help you to not be craving all kinds of crazy foods throughout the day which is all good.
If you’re trying to lose weight then not being totally ravenously hungry and craving sugar and stuff like that is a good thing. It’s a good thing. So some foods are more satiating than others, and it depends on their macronutrient composition.
Carbohydrates, being the least satiating, fat being the next and then protein being the most, by far, the most satiating of the three big macronutrients. However, not all proteins have the same effect on satiety. Whey protein appears to be more satiating than other types of protein such as casein or soy.
These properties make it particularly useful for those who want to try to you know, consume fewer calories and lose weight. Okay, so protein, super satiating, I always suggest people eat more protein. And this is a great way to help you lose weight.
That is actually the next big benefit of a protein supplement is that it increased consumption of protein has been a well known weight loss strategy. And this is one of the things that I promote with my clients as well. And the reason this works is because it suppresses appetite, it leads to typically reduced calorie intake, it helps to boost your metabolism helps you to burn more calories.
And if you’re burning the right kinds of calories, meaning fat, then it’ll help you to lose more weight, it helps to maintain muscle mass when you’re losing weight. A lot of people they set out to lose weight, and they lose a lot of muscle mass in the process. We don’t want to do that. So supplementing with protein, especially a good quality protein, like whey will help you to offset that muscle loss.
And as long as you’re doing proper strength training as well, then you’ll be actually gaining muscle and losing weight and losing the fat weight. This is how you improve your body composition and get that have that nice, lean, strong look that we all want. So whey protein has been shown to be particularly effective, and it has a superior effect on fat burning and satiety than other types of protein.
So just know that how much protein powder should you be taking, really, the recommendations vary a little bit here, but 25 to 50 grams per day seems to be fine. If you’re somebody that is not really getting enough protein from your diet, then do a double scoop of protein.
So like 50 grams, typically a scoop is like 20-25 grams of protein. So do a couple scoops of that, mix it up with some water, some milk or almond milk or whatever, you know, floats your boat there. But 25 to 50 grams a day seems to be the recommended amount, total protein recommendations, and this has changed over the years.
But I like to tell people that you should probably be getting point seven to one gram of protein for every pound of ideal body weight. So if your goal is to get to 150 pounds, you probably want to be between 105 to 150 grams of protein per day.
Again, this can be hard for some people, especially women, women seem to have a little bit of a hard time getting enough protein just from food alone. So supplementing is a great way to make sure you’re getting adequate protein to support your weight loss to support your training.
Brands I recommend – there’s lots of great brands out there. I just recommend looking for brands that have few ingredients that don’t have any weird ingredients that you don’t understand that don’t have any added sugar. I’m currently using a whey protein powder by a company called Levels.
And the ingredients are really simple. It is whey protein, vanilla extract, sunflower lecithin, which is a natural emulsifier just improves the consistency when you mix it up. Sea salt, stevia leaf extract and monk fruit extract. That’s it super simple ingredients. I understand what all those are. There’s nothing weird in there.
But look for a brand that you know is in your budget and also because protein can be expensive. Look for something that’s in your budget and that that feels good to you. Okay, just read the labels get good at reading labels.
Okay, last of my big three supplements that I think every runner should be taking is creatine. So what is creatine? Creatine is a natural supplement used to boost athletic performance. It’s not only safe but it’s one of the world’s most popular and most effective supplements for building muscle and strength.
Creatine is a chemical compound that occurs naturally in the body. It’s also found in red meat and seafood. Creatine is an amino acid that comes from other amino acids. So there are Some amino acids that we call essential amino acids, and these are ones that we have to get in our diet, okay?
And so those those essential amino acids can kind of combine and then those produce other amino acids. I think there’s like 20 total amino acids that we need for survival. But then there’s, like 11 other amino acids that are created from combination of the essential amino acids, if that makes sense, okay.
And creatine is one of those amino acids that is created from a combination of other amino acids. So the human body makes creatine in the liver and the kidneys and the pancreas. It’s stored in your muscles, mainly in a form called a phospho, creatine or creatine phosphate. And creatine is involved in making energy for your muscles.
Why should you supplement with creatine? Can’t you just get this in your diet? You can you can actually get enough creatine in your diet if you’re eating red meat and fish, but you would probably need to eat something like two and a half pounds of steak every day to get you to the recommended dosage of creatine which is five grams per day.
Five grams is like a rounded teaspoon of creatine so it’s not a lot, but two half pounds of steak maybe a little bit much for most people. Okay, so it’s much easier to just supplement. Again, these are the supplements that I think are so beneficial, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be supplementing with them, especially creatine.
So what are the benefits of creatine? One it helps to produce helps your muscle cells produce more energy. Creatine increases your muscles phosphocreatine stores, it aids in the formation of ATP, which is the key molecule your cells use for energy and all basic life functions. During exercise ATP is broken down to produce energy.
The rate of ATP resynthesis limits your ability to continually perform at max intensity. So as your ATP as you use up ATP faster than you can reproduce it Okay, so creatine supplements actually increase your fossil creatine stores allowing you to produce more ATP energy to fuel your muscles during high intensity exercise. This is the primary mechanism behind creatine perhaps performance enhancing effects.
So I mean right there, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using creatine. Creatine also supports many other functions in the muscles. It’s a popular and effective supplement for adding muscle mass. It can alter numerous cellular pathways that lead to new muscle growth for example, it boosts the formation of proteins that create new muscle fibers. It can also raise levels of insulin like growth factor, IGF1, a hormone that promotes increases in muscle mass.
What’s more creatine supplements can increase the water content of your muscles. This is known as cell volumization and can quickly increase muscle size as soon as you start taking creatine you’ll notice a little bit of of water retention and your muscles. Most people see it as a little bit of weight gain.
So they’ll say oh my gosh, I’m starting creatine and I started gaining weight. No, you’re going to just gain a little bit of muscle and water content and your muscles are totally fine. It’s actually good for you to do that. Some research indicates that creatine decreases levels of myostatin, which is a molecule responsible for stunting muscle growth. So reducing myostatin can help you build muscle faster as well. Very, very awesome stuff this creatine, it improves high intensity exercise performance.
So creatine is direct role and ATP production means it can drastically improve high intensity exercise performance. They improve numerous factors including strength ballistic power, sprinting ability, muscle endurance, resistance to fatigue, muscle mass recovery brain performance, unlike supplements only affect advanced athletes.
Creatine benefits you regardless of your fitness level, that is key right there. And one review found that improves high intensity exercise performance by up to 15%. Why are you not taking creatine every day? Creatine also speeds muscle growth, so it’s one of the most effective supplements for adding muscle mass.
Taking it for just as few as five to seven days has been shown to significantly increase lean body weight and muscle size. This initial rise is caused by increases in water content of your muscles fine over the long term though.
It also aids in muscle fiber growth by signal signaling key biological pathways and boosting your performance at the gym. And one study of a six week training regimen participants who used creatine added 4.4 pounds more muscle mass on average than the control group that’s huge, huge, huge, huge.
Similarly, a comprehensive review demonstrated a clear increase in muscle mass among those taking creatine compared with those performing the same training regimen without creatine. This review also compared the world’s most popular sports supplements and concluded that creatine is the best one available. Its advantages include being less expensive and far safer than most other sports supplements.
Again, creatine for the when creatine helps to improve brain function, it plays an important role in your brain health and brain function. Research demonstrates that your brain requires a significant amount of ATP when performing difficult tasks and supplements can increase the phosphocreatine stores in your brain and help it produce more ATP.
Creatine may also aid brain function by increasing dopamine levels and mitochondrial function. As meat as the best dietary source of creatine vegetarians often have low levels of creatine in their system and one study on creatine supplements and vegetarians found a 20 to 50% improvement in some memory and intelligence test scores. When these vegetarians who are starving were on a creatine supplement.
And then for older individuals supplementing with creatine for just a few weeks significantly improved memory and recall ability. And older adults creatine may boost brain function protect against neurological diseases and reduce age related loss of muscle and strength. So just take creatine every day, just from now on. Okay.
One last thing about it is that it helps to reduce muscle helps to reduce fatigue and tiredness. One study they did show that people that had been sleep deprived had reduced levels of fatigue and increased energy levels. And they did a test on cycler cyclists. And they found that creatine reduced the fatigue in athletes taking a cycling test and has been used to decrease fatigue when exercising in high heat as well.
So again, creatine, for the win every day. Creatine is safe and easy to use. Along with all of its benefits, it’s one of the cheapest and safest supplements available. It’s been studied more than any other supplement out there. You can find it just about anywhere. It’s been researched for more than 200 years. Yeah, I know that’s crazy.
And numerous studies supported safety for long term use clinical trial trials lasting up to five years report no adverse effects in healthy individuals. What’s more, supplementing is easy, just do three to five grams of creatine monohydrate powder per day.
So what I’m recommending is creatine monohydrate. That should be the only ingredient so if you’re buying something and it has anything else in it, just don’t get it just stick with creatine monohydrate that should be the only ingredient I use a brand called Optimum Nutrition. It’s great, lots of good reviews. It’s odorless, tasteless, pretty much and and I just add it to my protein shake, mix it up. And then I’m good to go around five grams a day for most people, if you’re if you’re a little on the lighter side, you could probably be closer to that three grams. If you’re heavier, you know, 220 pounds or 250 pounds you could probably go six or eight grams per day something like that.
Most people seem to do well around five grams per day. Cool. Okay, those are supplements that I think every runner should be taking. I hope you got something good out of this episode today. I hope you have some good takeaways and you can start supplementing with abandon because these are these are good ones and I think just about everybody can benefit from these core. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Sometimes, I have a bunch of thoughts that I want to share with you here on the podcast and I’ll create an episode for each one of those random thoughts. This is a great way of taking a deep dive …
Continue Reading about 206. Random Thoughts about Weight Loss for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 206 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, and today, some random thoughts about weight loss for runners.
So sometimes I have a bunch of thoughts that I want to share with you here on the podcast. And what I do is I create individual episodes for each one of those random thoughts. This is a great way of taking a deep dive into each topic and looking at it from several different angles.
However, today’s podcast is going to be a little bit different. Instead of focusing on just one topic, I’ve got several sort of random thoughts about weight loss for runners that I’m going to share with you here today.
And these thoughts and topics might all seem kind of random, but they do all focus on weight loss and running. So maybe they’re not so random after all. But first, I know I talk a lot about losing weight and improving your health and your fitness here on the podcast.
And all this stuff can feel pretty overwhelming. So if you’re looking for a good place to just get started and understand the basic core principles that I talked about here, and that I have talked about for the last four years here on the podcast, I’ve got a free training that I created, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
In this training, you’ll learn how to fuel your body so you can lose weight and improve running, you’ll learn about strength training, and how important that is for you. You’ll learn how to make mindset shifts to make all of these changes of lifestyle, sustainable, and tons more.
If you’re ready to get leaner and stronger, if you’re ready to run faster and longer, if you’re ready to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, then you need to check out this free training now just go to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Easy peasy.
Okay, so today, some random thoughts about weight loss for runners. So like I said at the intro here, a lot of times when I set out to do a podcast, I’ll have lots of topics that I kind of choose from, and I’ll pick one topic.
And I’ll take a deep dive into that one topic. And I love doing that because I get to really delve into each particular thought or principle or topic or whatever it is. And look at it from a bunch of different angles and really give you a very clear picture of that one principle.
And if you look at my past episodes, you’ll see that this is the case that most episodes take a deep dive into one particular topic. But occasionally, I have a bunch of topics or a bunch of thoughts that I want to get down. And they’re just not enough for an entire podcast episode.
Sometimes I share those thoughts on social media. And sometimes I just kind of put them in a little, you know, little file, you know, keep a little note on my phone where I keep all my ideas for future podcasts and stuff. And I’ll just kind of keep them on the phone and just keep looking at them and go I don’t know, I don’t have enough to really do a podcast with all of these little random thoughts.
But today, I thought I’m just going to take a bunch of these random thoughts. And I’m just going to beat them out to you here. And please understand that all these things are related to running and to weight loss and to diet and exercise and stuff. So they’re not entirely random, but sometimes they are inspired by some comments that I get from people on social media.
Sometimes it’s just some basic principles that I want to make sure that you understand. And so just understand that today’s podcast is a little bit different. I’ve just got some random thoughts I want to share with you.
So I’m just going to dive in and start going through some of these and just keep in mind these are in no particular order or anything like that. They’re just some thoughts that I had, and I’m just mashing them all together here today.
Okay, so the first thing I wanted to talk about is some comments that I’ve gotten from some people on social media. So I occasionally share this podcast episode, and I do a Monday Motivation post. I try to do that every week. I miss a week here and there, but I’ve tried to stay pretty consistent with that.
And occasionally I will get some comments from people bored on those posts, and they’re not always super positive. Now there are lots of positive people out there. And if you’re somebody that has commented on my stuff regularly or shared some of my stuff, thank you for doing that, I appreciate that.
If you’re somebody that has been posting some hateful comments, then stop doing that. There’s really no reason for that kind of stuff. But some of the comments I think, are kind of interesting. And I’ve gotten a few similar comments from people recently. And I wanted to kind of address some of those.
And I want to preface this all by saying that I hate social media, I really do. I do not think social media is good for us. I think it is dumbing down us as a society. I think it’s causing a lot of, you know, FOMO, fear of missing out, I think it’s causing a lot of resentment with people.
I think it’s causing a lot of, you know, thinking that other people are better than we are. I think there’s a lot of negativity around social media, there’s bullying that happens on social media, it’s very divisive. People take things out of context. There’s so much now they’re doing with AI, where they’re actually creating videos of people saying things that it’s not, they never said those things.
But they can use AI and, you know, chat GPT, or whatever it is, and create a very convincing video of somebody saying some words that they haven’t said. So a lot of the stuff we’re even seeing out there isn’t even the truth. It’s not true. But we’re seeing these things. And it’s filling our feeds with just garbage and nonsense and divisiveness. And I think there’s a problem there.
So anyway, I just wanted to say that I try not to use social media very often, I do it because it helps to spread the word about this podcast, and helps to share some of the principles that I’m sharing out there in the world. But I don’t do a whole lot on social media.
But occasionally, I’ll get some comments from people. And some of them are, I’m gonna go through a couple of these that I’ve gotten recently that have, you know, I’ve gotten several comments that are very similar to this.
One of them is like, you shouldn’t tell people they have to lose weight, stop telling people they need to lose weight. And I just have to say, like, what, first of all, I have never told you or anybody that you have to lose weight.
I have never ever, ever said that and I’ve never thought it. If I have implied that, then I apologize. I don’t mean to think I’ve implied that. So I’m here to help you lose weight, if that’s something that you want help with. If you don’t want help with that, move on. That’s it, you just need to walk away.
If you’re somebody that doesn’t feel like they need to lose weight, and you’re listening to this podcast every week about me telling people how they can lose weight and how to be healthier and how to improve your diet and running, then, and you’re getting really resentful about listening to that. Just stop listening to that.
Okay, I’ve got no problem with that. I’m here for the people who want help. That’s it. And there are lots and lots of people, millions of people in this world who want help losing weight, they’ve tried all the stuff, it doesn’t work for them.
So I’m not telling you, you need to lose weight, but I’m here to help you if you want the help. Okay. So first of all, I’ve never told you, you need to lose weight.
Another comment that I’ve heard, or seen recently from several people is the gist of it is this. It’s not about losing weight, it’s about losing fat. So stop telling people, they need to lose weight, you need to tell them they need to lose fat.
Okay, so we’re now the semantic police out there. We’re like telling, you know, using these little phrases, I talk about weight loss because everybody understands what that means. Yes, it means losing fat weight. I’m not telling you, oh, I’m going to help you lose weight. And I really hope you lose muscle and bone mass because that’s my goal is to make sure that you know, develop osteoporosis and sarcopenia you know, no, it’s not about that.
Of course, it’s about fat loss. You know, people don’t like the word fat, you know. So I do use the word fat a lot. We talk about getting fat-adapted and being a fat-burning machine. But if you tell people, if you put it out there like, hey, I’m the Fat Loss For Runners Guy like people are not gonna like that. I don’t know. It just has some negative connotations.
So I think we all know, I’m talking about losing fat weight, right? I’m not talking about losing muscle. In fact, one of the big principles, I make sure that every one of my clients understands when they start working with me is that we don’t want to lose muscle.
We want to make sure we are preserving or gaining muscle mass while we are losing weight. And there’s a way that you can do that. A lot of people when they set out to lose weight, they just cut their calories back really significantly.
And yeah, they do lose weight, but that is muscle and bone, and fat. And we don’t want to do that that’s not the right way to do especially if you’re an athlete, and you’re a runner, and you’re training for something like you just need to make sure you’re losing weight the right way.
A/nd I always make sure that my clients are losing weight the right way. Okay, so of course, it’s about fat loss. Of course, it is. Right? I don’t explicitly say that. But please understand, that’s what I’m talking about. So if you’re somebody out there, that’s like, oh, I didn’t know you meant fat weight. Well, now you do.
And speaking of fat, as somebody has mentioned, you know, a couple of times in the past, like, oh, you fat shame people, you fat-shamed people like, listen, again, I have never, I’ve never shamed anybody about anything.
Again, I’m not telling you, you need to lose weight. I’m talking about, I’m talking to the people who are interested in becoming leaner, who are interested in changing their body composition for the better, who are interested in becoming healthier. That has nothing to do with if you’re overweight, good for you.
I’m old, I was overweight. You know, I was overweight for a decade or more, a couple of decades. And then I lost a bunch of weight. And then I gained a bunch of that back again. And I had to lose it again. Like I know what it’s like to be overweight.
And I’ve never been shamed by anybody in my life for that. And I’ve never shamed anybody else or not intentionally shamed anybody else for being overweight. Like, it’s such a common thing these days for people to be overweight. It’s like, okay, great. If you want to lose weight, great. If you don’t, that’s completely fine, too. I’m okay either way.
I’m here to help you if you want to lose the weight. But I’ve never fat-shamed anybody. I did have a friend that sort of fat-shamed me. Like, when I was pretty overweight, I was working with this guy. And he used to call me fatty Patty from Cincinnati. That was his little nickname for me. And he thought it was really funny.
And I, you know, kind of went along with it. He was a good friend of mine. So he could say that, you know, he didn’t mean it in a really mean way. But looking back on it, and I’m like, oh my god, he was fat-shaming me, but it never really bothered me that much.
A couple other random thoughts. Okay. So I’ve heard from a lot of people, some people mentioned this on social media. Some people mentioned this when I get on calls with them, where they’re like, oh, you know, I’ve been told that, since I’m a runner, I shouldn’t try to lose weight, like you shouldn’t do that. It’s not okay to do that. You shouldn’t, you know, try to lose weight while you’re training for a marathon or half marathon or something like that.
And I want to challenge that. And I want to, I want to dive into this just a little bit. So a lot of people I talked to tell me, Patrick, I am a runner. I’ve been running for a long time. You know, I used to eat a ton of you know, carbs, and sugar and junk food or whatever it was always fine and never really bothered me at all.
But as I get older, I tend to put on more weight. In fact, the more I run when I get into my training cycle, and I’m training for a marathon or half marathon, I gain weight, and what’s going on there? Like how come things aren’t working for me? They used to work for me.
And, you know, they’ve heard from people like, oh, you know, I’ve heard that I shouldn’t try to lose weight when I’m training for something. And I’m always training for something. I’ve got, like two races a year.
So I’m kind of always training for something. I have a short offseason. But you know, I gain weight while I’m training. But what am I supposed to do here because like just every year, year after year after year, I keep gaining more weight.
And I think this is interesting, because there are people out there that will tell people, like you shouldn’t try to lose weight if you’re a runner. But apparently, it’s okay to gain weight as a runner, like that’s okay. But you shouldn’t try to lose weight.
I think that’s kind of backward. I think that’s kind of stupid. So a lot of people think that the answer to losing weight is just running more and more and more. And if you’re running a lot, you know, you’re putting in 60 miles a week or whatever it is, you’re training, you know, some massive amount of training, and you’re gaining weight in the process or not losing weight in the process, that you’re just you know, you’re doing it wrong, you there’s something wrong with you, you know, it’s genetics, whatever.
And listen, it isn’t genetics, it isn’t that there’s something wrong with you. You’re just doing the wrong you’re focusing on the wrong thing. You know, it’s not about you. It’s not about your diet. It’s about, wait, I’m sorry, it’s not about your exercise. It’s about what you’re eating.
It’s really more about the diet than it is about the training that you’re doing. Really, I talk to people every day who are like I gain weight, the more I train, and I’m like, yeah, because your diet is terrible. And the more you train, the hungrier you are, typically, and the more you end up eating of that junk food, and so you’re just gonna gain weight, your body’s gonna keep storing a lot of that junk food is excess fat, even though you’re running a lot doesn’t matter.
So the answer is not to run more. But this idea of not losing weight, as you are training for something, I don’t think that is valid for all people. Now, some people are like, listen, when I’m training, it puts my body under a lot of stress. And that stress will cause me to hold on to more weight, which is kind of true if you’re training the wrong way.
In other words, if you’re overtraining, you could be putting your body into a state of chronic stress. Chronic stress equals chronically elevated cortisol levels, chronically elevated cortisol levels to the stress hormone will lead to chronically elevated blood sugar, and insulin, and you’re basically staying in that fat storage mode, you’re always storing fat, and your body cannot burn fat, while you’re in a state of chronic stress.
So I get that part of it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or can’t lose weight, while you’re training, you just need to fix your training and fix your diet. The other side of this is that when most people set out to lose weight, they cut their calories and they lose muscle and they lose bone mass.
And they lose fat weight too. But when you’re training for something, you do not want to be losing muscle mass, like you need to maintain muscle mass while you’re training, otherwise, you’re gonna like really mess yourself up, and you risk getting injured. And there are lots of reasons why you don’t want to lose muscle and bone while you’re training for a marathon. It’s just pretty obvious, right?
So you risk injury, you risk burning yourself out. Really, it’s really bad for you to do that. And so we never want to lose muscle and bone, we always want to just focus on fat loss. That’s why I always talk about fat burning, turning your body into a fat-burning machine, getting you fat adapted.
Once you’re fat-adapted, that means your body is burning fat the way it’s supposed to. It means that you have tons of energy for running fat stored body fat is a great source of fuel for runners. Plus, if you want to lose weight, we’re talking about fat weight here, you have to burn the fat.
How do you burn the fat? Well, you got to stop storing the fat and you got to get into that fat-burning mode instead, right?
So another couple of reasons why people say you shouldn’t try to lose weight while you’re running or shouldn’t run while you’re trying to lose weight. So some people say, oh, you’re losing weight, great, just focus on that.
Don’t work out, don’t run, because it’s going to put your body under too much stress. It’s too many changes all at once. You should just focus on one thing at a time. That way, you’re going to be more compliant with your diet, like just change your diet first. And then you can work on exercise later.
And I’ve heard this quite a bit and people that I talk to tell me this and they’re like, man, I’m not doing that. I don’t want to go on some diet where I can’t exercise for three months or something. That’s crazy. I’ll go crazy, right? Because the exercise is so good for you. There are so many reasons why it’s so good for you.
It produces dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, like, it’s our feel-good hormones, our feel-good neurotransmitters. It’s like, it puts us in a good mood, it helps us to sleep, it helps us to focus it, you know, gives us plenty of energy throughout the day. Why would you stop doing that?
Oh, because you know, it’s going to be too hard for you to stick to your diet and exercise at the same time, well, then you need some help with that. You’re doing it wrong, right? You just need some help with the mindset around this stuff. So you can lose weight while running. You can lose weight while working out. You can do both.
And if you’re somebody who loves working out and you want to focus on your nutrition and change you should be able to do that and you can do it. I help people with this all the time. It’s totally doable.
Another thing I hear people say and a lot of these comments are coming from social media. A lot of these topics are coming from social media. This one is oh, you know you don’t need to change your diet or anything just you know, eat right and exercise.
You know, I don’t understand why it’s so hard for people to understand. Like these are comments that I hear from people that you know kind of on I’m paraphrasing here, but you know, just the writing exercise, it’s easy to do. You know, that’s all you need to do.
And listen, if it was easy, there would be no overweight people in this world, there’d be nobody that really needs to lose weight ever if it was easy. If it was just that simple. Of course, we know that we should eat right and exercise. Of course, we know that.
But what does it mean to eat right? I mean, if you get out there on the internet, you start looking, okay, what’s the right diet, like, you’re gonna get 10 million different answers. It’s stupid. Like, we’ve just got this wrong, where we think there’s like one answer that’s going to work forever. It doesn’t, it doesn’t.
Whatever you did, whatever this random person over here did, whatever the latest fad diet is, whatever the trend is, whatever that book is, you just read, none of that stuff is going to work for everybody. I’ve tried all that stuff. And until I just kind of put together my own sort of protocol, my own food plan. That’s the only thing that really worked for me.
And that’s what I help people do, you know, I help people figure out what works for them. Because all this other nonsense that’s out there, you know, vegan diet, or a carnivore diet, or South Beach diet, the Mediterranean diet, whatever it is, whatever, whatever diet that’s like, pre-made, that you’re trying to follow, it’s not going to work for you.
I mean, it’s just not going to, well, it’s not gonna work for everybody, we’ll put it that way. Right, there isn’t one diet that works perfectly for everybody, we all have to just get our heads around that. And so I don’t encourage people to follow any particular diet, instead, I help you get off the junk food.
I help people start eating real food, start focusing on getting enough protein, ditching the really problematic carbohydrate-laden foods, processed foods, the seed oils, the sugars, that kind of stuff. And just focus on eating the kinds of foods that fill them up, and that make them feel great.
And that improves their body composition that helps them to lose the fat weight and gain muscle and maintain muscle. Like that’s so important. And related to that, I’ve seen comments in like Facebook groups from people who are like, oh, man, I, you know, I’m, I’m struggling with gaining weight while I’m training for a marathon.
I’m in a lot of running groups and stuff on Facebook. And I’ll see people post, you know, questions like, oh, you know, I’m gaining weight, what should I do, and all these people, random people who know nothing about this person, are telling them what they shouldn’t, should or shouldn’t eat.
You know, how, oh, here’s what you should do. You know, here’s the diet, you should do blah, blah, blah, eat vegan, eat, you know, nothing, but meat, eat nothing. But you know, broccoli, nothing, but whatever. Like, there’s all these crazy diets out there. And listen, you know nothing about that person you have, you’re not qualified to give that person advice.
Even if you are a doctor, you shouldn’t give that person advice, because you don’t know them, you don’t have a relationship with that person. Again, this is why I do coaching. And I don’t just sell a book about this stuff, because I can’t put it in a book.
Because the same thing doesn’t work for everybody, you’ve got to really understand that, okay. But these randos that are just giving people this unsolicited advice, and sometimes it’s solicited, but you know, most of the time it’s not, and just telling people what they should do. It’s so stupid, just don’t do that.
If you’re one of those people who like feels compelled to give people advice on what they should do. Don’t do that. Okay? Because you don’t know what’s going to work for them.
Okay, a little bit of this as ranting, I get that I’m just like, I wanted to get this stuff off my chest for a while. So thank you for letting me do that. Related to all that there are tons of like running coaches out there. And even like nutritionists and dietitians that I’ve seen, who you know, preach about certain ways of doing things. And they have, they follow this traditional coaching style, which is, it’s really not even coaching, it’s just they tell you what to do.
Like, here’s what you’re going to do, here’s the protocol, you’re going to follow, you know, I have this 10-step plan, this is what’s going to work for you right, again, it’s a one size fits all, but they’re not taking into account that you know, that you’re an individual and that you have certain metabolism and certain lifestyle needs that need to be considered here.
And, and lots of other factors that make you an individual, you know, genetics and food preferences and how you like to work out and you know, how much running you do and all these other things.
But there are lots of coaches out there dietitians, nutritionists, whatever, who don’t have a one-size-fits-all program, they just tell you what to do. Here’s what you’re gonna do. They don’t consider the fact that it’s hard to, like you know what to do, but it’s hard to stick with it.
It’s hard to keep doing those things. And they don’t even consider that. Oh, you didn’t, I told you to eat these foods, you didn’t do it. Why not? Well, because, you know, I really struggle with this stuff. And, you know, I think I might be like, eating emotionally, because I find that I just, I need to eat to feel better. And they’re just like, I don’t get any of that, you know, you just need to stick to the plan here.
You know, you need to have more willpower, you need to be more disciplined. That’s not helpful. And all these people that I’m talking about these coaches, these, a lot of these people I’m thinking about here are like elite athletes, who decided they want to be a coach, they have never been overweight in their life.
They’ve never had to lose 40 or 50 pounds, they don’t know what that feels like they’ve never struggled with, you know, food. You know, emotional eating, or with food issues, you know, they’ve never struggled with their weight. They never struggled with working out or running, you know, maybe they did early on.
But they’re not a four to five-hour marathoner who struggles to, you know, PR, or struggles to, you know, maybe you’re trying to qualify for Boston or something like that. These are people who are like, elite athletes, top athletes in the world. And they just think they, they’re a little disassociated with the common people like me, and you, you know, and, and I see these people doling out advice and telling people what to do.
And I just look at it and kind of shake my head, because I’m like, that is not gonna work for everybody. And it might work for some people who are, you know, of elite caliber, but you’re trying to reach the general population out here, you’re talking way over their heads like they’re not there, they just can’t relate to that stuff, and you can’t relate to them.
So how can you help these people if you’ve never been there before? How can you help these people if you, you know, lose weight or change their diet? If you’ve never struggled with that stuff? You know, you’re somebody who’s like, oh, you know, like David Goggins? You know, it’s like, oh, you know, just run 200 miles a day, you know, and it’s no big deal. Like, just, you just do it, man, you know?
And well, that’s hard for people sometimes. And what do you do when that kind of stuff is, is challenging? It’s hard to get out of bed and put those running shoes on and go out the door? How do you deal with that stuff? How do you deal with the fact that you’re used to eating, you know, junk food, because you know, you’re not dealing with some of the mental and emotional stuff that you’re going through and you keep turning to food?
Like, how do you deal with the stuff that comes up, when you stop eating that food, like, there’s going to be all this stuff that comes up when you stop eating the junk food that you got to start dealing with, you know, and I’m not saying I’m like a therapist or anything like that. But we do a lot of work around emotional eating, we do a lot of work around helping people to change their relationship with food.
So it’s not about just eating automatically and eating emotionally, it’s about eating intentionally, and eating mindfully, you know? And of course, eating good food, eating real food, not junk food. Okay, so I think that’s about it for these random thoughts that I had today.
Thanks for listening to all of this stuff here. I wanted to just get all these out and share them with you because they’ve been topics that have been on my mind for a while. And every now and then I’ll put together a little list of random topics and I’ll share them with you guys.
I think this is kind of fun for me to do. Today. Actually, it just can kind of go off on a tangent on these little things. A little bit of a rant here and there too, which is okay. I hope that’s okay with you. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
I recently sat down with Dr. Marvin Merrit and had an awesome conversation about what it means to be a healthy human being. In the world of health and fitness, there is a lot of information out …
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 201 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, reversing disease through nutrition and exercise with Dr. Marvin Merrit.
So I recently sat down with Dr. Marvin, and we had this awesome conversation about what it means to be a healthy human being. In the world of health and fitness. There’s a lot of confusing information out there. And it can feel pretty overwhelming. And a lot of this information can even be contradictory.
Okay, so how do you know what you should be doing? Well, rest assured that Dr. Marvin and I break it all down for you. And we offer up some very clear strategies for reversing disease, using nutrition and exercise so that you can become the healthiest version of yourself yet.
But first, I know I talk a lot about losing weight, and improving your health and fitness. And I know that all the stuff that even I talk about here can feel a little overwhelming.
That’s why I created a free training just for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. I wanted to make it easy for you, I wanted to break it all down, put all the stuff that I’ve been talking about here on the podcast for over 200 episodes now and give you some really actionable strategies.
So in this training video, you’re going to learn how to fuel your body properly so that you can lose weight and improve your running. You’re going to learn the incredibly important role that strength plays in being a lean healthy runner.
You’re going to learn how to make changes that are actually sustainable, because that is what it’s all about. We’re not interested in short term fixes. We want sustainability with our diet, and so much more. So if you’re ready to get leaner and get stronger, run faster and run longer than ever before. If you’re ready to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself yet, then check out this free training.
It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. You can find it by going to my website, runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training.
Okay, without further ado, let’s just get into this conversation. So much fun talking to Dr. Marvin, reversing disease through nutrition and exercise with Dr. Marvin Merrit.
Okay, today, I’ve got Dr. Marvin here, Marvin Merrit and Marvin reached out to me on Facebook, right?
Dr. Marvin Merrit
Yes.
Patrick McGilvray
And you were sharing with me that you teach a lot of the same concepts and principles that I talked about on my podcast, and I share on social media and things like that. And you said, hey, this would be a great kind of collaboration, or maybe we can have a conversation about this.
So we got on a call and you and I had a great conversation where I thought, man, we should really record this, you know, and do a podcast on this because you come out with this healthy eating and healthy lifestyle, from a little bit of a different perspective, being a doctor.
And I typically don’t talk a lot about, about the health, I’m sorry about the medical side of things because I’m not a doctor. I do quote a lot of doctors and I read a lot of the research and I and I understand a lot of the concepts.
And I absolutely know how a lot of these healthy principles can help us with medical conditions. But it’s you know, I don’t like to talk about that stuff, because I don’t have that MD after my name, you know. So that’s where you come in. And I want to just kind of talk to you about, you know, those, the medical side of things and how healthy eating and exercising can help us.
So first of all, before we get into all that stuff, just give us a little bit of background on who you are, and how you got to where you are today with all this stuff.
Marvin Merrit
Sure. Well, basically I’m a kid from New Jersey. I went to college as an undergrad at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Upon graduation from there, I attended Life University where I got my Doctorate, and I’ve been a practicing physician for almost 40 years.
My practice has taken many manifestations over the years. And now I kind of focus a lot on treating my patients very well. realistically very naturally, through exercise through diet and through nutritional supplements to manage what we call metabolic syndrome, which is type two diabetes, hyperlipidemia, which has high cholesterol, high triglycerides, and hypertension, which we commonly refer to as high blood pressure.
And being that these are all lifestyle diseases, people can go ahead and make that conscious decision. Do I want to live healthy? Do I want to eat healthy? Do I want to increase my exercise?
Because all of those combined together will help with the better control of all of these diseases that many people suffer from not just here in the United States, but around the world and just about all modern countries.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and when you say that lifestyle diseases, I think that is spot on, because these are things that are caused by lifestyle. Right?
Marvin Merrit
Exactly, exactly. You know, you, you eat poorly, you know, it’s the old story garbage in garbage out, you eat poorly, you’re going to end up with high cholesterol, there’s just no way around it.
You eat too much saturated fats, too much greasy foods, the fried chicken, the French fries, you’re going to end up with high cholesterol levels.
You eat a lot of products that have hidden sodium in it. And I say hidden sodium, because it’s okay to add a little bit of salt at the table, especially if you’re working out, you’re sweating, you want to replace some of those electrolytes.
But there’s so many foods that have hidden sodium in it because sodium for ages has been used as a preservative. And when you start reading things that are in a can, or things that are in a jar, you see all of this hidden sodium in there in its chemical names, such as, you know, sodium benzoate, you know, people don’t know what sodium benzoate is, they just see that it’s another chemical.
But without fully understanding the labels that are on the containers of the foods that we eat, they don’t realize what they actually have. So that’s where it all comes into play.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I’m gonna reel it back here in just a second. But I have to tell you, I saw this very funny meme once. And I love this, it really sums it up. It’s a guy, you know, talking to his doctor.
And the doctor says, well, you have all these lifestyle diseases. And the guy says to the doctor, okay, I guess I need to change my lifestyle. And the doctor says, oh, no, here’s a pill.
And I think that sort of sums up the medical, the general medical answer to these lifestyle diseases, which is take this drug, take that drug, don’t change your lifestyle, don’t worry about that. That’s all fine. Just, you know, take these drugs.
What’s your take on that? Like, how do you approach things differently than just prescribing medication for people who have these issues?
Marvin Merrit
What it really comes down to and it’s something that that you talk about is people have to be willing to be uncomfortable, they have to be willing to change their diet, they have to be willing to cut out the starchy carbohydrates, the breads, the cakes, the cookies, that candies, the ice cream, you know, the things that are the comfort foods, they have to be willing to get up off the sofa and move, whether it’s run, walk, ride a bicycle, you know, whatever the case, may be getting the pool and swim a couple of laps, just do something physical every single day, they have to be willing to do that.
And, and it’s, it’s all changing that comfort level, people have to be uncomfortable. There’s nothing wrong with okay, you go out for dinner with your, you know, whoever on a Saturday night and you want to have a little bit of something that you don’t normally eat, that’s okay.
But when you do it every day, that’s what gets them into the position that they’re in. And by doing that, that’s the way they’re able to lower and eventually get off some of these medications like the Metformin and the Glipizide. And, and that’s just for diabetes.
Or you know, the medications that we use for high cholesterol, the statins, which are horrible drugs to start out with, because people have so many side effects with them.
And then the hypertension medications, the ACE inhibitors that yeah, great. So it’s going to help lower your blood pressure, but it’s going to give you a chronic cough for the rest of your life. Why put those into your body when you can put natural healthy foods into your body and reverse all of these situations that you have?
And it’s like I always tell my patients, you know, you can keep a diary, and you can fudge that diary all you want. You can come in and talk to me and you can tell me any story you want. Blood doesn’t lie. When I run your blood, I know the truth.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s cool. So you see a lot of these metabolic syndrome issues with people and you treat them naturally and you see good results. Do you see a lot of reversal of these diseases?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, I actually do. If you if you get them off, you know, again, the starchy carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables are okay, but you get them off those starchy carbohydrates, all of those carbohydrates turn to glucose, that’s how we metabolize them, the glucose gets in the blood, and that’s going to raise your blood glucose levels.
Now when it gets a little bit too high, that eventually is going to get stored in the liver. And that’s going to get stored as glycogen. Glycogen is good, because we break that down between meals, we break that down when we exercise.
However, if you don’t do that, then that glycogen is eventually going to turn to triglycerides, triglycerides will get them back into the blood, those can clog some arteries, specifically arteries in the heart.
And that’s how people end up with myocardial infarction, heart attacks, they end up with blockages in the carotid arteries, and it just becomes a vicious vicious cycle.
So what I tried to do is change their diets, get them off the carbs, get them off the fats, get them taking some good healthy supplements to help alleviate some of these problems, such as red yeast rice. Red yeast rice is a natural statin. It’s been used for hundreds of years. Okay.
But most doctors don’t want to use it. And I don’t want to get into the whole theories behind, you know, drug reps and you know, and drug labs and things like that. But they are more prone to prescribe a medication than to use something natural because there’s an incentive there to write that prescription.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I hate that it works that way. So you mentioned like lowering fat intake. What do you mean by that? And like, what do you consider like good, healthy fats?
Marvin Merrit
Okay, so good, healthy fats. Good healthy fats are going to come from things like olive oil. I use a lot of olive oil when I personally cook, because it’s a good healthy fat because you can’t deep fry in it, you just saute in it. Other good healthy fats, avocados, good healthy fats, all your nuts, good healthy fats. Okay, those are all things that are healthy for us.
What’s not healthy is all the processed oils, all the seed oils, while those seed oils are these heavy oils that we just don’t digest well. And because we don’t digest them, well, now they end up getting stored.
And that’s how people also end up suffering from what we call fatty liver disease. The too much of the saturated fats, the fats get stored in the liver, and the liver becomes filled with fat.
It’s reversible, because the liver is one of the most versatile organs that we have in the human body. So we’re able to reverse that. But again, it’s getting off those fats and changing the diet up.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I tell people, generally speaking to stay away from those seed oils, canola oil, you know, that kind of stuff. Whatever is considered like vegetable oils, you know, because they were designed to be something that was like heart healthy, and they’re sold and marketed as being heart healthy. But I think there’s other implications that eating that stuff. There’s like some long term studies that have been done that have shown that this stuff is just toxic for your body.
Marvin Merrit
It’s extremely toxic. You know, if you remember years ago, they used to say, oh, stop eating eggs, eggs are high and cholesterol. But when you take a look at an egg, an egg is almost the perfect food.
It has protein, it has some fat, okay, it has a little bit of carbohydrate in it. And again, in moderation eating a couple of eggs a week is almost the perfect food. So there’s nothing wrong with that.
Where again utilizing these these vegetable oils, the corn oils. Canola oils. You know, those, those just do not metabolize well in the body. And one of the other things I tell my patients, olive oil aside, the lighter the color of the oil, the healthier it is for you, because it’s not as heavy.
So if you use something like sunflower oil, sunflower oil is a very, very light colored oil. It’s good for you, you can utilize it. It metabolizes well in the human body. You can’t fry in it, deep fry in it, because it won’t hold up, it’ll break down. So those types of oils, those are the oils that tend to be more healthy for us.
Patrick McGilvray
And then how do you figure olive oil and things like that play in? Because olive oil is pretty dark, usually.
Marvin Merrit
Olive oil is pretty dark, but olive oil is purified. And that’s the nice thing about it, you get that extra virgin olive oil, which is the better of the olive oils. And that’s been purified. And that because you can’t deep fry in it. You can only saute like some vegetables or a chicken breast or something like that. It’s not going to be soaked in that oil.
Whereas you take something like a vegetable oil, or an animal based oil like lard and you drop your chicken breast covered in you know whatever coating you put it in and you fry it in there for 10 minutes or so, that oil just soaks right into the meat. It soaks right into that breading. And now you’re eating that oil on top of it. And that’s where the downfall comes.
Patrick McGilvray
Gotcha. Gotcha. And so let’s talk a little bit about the exercise side of things. So tell me a little bit about your history because I know you’re a runner, right?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, yeah, I run, I cycle. I actually, I was a wrestler. I wrestled in college, I wrestled in high school. I was a lifeguard on the Jersey Shore. That’s the way I worked my way through college.
I’ve always been very, very active. You know, and I picked up running probably about 10 years ago, I got this bug to, I started out walking. And I said, you know, I’ll let me try a little bit of running. And one thing led to the next and before I knew what I was doing, 5K’s and 10K’s and then a triathlon and said, Well, that’s a lot of fun.
So I started doing more and more, I’m just letting through the whole lifestyle of it. And, you know, realize that, you know, you can’t smoke, you can’t drink heavily, you can’t eat poorly, to participate in these sports, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work with our bodies.
Although oddly enough, I’ve seen some weird things on some of these courses that I’ve run with what people do. But, you know, nonetheless, you know, it’s all part of that healthy lifestyle.
And by exercising, that helps you metabolize all of these good foods that you put into your body into energy. And that gives you the energy to go out there and run 5k, to go out there and run 10k, to go out there and jump on a bike for 30-40 miles. And you don’t feel tired afterwards, you feel energized. On top of that, you get that dopamine release on top of it. And it all just ties together. And that’s what I try to get my patients to do.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and you have like a running group that you do there. And you’re in Florida, right?
Marvin Merrit
Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah, what I do is on Saturdays, I know it sounds crazy for a doctor to work on Saturdays. But on Saturdays, I go to my office and where my office is located in Pompano Beach, it’s in an office building kind of off the beaten path, which I kind of like and it’s a beautiful lake right across the street.
So my patients, I have two groups of patients, I have my walker patients and I have my runner patients. My walker patients, I meet them early in the morning. And we’ll go out for a two or three mile walk, a brisk walk and get their heart rate up and exercise and stretching beforehand.
We walk, come back, stretch again, we talk a little bit about our nutrition and any challenges that they face during the week.
And then I get my running group and a little bit later on. And we’ll go out for a 5k a three mile run, not too hard of a pace, running about a 13 minute mile give or take. Because some of them are a little bit slower.
And I don’t like to leave anybody behind. So we’ll slow the group down if we have a slower runner. And same thing stretch beforehand, go for a run stretch afterwards, you know.
And everybody says oh, we should go to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, no let’s not go to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, let’s go get something healthy to eat. The coffee is okay, but the Dunkin Donuts isn’t gonna work. And that’s what I tried to do with them at least two to three Saturdays a month, we get together and we do that.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s cool because you’re building this relationship with people where you can share more than you can in a you know, 14 minutes that you have with your patients, you probably spend more time with your patients than a lot of doctors, the traditional doctors that are working for these big insurance companies, they get, you know, certain amount of time they’re allowed to spend with each person. Right?
And that’s it, and then they’re done. But you’re creating these relationships, and you’re having these conversations with people and you’re actually out there running with them. You’re actually out there having breakfast with them. I think that’s really cool.
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, you know, my philosophy has been and to give you a little bit more of the background of how this generation of my practice manifested. Sadly, my mom died from complications of type two diabetes.
And going forward from that I said to myself, I said, you know, and she didn’t take care of herself. That was all part of it I said, people need to be educated. People need to understand because it’s a hidden disease. People don’t really know that they have type two diabetes until something goes really wrong.
Or they just go to the doctor for their annual checkup. And they do blood and they’re, you know, their fasting blood sugar is like 190 or they give a urine and their sugar is like 800 milligrams per deciliter or something like that.
So that’s when they find out about it. For the most part, it’s a silent disease. And because it’s a silent disease, people don’t even realize that something is wrong.
Once they realize something is wrong, then we can get them on the track to doing better, getting better, feeling better, feeling stronger, and reversing most of the symptomatology of type two diabetes. And again, type two diabetes goes hand in hand with high cholesterol, high blood pressure. They all three seem to go together all at the same time.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you mentioned that diabetes as being sort of a hidden thing and I know a lot of the visceral fat that people have, you know, visceral fat is that internal fat, it’s growing around your organs and things like that’s the really the bad kind of fat.
And people don’t know that they’re, that they’re getting, they don’t know that they have that. Right. I think it was Professor Tim Noakes, who was a long distance runner, and he was running all these marathons he had done like, I forget how many 72 marathons or something crazy like that.
And went to the doctor and was diagnosed with diabetes. And he was like, that’s impossible. You know, I run all these marathons and, and he sort of, I don’t know if he coined this term or not, but he calls it tofi T-O-F-I, thin on the outside fat on the inside. You know, that is like people who are fit and they’re exercising, and they look pretty good from the outside. But inside, there’s stuff going on, they need to get fixed, you know?
Marvin Merrit
Right. Right. And that’s exactly it. The thin on the outside, they’re fat on the inside, because yeah, you carry this layer of visceral fat. We all do, because we use it for insulation when it’s cold. And you live up there in Ohio, you know about cold
Patrick McGilvray
This week for sure, yeah.
Marvin Merrit
You know, it’s, yeah, it’s that body fat, that does help keep us a little bit warmer, which is very, very important. Also, in times of crisis, our bodies will tap into that, you know, internal body fat, but we shouldn’t be carrying enormous amounts of it.
You know, it’s interesting in my, in my, I’m also a college professor, as you know, so when, when I teach, when I teach about the heart, we do dissection. And for years, we used to do these sheep heart dissections.
And one of the things I remember about the sheep hearts is they were very, very fatty, they did some research and sheep actually carry a lot of visceral fat. Granted, they don’t have to worry about diabetes and things like that, like we do, but they carry a lot of visceral fat.
And I still have one of the sheep parts in my lab, and I show my students the sheep part, as compared to a pig heart, which is what we dissect now. Now pigs, they don’t carry visceral fat, they carry body fat, which is a little bit different.
And we take a look at the differences between the two. And I say, can you imagine a human being that has such a poor diet that eats a lot of fat, and they have a heart that looks something like this?
Because they do, they will build up that visceral fat on the heart, which can also compress the heart, which now can result in cardiac conditions. So it all begins to tie in together. It’s how you take care of yourself. How do you choose to live your life? And that’s the bottom line.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s so interesting. So what are some of the main I guess, what is the right word for it, like complaints or whatever the people are coming to you with? Like, what’s the main things people need fixed? And why are they coming to you?
Marvin Merrit
Okay, basically, my practice is straight referral. I don’t advertise. I don’t belong to any insurance companies or anything like that. In fact, I take absolutely no insurance in my practice.
The reason why I do that is because I want my patients to have a commitment. I feel that if an insurance company is paying for them to come, they don’t really see what the insurance company is paying other than their copay, whether it be $5 $10, whatever.
So I want them to have commitment and commitment comes from them paying me, I make it very reasonable for them. But the thing is, is that when they come in to see me their referral, usually from a friend that has seen me or a relative that has seen me, and yeah, their complaint is, yeah, I’m a type two diabetic, I keep going into my medical doctor, all they do is they keep on increasing and increasing and increasing my medication.
And I don’t feel any better. I’m tired. I’m sluggish and rundown. I’m hungry all the time and drinking, like I own the water company, you know. And those are all the symptoms that you see. And then you have to try to fix that.
So the first thing I always do with these folks is, you know, keep a diet diary for me, okay, I want to know everything that goes in your mouth for the next seven days.
I don’t care if you think it’s minuscule, like a piece of gum, I want to know what it is. And then we start taking examination of that we start breaking it down to see what can we replace it with? What changes can we make?
How can we okay, you like gum? Well, I see you’re chewing bazooka bubble gum, which is high in sugar? Well, you know, let’s, let’s see if we can change that to something that’s a little bit less caustic on the body.
Okay, I’m not a big one in artificial sweeteners and things like that. But I’d rather have them chew a gum that has no sugar in it than a gum that’s all sugar. Okay, so these are just the little changes.
And like you do in your podcast, you know, you make these little steps with these people and make little changes in the diet and make little changes in their exercise. And we just start looking at this week after week, month after month.
And what’s really amazing they see it because they’ll see it in their blood work that hemoglobin A1C went from 11.2 to 9.7 they’re not, you know, normal yet they’re still diabetic. But that’s a significant change. And they feel better.
They get on the scale, and they’ve lost 10-15 pounds, they feel better, the clothes fit better. They realize that when they go out to dinner, they don’t have to eat half a basket of bread, you know, they can walk away from the bread.
And again, that is that psychological motivation that happens with these folks. And really what I do with them, Patrick is I give them 90 days, okay? If in 90 days, they can’t comply with my recommendations, I can’t help them. And I very politely, I verbally discharge them, and I send them a certified letter that they’re discharged, that there’s nothing more I can do for them.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s hardcore man.
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, you gotta be, that’s the only way to be because, because otherwise, you’re going to go on to another doctor, and they’re getting another pill, and they’re getting another medication and another prescription.
And then before you know it, they’re taking, I have a friend of mine, sadly, he’s, he’s my age, I’ll be 64. In January, he just turned 64. And he’s a type two diabetic, with all the problems, he will not listen to me.
So he goes to another doctor, he’s on four different diabetes medications, he’s on two different blood pressure medications, and a statin. And that’s just to start out with. And, you know, it’s just, it says, he doesn’t want to be uncomfortable, he’d rather, you know, go out and eat half a pizza.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, there’s this whole mentality that I think we really have to shift and you’re doing a great job of starting to shift this mentality of, I can just do what I want is I just go to the doctor and get a pill or get, you know, get on some kind of drug that’s going to that’s going to allow me to leave this lead this great, crappy lifestyle.
You know, I was talking to an older woman recently. I think she’s in her 70s. And she’s a type two diabetic and is on diabetes medication, and the doctor wanted to up her medication. And she was eating, you know, some cookies or something like that.
And this is a family member, and my girlfriend was like, hey, you shouldn’t be eating those cookies. You know, you got to go on this. If you got to take this medication, you shouldn’t be eating those cookies. And she said, oh, it’s fine, because the medications are free anyway. And so I don’t have to pay for it. So it’s fine. You know, that’s kind of like that is the wrong mentality. Right?
Marvin Merrit
And that’s why I take no insurance.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, exactly. And I love that. And the other thing I wanted to say, and one of the reasons why I really wanted to talk to you is because of that approach that you just talked about that you take with your with your patients, which is the same approach that I take with my coaching clients, which is, we’re going to look at what you’re doing today.
And we’re going to make a few modifications, and we’re going to see how you feel. And then we’re going to make a few more modifications and get your body adjusted to those changes. And then we’re going to like, see how you feel.
And then we’re going to just keep going with that process. I don’t have a diet that I’m going to hand over to them, because there’s no way I can know what’s going to work best for them.
Now, of course, I have guidelines like you do, and I have suggestions. But at the end of the day, everybody’s a little bit different. And everybody approaches this a little bit differently.
Yeah, we lower the carbs, Yeah, we tried to get off sugar, we want to stop using sugar as an emotional management tool. Yes, we need to increase the protein intake, especially if your activity levels are pretty high.
But for the most part, this is going to be very individualized for the person I’m working with. And so many doctors or coaches or, you know, trainers, whatever they have this like one diet, you know, in mind, and I just don’t think that works.
And so that’s what I really like, it was kind of refreshing when you and I talked about that, that, you know, you do take a very individualized approach and you work with each person, you treat them, like an individual because they are and you work around where they are and make a few changes and then continue with that process.
Marvin Merrit
And that’s absolutely, you know, I don’t just hand them a diet. I mean, you can go online and there’s a million diets for diabetics. Oh, do this diet. Oh, do that diet. Oh, do the keto diet, do the Atkins diet. You know, and we can go on and on about that. Oh, do Weight Watchers.
But that’s a cookbook, okay. We can’t do a cookbook. We have to make the recipe, individual to everybody’s lifestyle to everybody’s tastes, so to speak. And that’s what I tried to do because what might work for one patient may not work for the other patient.
And we have to find, you know, what’s that happy medium for that particular patient? What are we going to slowly begin to tweak in their diet? What is their, you know, their level of being able to exercise?
Some of them haven’t gotten off the sofa in 20 years, you know, I certainly can’t have going out and running, you know, 5K’s from day one. But you got to find out what their level of activity is.
I deal with a few patients, unfortunately, they’re either widows or widowers, and you know, they’re at home. And, you know, they don’t get out a lot. And I tell them, you know, what, get a dog. The dog needs to be walked. If you get a dog and you walk the dog, well, now you’re getting out there, and you’re doing some exercise.
And sometimes it’s as simple as easy fix as that and now they also have companionship, something that they’re responsible for, and they’re able to go out and do that. And that’s, that’s just a little easy fix that I do with some of our patients, not all of them, because they all can’t have dogs where they live. But those that can, that’s something that I strongly recommend.
Patrick McGilvray
Not everybody likes dogs, Marvin, okay. You can walk your lizard if you need to. There you go. Yeah. Well, from an exercise standpoint, what do you see as sort of the best types of exercises that kind of across the board, most people should do or get the best benefits from doing regularly,
Marvin Merrit
There should always be a balance between aerobic or cardio exercise and strength training. Again, very similar to the things that you talk about in your podcasts, you know, we talked about, you know, cardio exercise, again, it doesn’t have to be running, but walking, walking at a good pace, you know, not walking, like you’re going through the mall, shopping, but walking at a good pace.
And then some strength training and strength training doesn’t necessarily have to mean, you know, go to the gym and spend hours and hours on end in the gym. All it means is, go on Amazon, get some bands, you know, and, and start doing that.
Some of my patients, I’ll actually, you know, I have the bands in my office. I want to say I sell to them, I sell them for what I paid for it off of Amazon. It’s just a convenience thing. It’s like, here, let me show you how to do this. And I’ll show them a half a dozen exercises to do with the bands, maybe some arm curls, maybe some overhead presses, some, you know, deltoid work, just some things like that.
And I have them worked with bands, sometimes they’ll come to the office on the Saturday sessions, I’ll have them bring their bands with them. And as a group, we’ll do some band exercises. And that’s it just something to get them physically moving again.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I love that. And I’m a big fan of strength training, especially like actually being intentional about getting stronger muscles. Because as we get older, and I know you probably work with a lot of older people that, you know, one of the biggest issues with older people is that their muscle mass really declines, you know, they start getting very weak.
And then their bone mass also gets pretty weak. And then they fall and they have complications. And that leads to all kinds of issues because now they’re completely immobile, they can’t do anything. So building muscle, building strong muscles, building a strong skeletal system, skeletal muscle and bone sport. It’s so huge. Oh my god, it’s gonna put years and years and maybe decades on your life.
Marvin Merrit
It’s sustaining. You know, without getting too scientific, we have what’s known as Wolf’s law. And Wolf’s law states that the more stress you place on your skeletal system, the healthier your skeletal system is going to be.
And this is something that I find with my female patients is that as they get older, they suffer from what’s known as osteopenia, which is a loss of bone mass. Okay. So I put them on calcium and magnesium that helps with the with the bone mass a little bit from nutritional standpoint.
But they get that way because they haven’t done much in the way of exercise. Now you start putting more stress on the skeletal system by having them exercise a bit, and it’s not so much that you reverse the osteopenia, slowly osteopenia, so it doesn’t progress to a severe case of osteoporosis. And that’s what you really want to prevent. Because you don’t want this poor woman stepping off the curb and the pressure is just right. And boom, she breaks a hip. That’s the thing you don’t want.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, what’s the difference between osteopenia and osteoporosis?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, osteopenia is when you start losing bone mass. Osteoporosis is where the bone actually gets eaten away, and you lose all of this calcium. And it almost looks like in osteoporosis, if you look at it under the microscope, it almost looks like moths have eaten away at the bone, like moths will eat away at a cloth. That’s what it’s like. Osteopenia, you just start seeing on an x-ray, how the bone mass is getting thinner and thinner and thinner. And then it can lead to the next.
Patrick McGilvray
Wow, okay, interesting. Just learn something. That’s cool. So yeah, I think strength is like so huge. It’s like one of the best things you can do for yourself. And I think that if as we get older, if we continue building strong muscles and supporting strong bones, then you’re you’re going to live longer, you’re going to have a better quality of life, you’re less likely to get injured from doing normal day to day things, especially those of us who love to run. And you can run as you get I know people who run marathons in their 90s, you know.
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, there’s a video that I showed to my students when I’m teaching. It was done by PBS, and it showcases an 87 year old man doing the triathlon Escape from Alcatraz. I mean, that’s one of the toughest triathlons because you’re swimming across San Francisco Bay for a mile and a half, followed by I think it’s 20 miles on the bike, and then an eight mile run. And he’s 87. I mean, that’s pretty big. I want to be back. I want to be him. That’s my goal.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s no joke right there. That’s,
Marvin Merrit
That’s my goal. Yeah. That’s my goal.
Patrick McGilvray
That is amazing. Yeah, that San Francisco Bay is brutal. That is brutal. It’s a little stretch of ocean swim. Can’t imagine. People swim in that and they get seasick from this swimming because there’s so much up and down movement. This has been really good.
So let me ask you this. If people wanted to try to find you, how could they reach out to you and, and be able to find you and learn more about you and how they might be able to hook up with you?
Marvin Merrit
Sure, they can email me and marvinmerrit@bellsouth.net. But that’s one way they can call me. And I can give you my cell phone number. I have no issue with that. I always ask though, if you want to reach out to me text me before calling.
I’ll always get back and my phone number is 954-649-5280 Just text me before calling tell me what you need me for. And I’ll be more than happy to, you know, if I’m with patients or teaching, I’ll just politely text you back that I’ll get back to you. But I’ll always get back to people and I always do. That’s just the way I am. That’s the two easiest ways to get hold of me.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, cool. And do you work with people that are not local to Pompano Beach area?
Marvin Merrit
Yes, absolutely. I can do it. You know, via telehealth, you know, no problem with that at all.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Cool. What’s next for you? I know you just did a race about a week ago. Right? What did you do?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, I did the Danger Point 5k I had a personal best that 3550. Which I was pretty happy with in my ripe old age. I think next I’m probably going to do the jingle bell jog on Christmas Eve. Okay, I’ll do that next.
And I’ll keep training but I’ll take a little bit of time off from from racing because I want to do the In April the Los Olas Triathlon, which is down here that’s, well it takes place on Fort Lauderdale beach and they call it the Los Olas Triathlon because it crosses Los Olas Boulevard which is pretty famous down here.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Is that a sprint triathlon? Yeah. Cool. You swim in the ocean?
Marvin Merrit
Oh, yeah, swimming the ocean. And then we’ll see where the spring in the summer takes me. There’s usually a couple of events that pop up. Last year I did the July 4 triathlon. It was a great weekend. Actually a great couple of weeks, I did the Memorial Day 5k followed by the July 4th triathlon, which was on July second, followed by the July 4th 5k, on July 4th, so it was a nice quick couple of weeks and then finished up the end of August with the Iguana Man 5K.
So I try to stay active. I tried to do you know, 5675 k’s a year, two, three triathlons, maybe a duathalon depending on how the water is.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. You are an example of what is possible, Marvin, I love it. Keep up the good work seriously. You’re doing some work in this world. And you’re helping people get healthier and helping people live longer and helping people figure out how to do all this because it’s confusing.
And there’s a lot of information out there that’s just like, it’s a lot of conflicting information, a lot of confusing information and it’s very overwhelming for people. So to have somebody like you where people can go and, you know, do a consult with you like even you know, over Zoom or however you do it. That’s awesome.
Because that gives people an opportunity to start to see that things can be different for them and they don’t have to be on medication for the rest of their life. Just because you have one of these lifestyle diseases, it’s not a death sentence. It doesn’t mean you can’t improve with the right diet and exercise.
So hats off to you, my friend for doing good work. Keep it up. Thank you for taking some time to chat with me here today. It’s been really fun.
Marvin Merrit
I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot. Patrick, thank you so much for having me.
There’s a lot of confusing information out there about how runners should approach strength training. Some people say you should use very light weights and do a ton of reps so you don’t bulk up too …
Continue Reading about 199. Strength, Power, and Hypertrophy for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 199 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, and today, Strength, Power, and Hypertrophy For Runners.
So there’s a lot of confusing information out there about how runners should approach strength training and exactly what do we mean when we say strength training? Some people think you should use very light weights and do a ton of reps you know, so you don’t bulk up too much.
Other people suggest lifting heavy weights and doing fewer reps. But for a lot of runners, that seems kind of scary. And they’re like, oh no, is this good? Is it going to help me with my endurance? So what is the right answer for you? That’s what this episode is all about.
In this episode, I’m gonna explain the difference between training for strength, power, and hypertrophy and what all those things mean. Hopefully, by the end of this episode, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of these different resistance training methodologies and how to do them correctly.
But first, if you want a little help getting started with all of the stuff I talked about here on the podcast, I created something that I think is going to be perfect for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and how to keep it off for good without running a million miles a week, I created this training based off of years of doing this podcast and all the topics that I talked about, I kind of distilled it all into about a one hour training that you can go through.
It’s totally free, just have to enter your email address so you can get the follow ups and things like that. But this is going to teach you how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals.
So, if you’re ready to become leaner and stronger, if you’re ready to run faster and longer and become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, you owe it to yourself to check out this free training. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
You can find it on my website, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. And it’s free by the way. Okay, let’s talk about strength, power, and hypertrophy for runners. So first of all, I want to stress the importance of this topic today, which is resistance training.
So a lot of people just lump it all into strength training, they say strength training, and that’s what everybody thinks of. But there are actually different ways of improving your skeletal muscle, so you can strengthen your muscles or you can get bigger muscles, or you can get more powerful muscles. And I’m gonna explain the difference between those today.
But resistance training helps to improve your health in many, many ways. I always say that the number one driver of your health of your body composition is going to be nutrition. Food plays such a huge role in your body composition, your ability to burn fat, the second biggest driver of body composition and fat burning.
And overall health is going to be resistance training. So you got to be doing some sort of regular resistance training. I talked to so many runners every single day who tell me, oh, I’m great with my running. I do that all the time, but I just never hit the gym. I never do resistance training. I hate it. I don’t like going to the gym.
And I’m just like why? It is the best thing that you can do for yourself from a fitness standpoint, better than running, running is catabolic. Running breaks down muscle, it really does. And if you’re not, if you’re like running long distances, and you’re doing no strength training, that’s not a good combination.
Okay, so we got to be doing some regular resistance training. But there are different ways you want to do it depending on what your goals are. But some of the benefits that you get from resistance training and doing these things regularly, and becoming stronger and putting on a little bit of extra muscle is things like improved body composition, so you have more muscle mass and less fat mass so your body composition gets improved, and you look better, you look better naked, which is amazing.
Regular resistance training will help you burn more fat. It helps to improve your endurance because you’re able to run longer distances on fat as fuel number one, but also you’re able to improve your endurance because your muscles won’t fatigue as quickly as someone who doesn’t have as strong of muscles.
So when your muscles are stronger, you can actually run longer distances before you fatigue. Regular resistance training helps improve your speed as a runner because you can run faster and push yourself harder. Because you have more muscle mass, it helps to improve your power-to-weight ratio, which just means that, you know, the weight on your body isn’t necessarily fat, it’s more muscle.
And so that weight is actually propelling you faster down the road. Okay, so your power-to-weight ratio goes up because you can burn some more fat and then you have more muscle and so you’re going to be a more powerful, faster runner.
Regular resistance training helps to prevent injuries. This is one of the big keys that a lot of runners don’t understand why they keep getting injured. And the thing you have to understand is that when you’re stronger, your whole body is stronger, not just your legs, but you know head to toe, you are less likely to get injured.
Getting stronger, helps to protect muscles, but it helps to protect your joints as well because we have all these connective tissues, ligaments, and tendons that are holding our joints together in this thing, these things are really involved with running, most running injuries, our connective tissue injuries, you know, there’s tendinitis in different areas, that tends to be where people get the most injuries from running.
And so regular strength training can help prevent injuries in those areas as well. Regular strength training helps improve your lactate threshold, meaning you can clear lactate faster, it helps improve your metabolism and helps you burn more calories.
Also, muscle tissue that has been well trained, is more efficient at utilizing calories. So you know you’re more energy efficient at changing protein into muscle and things like that. So so many ways that your metabolism gets improved from doing regular resistance training. It helps prevent sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is muscle loss as you get older.
And I was just reading a study recently that showed that people as young as 30 are starting to experience sarcopenia. And if you’re getting muscle loss as early as 30 years old, and that just continues as you get older, you’re not going to be in good shape. When you get older, you’re not going to be able to pick up your grandkids or you know, you won’t be ambulatory, you won’t be able to walk.
You know a lot of people that as they get older, they lose muscle and they get injured because they can’t carry themselves properly, they fall down, they break a hip and then they’re like bedridden. And this really drastically speeds up the aging process. And people die a lot earlier when they don’t have as much muscle mass.
So you got to be doing regular resistance training, starting today, for the rest of your life. Okay. It also helps improve bone density, a lot of women talk about osteoporosis, and something that is a concern for a lot of people in general. Well, regular resistance training will help offset that.
Regular resistance training helps boost energy and helps improve your sleep. It just helps you to live longer. They’ve done studies that have shown that people who exercise regularly and they did studies comparing people who did cardiovascular exercise and resistance training, the people who did regular resistance training and no cardio actually live longer.
So I’m not saying don’t do cardio, but I’m just saying that regardless of whether they do cardio or not the people who did regular resistance training lived longer. So we’re just talking about quality of life here.
So there are so many benefits and there’s probably even more, I’m just listing the ones that I think are especially important for us as we get older and you as a runner, but there are so many benefits to regular resistance training. If you’re not doing this right now, just you have to start.
Okay, and I’m gonna give you some help here and give you a little bit of guidance to get you started. But just understand that it is key that you are doing something regularly which means twice a week at least, you can do more than that which is totally fine.
I think a lot of people get really great results when they do it three or four times a week. But you can get good results by just working out and doing some sort of resistance training twice a week.
I have a great program that I teach to my clients which is 20 minutes twice a week. It’s a full-body workout that you only have to do twice a week. And it is very effective and a great place for most people to start and once they get you know a few months into that they can start to change that up and maybe add more to that. But that’s a great place to start.
So if you’re thinking I don’t have time to do it, you have time you have 20 minutes twice a week. Or if you’re like oh I don’t have a gym membership. You don’t need a gym membership. You can do this a lot of this stuff at home you can at least get started at home.
You can get some resistance bands for a little money maybe 50 bucks, 75 bucks, something like that. You can get a set of resistance bands with different resistance weights on them, technically like the different weights, they’ll say like 20 pounds of resistance, 40 pounds resistance, 60 pounds resistance.
Those are great because you can use them anywhere, and you can take them on vacation with you. I mean, yeah, I take my resistance bands on vacation with me and I work out in the hotel room, you know, because it’s that important to me, you know.
So it doesn’t take a gym membership, it doesn’t take a lot of time, you don’t have to become a gym rat and spend all your time six or eight hours at the gym every week, just start right and start doing this consistently. And as you do this, you’re going to feel so much better. You’re just going to. Your quality of life is going to improve, you’re going to sleep better, you’re going to have more energy.
Running will improve, you’re not going to be as injured, you’re going to be burning more fat, your body composition is going to improve, people are going to go oh, man, you’re looking like your skeletal tone there.
You know, that looks great. All that stuff is possible for you, but you have to start. Okay. So one principle I want to go into before we talk about the different the differences between strength power and hypertrophy is the progressive overload principle, which means that in order to strengthen a muscle, or to grow a muscle, you have to overload that muscle.
And we don’t want to do that massively by lifting 1000 pounds, the first time you go and lift weights, it’s progressive overload because you have to progressively overload that muscle, or you’re not going to get the benefits.
So what I mean like that, like, imagine you’re doing bicep curls, we all know what that looks like. And you grab a 10-pound weight, and you’re able to do 10 bicep curls until you just can’t do another one, and you hit failure.
So you, you get about halfway up and you just cannot finish that rep. That’s called failure when you cannot finish a rep with good form. That is, that is where you’re gonna stop with that exercise, because you’ve hit your threshold, right? So you cannot go anymore.
So you’ve hit that threshold, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to, you know, give it a day or two to rest that muscle, and then you’re going to try it again. And this time, you might be able to do 11 reps, okay, so you’re gonna progressively overload that muscle.
And again, you’re gonna go and do 11 reps until you hit that failure again. And then you have, you have seen some improvement, you’ve made some progress, you overloaded the muscle, the muscle had an adaptive response, a positive adapt adaptation to that overload and said, I need to get stronger, I need to grow.
And there are different ways muscles grow, muscles can get stronger, or muscles can get bigger. And there’s a little bit of overlap between the different ways we’re going to talk about building muscle here.
But you know, when you’re doing strict strength training, you will see some muscle growth when you’re using when you’re training for muscle growth, you will see some strength improvements as well.
But just understand that we want to overload the muscle in order for it to have that positive adaptation, whether it’s to get bigger or to get stronger. Okay, so that is very important. We just have to remember that principle here.
Okay, so, first of all, let’s talk about strength and strength training. Why do we want to train for strength? Well, we want to get stronger as human beings, we want to be able to carry ourselves around, we want to be able to run longer distances, we want to be able to lift heavier things, you know, we want to be able to enjoy the quality of life.
As we get older, all these things are going to be improved when you do regular strength training, and you’re not going to get bigger, you’re not necessarily going to get much bigger muscles, they will grow a little bit, but it’s going to be pretty minimal. Okay, so people that think, oh my gosh, I don’t want to train strength training, because I’m afraid I’m gonna get all big like a bodybuilder.
Don’t worry about that. It is really, really hard to get big, like a bodybuilder. I know from experience, I’ve been trying this and I’m a little bit older. And it does get a little bit harder as you get older too. But I’m a little bit older. And I’ve been I’ve been doing very targeted hypertrophy and strength training to get bigger muscles, eating extra calories. And it is very hard to do. I am doing it. I am getting bigger, but it is it’s taking a long time. And it’s very hard to do. I don’t think you need to worry about that.
But I think it is important and we can all benefit from getting stronger. So I think strength training is something we definitely want to be focusing on at least at some point in your training cycle.
Let’s say you’re training for a marathon. You know, you want to be doing some sort of strength training throughout the entirety of that training cycle. You don’t want to be you don’t want to just do the strength training in the offseason I’ve heard people say that to like, oh, I’m only going to do it in the offseason. Why? Because you only want to be strong in the offseason? You only want to be injury-free in the offseason? You only want more energy in the offseason?
No, don’t do that. The only time you really need to not do any strength training is right before a race, I usually tell people to take the week of a race off. And the week before you can do some light strength training, but don’t get too, you know, don’t lift too much.
You don’t want to be sore, you don’t want to be sore go leading into your a race, you know. So you can train all the way through your training cycle, you can wait to train through your entire training cycle just that last week when you’re tapering, and you’re about ready to do your race. Cut it out, just don’t do any of it. That way, you’re just 100% for your race, okay?
But we want to get stronger. And if you’re somebody who wants to get stronger and be able to lift heavier things, and to be able to improve your running performance to become a faster runner and improve your endurance, then building training for strength is going to be how you want to do this.
Okay, so this is about improving the strength of your muscle fibers, not necessarily increasing size, the size will increase a little bit, but we’re more interested in improving the strength of those muscle fibers. And the way we do it, I’m going to tell you exactly how you train for strength.
The first thing to understand is that you want to shoot for around 85% of your one-rep max. Okay, now you’re probably thinking what the hell is he talking about? What is a one-rep max? A one-rep max is the maximum amount of weight you can lift for one repetition.
Okay, but you don’t have to go and lift something super heavy and hurt yourself to determine what your one-rep max is. Instead, there’s a calculator you can use online and I don’t have the website address in front of me here, I meant to write it down, but I didn’t write it down.
But just do a search for a one-rep max calculator. And what it’ll do is, it’ll take something you’ve done, like let’s say you’ve done a benchpress, and you’re able to do 12 reps on a benchpress at 100 pounds, then it’ll tell you what your one rep max would be for that exercise.
Okay, so let’s say you can do 100 pounds 12 times on a benchpress, you put this number into this calculator, and it says, okay, your one rep max for the benchpress is 140 pounds, I actually did this and I put the data in here. So 140 pounds would be your one-rep max.
So we want to take 85% of that, which is like 119 pounds, so we’ll just round it up to 120. So for strength, you want to be doing benchpress, around 120 pounds. Okay, easy peasy, right 85% of your one-rep max. That’s number one.
The next part of this, and this is going to be really easy to remember is for strength training, we want to use the three to five principle. That means we want to train each muscle group three to five times a week, we want to do three to five exercises each time, and we want to do three to five repetitions of each exercise. And then we want to do three to five sets of each exercise.
So three to five sets, three to five reps of each exercise, three to five exercises three to five times a week, and then a three to five-minute rest in between sets. That’s a long time to rest in between sets, but you want to start each new set, feeling like 100%.
Okay, so the three to five principle is exercise three to five times a week, choose three to five exercises to do three to five sets three to five repetitions of each exercise, and then three to five minutes rest between, okay, that’s easy to remember three to five, that’s all you got to remember.
If you do that, you will get stronger, you’re going to build strength right now that 85% of your one-rep max, which is going to go up as you progress with this. Okay, so we want to aim for three to five. And this is actually another three to five number three to 5% increase in resistance each week.
So when we’re talking about progressively overloading, we got to increase that weight that we’re lifting each week. So we want to have just a slight increase each week, don’t try to go you know, 20% increase each week or something like that, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Just go slow, and shoot for that three to 5% increase in resistance each week. Okay.
And I do need to just say this. Like, you have to make sure that you’re doing your exercises safely. I’m just taking this information I’m sharing here as generalized information. You and I are not working together. But just take this information and make sure that you’re cleared to do weight training, and that you’re doing these exercises safely. Okay, that’s very important.
That’s my little disclaimer right there. Okay, so that is strength. We want to shoot for 85% of our one-rep max and then use that three to five principle. Now the same principles are going to apply when we talk about power pretty much, there’s going to be a few exceptions here. But understand that power is going to be very similar to strength with one exception being that we’re adding in speed.
So we’re going to add speed, times of force force is the amount of weight you’re lifting. So speed is how quickly you’re lifting that weight. And that equals power. So what we’re using as the primary driver to build power is intensity.
So the intensity of these exercises is going to be different when you’re doing resistance training for power versus strength. Okay, we’re going to be using for submaximal weight here. So we don’t want to use it as heavy weight, we want it to be about 30 to 70% of our one-rep max.
So you could use like 50%, maybe, as the number, you can start there and just kind of see if you need to go up or down from there. But we want to lift fast, we want to lift powerfully. So intensity is the primary driver. And these workouts that you do, if you’re lifting for power, they should not not be fatiguing, they should be non-fatiguing.
That means that you should still have gas in the tank at the end of your workout. Okay, and again, we want to progressively overload based off of power, but we want to aim for that three to 5% increase in each in resistance each week, not the volume. So we’re not increasing the volume, when we’re talking about increasing resistance, we’re talking about the weight on the bar, okay, or the weight of the resistance, or the amount of resistance, I should say.
So we don’t want to increase the volume, we want to keep the volume low when we’re training for strength and power. When we’re training for hypertrophy, which I’ll talk about in a minute, the volume is going to be higher, the weight is going to be less.
So training for strength and power is going to be similar. With a few of these exceptions, you’re going to use a little bit less resistance with the power just because you’re going to be lifting it very fast. So and that’s the big difference. They’re slow and controlled with strength training faster with the power. Okay.
Okay, next, let’s talk about hypertrophy. What is hypertrophy? So, strength training means we’re trying to improve the strength of the individual muscle fibers. hypertrophy is all about increasing the size of those muscle fibers. So hypertrophy is building bigger muscles.
So when you look at like bodybuilders, they’re mostly focused on hypertrophy. And something interesting, I think, a lot of runners that think about weight training, they want to do lighter weights and lots of reps. And they think that this is the way to make sure they don’t get too big.
But actually, the opposite is true. If you’re a runner, and you want to improve your running performance, you want to be just focused on that speed or that power and strength, like you want to focus on higher weights and lower reps actually, okay.
The opposite of hypertrophy is atrophy. You’ve probably heard that word before. So atrophy is a gradual decline in effectiveness or vigor due to underuse or neglect, you do not want that. When your muscles atrophy, they are no longer strong, they’re no longer big, they get smaller. And we do not want that, we want to make sure that our muscle mass is we’re maintaining muscle mass as we get older, and maintaining muscle strength as we get older.
Okay, so hypertrophy is all about building bigger muscles. Okay? Again, there’s a little bit of overlap with these. But if you want to focus on hypertrophy, you’re going to do things a little bit differently. The three to five principle that’s great for building strength, and it’s great for power. But hypertrophy is a little bit different.
Strength is all about heavy loads. So you want to do fewer reps, but heavier, heavier weight, hypertrophy is all about volume. So hypertrophy is all about lots of sets, lots of reps with lighter weights, okay?
So when we talk about doing hypertrophy training, you probably want to start around 65% of your one rep max. So you can play around with that number, but that’s a good place to start. And what we’re looking for is something between like six and 30 reps per set, okay? Anywhere between like 12 and 20 is usually a good place to be like, that’s kind of the sweet spot, but it can be as high as 30 or as low as six.
I shoot for 15. Like, that’s just kind of a number that I think is a great number to get to for hypertrophy. And so that’s kind of where I go. If you can’t do 15, then you need to decrease the load.
You know, if you can’t get to that 15, or if you’re getting to like 25, and it’s still, you could keep going, maybe increase the weight a little bit. So you, you hit around 15 and maybe 17. I’ve been focused on hypertrophy lately at the gym, and I noticed that I’m getting between like 15 and 18 on most exercises. And then as I can continually do like, 18, 18, 18, I made up the weight until I can only do like 15.
And then I’m, I’ll get to the place where that would be that new weight if I can, you know, do 16 17, 18 pretty consistently, then I’ll up the weight again. Okay. So hypertrophy is, you know, we want to be around 65% of our one rep max, and then somewhere around 15 reps, and then three to 10 sets.
So we’re doing a lot of volume here. So with a lot of volume, you can’t do as heavy weights, but you can do more reps, lighter weights. And I like to shoot for the middle of that. So maybe six sets, okay.
So an example might be you’re doing squats. So you pick a number that’s like 65% of your one rep max. And do six sets of 15 reps of squats, and then your rest period in between these sets is shorter. So the rest between you know, power and strength is going to be three to five minutes.
You only want to rest for like 30 to 60 seconds between sets when you’re training for hypertrophy because you want to keep that load going, you want to keep the volume up, you want to keep the intensity up. Okay. So only about a minute, you know, rest between sets when you’re doing training for hypertrophy. Okay.
So why would you want to train for hypertrophy? If you want to get bigger muscles, you know, if you’re somebody that is like, you know, I want to I want to get stronger. But I don’t want to get all big and bulky, then focus on lifting heavier weights, and don’t do as many reps and sets.
If you’re somebody that it’s like me and where I was like, I want to get bigger, I want bigger arms, I want a bigger chest, I want you know, bigger legs, then I’m going to focus on doing more volume.
Okay, now, I like to do this in cycles. So I go through six-week cycles where I do each one of these I go from strength to hypertrophy to power to strength hypertrophy to power every six weeks. And this is great, even through training cycles.
I feel like I’m always improving from a muscle standpoint, like getting bigger or getting stronger muscles. Okay, one more thing I want to tell you. And this goes for all the different methodologies that I’ve been talking about here.
Strength, power, and hypertrophy is the power of intention. So it doesn’t matter how you’re doing your training. One of the keys is intention. So you want to put your mind and your intention into each muscle that you’re working, right? So you want to think about the muscle.
So if you’re doing bicep curls, you want to be looking at that bicep muscle and thinking about that bicep muscle, this is something that Arnold talks about. He talks about looking at it and focusing on getting stronger, I’m not going to do my Arnold impression here, because that would be terrible.
But focus on that muscle getting stronger, getting bigger, getting more powerful, or whatever, contract that muscle tightly each time you do each single rep you want to contract your muscles as hard as possible during each exercise to get the maximum results from each rep that you do.
Like if you’re just sitting there going to do that you’re not really if you’re doing it super fast. I saw somebody at the gym doing this the other day, they were talking on the phone and doing leg extensions, and they were just there was almost no weight on there.
And it looked like there was no effort being used whatsoever. They’re not getting any results. Whatever they’re doing is not they’re not getting stronger muscles or bigger muscles. They’re just like goofing around is what they’re doing. Okay, they’re wasting time. They can say I went to the gym and I did all these leg lifts. But it’s not working. I’m not getting stronger. I wonder why?
Well, you’re not putting any intention into it. Okay. So think about this. If you’re doing a plank, and you’re holding that plank position, but you’re intentionally thinking about your core and you’re contracting your core, the entire time you’re doing that plank, that plank number one is going to be a lot harder, but it’s also going to be way more effective.
If you’re doing bicep curls you don’t need as much weight on the bar to get the same result. If you contract hard during those lifts, you don’t need to do as many reps. Let’s say you’re training for strength and you’re not doing as many reps. You can get massive results by going slow and controlled and then really contracting that muscle especially in that top, you know that top contracted position holding it.
Okay, so you want to get the most out of each rep that you do you want to be very intentional about this stuff. I know I rattled off a bunch of numbers, but it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re doing these things really passively like that. We have to put intention into how we’re doing our strength training because it is that important, okay?
If you want to live a long, healthy life and be strong all the way up until old age and live to be 100 years old or whatever, then you know strength training is going to be the way you get there. Okay? You want to lose weight, you want to improve your body composition, you want to be a better fat burner, you want to improve your endurance as a runner: strength training, hypertrophy training, power training, that’s how you’re gonna get there. Okay?
And as always, if you’re looking for help with any of this stuff, we can talk about coaching. That’s what I do. Just head over to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me and we can set up a time to have a little conversation about coaching, and see if there’s a good fit for you. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Love to you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
When it comes to losing weight, there are many, many approaches you can take - some of them will work while others definitely will not. Runners especially need to be mindful of their approach to …
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My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 193 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Five Dieting Disasters Runners Need To Avoid. So, when it comes to losing weight, there are many many approaches you can take.
Some of them will work, others definitely will not. Runners especially need to be mindful of their approach to weight loss because certain methods might help you lose weight, but will drastically impair your running performance.
So in this episode, I’m going to go over five dieting disasters that runners need to avoid if you want to lose weight without completely destroying your running performance. I’ll be talking about things like calorie restrictive diets.
The problem with the types of foods you might be turning to carbohydrate management, overtraining, one size fits all approaches. So I think there’s going to be something for everyone in this episode.
But first, I talked to a lot of people who want and need help figuring out this whole nutrition exercise stuff so they can lose weight and keep it off for good. And they want to change, they want to do something about it. But instead, they put it off, they say things like I need to think about it. Or maybe later, maybe now’s not the right time.
But if you’ve been thinking about this for a long time, now, you know that you’re going to have to eventually do something differently, or else nothing is going to change for you. Right, nothing changes, if nothing changes, right.
So thinking more about it or delaying this decision isn’t going to do anything, you have to take action. So you have to make a decision, and you have to take action, the only thing guaranteed to not work is to just do nothing.
And a lot of people continually put things off, because they’re afraid, because they fear failure, or they feel fear, the kind of changes that you’re going to have to make when you take on something like changing your diet.
And the truth is, yeah, you’re gonna have to sort of become a different person in this process. But think about this, where do you see yourself in, let’s say six months time, what would that different person look like?
Because if you do nothing, you’re probably going to still be right where you are, maybe struggling with your weight or your body composition, your energy levels, still wishing you felt better regretting that you didn’t start six months ago, right. But if you took some action and started now, in six months, you’re going to be six months closer to your goal, wait six months of having practiced good habits, having developed good habits, six months closer to that most badass version of yourself.
So don’t put it off. If this is something that you want for yourself, take action, make a decision. And if you want some help from me, great. If you want to do this on your own, I think that’s amazing, too. But I’m here for you.
If you want a little bit of help, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me. And then you can fill out a little application, you and I will get on a Zoom call, we’ll have a conversation and see if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is, great. If it’s not, that’s cool, too. I want the best for you. That’s it, whether you want to work with me or not, it’s okay.
But I do want you to stop thinking about it, stop putting it off and just take some action and do something today. Okay. One thing you can do right now is if you just want a little bit of help getting started with all this stuff, you can take some action.
And check out the free training that I created. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. And in this free training I put together I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and keep it off for good without running a million miles a week.
Some of the things that you’re going to learn is why running more and eating less does not work when you’re trying to lose weight. Some of the things that runners don’t do properly when they’re trying to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your endurance and you know, get weight loss really working for you.
And then I talked about the mindset shifts required to make these things last for life. So there’s a lot more in that training. I spent a lot of time putting it together. It kind of takes everything I teach on the podcast and combines it into about an hour long training. So definitely check it out.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training and then you can go through that, and that’ll get you started on the right track. And if again, if you want a little bit of help moving forward with this stuff, you can always apply for coaching with me. Cool.
Okay, let’s talk about five dieting disasters that runners need to avoid. And the reason this came up is because I’ve been hearing a lot about a lot of different types of diets. Recently, I listen to a lot of books, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and read a lot of books on diet, nutrition, exercise, running.
And one thing that keeps coming up is that all of these diets that are out there are kind of designed for the general public. And they’re really not specifically designed for runners. And so the first dieting disaster I want to talk about is cutting calories.
And this is one of those things, cutting calories is one of those traditional ways of losing weight that a lot of people ascribe to that is, unfortunately, just not really good for runners, it really just doesn’t work for us as runners actually, it really doesn’t work for most people. I’ll get into that in just a second.
But just understand that as runners we have special needs, we are special. We need to make sure that we have the energy that we need, and the fuel that we need to power us through some long workouts, some long runs, some tough workouts, some higher intensity workouts.
And honestly, if you’re in a calorie deficit all the time, this is going to be kind of a problem. So cutting calories is one of the dieting disasters I think you absolutely want to avoid. So here’s a couple of problems with this. Yes, if you cut calories, you can lose weight, but you’re not really fueling your body properly.
If you are constantly in a calorie deficit, right, you’re not going to have enough fuel to properly not only fuel for your workouts, but recover from your workouts, which is probably even more important because running is catabolic.
Running breaks down muscle, just like lifting weights is catabolic. When you lift weights at the gym, you are breaking down muscle, you’re tearing muscle fibers, in order to get your body back into an anabolic state where you are building and maintaining muscle, you need to get enough rest, you need to make sure that you’re providing enough fuel enough calories, enough protein to build that muscle back up.
And unfortunately, a lot of these calorie deficit diets will not give you the proper amount of calories that you need and the proper amount of protein especially in order to get back into that anabolic state where you’re maintaining and actually building muscle.
Okay, so you’re constantly breaking down your body, you’re breaking down tissues, you’re breaking down muscle, and this is going to dramatically impair your progress as a runner. So when you’re in an anabolic state, you’re building and maintaining muscle mass. When you’re in a catabolic state, you’re breaking down or losing overall muscle mass.
The anabolic state happens when you are at rest and when you are fueling. And when you are recovering, when you’re sleeping and things like that catabolism being in that catabolic state happens while you are actively working out especially doing anything that’s high intensity.
So your running performance is going to take a huge hit if you’re constantly in some sort of a calorie deficit, okay, you’ve reduced your overall caloric intake, you’re not recovering from those harder runs. The next run you go out on the next workout that you engage in is going to feel especially hard because you’re not fully recovered from the previous workout.
And so you’re not going to recover fully from this workout. And then this cycle just continues. And this is a way of getting super burned out and really hurting your running performance. And it could lead to injury too, especially if you’re not building muscle actively. If you’re not gaining strength, if you’re losing strength through this process, this can really lead to injury. So this is a big problem. The other thing you have to understand is that this whole idea of calories in calories out, this is not really a sustainable weight loss method.
And I know that this kind of information is disseminated out there from everyone. I listened to so many experts talk about cutting calories as the way to control weight. But it is not sustainable. Studies continually show that cutting calories, yes, is an effective way to lose weight. No doubt about that.
Studies have shown that it’s also the number one least sustainable weight loss method. Why? Because when you are in a calorie deficit, it will actually over time will slow down your metabolism. So your body’s really great at keeping you in homeostasis, which is keeping your body in a balanced state.
So if you reduce energy coming in, over time, your body will reduce the energy that you’re putting out. So if you continually eat in a calorie deficit, your body will slow down your metabolism because it’s saying, hey, we’re only getting 800 calories a day, 1000 calories a day, whatever, we need to slow things down here. So we’re not burning so many calories here, we need to slow down this metabolism to match what’s coming in.
And when you continually do this, your ability to lose weight will eventually stall and stop. And then you cannot continually eat in more of a deficit, because then you’d have to reduce it by a few hundred calories more to get the weight loss going again.
And then you can see why this is completely unsustainable. That’s why shows like The Biggest Loser were great at first. All these people that are pretty overweight, they lose a ton of weight by restricting calories. But eventually they gain it all back.
And then some, in fact, I was doing a little research on this. And there was a study from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health that said that they followed 14 former Biggest Loser contestants over the course of six years. And the participants had all gained back most of the weight that they had lost on the show. And in some cases, they even put on more.
So this is not a sustainable weight loss method, the whole calorie deficit thing. You cannot continually eat in a calorie deficit and expect to, you know, keep performing well as a runner. Okay? I would argue that even as a human being, it’s just not sustainable. So cutting calories is a huge mistake. And I think it’s a disaster that you just need to avoid. Okay. So that’s number one.
Number two is not eating real foods. So runners love their fuel. They love their shakes and their smoothies and their bars and their drinks and their gels and their goos. And all this other stuff, whatever’s quick and easy for a runner, I need my fuel. And so you grab the latest, greatest thing and a little package or whatever.
This can be a real problem because you end up eating a lot of processed food. And processed food is processed food is food that no longer looks like food. It’s like heavily processed food that has been ground up and you ‘ve pulled the certain ingredients out of whole foods and then combined them.
And all you gotta do is look at the back of a package of whatever you’re eating like an energy bar, and look at the ingredients and you’re gonna see tons of ingredients, tons of ingredients you don’t understand, usually tons of sugar, and refined grains like flour.
And there was another study from the NIH that said that when people ate a diet full of ultra processed foods that they just consume more calories and gain more weight than when they just ate minimally processed foods. So just the fact that eating processed food will cause you to gain weight.
I was looking at the back of a Clif Bar recently. Actually, I just looked this up online, I don’t buy Clif Bars anymore. I used to eat this stuff all the time back when I was like 40 or 50 pounds heavier, but I was looking at the ingredients of a Clif Bar.
And I’m just gonna read through a bunch of these ingredients so you understand what I’m talking about. This is processed food. This is highly processed food. And you’re gonna notice a couple things.
The first ingredient is organic brown rice syrup, and they use the word organic in front of everything here to make it sound like it’s healthy, just so you know. Okay, organic brown rice syrup. That’s sugar, by the way. Organic rolled oats, soy protein isolate, organic cane syrup, sugar, organic roasted soy beans, rice flour, cocoa, organic soy flour, organic high oleic sunflower oil, organic cane sugar, sugar, organic oat flour, organic oat fiber.
Why do you need organic oat fiber if you have oat flour and rolled oats in there anyway? Natural flavors. What does that mean? Alkalized cocoa, organic cocoa butter, sunflower oil, salt, barley malt extract, green tea extract, unsweetened chocolate, soy lecithin, baking soda, dye, calcium phosphate, magnesium oxide, ascorbic acid, tocopherol, acetate, beta carotene, NYAS, cinnamon, global, I’m not going to try to pronounce a lot of these words because they’re crazy.
Here’s the thing that I want you to take away from this. This is a highly processed food loaded with sugar. The reason people love Clif bars is because it’s just a candy bar wrapped in a quote unquote healthy package. Look at the word organic on there. Oh, they’re organic. It’s good for you.
If you’re an athlete, you know, they got a picture of somebody like climbing a mountain climbing rock climbing on the package. So of course it’s for the athlete, it’s good for you. It gives you energy. Yeah, it gives you energy. It’s just pure sugar.
Okay, so just understand that this is an ultra processed food. And this is not healthy food. Okay, this is not something that is good for you. And to eat a bunch of stuff like this constantly is a problem. Right? This is going to be a disaster.
So what happens? What if you ditched all the highly processed foods? What if you just ate real food? Well, a couple of things. Number one, eating real food will help you to stay satiated. Protein and fat are filling. And when you eat foods that are high in protein and good quality fats, your body’s getting all the nutrients it needs.
You’re gonna stay more satiated through the day, you’re gonna feel full, your body gets everything it needs, your hunger signals will return to normal. All the sugar and processed food will kind of mess with your hunger signals.
Ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, gets overproduced when you’re eating foods high in sugar high in carbohydrates. Leptin is the fullness sensor. It’s a fullness hormone. And that gets downregulated and will cause you to stay hungry even after you’ve eaten a bunch of food when you’re eating processed food and carbohydrates and things like that.
So it causes you to stay hungry all the time, which makes controlling your eating really hard to do and you end up just massively overeating. It’s very, very easy to overeat stuff like Clif Bars, right? It’s pretty hard to overeat like chicken or steak or broccoli or eggs like you don’t eat so much. And then you’re like, poof, I’m full.
That’s the way we’re supposed to be. That’s the kind of food we’re supposed to eat. So eating real food will help to reset your hunger and satiety signals, you’ll naturally and easily just kind of eat the right amount of food. Your body is very good at knowing, hey, I should stop eating when you’re eating real food. It doesn’t have those same sensors working properly when you’re eating all this junk food.
All this processed food, especially food, it’s super high in sugar, like a Clif Bar. Okay, so what is real food? Real food is food that still looks like food. You look at it, you’re like, oh, that is an egg that is an avocado. That is a steak. Like you know what that is, your ancestors would recognize that stuff as food.
So examples of real food that we can find in the grocery store would be that stuff that we find around the perimeter of the grocery store. The outside edges of the grocery store stuff like fresh produce fruits and vegetables, meat fish, cheese, dairy, eggs, nuts, seeds, legumes, healthy fats, olive oil, butter, coconut oil, you want to stay away from those toxic seed oils that would include things like canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, grapeseed oil, rice bran, all these things are toxic and highly highly processed.
And if you understand how they process these quote unquote, like vegetable oils, it’s a horrible process that they go through. This stuff is just not good for you. Stick to real quality healthy fats, okay? Also just stay away from the package foods if it has a label and an ingredient list and a marketing message. I would just say no to that stuff. Okay.
Now sometimes this kind of stuff is okay like, I’ll go to the frozen foods aisle and I love getting like bags of frozen broccoli, or riced cauliflower because I love love riced cauliflower. It’s a good substitute for rice and a lot of dishes and stuff. And to make it myself is a pain in the butt, super messy and a huge pain in the butt so I can just buy that stuff. Yes, it is, quote unquote processed because they’ve chopped up the broccoli and they froze it.
They’ve like shredded the cauliflower or whatever they do to it, they’ve erased it. But it’s minimally processed. If you look at the package, there’s one ingredient, it’s like cauliflower. There’s one ingredient, it’s broccoli. So that kind of stuff is okay. Stay away from the stuff with a package, and a label and a bunch of ingredients, and you’re going to be fine. So just stick with real food, okay, because eating all the processed food is going to be a disaster for you. All right.
Number three, carbohydrate mismanagement. So carbs are not the enemy. And I just did a podcast about this a few weeks ago, you can check out episode 190 and listen to that. And I talk all about carbs and why carbs should be included in our diet, and everybody needs to kind of figure out their own number of cards and things like that.
But just understand that carbs are not the enemy, but carbs need to be managed. You need to control your carbohydrate intake, if you want to improve fat burning, so fat burning will help you to improve your body composition. Because fat burning is how you lose weight, you have to burn fat.
Fat Burning also is how you improve your endurance as a runner, you have to get good at burning fat. So the goal with our diet is to eat the kinds of foods that will help us to keep our body into a fat burning state. Right, so we do eat some carbs, but we don’t want to go crazy on the carbs. We need to manage our carbohydrate intake because carbohydrates are just sugar. And there’s a spectrum there.
Of course, you know, there’s table sugar, and brown rice syrup and cane sugar syrup and things like that, which are super concentrated forms of carbohydrate. And then there’s like, you know, blueberries or a sweet potato, which are carbohydrate, and they’re a little bit higher and carbohydrate, but they’re pretty low, and they don’t spike your blood sugar, okay, but when we consume carbohydrates, sugar, some of that energy is used, or some of that sugar is used for energy, and then some of it is stored as fat.
And depending on the concentration of carbohydrates, it’ll determine how much of that is stored as fat. So eating just pure sugar, if you drink like a big 32 ounce Coca Cola or something like that, that’s going to have like, I don’t know, 28 grams of sugar, or I’m sorry, not 28 grams, probably have like 28 teaspoons of sugar in there or something like that’s crazy.
It’s like a ton of sugar. Most of that’s going to be just stored as fat because your body can’t use that much sugar, right, right all at once. So too many carbs, too much sugar, and your body will not turn on the fat burning system, you will be storing fat.
Because when you raise your blood sugar, which happens when you eat most foods, but especially things that are very concentrated and carbohydrates, you raise your blood sugar quite a bit, insulin gets raised quite a bit and insulin is the gatekeeper, they will keep fat locked up in your fat cells.
So we want to keep insulin levels managed. We want to keep them pretty low most of the time. So fat burning should be your goal. This is our natural state as human beings. Fat Burning is what we’ve always done, we feast and famine, or feasted and fasted. As human beings we’ve had these times in our evolutionary history where we developed this amazing fuel system that can be used in times of famine when we did not have a lot of food available.
So we’d go on a hunt, where you would eat some large animal, let’s just say like a woolly mammoth or something like that. And then we would fast for days because we have this storage system, you know, we’ve stored some of that energy as fat and we can use that for energy. Right.
But nowadays, we’re eating all the time we’re eating tons of processed food, tons of sugar, and we just keep storing the fat and storing the fat we’re not tapping into that stored body fat for fuel and that’s what we want to do. So our goal, from a dietary standpoint, from a nutrition standpoint, from an exercise standpoint is to enhance fat burning, right?
This helps with weight loss. It helps with improving endurance and it helps with your energy throughout the day. If you want all day energy, just burning more fat helps with focus and concentration. All kinds of positive benefits of becoming a good fat burner, okay? Too many carbs. Fat Burning just gets shut down. So carbs don’t need to be eliminated. We just have to manage them properly. Okay.
The other side of this is just not eating enough. So people think, oh, carbs are bad, I just got to stay away from carbs, I’m just going to eat zero carbs. Okay? Some people do really well, eating very few carbs, it’s almost impossible to eat zero because even if you eat like an egg, it’s got like a one or two grams of carbs in there, okay?
Some dairy has carbs, if you just ate nothing but meat, which a lot of people love this, like carnivore diet, they’re gonna get close to zero carbs, but probably not zero. And they do okay, and they, they might do fine. I don’t personally think that is the best for everybody. I think there are some people that really do well on that.
I’ve tried it, and it was great for a period of time. And then I felt like I needed just a little bit more in the way of carbohydrates. So I added some more carbs into my diet. But carbs are not necessary, I want to make sure that it is very clear that our body will produce the glucose that we need to keep our brain functioning. And all these people that have been doing carnivore for 5-10 years. They don’t eat anything but meat and salt. And they do really well.
And they’re functioning great, you know, they’re improving their performance, their athletes, whatever. And that’s great for them, doesn’t mean everybody has to do that. Okay. So I think sometimes we can go a little bit too low.
And if you’re somebody who isn’t performing well at super low carbs, then we got to increase those carbs. Some people do well, when they’re 50 grams or less per day, other people feel better when they’re at 100-150 grams per day, something like that. But again, this is still considered kind of low carb, okay?
The average American is somewhere around three to 500 grams of carbs a day, it’s crazy. So a lot of carbs, I couldn’t eat that much today, if I tried. Why? Because I probably could if I really tried. But that is a ton of carbs to eat in a day.
In my opinion, I’ve been doing this low carb thing for years and years, I feel so much better when I keep my carbs pretty low. Right? So some people do well, if they’re super low, let’s say under 20 grams a day, that would be like the carnivore type people, others do something called carb cycling, that might be where you, you for like three or four days in a row, you might do around 50 grams, and then you have a day where you up that to 120 or 150. And then you go back down and every third or fourth day, you increase your carbs, you know, by 100 or 150 grams a day.
And some people do well with something like that. So in the course of a week, you know, your average daily carb intake is a little bit higher than somebody that’s doing, you know, a much lower carb intake. But again, this is individualized, you gotta figure this out for yourself. Okay, carbs will help your body to recover from hard workouts, they help you to get back into that anabolic state so they help you to signal proteins synthesis in order to build muscle.
So insulin is one of the ways that you can activate muscle protein synthesis. Another way of signaling muscle protein synthesis is eating foods high in leucine. Leucine is an amino acid and it helps to activate that protein synthesis so eating foods high in leucine will help you to build and repair muscle things like chicken beef, pork, fish, tofu, can beans, lentils, milk, cheese, cottage cheese, eggs, all these foods are high and leucine.
Anything that has a complete protein typically is going to give you higher amounts of leucine. So eat some carbs, eat the right amount of carbs for you and your goals and it takes a little bit of trial and error sometimes to figure this out. You might do better if you’re eating some carbs to help signal some protein synthesis as well. Okay.
The other problem is that people who just eat the wrong kinds of carbs so it’s easy to say okay, I need to eat a few more carbs every day and then you’re just going crazy on like doughnuts and pasta and muffins and cookies and Clif bars or whatever. And these are all junk carbs right they’re not healthy foods.
Refined sugar is not healthy food. There’s no study out there that is going to show you that sugar has a bunch of health benefits unless it’s sponsored by like the sugar industry like Coca Cola or something like that.
And I have seen those kinds of studies before they’ll be like, sugar is good for you. It’s clean energy and blah, blah, blah. And I’m just going to tell you right now there is not a nutritionist or a dietician, no matter what sort of method they prescribe that they are not going to tell you that sugar is good for you.
Okay, doesn’t mean you can never have sugar but you just got to be really careful with that again, it comes to control management, but the right kinds of carbs are the ones that are not going to spike your blood sugar. Like our goal here is to keep fat burning going.
Our goal here is to keep your blood sugar managed relatively low, not super low. You don’t want to be hypoglycemic. But we got to kind of manage our blood sugar so it’s not constantly spiking and crashing. So the right kinds of carbs and the ones that I like talk to my clients about including in their diet would be things like fruit, berries, dairy, legumes, starchy vegetables, like sweet potatoes, root vegetables.
Again, these are all real foods, they still look like food. Our ancestors look at these things and say, oh, yeah, I know what that is. That is a sweet potato. Oh, yeah, that is a blueberry. Okay, so carbohydrate management is very important.
Number four is increased cortisol. Cortisol is the stress hormone. Your body produces cortisol when you get stressed out, and this is normal. And this is actually good. Because when you’re in this stressful situation, and we’ve evolved to produce cortisol in stressful situations, like the saber toothed tiger comes at us from the jungle, and we’re staying there and we’re like, oh, my gosh, your body raises cortisol raises glucose produces a bunch of blood sugars, so that you can like fight or flight like you couldn’t run away, I would run away if it was me.
Same thing happens when we are under stress, though today. And this stress could be from an inbox full of emails, or financial issues, or work related stuff, or family or relationship stuff. Like there’s so many things that stress us out in society today. And if you’re in the state of chronic stress, where cortisol is chronically raised, this is a big problem. All right.
Cortisol, in small amounts in in short term is fine like it is actually it’s a good thing. Because your body will have an adaptive response to that. So you do a hard workout, you do a hard hit workout, cortisol is gonna go up. As soon as you get into the rest mode, like that’s gonna go back down again. And then cortisol is back to normal, and you’re good to go.
The problem is that we have these lives, you know, stresses that keep us in a chronic state of stress, which keeps cortisol chronically high, which keeps our blood sugar’s chronically elevated, which keeps insulin chronically elevated, which keeps us storing fat. It keeps us from burning fat. So if you want to completely avoid fat burning, just stay stressed out all the time.
So this is like lack of sleep, too many hard workouts, not enough rest and recovery days. One way that a lot of runners will put themselves in a state of chronic stress is doing what I call chronic cardio, this is where you’re just doing all your workouts at that sort of medium hard level of intensity, they’re not easy enough to be easy.
They’re not hard enough to be hard. It’s like you’re doing everything at the high end of zone three or something like that. And it’s just all your workouts are a little too hard. You’re never giving your body a break. You’re never pushing yourself so hard that you’re getting into those higher zones, and you’re never really doing anything that’s easy enough to help you to respond and recover and repair.
So we got to be careful with this chronically elevated stress, chronically elevated cortisol, and chronically elevated glucose peruses, that chronically elevated insulin and then you’re chronically storing fat, right? You cannot burn fat while your body is stressed out.
So you have to manage stress. This means managing your day to day stress. And any sort of exercise undue stress. So you got to prioritize rest and recovery days. You can’t really improve your fitness if you’re out there just cranking out the miles day after day after day, your fitness improves while at rest. So you do hard HIIT workout speed intervals, something like that.
And then the next day you take a rest day, maybe an active recovery day, something like that. Well, that’s when your body has the positive responses and your cardiovascular system improves. Your lactate threshold improves. Same for lifting weights, you don’t get stronger while you’re lifting weights at the gym. That’s when you’re breaking yourself down. You get stronger during the rest and recovery phase, right.
So you have to improve stress. You have to manage stress, you have to improve your sleep quality. Sleep is so important. People don’t understand the importance of sleep but getting enough sleep and getting good quality sleep are super important because if you’re not getting enough sleep you could keep yourself in this state of chronically being stressed out. And stress leads to a lack of sleep. And a lack of sleep creates stress.
So this is a terrible cycle to be in. So you have to manage stress from the outside and you got to manage stress from the inside. And you have to make sure that you are getting quality sleep, whatever it takes, okay? A better approach to running is the 80/20 method. I’ve talked about this before, this is going to help you to keep cortisol at normal levels at 20 just means that 80% of the time, you’re you’re running workouts are going to be pretty easy conversational pace, pretty low zones, one or two 20% of the time, heart zones, 3, 4, 5, where you’re going to be doing speed intervals, you’re going to be doing HIIT workouts, you’re going to be doing tempo runs anything that’s going to really push the needle hard, but that’s only 20% of the time.
And if you kind of stick to that formula, the 80/20 formula, that’s where the magic happens, right. That’s how you improve your endurance, you improve your speed, you improve your strength without burning yourself out. So you do have to include the 20% of hard workouts, but it should only be 20%. It shouldn’t be chronically hard workouts, okay? All right.
And then number five, dieting disaster that runners need to avoid is one size fits all approaches. And I have done all this stuff. I’ve read the books, I’ve tried all the fad diets, I’ve tried everything that’s out there, pretty much. I’ve even experimented with some of these lately, just to see like, hey, this actually sounds interesting. I wonder if this might work.
This diet that somebody wrote out there, you know, the problem with that is that they don’t work. They don’t work for everyone. There’s not one diet that is going to work perfectly for everyone. Why? Because you are an individual. You have your own body, your own metabolism, your own goals, your unique lifestyle, your own culture, food preferences, food likes and dislikes food allergies, you got your own athletic goals, your own training schedule, your own particular body composition goals, your own hormonal makeup, genetics have a factor in this too.
If you think that one fad diet is going to work for you exactly the same as it did for that celebrity who’s selling it, I’m sorry, but you’re just mistaken, it’s not going to work for you. I mean, it might, but there is no one size fits all diet out there. Okay.
That is why I am a coach and I don’t have a book to sell you on how to lose weight, right? Because it just doesn’t work that way. Everybody’s different. And coaching works, where all these other diets fail. Because what I do is I’m going to meet you where you are, and treat you like the individual that you are, we’ll take a look at what you’re doing today.
And then we’ll start making some changes. And this looks a little bit different for each person I work with because we’re starting from where you are. And then we start making some small changes. And we start small, and then we layer things on. And you know, we got to make sure that your body adjusts to each of these changes. But this is the right way to approach any type of dietary intervention, like you can’t just change 27 things all at once.
This is not sustainable, this is very overwhelming, and most people will not stick with it. So when you look at some fad diet out there, and they say okay, here’s the 27 things you need to do. Here’s the food you need, this food’s naughty, here’s the kind of thing, here’s my carbs, calories, how many macros and blah, blah, blah. Like it’s just overwhelming for a lot of people.
So it has to be something that is a progressive approach. I always take an progressive approach with my clients. And coaching is about feedback and results like is this working for you? Yes or no? Are you seeing positive results? Yes or no? If yes, cool. We’re going to keep going. If no, then we need to change something so that we can start getting results again.
And I’ll even say this, and this might sound a little bit arrogant, but coaching pretty much always works as long as you stick with it. As long as we are constantly analyzing results and making changes when necessary. You’ll always be moving towards your goals. You’ll always be getting results as long as we take that approach.
Because it’s not about any particular diet. It’s not about some dogmatic set of principles. Coaching is about what works for you as an individual. Yeah, sometimes it takes a little bit, a little bit of time to figure things out. Sometimes you have some setbacks, sometimes. It just doesn’t work.
But then we get into detective mode and we figure out a solution. And every other diet that’s out there, every other like one size fits all diet. You know, here’s what you do. And if it’s not working, sorry about your luck, you’re probably just doing it wrong. That is not the approach you need to take, you need to take an individualized approach.
And I’m not even saying you got to have a coach to help you through all this stuff. But you do have to constantly be analyzing, is this working for me or not? And if it isn’t, there’s something that has to change, you can’t keep doing the same things and expecting the results to be different, right?
So that is why I don’t just have a document, I can hand it over to you and say, here’s what you’re going to do. And this is going to work perfectly for you. Because there is no such thing. There just really isn’t. Okay. So this is a very dynamic process. It’s a process of trying some things and seeing if it works, and if it does, great, try something you know, later on the next thing, if it’s not working, though, we have to make a change. You can’t just keep doing the same things. Okay?
So you have to take more of a dynamic approach to whatever method you want to take on here. And that’s again, that’s why I do coaching and I don’t just hand over a book or document or something like that.
Okay, so those are the five dieting disasters that runners need to avoid. Number one, cutting calories and number two, not eating real food number three, carbohydrate mismanagement, number four, increased cortisol and number five, the one size fits all approach is just don’t do those things. And you’ll be fine. Cool.
And as always, if you’re looking for some help with any of this stuff, we can talk about it just head over to runningcoaching.com and click on Work Withork with me. We’ll have a conversation, see if coaching is a good fit for you. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
