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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Fat Burning

172. Can Losing Weight Be Fun?

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Most people think that losing weight equals suffering. If you want to lose weight you have to stop eating all “delicious” foods forever and you will suffer every single day. They use words like …

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Podcast Transcript

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 172 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, can losing weight be fun? So most people think that losing weight equals suffering. If you want to lose weight, you have to stop eating all the quote-unquote delicious foods forever. And you’re basically going to suffer every single day.

They use words like suffering and struggling and deprivation and starvation and white knuckling it. And I don’t know about you, but all of this sounds pretty terrible to me. If this is what you think losing weight looks like, if you’re suffering every day trying to lose weight, you are doing it wrong. Today, I’m digging into this concept of making healthy eating and losing weight fun.

Can losing weight be fun? Armed with the right mindset, I think it can absolutely be fun. But first, it’s been drilled into our heads that if you’re a runner, you have to eat carbs, lots and lots of carbs. The truth is, though, in two and a half million years of human evolution, we’ve never relied solely on carbs to run long distances, we just never have.

We burn fat, lots of fat, the idea of not using gels, and goos and stuff to run – this isn’t crazy. This isn’t some new fringe concept. It’s actually baked into our DNA. Humans are naturally excellent fat burners. But we’ve gotten far away from that in the last few decades. When you adapt to burning fat for fuel, you will have all the energy you need for running your own stored body fat, right?

We’re not talking about eating bacon and lard or whatever this is like your own stored body fat becomes your fuel source. Plus, if you want to lose weight, what do you have to do? You’ve got to burn fat, you’ve got to burn that stored body fat. So this whole concept of that adaptation, it’s a beautiful thing all the way around.

You really don’t need to eat a ton of carbs to run, you can eat some, that’s fine. You can become fat adapted, though and start using your own body fat as fuel. When you get fat adapted, you’ll never run out of fuel, you’ll be able to run basically all day, and you lose weight in the process. It’s a win win-win.

Learn more about my unique approach to weight loss for runners and join the Coaching Project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more. Okay, I mentioned something in last week’s podcast, or maybe it was a couple weeks ago about creating habits and trying to make things fun. And I just sort of touched on this idea of, you know, changing your habits eating healthy and how it can be fun.

And I got some questions about that. So I’m like, you know what, I need to just address this today. Because I think there’s this concept that when you change your diet, and when you start exercising, if you want to lose weight, like it’s just not going to be fun. Like you have to suffer your way through this whole process. I think most people believe that if you want to lose weight, you have to suffer. It has to be about suffering and struggling and excessive hunger and deprivation and white knuckling it. And this all sounds like super terrible, right?

The problem with this thinking, if you believe that in order to lose weight, you’re going to have to suffer for the rest of your life, that is absolutely not sustainable. There’s no way you can maintain that level of suffering forever. And so a lot of people believe this. They believe that losing weight equals suffering forever, never going to eat good food again. Got to eat bland, cardboard tasting stuff for the rest of my life. I’m going to be freaking out and feeling deprived every time I’m around some sort of quote-unquote delicious food. Like I just there’s no way I can deal with that. And so they just quit. There’s like, there’s no way I can do that for the rest of my life.

And many of you listening to this right now I know that you are good at suffering already. Like you’re a runner, like you’ve probably run marathons or ultra marathons or half marathons or whatever. Just training for an event like that and training for a marathon requires a lot of suffering.

Like you, there’s months of suffering, I gotta get up early. And it’s cold in the wintertime and like, you know, go run in the rain and run the snow and the ice and the wind and push yourself through the miles and you know that hurts. PR during a marathon is painful, there is pain involved in improving your time.

Every time you want to run a marathon, qualify for Boston, whatever that looks like for you. There’s pain involved, there’s suffering involved, not just in the race itself, but in the months of training that lead up to them. So we are good as runners, we are good at suffering, we can do that. We know what that looks like.

And I’ve suffered so much doing hard races. I have never run a marathon that at some point I didn’t say, ‘why do I even do this, this sucks so bad right now.’ And I remember running my 100 miler, and that’s a whole new level of pain and suffering, my friends, I’m just going to tell you right now, that this is something that I haven’t done again, since because there’s so much pain and suffering involved with that is like 28 hours of pain and suffering involved with that, right?

So runners, we can endure a lot of pain and suffering, we can deal with that, we’re good at this, right? But when I say to you, like, you know, what, just, you know, limit how much like pizza you’re eating or ice cream, like, you know, maybe just not eat that much. Immediately this becomes some type of suffering that you’re just like not willing to endure, right? Think about that for just a second.

You’re going to do all the hard work required to let’s say, qualify for Boston. So hard to do that. Right? You will suffer for months. And during that race itself, you’re going to be running so hard, you’re going to deal with so much pain, that, but if I say like, hey, don’t eat ice cream for 30 days, or 60 days or something like that, it’s like, oh, my god, I can’t do it. Right? It just becomes in our mind, it becomes something that we’re just not willing to deal with. Right? So this is why most people don’t even start.

Now, there is some suffering at the beginning. Like when you change your diet, there’s going to be a little bit of, you know, deprivation, you’re going to feel a little bit like, oh, what am I supposed to eat? I can’t eat sugar, I can’t eat, you know, processed flours and things like that. And whatever your plan looks like, everybody’s a little bit different.

But let’s just say you’re not eating pizza and ice cream. And you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m you know, this is hard, right? Yeah, it is hard at the beginning. Over time, that gets better. That gets better. Like it’s this is not going to last forever. I think we all know that, right. But if you believe that, you know, the rest of your life, you’re going to be suffering and struggling, no one’s going to sign up for that.

No one on this planet is going to sign up for that. I don’t care how much pain you can endure during an ultramarathon or something like that, nobody is going to sign up for a lifetime of suffering and struggling around food, right?

So there’s a mindset that this is too hard, I’m going to feel deprived for the rest of my life, screw this, it’s not worth it. And that mindset is just wrong, you have to change that, right? But most people, they just come at this whole process like losing weight, the whole journey of losing weight, is just going to feel so terrible forever that they quit or never start.

But when you do that, you’re really giving up what you really want for yourself. You want to get healthier, you want to be stronger, you want to feel good in your body, you want to feel confident, you want to run faster, whatever it is. Losing weight is actually just sort of a nice side effect of all those things.

Like you’re trying to become this healthiest version of yourself. And losing weight is just a little nice side benefit in the process. But you give all that up when you quit on yourself because you think it’s gonna be too hard or you make it too hard, right?

Becoming a fit, strong, healthy human being means you’re probably going to have to change some things. If you want to lose some weight, you’re gonna have to make some changes, you’re probably gonna have to give up a couple of these foods that you’ve been eating, or maybe not eat as much of some of these foods. Really limit how much pizza you eat.

I eat pizza every now and then. I eat some tacos here and there, I had some sushi a couple weeks ago. It’s great. I don’t do that all the time. But there will be some amount of discomfort there will be some amount of suffering involved. It should be minimal. It shouldn’t be temporary.

Changing your diet, changing anything for that matter, comes with some amount of discomfort, right? Just accept this, right? Let’s accept this and move on. It’s gonna happen. It’s typically at the beginning, it’s not a lifetime of pain and suffering and struggling. If it is, you’re doing it wrong. And I want to clear one thing up right away. The goal of all this, the goal of losing weight, or eating healthy, is not to have fun. It’s to be a fit healthy human being and do what it takes to stick with that, like make this your lifestyle.

To live your life as a fit, healthy human being, that means there will be some struggle, some suffering, some times that are not so good. That’s okay, that’s part of the process, there’s also going to be some times where it is fun, where it feels great, just like running.

But if you want to get stronger, let’s say, you’ve got to lift the heavy weights. Lifting heavy weights is hard, it hurts. There’s a certain amount of suffering involved, right. But is that fun? The results are fun. Looking in the mirror and seeing your abs for the first time since you were like 12. That’s fun. Having your shirts fit tight around your arms. That’s fun for the guys, maybe, maybe for the ladies, too.

If you want to lose weight, you have to endure a little bit of suffering like not eating pizza. That’s not fun. Not drinking any alcohol when everybody else at the table is drinking is not necessarily fun. But you know what is fun? Not waking up with a hangover the next day, stepping on the scale and seeing a lower number, that’s fun.

Fitting into that pair of jeans again, that’s fun. Feeling confident enough to wear a two piece bathing suit, or to maybe take your shirt off at the beach, guys only probably, depending on what beach you’re at, that’s fun. So it’s not going to be fun and games all the time. And you have to accept that, right?

You’ve got to kind of do some of the hard things in order to reap the benefits in order to have the fun. Running is hard, right? We do it anyway because we love how we feel afterward. We love pushing ourselves. We love accomplishing big things. We love seeing what we’re capable of. We love accomplishing more and running faster and running further.

But running is not always fun. Running is hard. A lot of times running is hard. I did two runs last weekend, I’m training for this Ultra. And on Saturday, I ran 24 miles. On Sunday I ran 10. Right, that was on the schedule. That’s what I told myself I was going to do. I did the 24 on Saturday and was pretty good. I felt good. Felt pretty strong, and recovered quickly from that run.

And the next day I set out to do 10. And every step of that 10 miles was terrible. It was so hard. I’m like oh my god, this is so hard. And if my belief is that running is supposed to be fun all the time. I’m quitting like right now, I’m not doing any of this, running is hard. Let’s just be honest, like running is hard.

You know, I’m putting in these miles because what I want for myself is to finish this Ultra and I, you know, I’m putting in the miles and I’m doing the hard things now so that I can reap the benefits and finish this thing. Now this Ultra I’m doing is going to be another level of heart. And that’s okay, I’m building the strength and the endurance and all that right now to be able to finish this thing.

But sometimes, running is hard. Sometimes, losing weight is hard, sometimes sticking with the plan, and not eating the pizza, and not drinking the beers after work or whatever is hard. Losing weight is hard sometimes, but we do it anyway because we’re committed to that process.

We’re committed to this as a lifestyle. I saw this quote the other day, which I thought was so awesome, it said, “How long does it take the average person to run a marathon?” That was like a question that was posed and the answer underneath it said, “Average people don’t run marathons.” I thought, damn, I love that!

I love that because we are not average people. We want more for ourselves. Average people don’t do the hard things. Average people will not deal with any amount of suffering or struggling in order to lose the way because it’s hard. But you’re not average. You’re willing to do the hard things so that you can become more, right?

Another thing I want you to think about is what does fun even mean to you? Is running intervals fun? I don’t know. Probably not. I’m going to say no. But how good you feel afterwards, that’s fun. Is doing the work to PR a marathon fun? No, but there’s some elation that you feel when you cross the finish line that is out of this world. I

s it fun to skip dessert? No. But when you see that number on the scale go down again, that’s fun. You got to reframe fun. Is it fun to binge out on like fried food? It might feel like it at the time, listen, I can’t eat this stuff. I eat fried food and I feel terrible for like three days. I’m sluggish, I can’t think straight. I got to stay away from this stuff. Stay away from fried food. If you just do one thing, stay away from fried food.

You know what is fun though? Waking up every morning feeling good. Having lots of energy, having a clear head. That’s fun. So we have to kind of reframe our idea of fun and maybe push some of this short term pleasure off the table, in favor of what we really want for ourselves long term.

And one thing I just have to say right here is like fun is subjective. What might be fun for me is not going to be fun for you necessarily. How you make weight loss fun, or how you make running fun is gonna be different for each person. So we have to come up with some ideas that feel good individually. But I’m gonna give you some examples here.

So how can you make running fun, let’s say one thing I love is running with friends. If you have a group of people you can run with regularly, that is fun. I have had more fun in my running group over the last, whatever, 15 years, basically running with the same people for that amount of time.

It is so amazing because we do hard things, but we do them together. And we laugh and we joke around, there’s always a joke of the day, usually super inappropriate. And super fun. Mix up your workouts, don’t do the same workouts all the time, change things up, leave your watch at home. That’s kind of fun. Just go out there and run. Leave your phone at home. They call this running naked.

It doesn’t mean running without clothes on, I want to make that very clear. Running naked means leaving your watch and your phone at home and just going for a run and paying attention to your breathing and to your surroundings. And like it’s just different, you know, run somewhere new, pick a new route somewhere you’ve never been before.

Get out in nature, run on a beach, one of my favorite things to do in the world is run on a beach. If you can do that, if you have any access to a beach, go do that right now. Run on trails, run up a mountain, get out in nature and run in nature, it’s amazing. This is what we do as human beings, we’ve just evolved to run in nature. So do more of that.

How can you make losing weight fun? Do it with friends. You know, one of the big reasons I have a group component to my coaching program is that we do it together. You know we support each other, we do coaching together, and we encourage each other and we’re there for each other.

We share ideas, and we share what works for us and what doesn’t work. And it’s more fun to do with friends. Plain and simple. Try new foods. What foods do you love? And by the way, there are so many choices for healthy foods out there. It’s literally limitless.

I hear people say this all the time. “I don’t know what to eat. There’s nothing to eat.” This is just a cop out. This is an excuse. There are a few foods that we try to stay away from like, I’ll tell people like maybe we start out with stay away from sugar, flour, vegetable oils, you cut out those three things.

“Oh my gosh, what’s left?” Literally everything else in the world. Everything else. Eat more protein, stay away from junk food. And then the choices are limitless from there. I love burgers and I found a bunch of new burger places around town here. And we go to these burger places and they do a great job of like making a burger with a lettuce wrap.

I don’t eat flour and leave you know the bun, whatever. So I’ll get a lettuce wrap burger. Oh, get an extra patty on there and put all kinds of stuff on there. Veggies, lettuce, tomato, pickles, onions, jalapenos, and a fried egg on there, whatever. It’s like super delicious and just love eating burgers again, you know?

I like pizza, all the pizza here. I’ll make my own crust. You know. Try new places, new foods, new recipes. Eating healthy can be fun. If it’s not fun to some degree, it doesn’t have to be fun all the time, you’re probably doing it wrong. Okay.

Another way of making this whole process of eating healthy and losing weight fun is rewarding yourself. Reward yourself for sticking to the plan. Don’t reward yourself with food. Don’t reward yourself with like, oh I stuck to my plan for the last week I’m going to eat a pizza, I’m going to eat ice cream, I’m going to, you know, eat a bunch of candy. No, don’t do that. That’s called self sabotaging behavior. We don’t do that.

Reward yourself with things like a massage, or go to a museum or get a new pair of running shoes. How about that, or a new shirt or pair of jeans or bathing suit or something. Reward yourself with something that feels good. Make it fun.

Go out in the woods, take a hike, get out in nature, take a weekend trip somewhere, it doesn’t have to be somewhere far away, or expensive or whatever. Just do something to reward yourself for sticking with the plan. Again, fun is subjective. So what’s fun for you? Like how many ways can you come up with to make losing weight fun for you?

And I talk about all this stuff here on the podcast. But listen, if you really want to change, you’ve got to do stuff, right? The only way you can produce results is by taking action. Action produces results, thinking about stuff doesn’t give you results.

So when this podcast is over, I want you to get a notebook or journal and I want you to spend a few minutes and write down all the different ways that you can make losing weight fun. Answer these questions. How can I make eating healthy, more fun for me? How can I make sticking to my plan more fun for me? How can I make exercise more fun for me? How can I make running more fun for me?

Ask yourself all these questions, write down all the answers, you should probably be able to come up with 100 different answers to these questions total, you know, something like that. 50, whatever, come up with as many as you can, the more fun you make it, the more likely you are to stick with it.

Another concept I want you to kind of wrap your head around is this. Over time, your palette will change. You may think that eating healthy is gonna be boring, I’m not gonna like it and it’s not going to taste good. And when you first change your diet, and you first stop eating some of these hyper palatable foods, your taste buds may be like where’s the good stuff, quote-unquote good stuff?

Where’s the overly processed hyper palatable foods? Like, over time your taste buds will change. And things will start to become more delicious to you, the simple foods will become more delicious to you. For example, one of the things that I love to eat, I love eating steak with salt on it like that is one of my favorite things to eat. It’s so simple. And this is from a guy who didn’t eat meat for like 10 years.

And now I just love it’s like such a beautiful thing. You know, a nice ribeye grilled with some salt. That’s it. It’s so good. And that’s all I need. Chicken and broccoli is one of my other favorite things. It’s just, you know, broiled chicken with broccoli. That’s it. And some butter and salt on that broccoli. Oh my gosh, so delicious. My mouth just like explodes with flavor. And I’m like, this is so good.

But it wasn’t good at the beginning. It was hard. It was like, this is like, I want a pizza, I want bread, I want sugar, or whatever. And I don’t need all that stuff anymore. My tastes have changed, my palette has changed. I find so much satisfaction and fun eating a super simple diet. It’s not complicated. It’s not, you know, super exciting. But it’s also fun to eat this way. It really is. Food can be fun, every meal doesn’t have to be some magical spiritual experience. Okay?

Over time when your tastes change these simple foods will become more fun for you to promise. If you’re trying to lose weight and you’re suffering, you’re suffering long term, you are doing it wrong. It’s not sustainable, you’ll quit. Right? It’s kind of like doing speed work every single day, you are going to hate running very quickly, you’re gonna burn yourself out, and you’re gonna quit because that is not sustainable.

And then listen, if you want to have more fun on your weight loss journey, consider joining us in the Coaching Project where we actually have fun. This is my lifetime access program. We support each other, we encourage each other, we learn from each other, you get live coaching with me every week, twice a week. And this makes the process of losing weight actually fun.

Just like running alone is not as fun as running with a group. Being on this weight loss journey alone is not as fun as doing it with a group like the coaching project. Cool. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

169. What Should I Eat?

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One of the most confusing topics in the health and fitness world today is…what should I eat? There is just so much noise out there on social media, in the news, and even on podcasts. And almost …

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Podcast Transcript

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 169 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, what should I eat? One of the most confusing topics in the health and fitness world today is what should I eat?

There’s just so much noise out there on social media, in the news, even on podcasts. And almost every one of the principles someone says you need to follow is contradicted by some other principle that someone else says you need to follow. And just about every person that I talked to tells me how frustrating all of this is. And honestly, it’s probably the number one reason why I do what I do.

I became a coach to help you navigate around all the BS, and figure out exactly what you should eat and shouldn’t eat, so that you can achieve your own personal weight loss and running goals. So today, I’m gonna explain why what’s out there in the media is so confusing and what you should do instead.

And by the end of this episode, you should have a much better understanding of the complexity of the question, what should I eat? And I have a few simple steps you can take right away to help you get started on your own weight loss journey. But first, losing weight, getting stronger, running faster; all of these things require a high level of commitment, not a half-assed “I’m sort of in sort of out” type of commitment, but an “I’m all in no matter what” type of commitment.

Because whether you’re fully committed or not, your own health and fitness journey will be riddled with challenges, you might progress slowly or your progress might be minimal. You might lose motivation. You might slip back into old habits or behaviors. You know, you might have a really bad run or you might gain a few pounds, whatever, these things will happen.

If however, you’ve made a real commitment, none of these things will really matter. Most people don’t do this though. Most people come face to face with one of these challenges and they just quit. They give up. In order to get through this tough stuff, you have to have a solid commitment and then you have to recommit to your goals daily.

When you make a daily recommitment to accomplishing your goals, you stay laser focused, you stay motivated, you keep making progress, you gain massive confidence in yourself. So a couple things I want you to consider. Two questions I want you to ask yourself, number one, what are your goals? And then two, how are you recommitting to these goals today?

And if you’re looking for a little help setting goals and staying committed, join us in the Running Lean Coaching Project where we’re all about supporting each other to accomplish big goals. Okay, just learn more at runningleancoaching.com/join.

Okay, arguably one of the biggest questions I get is, what should I eat even with the people that I’m working with my coaching clients, we talk about this extensively, especially at the beginning. Why? Because there’s so much freaking confusing information out there. Sugar is good. Sugar is bad. Carbs are fine. Don’t eat carbs, keto, carnivore, low carb, no carb, all carb Mediterranean, South Beach, vegan, paleo, plant based, Whole 30. And on and on and on, right?

What are you supposed to do with all of this? Which one of these diets is going to work for you? Seriously, like which one? Do you know? How do you know? How do you know if you choose the right one? And then people will say well, you know, this study came out recently that says an insert diet here. Insert diet here will kill you, whatever that is, you know?

There are some things we have to understand when it comes to these studies that we see out there. Sometimes these studies are pretty poorly done. And they make the news anyway. You got to look at a couple of things like number one, how many people are in the study? How long did they do the study?

Is it a randomized controlled trial or is it just a what they call an observational study where they just ask people some questions? You know, are they actually like monitoring these things directly? Who paid for the study? Big food, Coca Cola, some big pharmaceutical company, you’ve got to like look into that kind of stuff too.

Okay, so recently there was a couple of studies, I’m going to call out a couple of these because I want to show you what I’m talking about here. There were a couple of studies that came to my attention. One of them was a study they did on one of the sugar alcohols, so it’s a sugar substitute called erythritol. And, you know, I’ve eaten this stuff before, it’s okay. I don’t really do much of it anymore. It doesn’t really agree with me too much.

But the headline said this, “Zero calorie sweetener linked to heart attack and stroke, study finds.” So this was the CNN Headline. And I was like, wow, that sounds terrible, like a big attention grabbing headline, right? Basically, you’re gonna die if you eat erythritol, okay, or some other sugar substitute, so I looked into this a little bit.

And the actual study, and I use that term loosely, was done on eight people, eight people who were eating erythritol, and they were eating the amount that can be found in a pint of low carb ice cream, or like, no sugar ice cream, okay. Kind of a lot, but you know, whatever, but it was eight people, okay.

And then this was kind of buried in the text of the article. It said, “And while the study found an association between erythritol and elevated cardiovascular risk, it did not prove that the compound itself causes strokes and heart attacks. The study includes observational research that requires further validation.”

So if you read the actual article, it will tell you that this doesn’t prove anything. But we see this headline, and CNN puts this headline out there, and they’re just trying to get clicks, right? They’re selling advertising, they want to get clicks, they put these sensational headlines out there.

But if you’re somebody who’s trying to find a good, you know, sugar substitute and erythritol, has been shown to be fine up until whatever this study on these eight people, eight people, really? That’s a study? I just don’t understand how you can call it a study with eight people.

There was another one that several of my clients brought this to my attention, because we do kind of a lower carb approach, typically, for most people. Now, it’s not what everybody does, but we typically don’t eat a ton of carbs. Some people like to go a little lower carb and do things like keto, carnivore or whatever, which is fine, if that’s what you want to do. But I’m not trying to say like you have to do this or that. But the program that I teach is not about any particular diet. And I’ll get more into that in a second.

But there was a study that said, and here’s the headline on like Fox News or whatever, “Keto diets could increase risk of heart attack and stroke, says news study.” So the things you have to understand about this study, is it says the participants self-reported their food intake via a questionnaire at only one point in time, which could impact accuracy. With only one day of food choices reported, there could be a lot of variation as to what diet these subjects actually followed on an ongoing basis.

Again, you’ve got to read through even the news article, if you just read the actual news article, it basically says these people reported one day of food choices, right? One, one day, one day.

And somebody replied to this with a comment that I thought was really good. And I’ll just read what they said. They said this quote, unquote, study was a really poorly done observational study of 305 people. So 305 people is a very small study group, okay, but better than eight, right?

They gave them a one time 24 hour food survey. That’s right. They asked them what they ate over the last 24 hours. And that was it. That was the quote unquote, study. Okay. And then here’s the part that doesn’t make any sense at all. They labeled anyone eating less than 25% of calories from carbs, and more than 45% from fat, they labeled them the Keto group. Yeah, so 3000 calories a day. That’s up to 187 grams of carbs a day. That is like 10 times what typically people say is Keto. Okay.

So basically, the group that they’re calling Keto is a high fat, high carbohydrate diet is what they were actually doing. Okay? So labeling something like this as dangerous is irresponsible, in my opinion. Now I’m not saying like, oh, keto is amazing and everybody should do it. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But we have to look at these studies, and really like read not just the article, but even go into the study itself and look at who’s funding the study. How many people were they really talking about? Was it eight people? Can you actually publish data on a study done with eight people? I guess you can, right.

But calling this high carb, high fat diet keto, having test subjects report on one day’s worth of food, is this really a study? No, this is an abomination. This is like, this is fleecing us. It’s fleecing. It’s whoever’s writing these things, or doing these studies has some kind of an agenda to make this stuff more confusing for us. Right? So.

Okay, my point with telling you all this, is to say that making a decision about what you should eat can be challenging, and confusing, and somewhat stressful. And by the way, I’ve tried all these things. You know, before I’ve tried all these diets that I mentioned before, you know, the Whole 30, and the vegan and the whatever. I tried all this different stuff until I finally figured out what works for me. And what I’m doing today doesn’t look like any one of those particular diets, right?

The best study that you should follow is the study of one. And that’s you what works for you, you need to figure that out, you need to figure out what actually works best for you. And if what you’re doing improves your health, helps you to lose weight, makes you feel amazing, improves your running; but it doesn’t line up perfectly with some rando study out there. Don’t worry about it, right?

You know, if you’re getting good markers from your doctor, and like everything is looking good, and you’re feeling good, you’re losing weight, don’t worry about it. You do you, okay? So I just wanted to frame this conversation, like there’s a lot of confusing and a lot of misleading information out there.

And what people come to me and they say is, “just tell me what to eat”. So here’s where I’m going to give you like the bad news, okay? Because no one can do this. Not really, ethically, right? Because there’s no dietician, or nutritionist or doctor out there, that’s going to be able to tell you what you should eat and what you shouldn’t eat, and know for sure 100% certainty that this is going to work for you no matter what. No one, right? Including me. And you just have to accept this fact. Okay, so I just want to start there.

You’re asking, a lot of people are asking, for someone to just tell them what they should eat, and what’s gonna work for them and work forever. And it just doesn’t work that way. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. The human body is a complicated organism. With a lot of interconnected systems, we’re not steam engines where the amount of energy we put out is exchanged exactly for the amount of energy we put in, it’s not like that it’s not all about calories in calories out, there’s a lot more going on. Okay.

We’re all very different individually, we’re fundamentally different from each other, which is good. This is a good thing. As humans, we are all unique. And this is beautiful, we all have our own goals. For example, some of us want to lose weight, some of us want to gain muscle, get stronger, fit into our clothes again, see our abs again. Look better by the pool or look better by the beach, or run a faster marathon or run an ultra marathon or just run. Or just feel better about ourselves, have more energy, not feel so bloated all the time, whatever, we all have our unique goals.

And your goals will influence how you structure your particular nutrition plan. Okay, so that’s one factor we have to think about. Another factor is that we all have a unique metabolism. Some of us can eat more processed food, some of us can eat more sugar and we still like lose weight or we don’t gain weight. Some of us like me, if I just smell pizza, I gained a few pounds.

I’m very carbohydrate sensitive. When I eat carbs, I gain weight, so I keep my carb intake pretty low. And I had this friend some years ago, who was a small guy, he was probably like 140 pounds soaking wet. He was a short guy, thin guy. He never exercised, he never ran, he didn’t lift weights, he didn’t do anything like that.

But this little guy could eat more food than anybody I’ve ever seen. More bread, and pasta, and cake and sugar and whatever. And this guy never gained an ounce, ever. He just stayed the same. So is he a freak of nature? I don’t know, maybe I was always jealous. I’m like, dude, I would try to keep up with him eating and I would just gain weight like crazy.

So, your unique metabolism will make a huge difference in what works for you and what doesn’t work for you, some of us have to be a little more conscious of things like sugar and in, you know, refined carbohydrates and things like that, right? Okay, so we all have a unique metabolism that we have to factor in here, we all have our own genetics, like genetics does play a part in your, you know, weight loss, or, you know, your ability to, let’s say, you know, metabolize carbohydrates and things like that.

But it’s not the whole story, because many people have the gene for obesity, but they don’t become overweight, right. So your genetics might play a part here. And we have to kind of factor that in as well. And then we have things like cultural influences, right? Sometimes your family of origin and the culture you grew up in will dictate some foods that you eat and some foods that you definitely need to avoid. And we have to factor this into the equation as well, right.

And then we have our own likes and dislikes. Some people love Brussels sprouts, others hate Brussels sprouts, some people prefer mostly like an animal based diet and other people are more like on the vegetarian side of things. So your personal food preferences, your personal likes and dislikes have to play a part in this equation as well. Right? Because if you don’t like the food that you’re eating, you won’t stick to the plan.

I don’t care how great you think the plan is. If you don’t like it, you’re not going to stick with it, it’s not sustainable for you, right? So it has to be a consideration. Other things that we need to consider is like how much food should you be eating? How often should you eat? What should your particular macronutrient breakdown look like? Like how much fat, protein, carbs should you be getting? What should that breakdown look like?

Your hydration, your supplements, electrolytes, all kinds of stuff, right? So all those factors right there. Just think about those factors, there’s probably some I’m not thinking of right now. But all those factors right there, create a super unique plan that doesn’t really follow any one of those diets that I mentioned before. There is not one diet out there, that is going to hit all of those things perfectly for you. Or if it does, that’s pretty rare and pretty amazing.

And so do that, if that works for you, whatever. But pretty much no quote unquote, like fad diet or whatever out there is going to be the perfect plan for you out of the gate. It just isn’t, you know, some of this stuff may be a good place to start. Okay, start with Whole 30 or whatever feels good to you. Start with like paleo, maybe and then go from there. You know, you can add in more vegetables or more fruit, or maybe you do more carbs or fewer carbs, whatever.

The number one reason why I am a coach is to help you navigate all this stuff and put together a plan that’s actually made for you. And that works for you. Is it going to be keto or carnivore or vegan or paleo or Whole 30? Probably is going to include some aspects of some of these things, or all of them, but it’s not going to be one of those. Right?

So you’re probably thinking right now like, great, so you can’t tell me what I should eat then, right? Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because I can’t, even with my coaching clients, they have to fill out like a food questionnaire, I need to see like kind of where they’re coming from today. That way, we can start moving them in the right direction, right?

So they fill out a questionnaire of like, what does a typical day look like for you? What kinds of foods do you like? What kinds of foods do you not like? And then we get into some conversation about what their goals are and what they’re trying to accomplish with all of this. Right?

So and then we start them out on a plan and I have some frameworks that I can use some blueprints that we can use to get you started. But as we go, we keep track of things, right. This is the beauty of coaching, by the way, because it’s a feedback system. So if the plan is working, then we can like layer on the next step. And if that continues to work, okay, cool, then we kind of move on to the next step, and so on.

But if anywhere along this process, things stop working, we need to address those things, we need to find out why they’re not working. And then we need to make some corrections here. And this is where the custom plan that does work for you really begins to take shape. Right, it’s not some cookie cutter program, you know that you bought a book and read it, and then that’s what you’re going to do, and it’s going to work for you, you know.

And then all my clients, they don’t all do the same thing everybody does, that does something a little bit different, because we factor in all these different things, okay. But I don’t want to leave you hanging here today, I do want to give you some general guidelines to get you started on this, because there are a few things that pretty much work for most people, not everybody, but pretty much work for most people.

So I’m gonna give you a couple of places where you can start. And I think this will start moving you in the right direction, whether you’re trying to gain muscle, lose weight, improve your running, all of these kind of apply across the board. And this is generally where I start with, with most people I work with, again, everybody’s so different, we have to like, create a custom plan for each person. But here’s some things that you can do.

Number one, you’ve got to start with where you are. And the way you kind of figure out where you are is to do a detailed food inventory, like what are you eating. So you got to write this stuff down, like you got to keep track of what you’re doing right now. That means write everything down, you can write it down in a notebook, write down on a piece of paper, write a note on your computer, write on your phone.

There are apps that will help you track all this stuff. So you can actually see detailed data of like macros and things like that, My Fitness Pal, Carb Manager, Lose It. Those are three apps that all work to help you enter your food and keep track of what you’re doing. So step one is just what are you doing? Right? And it’s important that you track everything every BLT – bite, lick, taste, track everything.

And this first step might surprise you. Because you might start to notice some trends. Oh, I do notice that I do like snack on a bunch of junk food at the same time, every day, I really didn’t realize I was doing that. Or I’m eating like, you know, 10 times a day, is that normal? What’s up with that?

Or, boy, I sure eat a lot of these meals. So just keep track of what you’re doing. That’s step number one, you’ve got to find out where you’re starting, because you can’t change it if you don’t know where you’re starting from. Okay, so step number one, track everything. Do this for, I don’t know, a week or so that’s probably enough time to gather enough data. So you can kind of see, that’ll get you through a work week and through the weekend.

And if you want to do longer, that’s fine. But I think a week is a good amount of time to track just to see like where you are with all this stuff. Okay. A lot of times just being aware of what you’re doing is enough to elicit change. You know, this might inspire you to take some action that you didn’t even think about before you started tracking. So definitely track. Okay.

And then the next thing and the next easiest step is to eliminate a couple things, okay. And there’s a few things that I think work for most people if we can eliminate these three things. The most problematic for most people are going to be sugar, refined grains and seed oils. Seed oils are things like canola oil, and anything labeled like vegetable oil, corn oil. Refined grains are flours, you know, soy flour, if you just eliminate sugar, flour, and refined I’m sorry, sugar, flour and seed oils, you’re going to eliminate a huge, the three biggest contributors to metabolic dysfunction in the human body.

Okay, so most people can eliminate these things safely. My suggestion is try to eliminate these three things and see how you feel. My guess is that you’re going to feel better, pretty quickly. One caveat, if you give up sugar and you do this, like kind of cold turkey or like, Oh, I’m just gonna like give up sugar. You might experience a little headache or lightheadedness. This is normal. This is like withdrawal from sugar. Okay?

So make sure you’re drinking enough water, get enough electrolytes and you’ll you’ll do fine. You need to increase your salt intake a little bit when you when you stop eating sugar. Okay, so that’s kind of step number two first step just track everything for a little while. Try eliminating these three problematic foods and see how you feel.

All right now, after a week or two of doing that, like no sugar, no refined grains, no seed oils, you might layer in the next step would be like maybe stop snacking. Snacking is never a need for fuel. It’s never a need for like a whole meal. It’s always some emotionally driven event. So you’re bored, or you’re tired, or you’re stressed out, or you’re anxious, or you’re lonely or whatever. And these are all emotions. And snacking is just a way of dampening these negative emotions, right?

Eat, and you feel better, works like magic. And you do feel better for a minute, until the effect of that food wears off. And then you feel like crap again, right. And what are you snacking on? My guess is it’s not the Brussels sprouts, right? It’s probably chips, and cookies and crackers, and pretzels and leftover pizza, all the carbage By the way, pretty much all these snack foods out there are made with three ingredients sugar, refined grains and seed oils. So if you’re not eating that stuff, then snacking is pretty much like off the table anyway, right?

Okay, so these steps right here, these three steps, track everything. eliminate those three problematic foods, stop snacking, they’re very simple, right, but they’re also powerful. They will definitely get you started on your weight loss journey and help you get fat adapted. So not eating all the sugar and junk food will help your body turn to stored body fat as fuel and you’ll adapt to being a more efficient fat burner. If you want to lose weight, you’ve got to do what?

That’s right, you got to burn fat. And the right nutrition plan should do two things. It should help you regulate your blood sugar and help you burn fat and help you become a fat burning machine. Okay, so those are some things you could do to get you started. And if you ever want help with all this, if you want to make all of this way easier, join the coaching project, we’ll put together a custom plan that works for you and gets you to that most badass version of yourself. Just head over to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more. Cool.

All right, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

163. 3 Proven Ways to Get Your Body Burning Fat

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There’s a lot of conflicting information out there in the world today about proper nutrition, the best ways to lose weight, what types of exercise are best for weight loss, and on and on. But I …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 163 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today three proven ways to get your body burning fat. I know that there’s a lot of conflicting information out there in the world today about proper nutrition, the best ways to lose weight, what types of exercise are best for weight loss, and so on and so on.
But I think we can all agree on one thing that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, right? Losing weight means reducing the amount of fat you have stored in your body period. When you look at yourself in the mirror naked, you see exactly where this fat is to write. That’s the stuff you want to get rid of. But how do you do it?
Maybe you’ve tried running it off. And maybe you’ve made some progress with that, but maybe not. For many of us running just doesn’t move the needle at all. There are lots of ways to reduce body fat. Today, I’m gonna go over the three proven ways to get your body burning fat so that you can lose weight and so that you can improve your running performance.
But first I want to talk about something. Here’s something that most coaches get wrong. Most coaches focus on one thing, they focus on what you should do, which is fine. That’s part of coaching, you need to know what to do, you need to know how to do it. But there’s more to it than that, especially if you really want to make changes to your health and fitness that lasts, especially if you want to make sustainable, long lasting lifetime changes.
So in my program, we don’t focus on just what you’re doing. That’s part of it. But rather, we focus on something bigger, like who are you becoming? This is a much more powerful approach to creating lasting change. Because when you focus on who you are becoming, you are way more likely to get there, you’re more focused, you’re more committed, you stay on track, more healthy habits become a way of life, they just become part of who you are, and what you do. So decide on who it is that you want to become.
And then hey, let’s make a plan to get you there. To learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Okay, so three proven ways to get your body burning fat. The first thing I want to talk about here is what is weight? Because we talk about weight loss a lot. And people say I just want to lose weight, I want to lose weight.
So what is this weight that we’re talking about? Well, we’re talking about body fat, right? A lot of times when people go on calorie restrictive diets to lose weight, a lot of the weight that they’re losing is muscle mass, we don’t want to do that, especially if you are somebody who wants to continue improving your running performance or get stronger and just be a healthy fit human being you want to maintain or even gain muscle weight.
And while you are getting rid of the fat weight, and this is something that you can absolutely do, is what we call improving your body composition. Your body is composed of fat, muscle and bone and all kinds of things. We want to improve your body composition, we want to increase your muscle mass while reducing your fat mass. So this, this is really what we’re talking about when we talk about losing weight, we just don’t want to drop weight, we want to drop the fat weight, right.
And this all makes total common sense, right, we want to get stronger, we want to have more energy, we want to feel better, we want to be as healthy and as fit as possible. That is really what the goal is here. The goal isn’t even to lose weight, the goal is to be as healthy and as strong and fit as possible.
When we do that, when we make that our goal, the fat loss happens as a nice side result of all that right. So let’s just make sure that we understand we’re talking about fat weight here. Okay. And how do you lose the fat weight? Well, you gotta burn the fat. We can all agree on that. All right. I know there’s a lot of information out there and different ways of doing things and calorie restriction and don’t count calories and track all your food and never track your food. Only eat these kinds of foods, never eat those kinds of foods. And on and on and on.
And it gets pretty frustrating, right? But I think we can all agree that if you want to lose weight, you want to lose fat weight, you’ve got to burn the fat. Right? So let’s just focus on that this is what our focus is on this discussion today is how do we burn fat? How do we get our body burning fat more efficiently, we’re always burning a little bit of that.
But if we’re not losing that fat weight, we’re not burning enough. So we have to increase that fat burning capacity in our bodies. So the first thing I want to talk about here is the insulin model, because this is something that is very well adopted now and very well researched, and something that I think most people could agree is probably what’s going on with the majority of people who have a hard time losing weight.
And the insulin model looks something like this. When your insulin is high, in your blood, when your body has a high amounts of insulin, then your hormones are put into a state where your body cannot burn fat. High insulin means your body is storing fat, not burning fat. So the idea is to keep insulin levels low, so that your body can burn fat. So this is, this is what the insulin model is, it’s pretty simple.
It gets a little complicated when you talk about the best ways to keep insulin levels low. And a lot of this has to do with the study of obesity and the study of type two diabetes. But it applies to all of us really, and this is something that I think is really fascinating is that even though we might be healthy, and we don’t have pre diabetes, or diabetes, you know, we’re not obese, but we were runners, we’re pretty fit people, but we can’t seem to lose weight.
Maybe you know, there’s some truth to this insulin model of weight gain and weight loss. And maybe there’s something that we can apply to even us as runners, right. So, I think that we have to just take this as a baseline, understanding that when we have high levels of insulin, that our body is storing fat, when we can keep our insulin levels low, then we can create an environment where our body can burn our stored body fat.

Okay, so how do we keep our insulin levels low? So the first suggestion or tip or the first way, the first proven way to get your body burning fat is to lower your carbohydrate intake, get off the sugars, get off the refined grains, stop eating tons of carbs, this is not about you know, zero carbs. But you gotta get away from those refined carbs and the foods that really spike your blood sugar.
And here’s why. Because when you eat sugar, for example, your blood sugar spikes like crazy. So you get this huge spike in your blood sugar. When you have a huge spike in your blood sugar, insulin gets produced, again in a huge amount in order to bring that blood sugar back down to baseline.
So a high spike of blood sugar, glucose in the blood, high spike of insulin; now your body is storing fat, your body cannot burn fat when you’re in this high insulin mode. Okay, so we keep our carbs low. We don’t eat a ton of sugar, we don’t eat any sugar if we can avoid it. We don’t eat a lot of things like you know refined grains.
And, what happens is the food that you do eat, let’s say you eat some chicken and some broccoli, or some scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon and some avocado. These are all foods that are low glycemic. These are foods that won’t raise your blood sugar, a ton of good sources of protein, good sources of fat, and will not raise your blood sugar.
So what happens when you eat these foods is that your blood sugar stays pretty, pretty steady. It’ll go up a little bit. When you eat protein, your blood sugar will go up slightly. When you eat fat, your blood sugar doesn’t go up at all. So if you ate for example, I have coffee in the morning. I’ve put a little MCT oil in my coffee, maybe a little bit of grass fed butter in there, blend it up. Tastes amazing. Gives me a little bit of energy in the morning but does nothing to raise my blood sugar because it’s just pure fat.
Pure fat does not raise your blood sugar, carbs and protein will raise your blood sugar, carbs much more so than protein. Okay, so we eat a diet that is higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates. And what happens? Well, you’re getting all the nutrients that you need. You’re getting a very nutrient dense diet when you do this and you are keeping your blood sugar pretty low.
And when you do this, insulin is low, which means your body is constantly in fat, fat burning mode, not fat storing mode. Alright, so do we understand this much of this process so far? Because it’s very important that we understand this concept.
So here’s something we need to understand. As runners, we need to understand this as well, because we basically have, you know, two types of fuel that our body can use, there’s more, but I’m just gonna go over these two. So we have glucose, carbs, and we have fat; stored body fat as fuel. And think of it as a gas tank, and at the bottom of the gas tank is this huge supply of stored body fat as fuel.
So this is going to burn for days and days and days. But then at the very top of that gas tank, we have a little bit of glucose, so we have a little bit of fast burning glucose, there’s only a little bit but as long as that’s there, that’s going to be the preferred fuel source. So our body wants to burn that first. So if we burn that top layer of glucose off, then our body can start tapping into that huge supply of clean burning long lasting, stored body fat.
And this is how you start to burn fat really efficiently. And you can start to lose weight and things like that. As long as you keep that top level of fuel topped off, as long as you keep carbs, and glucose. As readily available fuel for your body to use as energy, you will not get into that fat burning, you will not be able to get into that other source of fuel.
Think about this: as runners, we’ve been told we need to keep our carbs up, we need to keep our glycogen levels topped off, which means that we need to continually eat carbs, continually eat sugar, so that we always have that to use as fuel. Fine, okay, that works as a fuel source just purely for running performance. But it also keeps your body in this fat storing mode. So you’re constantly going to be gaining weight in this process.
This is why so many people come to me and they’re like Patrick, I am training for this marathon. And I’m gaining weight, like what is going on here? And we look at the diet, we see that you know, maybe this person is eating the typical runner’s diet of nothing but carbs and sugar and then fueling with carbs and sugar, recovering with carbs and sugar and then repeating that process day in and day out. And they can’t figure out why they’re gaining weight.
And this is the process here, you just keep topping off the carbs and keep topping off the glucose and so you don’t have the ability to access that huge supply of stored body fat, okay, so get rid of that top layer of fuel, get rid of the glucose, get rid of the glycogen. And now you’ve got the ability to start burning stored body fat.
Okay, so the first proven method of getting your body to start burning fat more efficiently, is to lower your carb intake and just cut out most of the carbs. And we’re not talking about anything crazy here, if you’re eating 50-75 grams of carbs a day, that’s pretty low compared to what most people do. I know people that do very low, I probably do around 30-40 grams of carbs a day, maybe 50.
Some days when I’m running, I’m going to increase that to be a little bit higher, because I’m using that as a little bit of fuel before running. But that’s because I’m very efficient at burning fat. I’m already fat adapted, and I can use some carbs as fuel. I’m not trying to lose weight. But if you are trying to lose weight, just keep that stuff out of the equation, you don’t really need carbs, you don’t need carbs for running you can, you can run really well without carbs.
You really can. You don’t have to do it all the time. But you can do it most of the time, especially for the longer distance, lower intensity stuff. Okay. So lower the carb intake, and you can start getting your body burning fat instead of storing fat. The other thing I want to say here before I go on to the next one is that burning fat is our natural state.
We as human beings have always been really proficient fat burners. We’ve always eaten a pretty low glycemic diet. And it can be argued what we ate as human beings. Lots of meat, lots of fat, lots of, you know, tubers and some berries and things like that, honey. So you know, it’s not like we ate zero carbs or zero vegetables or zero fruits, but we didn’t need the kinds of processed foods that we have today. We didn’t have access to that stuff.
They weren’t obese, you know, ancient ancestors were not obese people. If they didn’t have type two diabetes, they didn’t have heart disease then they would have all the problems that we have today. So they were really good at storing some of the energy that they consumed as body fat. And then they were really good at using that stored energy as body fat.
It’s kind of like you’re putting wood on the woodpile to burn later. But in modern society today, over the last 40 years or so, 40-50 years, we have been a society that just keeps putting more and more wood on the woodpile, we’re not burning the wood for fuel, we’re not burning that fat for fuel, we’re just adding to the fat stores that we have. So this is a really big problem.
But just understand that we are, we can take control of the way our bodies work, and we can get back to being really efficient fat burning machines, like we used to be, as human beings forever got. So this isn’t some weird thing that I’m explaining isn’t like some fringe thing that just happened, you know, a year ago or something like that. Now, we’ve always been efficient fat burning machines, we just want to get back to that natural state.
Okay, so lower the carbon take, that’s number one. Number two, don’t eat all the time. Another way to get fat burning going, is to not eat constantly. So remember what I said about blood sugar? Well, every time you eat, even if you’re eating just, you know fat and protein, your blood sugar will go up a little bit.
So that means that when your blood sugar goes up, your body is going to produce some insulin to bring that back down to normal. So instead of eating six times a day where our blood sugar is constantly up, and insulin is constantly present, why don’t we just eat a couple of times a day?
You know, the human body is really designed to eat like once or twice a day. When we do that, you’re keeping it. This is another great way of keeping insulin levels steady and low, and giving your body the ability to burn that stored body fat.
Well, you know, well, what about timing for running? I need to fuel my runs. I need protein right after a workout. And I have to tell you something like there’s been so many studies that have really proven that it really doesn’t matter when you consume protein after a workout. As long as you get the right amount of protein each day, the timing is not that important.
You might have some minuscule gains from eating protein within an hour after a hard workout. But the results have really shown to be negligible, there’s really not that big of a difference between people who time their protein, you know, right around a hard workout, or they just eat later, you know, give themselves a couple of hours after a workout and eat when they feel hungry again, so people don’t get hungry right after working out. It’s more important to get enough protein each day.
So as long as you’re getting the right amount of protein each day, then that’s going to be more important, that’s going to have a bigger impact on your recovery and on muscle maintaining and muscle building, then, you know, this one, our timing right after a workout or something like that. So maybe eat a couple times a day, eat when you’re hungry, don’t eat when you’re not hungry.
When you do this, when you extend the amount of time between meals, and you know, we call this intermittent fasting, and people freak out when they hear the word fasting, but it’s just the thing. It’s not a big deal. We just don’t eat all the time. So we do some intermittent fasting, which means we’re just you know, going to maybe skip breakfast.
So maybe we do our workouts in the morning in that fasted state. And we do that there’s a reason why we want to work out in that fasted state, the number one reason is that we can really take advantage of the fact that we have not raised our blood sugar, we don’t have fuel onboard, we didn’t eat a bunch of you know, pancakes or whatever that we’re going to be using as fuel for our runs.
We can go out there and workout in that fasted state, which really improves your body’s ability to burn fat. So now you can start burning fat even more efficiently because you’re working out without any other fuel to draw from that glucose, that top level of fuel that I talked about earlier. It’s not there, you’re fasted.
So it helps to increase your fat burning. It increases your adrenaline when you work out in a fasted state. So it actually can work out a little bit harder. A you increase your recovery hormones like human growth hormone, which means you can recover faster from some of these harder workouts. And you’re kind of forcing your body to use stored body fat as a fuel source.
And the more you do this, the more efficient you get at it. So if you want to lose weight and you want to get your body really burning fat and you want a great source of fuel for running, just don’t eat all the time. Do some workouts in that fasted state, as well. And this will help to keep insulin low and it’ll help keep your body into that fat burning mode as opposed to the fat storing mode.
Okay, so we want to lower the carb intake and then we do want to space out our meals a little bit and not eat constantly. And then the third way of getting your body burning fat and this one you probably have figured I was gonna be talking about is exercise, right? I mean, this is the most, most common way that people think of when you think of oh, how do you burn fat?
And people think cardio, step aerobics, Zumba, Jazzercise, whatever, they think, you know, you just need to like go out there and run more, and that’s going to be the answer. And moving your body more will help. Only as long as you’re doing the first two things right? As long as you’re eating the right diet, you’re not eating tons of sugar, refined grains and tons of carbs. And you’re not eating constantly.
If you do cardio, you know, without all the sugar and stuff and without, you know, eating constantly, you will actually be able to burn more fat than you would if you’re eating the wrong diet and things like that. This is why people have a really hard time losing weight when they are running a lot is because they’re just the diet is wrong, right, you can’t outrun that high carb diet, okay, all the exercise in the world isn’t going to help if the only fuel that you’re burning is carbs.
So if you want to burn fat, you have to get rid of the carbs first. So number one, change the diet, get your body burning fat naturally without exercise, then when you do add an exercise, you’re just going to improve your body’s ability to burn fat that much more.
Okay, now we’re going to talk about a couple different types of exercise. So there’s two types of exercise that we want to do in order to burn fat. Actually, there’s more, I’m just going to talk about these two today, though. So we’re going to talk about low intensity exercise and high intensity exercise.
So low intensity exercise, this is long distance running. This is like a lot of running in zones wanting to or if you use the RPE scale, the rate of perceived exertion, this is like one to four this is that very easy, comfortable conversational pace, this easy effort, the stuff that you can do all day, like just go out there and run doesn’t feel hard. You know, it just feels very natural and very comfortable for you. Whatever that is, that low intensity running. This is great for fat burning. Even a brisk walk can get you there, you know, whatever. Whatever gets you into that state where you’re in those zones one and two, then you’re in the fat burning zone. This is awesome.
And we call these steady state exercises. This is running, this is swimming, this is cycling, elliptical rowing, anything that is going to keep you in that steady state for an extended period of time and extended can be 30 minutes, it could be six hours, you know, just depends on what floats your boat, right. So we like the low intensity stuff for fat burning.
But also, we also want to include some high intensity workouts. The high intensity exercise is interesting, because when you add in moderate to high intensity, like running, for example, you’re going to make gains and your endurance and your speed and your power, which all help to increase your body’s ability to burn fat even more efficiently. And so these are exercises like sprinting, you know, HIIT workouts, weightlifting, hill repeats, even things like dancing and boxing and martial arts like these are all high intensity, shorter duration, typically maybe up to an hour or so, but higher intensity.
And something that I think is really fascinating is that most carb adapted athletes, so most traditional athletes who are following a traditional, you know approach to nutrition and stuff, they’ll hit the crossover point from where they’re burning mostly fat to burning mostly sugar. Most people, carb adapted athletes will hit this crossover point around 65% of their VO2 max.
Whereas fat adapted athletes who are very efficient at burning fat can push this crossover point much higher. So instead of 65% of their vo to max they can they’re burning mostly fat at 70% of their vo to max or 80% or 90%. Jeff Browning, he’s famous, he’s an ultra runner, he’s famous for still burning mostly fat at like 90-95% of his VO2 max so even at the higher intensities.
You can increase your fat burning ability. So just understand that the high intensity workouts can help to push your lactate threshold help push your your ability to burn fat at these higher levels as well. And you know, when we exercise, we’re always burning both types of fuel. So never just one, but the ratio goes way up and fat burning when you keep the carbs low when you don’t eat all the time. And when we do these fasted workouts, you’re just going to increase your body’s ability to burn fat. So, you know, the carb adapted athletes just burn less fat, they need to refuel constantly, they’re using sugar for fuel, they’re never tapping into that stored body fat as a fuel source, they have a hard time losing weight, and a lot of times they even gain weight, especially during higher training periods because they tend to up the carb intake. Okay, so that’s carb adapted athletes.
Fat adapted athletes, however, burn much higher amounts of fat, they don’t need much in the way of fuel if any, for most workouts, they train themselves to use stored body fat for fuel, they do high intensity workouts as well, which helped to push their fat burning ability even higher, they tend to lose weight pretty easily. So these are the three best ways to get your body burning fat, reduce your carb intake, and eat less frequently. And be sure to include both high intensity and low intensity exercises. So you can burn tons of stored body fat and turn your body into a lean mean fat burning running machine. Cool. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

160. Should Runners Lift Heavy Weights?

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There’s a bit of a debate going on out there in the running community around whether or not runners should be lifting heavy weights. Some people think no, runners should never lift heavy weights …

Continue Reading about 160. Should Runners Lift Heavy Weights? →

Podcast Transcript

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 160 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today should runners lift heavy weights? So, there’s a bit of a debate out there in the running community around whether or not runners should be lifting heavy weights.

Some people think no, runners should never lift heavy weights. And they give a bunch of valid sounding reasons why others think that runners should always lift heavy, and they have their own logical point of view on the topic. And the two sides both have some good points. Today, I’m hoping to clarify this for you and give you my stance on the subject.

So in this episode, I’m going to definitively answer the question should runners lift heavy weights. And before we get into this topic, I want to give you a quick recap of my personal weight loss journey. I’m sharing this with you today because I want you to understand something I want you to know that I get it that I’ve been there and that I’ve come out the other side.

So a few years ago, I found myself around 40 pounds overweight. Very recently, I was running like a madman and I was trying to burn off all these calories. And it just wasn’t working. I was logging all my food. I was doing these like whatever the latest fad diets. I was running every day, and still nothing was working for me.

My cravings for sugar and junk food were like crazy off the charts. And I was seriously riding the struggle bus. And then I did something that changed all this for me. So I went against everything I’d been taught as runner like you need sugar to run, you need carbs to run. And I finally got off the struggle bus.

I started fueling differently for running, I began lifting weights consistently. And I fixed my mindset so that I could make all of this a sustainable way of life. I ended up losing the 40 pounds, running became way easier. I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been. I have more energy than I know what to do with and my cravings for junk food are basically gone.

So, this is what I do. Now I teach runners like you how to stop struggling with your weight and start living like the healthy, strong, lean, badass runner that you know you can be. Of course, it’s up to you, you can continue to struggle like I did for a long time there. But listen, when you’re ready to be done with all that, I’m here for you.

If you want to learn more about coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application, we’ll have a quick chat, see if coaching is a good fit for you. Cool! runningleancoaching.com/apply I hope to see you in the Running Lean Coaching Project.

Okay, so let’s talk about this: should runners lift heavy weights? So, the reason I’m bringing this up today is because I think there’s a little bit of a debate out there. And if you look up, you know, hey, should runners be lifting heavy weights, I think you’re gonna get some mixed opinions about this subject. And especially if you talk to other runners, or you talk to people at the gym, don’t talk to people at the gym about this kind of stuff.

I get it, butI always hear people say oh, I was talking to this guy at the gym and I’m always like, oh boy, here we go. Right. Some expert quote unquote expert at the gym. So why am I talking about this? Well, a lot of runners think that they should never lift heavy weights like they should always do very lightweights lots of reps and others you know have a different opinion they think you should always lift super heavy and so like what are you supposed to do?

Like how do you decide as a runner, what you should do? And it doesn’t matter which you know, side you kind of fall into. I want to help you kind of make this decision clear today. Okay, so the first thing I want you to think about is this. What are your goals? What are your goals?

First of all as a runner: so, are you planning on running your fastest half or full marathon? Are you running your first ultra or your fastest 5k? Maybe you are you’re a miler, maybe you’re running your fastest mile. Maybe you just want to run every day, maybe you just want to run and continue running forever and that just wants you just want running to be part of your life forever. And you want to stay strong for that. Because your goals as a runner will a little bit determine like which way you want to go with this. Okay.

The other thing I want you to consider is what are your overall health and fitness goals? Like, are you trying to lose weight? How much weight; 10 pounds, 50 pounds? Are you trying to get stronger? You should be. Are you trying to build some lean muscle to improve your body composition? Like lose some fat and gain some muscle weight? Or you just want to live longer, like be very, very clear on your personal health and fitness goals.

Okay, because at the end of the day, you get to do this however you want. And I’m going to give you kind of my opinion here today. And I feel very strongly about certain what I think about this in my certain approach. But I just want you to think about what are your goals, okay.

So how you lift, how often you lift, how much weight you lift will largely be affected by your goals. So, think about like what your personal goals are, as we’re talking about weightlifting and talking about how much weight and how many reps you should be doing and stuff like that. Because if you want to build some muscle or maintain the muscle that you have, there’s a little bit of a different approach you want to take to this, okay.

But whatever your goals, whatever your goals, there’s a place for strength training in your workout regimen, or at least there should be. Lifting weights should be something that you do all the time no matter what. So, there’s nothing really inherently bad about weightlifting. But the interesting thing is that most runners are notoriously bad at weightlifting, they just don’t do it or they don’t do it right. They think that they don’t really need to lift weights because they run. This is very, very wrong. And I’m going to tell you why in just a second.

If you want to be a healthy fit runner, if you want to be a healthy fit human being, you need to be doing some sort of resistance activity, you need to be lifting weights, right? Running is just not enough. In fact, running is catabolic. It’s a catabolic activity, it breaks down muscle, long distance running is amazing. I love it so much. It’s like my life, you know, I love running.

And there’s a lot of people who think that running is enough to build muscle like, Oh, I’m just you know, I run a lot. So, I’m good to go there. And I’ve got some bad news for you. Running is what’s considered a catabolic exercise. So, anything that is cardio considered like cardio or aerobic exercises, especially over long, longer durations. These are great activities, cardio, aerobic exercises, these are great for helping you to improve your cardiovascular system, helping to build a healthy heart helping to improve your lung capacity. But they also cause you to lose some body mass both fat, which is good, and muscle, which is bad.

Running effectively breaks down muscle over time, this is very important for you to understand: is that running is a catabolic activity. Over time long distance running will break down muscle tissue. In order to offset this, you need to be doing anabolic exercises regularly. Anabolic is in the state of muscle building that’s building muscle growing muscle getting stronger.

So, what you really want is a good balance of the two to maintain a healthy, strong, fit body to maintain that lean body mass and we’re talking about not just you know, bigger muscles, we want stronger muscles. So too much catabolic exercise without enough anabolic exercise and you lose muscle you lose strength. And this is going to affect running negatively, too.

Okay. So it’s very important that you understand this concept that running is a catabolic activity. It will break you down over time. So you need to be doing something to offset that. So here are some of the here’s the flip side of this right here. Here’s some of the positive benefits of weightlifting of doing regular strength training for runners. Right, so the first thing you have to understand is that when you do regular strength training, regular resistance training, you’ll lose more weight and faster so the more muscle mass you have, the more fat you burn.

Carrying around muscle requires more energy than carrying around fat. So, your metabolism actually increases just by getting slightly larger, stronger muscles. Building muscle also speeds up the whole fat adaptation process, which will help you burn even more fat. And you know, like everything we talked about here, we’re all about fat burning, right?

So, lift weights, get a little bit stronger, build some muscle, and you increase your metabolism, you burn more fat, boom, this is awesome. Building strong muscles also means that you’re at a much lower risk of injury, especially from what we call connective tissue issues. So like, most runners’ muscles adapt pretty quickly.

But your connective tissues like ligaments and tendons take much longer to get strong. That’s why you see most running related injuries are ligament and tendon injuries, not necessarily muscle injuries. So, building strong muscles will also improve and strengthen those connective tissues and prevent running related injuries. So if you want to run injury free, one of the biggest things you can do, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get stronger.

Also, when you get stronger, your endurance improves. So your ability to run longer distances before fatigue sets in is vastly improved when you’re stronger. So you can become a long distance running machine. But you need, you know, good strong working muscles in order to do that. Also, you get faster, carrying around a little more muscle means that you are stronger and your power to weight ratio improves the stance substantially.

So you get a little bit leaner, you lose some of that fat weight, you gain some muscle weight, and now your power to weight ratio has gone up, and you’re more powerful and lighter, and you’re able to run faster at higher intensities for longer distances, right. So as far as improving your running performance, getting strong is one of the best things you can do for yourself, you’ll get faster, your endurance improves, you get lighter, your power to weight ratio goes up, all those things are amazing.

And then lastly, when you lift weights regularly and you get stronger, you will live longer. Evidence continues to point to the benefits of strength training. And a new meta analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has concluded that people who do strength training regularly are less likely to die prematurely than those who don’t, even when they don’t do any aerobic workouts. So they’ve kind of factored that even if you don’t do any aerobic activity whatsoever, strength training will lead to a longer life.

And of course, doing some aerobic activity, improving your cardiovascular system, helps you to live longer as well. So you want to live longer: strength training. Okay. And so there’s all these amazing benefits to weightlifting for runners, right?

So here’s what I hope for you. I hope that your biggest takeaway from this episode right now is that you have to get into some sort of regular strength training routine, like you just have to get stronger. This is what I want you to take away from this, it doesn’t matter what your goals are, it doesn’t matter, you know, where you fall on the line of whether or not you should be lifting heavy weights or not.

I think the most important thing is that you are doing some sort of regular strength training, it has to be part of your weekly workout plan. Doesn’t matter what you’re training for. Make time for it. It’s that important, okay? Okay, so what happens when you lift weights, so let’s get into kind of the, what’s happening in your body when you lift weights, okay.

So before we talk about how heavy you should lift or how light you should lift, I want to explain what happens when you lift weights like, or at least what you’re trying to make happen in your body, okay? So your muscles will grow as a response to stress. So, you stress out a muscle or a group of muscles, essentially, you overload them. And then because of that overloading, they have an adaptive response.

So they grow more muscle fibers are produced those muscle fibers band together, they get stronger, the muscle grows a little bit and, and they grow. So you have this adaptive response. This is called the overload principle. Overload a muscle and in response, it gets stronger. Do this over and over again and you get bigger, stronger muscles, right? But in order to overload the muscle, you need enough resistance.

So resistance can come in many forms. Resistance could be your own bodyweight: hold a plank for a minute or two. See how long you can hold a plank just with your own bodyweight, or do push ups. Do some pull ups, these are all bodyweight exercises that are pretty hard, you know, you’ll find yourself getting pretty fatigued pretty quickly. With some of these bodyweight exercises, right.

Then we have free weights, we’ve got dumbbells and kettlebells, and barbells. And all kinds of machines at the gym, they’re designed to work certain muscle groups. And then we have resistance bands, things you can attach to a door or two, or you don’t even have to attach to anything, you can just pull on them, step on it, lift it up and create the resistance. That way, you can even use logs or rocks or heavy books or milk jugs filled with sand, it doesn’t really matter, you can literally use just about anything to create resistance, right?

The important thing is that you have to have enough resistance in order to over load the muscle if you want it to have that adaptive response, if you want it to get stronger. So the way you overload the muscle, as you get to muscle failure, you have to get to muscle failure in order to create that adaptive response.

So you can get to failure a couple of different ways you can overload that muscle in a few different ways. But you’ll you know that you’re there, when you can no longer lift that weight, like you cannot do another rep with good form, like you just your form breaks down, you start cheating, so to speak, you know. So for example, you can get to overload by lifting a one pound weight lifted like 100 times I promise you, you know, at some point, you’re going to probably get to overload with 100 with a one pound weight if you if you lift it 100 times or you can lift a 100 pound weight once or whatever amount of weight you can lift one time that will get you to that failure place, right?

So then we say like, okay, which is better? Should you lift 100 times should you do 100 reps? Or should you do one rep, like, what’s the right number? Like should you be lifting heavy? Should you be lifting super light? So, let’s look at what each of these kinds of looks like. Kind of looks like here.

The first one let’s talk about light weights; light weights, lots of reps. So, think about what it looks like and feels like to do a lot of reps with very light weights. So, lots of group workout classes are based on this approach, right? Everybody grabs some light little dumbbells and you’re lifting them and you’re like, you know, doing a ton of reps. And at the end of the workout, you’re like, oh, that was fun, you know, and you’re tired and you know, you’re probably, you know, pretty sweaty and things like that.

So you’re doing a ton of reps, you’re using very light weights. But what is this? This is mostly a cardio workout, right? Here, you’re really working out the cardiovascular system, you’re adding a little bit of resistance. But really, you know, it’s a cardio workout, right? And there’s nothing wrong with this, right? But as a runner who does pretty much nothing but cardio everyday when you go out and run, do you really need to be doing another cardio workout? Do you need to be lifting super lightweight a million times and making it some new some other cardio type workout? I don’t believe so.

I don’t believe you want to be doing that. You don’t need to do a bunch more cardio. Remember that you’re already engaged in a catabolic activity. And you need to be doing something to offset that. So more cardio is not going to be the answer. Even though you might be using some weights, it’s probably not enough resistance to make a difference and offset the amount of catabolic activity you’re doing from already. Right.

So the other thing to think about is you’re probably never going to see someone in a workout class like that get to muscle failure, you’re just never going to see somebody get to failure. So that’s, that’s a sign that that’s probably not the most ideal approach. Okay? So if you’re doing some kind of workout and you’re lifting, let’s say 10 pounds for the duration of the workout, and you really never get to failure, there’s no overload happening. There’s no adaptive response happening.

You’re not growing muscle fibers. You’re not getting stronger. What’s the point of all that? Yeah, it’s a good cardio workout. But you don’t probably need to be doing more cardio, okay. It’s good to improve your cardiovascular system, right? It’s good to do that, right, but that should not be your goal from weightlifting. Your goal with weightlifting should be to overload your muscles so you get stronger period.

Okay, so let’s look at now the other side of this, which is lifting heavy weights, right? And you’re probably thinking, I’ve kind of figured out, Patrick, this is probably your preferred approach. And yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I’m going to explain why. So when you lift heavy weights, you will absolutely get to muscle failure. So I want to make this very clear: to failure doesn’t mean it’s hard. Failure isn’t like, oh, man, this is really hard. I can’t believe I, I’m doing these reps, oh, gosh, this is really hard. This must be failure. No failure means you cannot do another rep with proper form. Failure means you’re trying with all your might as hard as you can to lift that weight, and you just cannot move it any longer. It should hurt. It should look ugly, feels terrible. And it’s pretty amazing, all at the same time. Okay.

So failure means you cannot move the weight. Again, you cannot finish that rep. That’s what failure is not oh, it’s hard. It’s like you cannot do it. Okay. And then heavy, lifting a heavy weight heavy is relative for you. It’s just, it’s heavy for you. It’s how strong you are, it’s relative to how strong you are. Heavy means that you can only do around six to twelve eps before you hit failure. Six to twelve reps is a good amount of reps to fatigue the muscle enough to stress the muscle enough to produce that adaptive effect.

You don’t have to aim for a one rep max like bodybuilders do and power lifters do. Although I do like doing this sometimes just to see how strong I’m getting. I’ll do a one rep max on bench press. And what have I been doing like bench press and deadlift? I’d stopped kind of doing the squat one rep max because my knees are a little bit jacked up right now. But I want to get back to that as well. And I’m seeing some progression happening.

So I can see that I’m getting stronger with the one rep but you don’t have to just do a one rep max. That’s not what we’re getting into here. Six to twelve reps is where you want to be. So aim for six to twelve and do a full body workout. And you only need to be doing this twice a week, you don’t have to become a gym rat, you don’t have to spend two to three hours every day in the gym.

And I have this very specific strength program that I teach my runners, my clients, and it’s a full body workout, it’s twice a week should only take you about 20 minutes each time. And it’s enough, it’s plenty. Like it doesn’t have to be super time consuming, okay. But the important thing you have to understand here is that you really want to get to muscle failure. And in my opinion, it’s just much more efficient and better for you to get to failure with fewer reps. So aim for that six to twelve rep range, lift heavy weights, there’s you don’t have to worry about getting too big.

This is one of the biggest fears around lifting heavy weights that I hear from runners is that and you’ll hear people say this all the time. I don’t want to get all big and jacked and like I don’t want to be carrying around tons of extra muscle weight. You know, I don’t want to look like one of these big bodybuilders. Listen, remember I said running is catabolic. Lifting heavy weights is a great way to offset this.

In fact, it is very, very hard to look like a bodybuilder it takes years of very hard work to look like a bodybuilder they lift five, six days a week, they’re in the gym for hours, they eat a ton of extra food, you know and they really limit the amount of cardio that they do in order to gain all these muscles and stuff. Okay, so please do not worry about getting too big. Do not worry about gaining too much muscle or looking like a bodybuilder, it is extremely hard to gain that much muscle.

We want to offset the amount of running that we’re doing with some good strength training, we want to build some muscle we want to get stronger. So lift heavy weights, aim for that six to twelve rep max, get to failure with each exercise. If you really want the best bang for your buck, from resistance training, lift heavy weights, save the cardio workout for all the running that you’re doing.

If you want to become a stronger, faster, more powerful runner, if you want to burn more fat, lose more weight. And if you’re interested in living longer, lift heavy weights. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

158. Building Your Aerobic Engine

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I get a lot of questions about how to improve running performance and one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer or faster you have to improve your …

Continue Reading about 158. Building Your Aerobic Engine →

Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, sports nutritionist, Master life coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to Episode 158, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, building your aerobic engine. So I get a lot of questions from people in general and clients about how to improve running performance.

And one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer, or run faster, you have to improve your aerobic fitness. So building and maintaining a solid aerobic base should be the goal of every runner, regardless of your running experience. But many runners skip this step, because they just want to get to the faster running the higher intensity running.

So in this episode, I’m going to explain how building your aerobic engine is essential to helping you improve both your running speed and your endurance. And Happy New Year everyone. This is the first episode of 2023. And is this going to be a new year and a new you or a new year and the same old, same old you?

So I want you to think about this, where do you want to be this time next year? When you look back? Over 2023? What do you want to have accomplished? Where do you want to be with your health and your fitness? Do you want to make this year the year that you finally lose the weight and learn how to keep it off for good?

So I really want you to think about this, what do you really want for yourself this year, because here’s the truth. Whatever you want for yourself, it’s available to you, it’s achievable for you. So let’s get you there together. When you sign up for coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability you need to achieve everything that you want for yourself in 2023.

So let’s make this year 2023 your best year yet, to learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application. You and I will get on a call, we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is, boom, we’ll get you started. And we’ll start making this the best year yet for you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.

Okay, so lots of people who are new to running, especially the newer runners, want to kind of skip the part where they have to focus on building their aerobic base, or what I like to call the aerobic engine. And this is a good time of the year to be talking about this, because I think a lot of us are just about to start marathon training, or maybe half marathon training, a lot of spring races happen in the United States.

And so the beginning of January is when a lot of training begins. The problem is that most runners don’t do a really good job of building their aerobic engine properly. At the beginning of a training cycle, lots of runners, even very experienced runners who are maybe following some sort of training plan.

So they may have some sort of marathon training plan that they’re doing. They just begin by, you know, doing all their miles at a kind of medium hard intensity, and they end up kind of maybe getting burned out or getting injured. A lot of overuse injuries happen, especially with new runners, but even with experienced runners.

And a lot of these overuse injuries happen kind of at the first half of the training cycle, which leads me to believe that when we start our marathon training or start our half marathon training program, you need to be you need to have developed a good solid aerobic base, you need a good solid base on which you can build, right?

So you want to start with a good base, start with a good aerobic engine, and then you can get faster and build your intensity levels on top of that. So what does it mean when I’m talking about your aerobic engine? So really what I’m talking about here, as I’m talking about increasing the efficiency of your cardiovascular system, right?

The cardiovascular system is the different functions of your body that can combine to enable you to run for longer distances, right? Your cardiovascular system is, you know, your heart, your blood, carrying oxygen to working muscles and organs to every working part of your body. So it’s mostly, you know, how, how efficient is your heart? How much blood can your heart pump out at a time, like how much blood volume can you pump out?

Because the more blood volume in your heart can pump out, the more oxygen you will be delivering to working muscles, the better you are at delivering oxygen rich blood to working muscles, especially those muscles used for running, that easier running becomes. So we want to improve this system. And it’s something that you can absolutely improve.

Now, if you’re a new runner, and you’re just starting out, and you get out there, and maybe you’re training for your first 5k, and you get out there and to run a mile is takes everything you’ve got and you feel completely winded at the end of that mile, that is fine, that is normal. If you’re just getting started with this, then that is something where if you continue running, and you continue doing the right kind of running, you will find that running a mile becomes very easy.

And then running two and three miles becomes a no big deal. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, I’m just gonna go ahead and, and run a half marathon or trust our training for a marathon, right? But don’t get ahead of yourself. Work your way up to that slowly. And I’m going to be talking about that in a minute here.

So really, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about your aerobic engine, is your cardiovascular system, you know, your body’s ability to deliver oxygen rich blood to all the working muscles and organs and all the functions in your body that help you to improve your running efficiency and your running performance.

Okay, so why do we want to build an aerobic engine? Like why is it important to build this? Well, you know, you just can’t expect to go out there and run a fast half marathon or a fast marathon. Without doing the work to build your cardiovascular system, you can’t improve your running performance, if you don’t start with a good base, right?

So you need to first build a solid aerobic base, then you can work on getting faster, and increasing the intensity of your running over those longer distances. But I want to make sure this is very clear, do not skip this step, do not skip the part where you build that aerobic base. And something that is actually kind of counterintuitive. But I’ll explain why this works in just a minute here, you will actually get faster, just by improving your aerobic engine.

So by doing more slow, easy running and improving your cardiovascular system, you will become more efficient at running and you can actually run faster at the same intensity levels. This is one of the huge benefits of building a strong aerobic base is that you can improve your running efficiency, you can improve your running speed.

In fact, there are many benefits to improving your aerobic engine here. So when your cardiovascular system gets more efficient, when you improve your aerobic fitness, running becomes easier. This is like one of the number one reasons why we want to do this, it just gets easier, right? You can run longer distances and you can run faster at the same perceived effort level.

So let’s say you go out there and you run out a perceived effort level of a three or a four and you’re like this feels great, it feels pretty easy for me. And you might notice your pace is a 10 minute pace. For example, over time, if you build your cardiovascular system the right way, if you build your aerobic engine properly, over time, you can run at that same three four effort level.

Oh, this feels pretty easy. But now your pace is a 9:30 or a 9:00 minute pace because you’ve improved how your body is fueling itself and how your body is using oxygen and and how much blood volume you’re pumping out there. Okay, so you actually get faster at the same effort level, which is amazing.

Another reason why we want to improve our cardiovascular system, or our aerobic engine is that it actually increases the number of mitochondria in your body. So this is the powerhouse of your cells. And you can actually increase the size and strength of your mitochondria as well. So this right here is going to give you an edge and this is one of the reasons why you run easier and you can run faster at the same effort level.

You also get denser capillaries and you can deliver more oxygenated blood with more capillaries working in your bloodstream. So your working muscles will actually get more oxygen, which makes running easier. Another kind of benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to build mental toughness. So as you improve your cardiovascular system, you start to feel more confident. So you can go out there and run three miles and it feels tough.

But as you, you know, increase your running volume as you increase your distance as you increase your aerobic capacity and your aerobic performance, then running becomes easier and becomes more confident you can run 8, 10, 12 miles and and feel like well, yeah, I can do this. And it makes you more mentally tough because it pushes you, enables you to push yourself a little bit harder, enables you to shoot for higher and higher goals. And next thing you know you’re running a half marathon or you’re running a marathon, you’re starting to train for an ultra marathon.

Another benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to improve muscular strength, you know, you’re delivering more oxygen to muscles, you’re able to run longer, you build more muscular strength, you improve your running economy, you improve your running efficiency, you become more energy efficient, you know, you’re using the same kind of you have the same inputs, but your output is much more efficient. And then you get faster, you know, you’ll be able to perform better at races.

So all these reasons are why we work hard to improve our aerobic engine, okay. So do not skip this, we absolutely want to make sure that before you begin your training, or the first phases of your training for any kind of endurance events should be to really build a strong aerobic base. Now some people like to do this in the offseason, they like to spend, you know, four to six weeks building that aerobic engine, even up to 12 weeks, you know, really building a strong aerobic engine before they get into their training cycle.

But you can absolutely do this at the beginning of a half or full marathon training cycle. So how do we do this? How do you start building your aerobic engine? What are the keys to improving your aerobic fitness and improving your cardiovascular efficiency?

So the first tip I’m going to give you here to improve your aerobic engine would be to increase your running volume. Right? The simple fact of running more will help you to increase your aerobic capacity, increase your running efficiency, just running more and increasing your volume helps to improve your running form and helps to increase your cardiovascular system.

You build stronger muscles. Running becomes easier, just by running more. But the caveat with this is you don’t do too much too soon. This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes that new runners make is increasing their volume too much too soon. So the standard sort of rule of thumb has always been to increase by no more than around 10% a week in your weekly volume.

So that means if you’re starting out and you’re running about 10 miles a week, you know, for the first few weeks, I would only increase that by like a mile each week. So maybe week one you’re at 10 miles and then you build up to 11, 12, 13. Maybe you can jump up to 14.5 or 15, 16, 18, 20. But you don’t really want to increase volume too quickly.

So people get excited when they start running and they’re like oh running is amazing. I feel so great doing this and your muscles might be ready to take on the miles but your connective tissues, your tendons and ligaments are not quite ready for that yet. And a lot of the running injuries that people experience are tendinitis issues or strained, you know ligaments or tendons. They tend to be more connective tissue issues than they do with muscular issues.

It’s pretty rare to strain the muscle from running in the beginning especially. It’s more common to have these connective tissue issues so definitely be careful and don’t do too. Too much too soon try to keep it around that 10% increase in weekly volume, then, you know, if you’re a more experienced runner, you can increase that from 10 to maybe 15 or 20% per week. The idea is that you have to do what feels right for you. And don’t overdo it. That is the key here. Less is more in this case, right. So just slowly build your volume, but definitely increasing your volume is going to be one of the best ways to improve your aerobic engine.

Another way of doing this is to run slower. So when I talk about running slower, there’s different ways we can look at this. So running slower means you’re running in, maybe you’re running in a zone one or two. From a heart rate standpoint, maybe you’re someone who likes to just use RPE, rate of perceived exertion, the scale of 1 to 10. And you might like to stay in the one to four range.

That would be nice, easy running, maybe you’d like to just run at a conversational pace, you’d like to just, you know, go by if you can carry on a conversation or not. The idea here is that you need to slow down, and you need to do a lot of running slower. When you do a lot of running slower, you increase your distance, but if you keep the intensity levels very low, you are at lower risk of injury. And you put less stress on your systems, you put less stress on your bones and muscles and those connective tissues like I talked about.

So slow running is one of the best ways to build your aerobic engine, it’s one of the most effective ways to build your aerobic engine, you’re not going to be able to get more aerobically fit by just cranking out every workout, you can’t go out there and do every workout hard or medium hard, you know that you have to spend a lot of time running easy and rolling slow.

So something I noticed here, so I took about three months off of running. And since August, so August, September, October, getting into November, I’ve been running very consistently since the middle of November in my room or maybe like Thanksgiving, let’s just say. And I’m noticing that I’m paying very close attention to my effort level and my heart rate.

And I’m noticing that I’m staying very consistent from an energy standpoint, very easy running most of my runs, I would say 90% of my runs right now or at a very easy conversational pace, probably that one to two zones, and the heart rate zones, and maybe three to four on the RPE scale, or two to four somewhere in there and that our RPE scale.

But one thing that’s interesting here is I noticed that my effort level is staying the same, my heart rate is staying the same, but my pace is increasing. So I’m getting faster, at the same effort level. So this is a sign that I’m building a strong aerobic engine. And this is what I want for you too. You should notice that over time, doing a lot of running 90% 80% of your runs at this slower pace, just slowing things down, will help you to increase your aerobic engine and help you to get faster.

So now as I get to the place where I’m you know, going to get into marathon training here, and I’m training for an ultra marathon event here in May, I will continue doing a lot of this slow, easy running and see my pace continually increase, you know, to a certain degree here, okay? The other way that you can really increase your aerobic engine is by running faster.

And I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive here. But doing higher intensity, like short, higher intensity workouts is another amazing way of building that aerobic engine, right? So why these work is that these workouts put a very high amount of stress on the cardiovascular system, very high amount of stress for very short intervals. This elicits an adaptive response where your system improves.

Think about it, like you know building muscle, like if you lift heavy weights, and you do you know six to eight reps of a very heavy weight. And you get to the point where you just cannot lift one more rep of that weight.

And then you stop and so that’s a short interval but very intense. Your muscle is going to have been put under a high amount of stress for a very short amount of time. That muscle is going to have an adaptive response. It’s going to get stronger. It’s going to grow. You’re gonna see some growth rather than that muscle, and the next time, you’ll be able to lift a heavier weight.

The exact same response happens in our cardiovascular system. So we put high stress for a very short amount of time on that cardiovascular system that improves, this isn’t there’s an adaptive response, your body’s like, hey, we need to, you know, change the way we’re doing things here, we need to increase the amount of blood we’re pumping out per heartbeat. So increase our blood volume, you know, we need to deliver more oxygen working muscles.

And this is another very effective way of improving that aerobic engine. And especially when you combine it with your longer slower runs, right, your very easy lower stress run. So very low stress, long runs, and then very high stress, short runs. So running fast and hard for short intervals, like this could be like, one to three minutes, a very hard running 4-10 minutes of moderate intensity running maybe 12-30 minutes.

For tempo type workouts, these are just examples of different intensity levels that you can add in there. But you know, anything short is one to 30 minutes, maybe. And it just kind of depends on the event that you’re training for. But high stress for short intervals, and low stress for the long runs equals a badass aerobic engine, right there. Okay?

So those two combined are a really, really good way of improving your cardiovascular fitness. So the slower runs focus on 80-90% of your runs at that slow pace, and then higher intensity, shorter workouts, you know, 10-20%, depending on where you are in your training cycle, when we’re talking about building your aerobic base here, I would I would focus on more of a 90/10 breakdown there, okay.

And then probably the most common method people think of when they want to improve their aerobic fitness would be the long run, like improve the length of your long run. And when I say long run, it depends on what you’re training for, again, so this could be 30 minutes, if you’re training for your first 5k, that could be a long run for you, or six hours, if you’re trading for for a 50 miler, you know, so, long run is very subjective. So it just kind of depends on what you’re training for.

Most of us, if we’re training for a marathon, let’s say, most people are going to be doing a long run anywhere from an hour to three and a half hours, something like that, okay. So when we’re talking about in increasing the distance of your long run, the effort level has to be low. So we’re talking about, you know, heart rate zones wanting to wonder for on the RPE scale, this is a conversational pace, this is a easy, I could run all day at this pace.

Okay, this is gonna be one of the most powerful ways of improving your cardiovascular system. So we’re, we’re not just doing one of these things. By the way, we’re not just picking one of these things and saying, like, Oh, I’m just going to improve my long run, I’m just gonna increase the distance on my lawn, or I’m just going to do some HIIT workouts or I’m just going to run slower.

No, you got to do a mile, you got to increase your running volume, you got to run slower, you got to run faster for shorter distances, and you got to increase the distance of that long run, you got to do all these things. But when you do and you combine them all, you’re going to find that your aerobic engine is pretty badass. Okay.

And then the last thing I’ll add to this list is really just getting better at burning fat. You need fuel for running. And when you’re especially running slower and running at these lower intensities, the preferred source of fuel your body’s going to want to use as fat, the better you can get at burning fat, the easier running is going to feel for you.

Listen, we as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burning machines, we’ve just gotten very far away from that state. You know, we’ve been eating a diet that forces us to use glucose as our main fuel source. And granted, it is a very easily available and very quick burning source of fuel especially for running but you run out of that fast and your body isn’t using a whole lot of glucose. When you’re running at these lower intensities fat is going to be the main fuel source, so you got to get good at burning fat.

I suggest you get fat adapted stop using sugar and carbs as fuel. stop relying on glucose as a fuel source. Start training your body to tap into your own stored body fat as a source of fuel for running run in the fasted state. That means you don’t need to fuel up before you run. Maybe for a long long run or a high intensity run, yes. But for the most part, you know, you don’t really need to feel up before the runs, train your body to get good at burning fat.

And this isn’t about like zero carbs or anything like that, this is just about using the right kinds of carbs and using carbs properly. Keeping the carbs pretty low, though, okay, so get better at burning fat. Listen, we’re great at storing fat, right? We’re really good at storing fat, we’re just not good at tapping into our own body fat for fuel. And if you’re somebody who has, you know, 10-20 pounds to lose, you’ve got way more than enough body fat to get you out there and run for many, many, many miles for days, days.

I’m pretty low in the body fat percentage, and I’ve got hundreds of 1000s of calories of body fat on my body right now that I could use, I could literally run for, you know, weeks at a time or something like that. So get better at burning that fat. And you’ll find that your aerobic capacity, it gets better too. And just running just becomes so much easier. Okay.

So remember, we want to build our aerobic engine, we want to, you know, we only want to be delivering more oxygen to working muscles. The way we do this, as we increase our running volume, we run more just more often, we want to run slower, keep it in those zones wanting to keep it in the fat burning zone, right? You know, RPE should be, you know, one to four, run faster, do some HIIT workouts, do some high intensity, but short workouts run longer, like increase the distance of your long run, and then get better at burning fat.

And when you do these things, and you combine all these things, you’re going to be well on your way to being a fit faster, more efficient runner, running is going to become easier for you, you’re going to be able to get faster, and your spring marathon or spring race, whatever it is that you’re training for, will be a huge success for you. Cool. Awesome. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

149. Keto vs. Fat-Adapted – Which is Better?

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There seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the endurance world when it comes to the terms “keto” and “fat-adapted.” Keto gets a bad rap because people tout it as being an all-fat diet - all …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 149 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today keto versus fat adapted, which is better? So there seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the endurance world when it comes to the terms keto and fat adapted.

Keto kind of gets a bad rap because people tout keto as being the all fat diet, right? Like you’re just eating sticks of butter wrapped with bacon, but this is definitely not the case at all. And then being fat adapted on the other hand, it causes confusion because there’s the word fat in there. And so people are running in the other direction because they’re afraid of fat. We’ve become kind of a fat phobic nation here. All right.

So any kind of dietary intervention that allows you to consume higher amounts of fat seems counterintuitive and scary and all that. So today on the podcast, I’m going to clear up all this confusion and help answer the question: keto versus fat adapted, which is better?

And whether you want to lose weight, run longer, or just become that healthiest version of yourself, burning fat is how you get there, and figuring out how to best get your body into fat burning mode; this is what I do every single day as the weight loss coach for runners.

So working together, you and I will put together a plan to get your body burning fat effectively. The way it’s supposed to. This is not some weird fat diet. This is like getting your body back to its natural state of being a fat burning machine.

We humans are excellent fat burners, we’ve just gotten away from that with the crappy diet most people eat. Okay, so if you’re ready to get back to being a fat burning machine, apply for coaching with me and we’ll get you there to learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you.

Okay, the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because there seems to be this confusion over the terms there’s confusion about what it means to be keto. There’s words like the ketogenic diet, and being in ketosis and ketones and ketone bodies and all these different words around keto, and people don’t fully understand what it means.

They also hear people talk about keto is just being like this diet, we’re eating nothing but fat. And fat adapted, you know, people are confused about what does that mean? What does it mean, fat adapted? And do you have to eat high amounts of fat in that diet, too? Is it all just about eating a bunch of fat?

So I want to break this all down for you today, I want to like kind of help you to understand the difference between the two. There’s some similarities to keto and fat adapted, they share many similarities, right? I’m gonna go over what those similarities are, how there’s some overlap between the two. And then what the differences are between the two. And I’m hoping that by the end of this episode, you can make that determination for yourself, which is better for you as a person.

Okay, I’m gonna just gonna say from the outset, that they’re both very beneficial states to be in being fat adapted and being keto, they’re both really healthy for you and they have lots of positive health benefits, okay. And I want you to understand how this relates to you as a runner as well. Okay, so I want you to understand the difference between keto and fat adapted, I want you to understand the implications that it will have for you as a runner.

I want you to understand the health benefits of both of these things and then hopefully, dispel some of these myths and misconceptions about keto and fat adapted and, and really just help you to make an informed decision about your own health and fitness journey. Okay, and what you want for yourself, so be thinking about that.

What is it that you want for yourself? What are the goals that you have for yourself, and then as I’m talking through this stuff today, think oh, that might be a way that can help me get there or maybe that’s not for me. Either way, it’s fine. There’s no right or wrong answer here. Okay. So first, let’s get into this.

Let’s talk about keto. What doees keto mean? Okay. So when we talk about keto, a lot of times we’re talking about the ketogenic Diet a ketogenic diet is a diet that is low in carbohydrates. It’s higher in fat, you know, when you drop the carbohydrate ratio, you’re going to increase your fat content as well. Okay? But it does not mean we’re eating sticks of butter wrapped with bacon all day long. That’s not what we do.

It’s basically keeping your carbohydrate levels pretty low so that you can lower your blood sugar, lower your insulin levels and shift your body’s metabolism away from burning carbs towards burning fat. And ketones are using mostly fat and ketones for energy.

Okay, so the ketogenic diet offers many health benefits right? Many studies have shown that this type of diet can help you to lose weight and improve your health and a bunch of different ways. The ketogenic diet has proven benefits that help reverse diabetes that help prevent cancers, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease.

But really the main focus here in the way that I want to talk about this today is on fat metabolism, your body’s ability to burn fat for fuel, okay, so you lower your carbohydrate intake, blood sugar, lowers insulin levels, lowers and now your body can access your stored body fat for fuel, okay? So the ketogenic diet is a diet that is low carbohydrate and higher in fat, yes, but it helps your body to start burning fat really effectively and producing ketones and and this state of producing a certain amount of ketones is called ketosis. Okay?

Ketosis is a metabolic state where your body is using fat and ketones for fuel instead of sugar and carbs and glucose, okay? It’s called dietary ketosis because in this state, your body is producing a certain amount of ketones. There are three main ketones that get produced: beta hydroxy butyrate, acetylacetate, and then acetone. The first two beta hydroxy butyrate, or BHB, and acetylacetate seemed, are the the main ketone bodies that get produced, okay, acetone is actually a byproduct of acetoacetate.

And in order to know whether or not you’re in this state of ketosis, you have to test your blood, your urine, your breath for the presence of one or more of those ketone bodies, okay? So being in ketosis means that you are producing between point five and three millimoles of ketones per liter of blood. So for me, when I have like, tried to get into ketosis in the past, I never really produced these numbers, I might get between like point five and one.

So I might be where they consider trace amounts of ketones, I might produce small amounts of ketones, but I never got into this place where I was burning, you know, two, three millimoles of ketones, right? Or producing those kinds of numbers. And to be honest with you, I never worried about it. I felt great when I when I do more of a Keto type of diet, when I keep my carbs super low.

And for me, it’s not about the number on some test device. It’s about how I feel and how my workouts are. And if I’m maintaining weight, if I’m losing weight, if my cognitive function is high, all those things are important to me, not a number of ketones. It’s produced on a certain test meter or something like that.

I’ve done the urine tests, I’ve done the blood tests, haven’t done the breath test, but there’s different ways of testing ketones. So if you follow a strict ketogenic diet, meaning you’re keeping your carbs very low, and you shoot for probably between 20 to 50 grams of carbs total per day.

So this is a dramatic lowering of your carbohydrate intake, especially if you’re used to eating like a standard kind of American type of diet with very, very high in carbs. If you follow this very strict ketogenic type of diet, you will most likely get into that state of ketosis, okay, which is great. Your blood sugar’s level out, insulin levels out, your body starts being able to use the stored body fat for fuel.

Ketones get produced as a byproduct of this fat burning, and you’re in ketosis, okay. And there’s a lot of great benefits to be in this state of ketosis. Okay. So some of the benefits of being in in ketosis and in doing the following a strict ketogenic diet, fat burning is put into high gear you are burning fat really effectively, you’re no longer burning glucose for energy because you’re not giving your body glucose for energy, you’re not really eating much in the way of sugar or carbohydrates at all.

So the only fuel your body has now is your own stored body fat and some of the fat that you’re consuming that you’re eating, okay? So fat burning is put into high gear, weight loss will absolutely begin to happen for you. If you want to lose weight, you got to burn fat, this is a great way to get fat burning going.

Okay, lots and lots of studies have shown the effectiveness of a ketogenic diet for weight loss, right? This is very well known. It’s the you know, they’ve proven like they’ve compared it to the low fat diet or low calorie diets, and they get better results. So you lose weight without counting calories without tracking your food, and with less hunger and deprivation because you’re eating a higher fat, higher protein type of diet.

And what’s interesting is they did a study, one particular study I’ll mention here was in the journal, Nutrition and Metabolism found that people who followed a ketogenic diet for eight weeks lost nearly five times as much body fat as those who followed a low fat diet, okay, so a low fat diet is not as effective at losing weight, like you can burn much more fat and get your body into this natural state of fat burning by just lowering your carbohydrate intake getting into ketosis, and boom, you’re gonna start to feel great, you’re gonna start losing weight, some other other health benefits of being in ketosis, your endurance improves.

So runners who follow a pretty strict ketogenic diet will most likely also experience an improvement in their running endurance, because you’re burning fat really effectively here, this is the key thing we have to understand here. You’re burning fat really effectively, even at higher running intensity. So people think that oh, you know, keto is great. You know, you really can’t, like run fast when you’re doing this when you’re doing the super low carb, you know, ketogenic approach, which is not really true.

They’ve done some studies, they’ve shown that typical carb adapted athletes, you know, they can hit, they can burn their burning fat up to about 65%, or their VO2 max, right. But the keto adapted athletes, somebody who’s doing more of a strict ketogenic type of diet can burn fat, you know, 70, 80 up to 90 or more percent of their VO2 max.

So as the intensity increases, as a keto adapted athlete, you can increase your fat burning as well. So just keep that in mind that athletic performance does not have to suffer because your carbohydrate intake goes down because you’re doing kind of a Keto type of diet, okay? Also, sleep is improved.

Studies have shown that ketogenic diet promotes adenosine activity in the body. So adenosine promotes the sleep drive. So it is a chemical that helps you sleep more effectively, right. And so they’ve shown that adenosine gets produced. It helps to relax the nervous system, it helps to reduce pain and inflammation, all of which help you improve sleep.

Your focus and concentration improve on the ketogenic diet. So your brain loves fat and ketones as a fuel source. And most people when they switched from, you know, a regular high sugar diet, high carb diet to a low carb ketogenic type of diet, they experienced the lifting of the brain fog that happens when they make this switch.

And most people don’t even know they’re in a brain fog until they start experiencing this. And they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how much more clearly I could think and concentrate. People experience more sustained energy throughout the day. So blood sugar and insulin levels are normalized. So you no longer have these spikes and crashes and energy levels throughout the day.

You don’t have to get an afternoon coffee just to get you through the last part of the day. Food cravings subside greatly. So when you switch to a lower carb diet and a strict ketogenic type of diet, you no longer have your hunger signals being jacked up by all the carbs and insulin. And so your food cravings go way down. You’re not as hungry during the day, this is a really good place to be by the way. If you’re feeling hungry all the time, there’s something wrong with your diet right there. There’s some dysfunction happening there.

Also, people experience less bloating and inflammation. Keto is a non inflammatory diet, you’re removing the inflammatory carbohydrates from your diet. So inflammation and bloating become a thing of the past which helps you to recover faster from the harder workouts as well. So you have this lack of inflammation And this is gonna play a role in helping you to recover faster especially from the longer harder workouts. Okay?

So these are all benefits of the ketogenic diet. These are all benefits of fat burning, when you really kick your fat burning into high gear. These are all the amazing things that can happen. Studies have actually shown that this kind of a diet, the ketogenic diet can have other benefits for a variety of different health conditions like heart disease.

They’ve shown that the ketogenic diet can help improve risk factors like body fat HDL, which is the good cholesterol blood pressure, normalized blood sugars normalized, and this can have a positive effect on your risk of heart disease. Cancer, they’ve shown that the diet has been explored as an additional treatment for cancer because it helps to slow tumor growth, which is really interesting. The keto diet may help reduce symptoms of Alzheimer’s and actually help to slow its progress. Research has shown that the ketogenic diet can cause significant reductions in seizures for children that have epilepsy.

They’ve shown that this diet can help improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The ketogenic diet also helps to reduce insulin levels, which plays a key role in PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome. And then the last thing that I thought was pretty interesting was that some research has shown that this diet, the ketogenic diet improves the outcomes of traumatic brain injuries as well.

Okay, so lots and lots of benefits of getting off the carbs and switching to a very low carb ketogenic type of diet. Okay, so that’s keto. That’s what it means to be in ketosis. You know, we’re keeping our ketone bodies up into that point five to three millimoles per liter of blood. We’re producing ketones, we have all these positive health benefits that begin to happen.

Now, let’s talk about the difference between keto and being fat adapted, okay. So first and foremost, understand this: being fat adapted shares a lot of the same benefits. In fact, all of the same benefits as keto they both mean that you are burning fat for fuel, you are training your body to become really effective at burning fat, right? They’re both great as weight loss interventions.

They’re both great at helping to improve cognitive function, sleep endurance, energy levels, blood sugar and insulin levels, faster recovery, everything else I mentioned above. So being fat adapted and being in the state of ketosis or following a ketogenic diet, share all of those same benefits. Okay. So in one aspect, they are virtually the same thing you would think right?

Being fat adapted means you’re burning mostly fat for energy, you’re producing ketones as well. Probably not as many though, and this is where there’s some overlap between the two. And this is where the differences start to happen. Okay. The biggest difference between being fat adapted and being keto is that when you’re fat adapted, you increase your ability to switch between burning fat and burning carbs for fuel.

So someone doing strict keto, you know, keeping the carbs super low, producing that point five to three millimoles of ketones is mainly using fat for fuel and ketones. But they will not be as metabolically flexible, meaning that you can’t switch between burning fat and carbs as easily. Okay, so eating a bunch of carbs may not shut down fat burning totally, but it will definitely kick you out of ketosis.

Okay, so as soon as you start increasing your carbs, you’re going to be kicking yourself out of that ketogenic state out of ketosis, okay. The fat adapted athlete can handle a carb load. So let’s say you eat a couple of sweet potatoes that night before a long run. In the short term, you’re going to be kicked out of ketosis, right? But it’s not a problem. Because as soon as your blood sugar and your insulin levels normalize, you’re going to be back to burning fat really effectively.

So you’ll quickly go from burning sugar burning carbs to burning fat, and you can kind of switch between the two. So, the key differentiator here is that the fat adapted athlete has the ability to use both fat and carbs as fuel. Metabolic Flexibility is the key here and this is a really good place to be. So you can switch between being keto and being fat adapted and one of the processes that I work through with all my clients.

First of all, we want to get their bodies used to burning fat, we got to get really good at burning fat. And this is the state we are naturally in as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burners. And we’ve gotten away from this state because we’re just eating tons of sugar, tons of grains, tons of processed foods, and we’re just burning all that for fuel.

So you’re constantly have to keep, you know, putting this big, fast burning fuel on the fire, it’s like putting paper on a fire and you just got it, you’re you keep burning through that paper really quickly, what we want to do is we want to be putting logs on that fire that burned really slowly.

And for long periods of time, that’s fat, okay, the paper is sugar, right? So we want to get our body back into the natural state of burning fat really effectively. And this is where keto is a great tool to us for a period of time, okay, so you can, you can go really strict ketogenic diet, you can keep your carbs super low at the beginning.

And you really don’t even need to test for ketones just keep your carbs super low, and you’re gonna start burning fat, right, and this may take some time, it may take two to four weeks, it may take longer, everybody’s a little bit different here. Okay. But then we can start incorporating more carbs back in the diet. And what we do is we time the carbs around key workouts.

So we want to get your body used to burning fat and used to burning carbs as fuel during certain times when your body demands more fuel from your body. So this is being fat adapted, right? But it’s not like a free for all with the carbs and sugar. This is not an excuse to binge out on ice cream and candy and stuff like that.

We’re still eating real food, nutrient dense sources of naturally occurring carbohydrates, for example, root vegetables or fruit, right? And then we time these around your workouts, you earn your carbs, and then you burn your carbs. Okay, and if you do this properly, you should still be experiencing all the benefits of keto.

So weight loss, improved endurance, improved cognitive function all day energy, etc, etc, etc. all the benefits I mentioned above, and also being able to use carbohydrates strategically around workouts as fuel to give you that extra gear, okay. So you can be fat adapted and not be in ketosis, you can be fat adapted, and not have to follow a strict ketogenic diet, fat adapted and keto are using the same pathways for energy.

So they’re both utilizing fat and ketones for fuel. But being fat adapted will allow you to also use carbohydrates for fuel, which is especially ideal for the endurance athlete. So I hope this clears up the confusion about keto and fat adapted, they’re similar. They’re similar states to be in their long, they’re like different sides of the same spectrum of fat burning, right, and they’re both great.

They’re both great places to be right, tons of health benefits for both and you get to decide what works best for you. Some people love being in ketosis all the time, they feel great, their workouts are great. They don’t need the extra push, they don’t need the carbs, and it can help them to lose weight or maintain their weight pretty effortlessly.

So keto is a great option for a lot of people. Other people prefer the option to use carbs for workouts. And being fat adapted gives them all the benefits of keto without having to be quite as strict right. So they also get the added benefit of having that extra gear for the higher intensity workouts and adding in some carbs, is how you do that. And that will definitely give you that edge. Okay.

And as always, if you want help with any of this, I’m totally here for you. We’ll figure out what works best for you. We’ll put together a plan for you and I’ll help you stay on track with that plan. Cool. All right. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.

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