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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

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41. Live Vibrantly

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If you ask most people how they feel about their life, they’ll probably tell you their life is pretty dull, pretty ordinary, maybe even dreary. Today, I'm here to tell you that this is NOT how you …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there and welcome to episode 41 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. If you ask most people how they feel about their life, they’ll probably tell you that their life is pretty dull, pretty ordinary, maybe even a little boring or dreary. Today, I’m here to tell you that this is not how you are supposed to live your life.

We have one very short life here on this planet. Do you really want to settle for a life that can only be described as dull and ordinary and dreary? Because here’s the thing, you get to choose. You can choose to live a dull and dreary life. Or you can choose to live a big, bold, beautiful, vibrant life. In this episode, I’m talking about choosing to live vibrantly, and why it’s such a powerful principle to live by.

But first, if you like this podcast, please come and check us out on Facebook. The Running Lean community is a positive, energetic and fun group of like minded runners. And it kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. I do weekly live coaching in that group on a whole bunch of different topics, you know, focus around the same kinds of things we talk about here on the podcast, but it’s a chance for you to ask questions and get support of a very large, thriving growing group of runners just like you.

So just head over to Facebook, search for Running Lean community and join us over there. And then listen becoming a fat-adapted runner, breaking old habits, creating new ones, developing the mindset to make all of this stuff permanent in your life can be challenging to do on your own. That’s why I offer one-on-one coaching.

I’ll help you figure out the right nutrition plan that will get you to your goals because everybody’s different. You’ll have me holding you accountable and keeping you on track and always moving in the direction of your goals will help you to do things that you don’t want to do so that you can be the person that you ultimately want to be most importantly you’ll develop the mindset that you need to make these changes for life.

Here’s a comment from one of my coaching clients Hannah and she says, “I did another virtual half marathon today fasted again. My co-runners are really surprised that I don’t need any gel or goo and I am fine. I see no difference in my pace and energy. In fact, I had two strong finishes recently. I didn’t feel like I was tired or exhausted. Patrick, I’m still carrying lessons that I learned from you. Really gives me this jumpstart I needed to change my eating habits. My weight has been stable for six plus weeks. So glad I found this page and eventually you.”

Yes Hannah, changing your eating habits will definitely give you more energy and stronger finishes. If you’re ready to stop screwing around with your weight if you’re ready to change your eating habits if you’re ready to start living vibrantly, then apply for a one-on-one coaching with me just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word. Do it now, I promise you it will change your life.

Okay, so several months ago, I sat down and wrote out the Running Lean Manifesto. This is just a list of the things that I wanted to live my life by a set of principles, the things that I stood for the things that are important to me. And now I’m sharing this with you guys because I think this is a great framework for living an amazing life healthy in mind and body.

And I’m calling this the Running Lean Manifesto. What is the manifesto? Well, it’s just a set of guiding principles or values and it’s like your North Star, something that you can always do that is always keeping you on track.

Why do we need a manifesto? Well a manifesto provides a blueprint to live by. Okay, it helps us to stay on track and always moving towards our goals. It’s easy to see where we are so you can say, “Am I living up to these principles yes or no?” Following these principles helps to give our lives purpose. And I believe we should all have some sort of manifesto to live by.

So here’s what the Running Lean manifesto is. Number one, eat real food. Number two, live vibrantly. Number three, thrive in your body. Number four, embrace discomfort. Number five, run because you love it. Number six, love yourself unconditionally. Number seven, think, feel and act with purpose. And then number eight, be an example of what’s possible.

So over the next several podcast episodes, I’m going to be talking about each one of these separately. And remember, these are the guiding principles for what I do. And they are the guiding principles of the Running Lean community. So these can be your guiding principles too, it’s totally fine. They are our guiding principles. Okay, so these are the principles that drive us forward together.

It’s the blueprint we can all use to become the best version of ourselves. Okay, so today I’m talking about the second principle, which is to live vibrantly. And what does that mean? And what kind of an impact can living vibrantly have on your life?

Well, first, let’s look at the definition of vibrant, what does that mean? Vibrant or living vibrantly means the word vibrant means full of energy and enthusiasm. Pulsating with life. Vivid, bright, striking, strong. That all sounds pretty amazing, right? The opposite of vibrant is spiritless, listless, dull.

So when I talk about living vibrantly, it means living a vivid life full of energy and enthusiasm. Not a dull, spiritless, listless life. Okay. We all squared away with that part? So are you doing it? You say, yes, I want to live a vibrant life. But are you actually doing it?

On the surface, you’d probably agree that you don’t want a dull spiritless life. But how are you living your life? Really ask yourself that question. Go inside, what’s the answer? I think way too often, we stay stuck in our own little cocoon, our little safe, comfort zone, safe from all the scary, hard things that are out there in the world.

For example, when I started coaching entrepreneurs, so I started my coaching career as a life and success coach for entrepreneurs. And that work was fine. It was safe. But I was feeling like it was kind of dull and listless. You know, looking back on it, like it wasn’t really challenging me.

And I wasn’t really passionate about this work that I was doing. You know, I was an entrepreneur and I had some success as an entrepreneur. I was helping some people but it was like, it’s okay.

At some point, though, I decided I want to work with people I connect to at a deep level. I want to work with people who are passionate about running the way that I’m passionate about running. The kind of weirdos you know, that are like, yeah, and you know, you know who you are, the ones that are like, want to go run 20 miles on a Saturday morning.

I want to connect with those people. Because I get that, I get that mindset. I wanted to work with runners on helping them to develop that mindset, and then their nutrition and help them solve the weight problem. And this felt really scary to me. I had to put myself out there.

This topic of like helping runners lose weight, especially when I talk about hey, you know, let’s get off the carbs. And there’s another way of doing this. It’s kind of controversial, right? Not everyone agrees with me. And that’s okay. I don’t need everybody to agree with me. It’s okay that you’re wrong about me.

But here’s the thing, I could stay safe and work with my little entrepreneurs over here and make some good money and have a nice little biz. Or I could go and do something that I was really passionate about, but I was like going into uncharted 10 Atari it was. It was scary though, there were a lot of unknowns. And it felt bigger than me. But that’s what I wanted. I wanted something that was bigger than me.

I love, love, love this quote from John Shedd. And if you’re if you’ve ever been to Chicago, you know, there’s the Shedd Aquarium up in Chicago. And so he had this quote, he said, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships were built for.”

Oh my gosh, that’s so good. A ship and harbor is safe, but that is not what ships were built for. So for me, I was not built to stay small and safe, and sit here on this shore. Doing my little entrepreneur thing over here, I was built for something bigger, something that lights me up, I was built for life so big and bright and vivid, that I blow my own mind every day.

Because the alternative to that is a comfortable life, but a very small life. It’s not what I wanted for myself. I’m not going to dull and dampen my experiences just for the sake of comfort and safety. I had to make that decision. I did that. For most of my life. I stayed small, you know, I stayed comfortable for a lot of my life.

And it got me sick and fat. I had diseases, I was you know, very unhealthy in a lot of ways. And my life was very, very small. When I gave up drinking, my life became bigger. When I gave up, you know, eating junk food. My life became bigger. My life is so big now, because I choose to live vibrantly every day.

Now, this does not mean that every day is always rainbows, rainbows and unicorn farts, okay, because it is not. Stuff gets hard sometimes. So how do you live a vibrant life, when everything is like crashing down all around you? And I get that sentiment I really do. It can feel like your life is falling apart sometimes.

But honestly, that’s just a thought in your head. That’s a thought that you are choosing to think my life is falling apart. It’s just a thought you’re choosing to think here’s the thing. Life is not supposed to be great all the time. We’re not supposed to be happy all the time. We’re just not.

If you expect yourself to be happy all the time. Or if your goal is to try to be happy all of the time, you will be gravely disappointed about half the time. Life is 50/50. 50% of the time it’s pretty good, 50% of the time, it’s not. And it’s okay. The goal is not to be happy all the time.

The goal is to have this life that’s 50/50 and be okay with all of it. You know, at the beginning of this year, I was going through a divorce, I was living alone. I had started two jobs and then lost them due to the pandemic I was delivering for Uber Eats just so I could pay my rent and make ends meet.

And I could have decided at that point that life was unfair. Everything’s crashing down around me. I’m just going into survival mode here. Go back to the shore. Stay safe. Have this safe, comfortable, dull, listless life. Or I could choose to live vibrantly. I wanted more.

I wanted to create a life so big and bold and beautiful and vibrant, that I would wake up every day and I would blow my own mind. So I worked on my business during the day, I recorded podcasts, and I was coaching people. And then at night, I was out delivering food.

You know, this was really hard for a while. It felt like I was starting over. You know, like I was in my early 20s you know, just starting out on my own again. It was really a very, it was a hard time for me. I kind of felt like a loser at times.

But I had to decide that I wanted something more. I had to decide that I wanted a life that was big and bold and vibrant. And how am I going to create that for myself? How can I live that way? Despite the fact that things around me do not seem awesome?

And the answer is, life is 50/50, we have to experience all of it. And we just have to accept all of it. And that’s the key right there is that you have to be willing to experience the good and the bad. You have to be willing to experience all the good stuff that comes your way. And all the challenging stuff that comes your way. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything.

You know, it doesn’t mean you have to like suffer. But you do have to learn how to experience the whole breadth of experiences and emotions that we all feel as humans, it’s all part of the human experience.

So I wasn’t trying to dull my experiences, I was willing to experience everything that life had to offer all the good, the bad, the terrible, the discomfort; the not knowing if any of this stuff was going to work. And I faced it all head on. I took on all those things with courage and determination as best I could.

I was determined to create a life that was pulsating with energy. That whole 50/50 thing life is, you know, half good half not so good. You have to accept this as truth. You have to, you have to accept everything. You can’t reject the bad stuff. You can’t reject the hard stuff. You can’t resist the uncomfortable stuff. Because that’s when you have that small, safe, dull life.

So be willing to feel that, be willing to experience the entire range of human emotions. You know, without sadness, we wouldn’t know what it feels like to be happy. Without anger and frustration, we wouldn’t know what peace feels like. Without hurt, we wouldn’t know relief. Without chaos, we wouldn’t experience calm.

If running a marathon was easy and pain free, do you think it would feel the same crossing that finish line? Do you think it would feel as amazing to cross that finish line if running a marathon was easy? No. It’s because of the struggle. It’s because of the fear and the pain and the suffering through the training that when you cross that finish line, it feels overwhelmingly joyful.

If you’ve ever run a marathon, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Or maybe it’s a 10k or a 5k or whatever that is for you. This is one of the reasons I love running so much. It’s not because it’s easy. It’s because it is hard. Because I’m willing to go out there and challenge myself and push myself and experience all of it. I’m willing to leave that safe harbor, so I can create a life that is buzzing with energy and enthusiasm.

This is what it means to live vibrantly. What would it look like for you to live vibrantly? Be honest with yourself. Are you living vibrantly right now? Or are you playing it safe? Do you have big goals and dreams for yourself? If yes, are you moving toward them? Are you taking action every day? Do you have a plan?

You know, one of the most powerful things about coaching is that working with me we create a plan for your big goals and your dreams. And then we work the plan. We take action and we move toward them every day. The power of coaching is having someone there to guide you, to hold you accountable to keep you focused to keep you on track to keep you motivated.

Now if you don’t have big goals and dreams, why the heck don’t you? Why wouldn’t you want a big, beautiful, bold, vibrant life for yourself? Seriously, ask yourself why you don’t want that. What kind of life do you want for yourself? The kind of life where you push yourself out of your comfort zone? Do more, be more, become the most amazing version of yourself yet? Or do you want the kind of life where you stay at home and stay safe and sit on the couch and binge watch Netflix all day? Because you get to decide.

Do you want the kind of life where you’re still carrying around that extra 40 pounds from now until the day you die? Do you want to constantly be struggling with your weight and your self image? Do you want to keep hating how your clothes fit or hating how you look in the mirror, or hating how you feel about yourself, or do you want something else?

Do you want something bigger? Do you want something more vibrant? Because it’s just a choice. And when you make that decision, like when you really decide when you go all in on living vibrantly, there is nothing that will stop you from getting there.

So my call to action for you is to make a decision to choose to live vibrantly, starting right now, what can you do right now, that would light you up. Now it doesn’t have to be like, oh, go jump out of an airplane or climb a mountain or, you know, this is not what I’m talking about.

You know, for me, it’s doing this right here. It’s recording this podcast. It’s teaching these principles to you. It’s encouraging you to live an amazing life. It’s motivating you to get out there and do something bigger than what you have now become more than who you are right now.

Doing this lights me up about what I do. And here’s a little secret for you guys. This is not easy. It’s still not easy for me to come on here and talk about these things. It’s uncomfortable. But I make the decision to show up every day with courage and determination. And because of that my life is pretty amazing. It’s pretty vibrant. Because I choose it.

I choose to live vibrantly every single day. I want my life to be pulsating with energy and enthusiasm. That just sounds so good to me. I want my life to be vivid, bright and meaningful. So what does it look like for you to live vibrantly? Maybe you have a big dream to get incredibly healthy, get back to your natural weight.

Maybe you want to run a 10k or a half marathon or a full marathon or maybe an ultra marathon. Maybe you want to run 10 miles a day for 100 straight days, like Andy in the Facebook group. This guy is a beast. He’s running 10 miles a day for 100 straight days. What if you just wanted to walk for 30 minutes a day for 100 days?

Maybe you want to start a business or get a new job or find your soulmate. Or maybe you want to quit eating sugar or maybe you need to cut back on your drinking. Doesn’t matter what it is, it matters that you choose to begin that you choose to live vibrantly.

Decide that you are not a ship that was built for safe harbors, and go out there and face the unknown. Face those turbulent waters with courage and determination and see what amazing, vibrant life you can create for yourself. All right, I’ll be diving into the other principles that I mentioned at the beginning from the Running Lean manifesto in upcoming episodes.

I’m so excited to be sharing this stuff with you guys. It’s super fun. And we continue this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So just come by and check us out. Challenge yourself to live vibrantly, to get healthier, to lose weight, to become a better runner, to become the best damn version of yourself yet. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

38. Stop Arguing for Your Limitations

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There are basically two ways to approach any challenge. One way is to focus on all the reasons why you can’t do it. The other way is to focus on all the reasons why you can. I find it …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 38 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about why we need to stop arguing for our limitations. There are basically two ways to approach any challenge. One way that some people do it is to focus on all the reasons why you can’t do it. The other way is to focus on all the reasons why you can.

And I find it interesting that so many people choose option one, when they’re facing something challenging in their life. They spend a lot of time and a lot of energy focusing on all the reasons why they can’t do it. So today, I want to talk about why we do this, why we argue for our limitations, and how this kind of thinking is just keeping us stuck. And I do offer some suggestions on what we can do instead.

But first, if you like this podcast, please come check us out on Facebook, though – Running Lean community on Facebook, you can just search for those words, and you’ll find us. This is a positive, energetic, informative, fun group of like-minded runners just like you that share common goals like losing weight, living a vibrant life, becoming super healthy, running, making running easier.

I host a weekly live trainings in there on things like intermittent fasting, which we’re focusing on this month. Running, nutrition, weight loss, exercise, physiology, all kinds of stuff. Here’s a recent comment from one of our community members, Amy.

Amy says, “I ran a virtual 10k this morning, although it was hot and steamy, I felt great. I didn’t have to eat anything before the run, or even feel like I needed anything to fuel with but water. Thank you, Patrick and the rest of the group for the motivation and helping me change my mindset and my body these last eight weeks.”

That is awesome. Thank you, Amy. Amy’s a great example of the kind of positive, motivated people we have over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. And this month, we’ve got this intermittent fasting challenge going on right now. Intermittent Fasting is just practicing some periods of the day where you just don’t eat anything.

You can call it time restricted eating or meal spacing. But basically, you know, we talk about how to do it safely, how to incorporate this into your running, why we would want to incorporate this into our running. There’s a lot of amazing health benefits, by the way. So just check us out, come and see what it’s all about the Running Lean community on Facebook, and figuring out all this stuff.

How do we do time restricted eating? How do I lose weight and continue running? How do I make running stronger? How do I become a fat adapted runner? All these things take some time to figure out. They take awareness, they take knowledge and they take some support, so that you can create this kind of lasting change in your life.

Listen, this is not about a diet, diets are temporary, right? What I help people do, through my coaching practice, is help people create new habits. And it takes about 90 days to create a new habit. So most of the coaching I do with people is a three month or 90 Day Program. And what you get with that is the knowledge, awareness and support that you need.

So that you can accomplish those goals so that you can create the habits that you need to change your lifestyle to change your relationship with the we’re all different. We all have different dietary needs, what works for one person may not work for somebody else. You know, if one thing worked for everybody, I could just create a PDF and give it to all you guys and be like here just do this, but it doesn’t work that way you need to figure out what works for you.

So together you and I will figure out exactly what will work for you. It takes a little bit of trial and error, but eventually we get it right. I want you to make big changes in your life. I want you to get off of the carbohydrate addiction, I want you to reap all the amazing benefits of becoming a fat adapted runner.

If you’re interested in this, cool, check it out, just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, that’s one word, and apply for coaching with me, we’ll get on the phone, we’ll have a little conversation, we’ll get on a Zoom call. And we’ll have a quick little conversation and see if this is a good fit for both of us. Cool.

Alright, let’s get into this topic today. So the topic today is, I titled this stop arguing for your limitations. And I have to tell you a little warning before we get started here that I’m doling out a little tough love today. I think this is an important message for all of us to hear. And listen, I need to hear this too. I’m not exempt from this message either.

So part of me talking about this is to remind myself that I need to stop arguing for my limitations too, because I do it sometimes, too. But I’m hoping this message resonates with you. I wrote a short post about this earlier in the week, and shared it on social media, and I think it touched a nerve for a few people.

And so I thought you know, I think I need to do a little deeper dive into this. Because a few people said, you know, oh, that was tough to hear, but I needed to hear it. So I’m hoping this resonates with you guys. So here’s what I’m seeing, I hear you guys tell me things like I want to do something big. I want I want to accomplish this big goal, I have this, this big dream or goal, you know, I want to lose 50 pounds, I’ve struggled for so long with this weight, I really want to lose this weight, or I want to run a full marathon, I really want to do that.

And so, you know, you say you’re all in, you want this with every bit of your soul, you’re like, I’m so focused on this goal, I’m gonna do it. You might have a plan, you start working the plan. But then you know, stuff starts to happen. Maybe you wake up in the morning, and then the weather’s not awesome, it’s raining outside, and you’re just like, I don’t really don’t feel like running today.

Or maybe you just get tired or maybe stuff like your job is stressing you out. You know, your kids are driving you crazy. Or the one that I love, you know, well COVID hit and so you know what that means as if like it was some hurricane that you know, knocked your house down or something.

But here’s what’s happening, we have all these external things that happen in our life. You know, we get an extra workload at work, you know, our boss is demanding more of us or, you know, the kids are being, they’re doing school from home, they’re doing like remote schooling, or the husband doesn’t help as much as he should be, according to you.

And you have all these external things happening. And instead of just forging on, you use these external things, as an excuse to give up to quit, you use these excuses to give up on these big goals and dreams that you said you are all in on. You wanted more than anything else. And you just use his excuse to quit.

You know, you say, I can’t focus on my health because you know, my kids are our home and they’re doing school from home now. So there’s no longer I can’t focus on my health anymore. What, really? Or I was doing fine, not eating sugar and carbs. But then I had this really stressful day at work. And, you know, my boss gave me a bunch of extra work. So I needed to eat a whole pizza and a half gallon of ice cream at one sitting.

If you’ve done that before, it’s fine. You’re normal. I’ve done that before. Or you’re just like, you know, this is just hard. It’s really hard. Training for a marathon is hard. Or losing weight is hard. So I just, that’s why I can’t do it. By the way, all this stuff I’m talking about here, this stuff is just life.

Stuff happens all the time. Life’s not supposed to be some carefree, happy existence. You know, flowers, daisies, unicorns, rainbows, it’s not like that. It’s more like 50/50 – half the time you feel pretty good. Half the time you feel not so good. That’s okay. You can either just accept this fact, or you can just fight against it with everything you’ve got.

And when you accept it, when you accept that you won’t feel happy all the time. Honestly, there’s a lot of freedom in that. What happens is we get ourselves into trouble when we have this belief. And we hold on to this belief very tightly that we have to feel happy all the time.

And I got news for you, that’s just never going to happen. This is you fighting against reality. And I see it all the time. I see it every single day. Well, I just want to feel better. Guess what, you’re not always going to feel good. And that’s okay. The inner turmoil that you feel is mostly caused by resisting these negative emotions, quote, unquote, negative emotions, unwanted emotions, like stress, like anger, like fear, like sadness.

All these emotions, we feel are just part of the human experience. We’re humans, we get to feel all kinds of amazing emotions, some of them are pretty amazing. Some of them feel so good. And some of them not so much. But to be human means we feel all these emotions. And we have to accept this fact, we will feel some positive and some negative emotion, some wanted emotions and some unwanted emotions, and it’s all good.

Life is 50/50 – be willing to accept all of it. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to accept it and say, well, that’s just the way it is. I can’t do anything about it. No. It’s like I tell my weight loss clients all the time, I’m like, you have to love yourself exactly as you are right now. Look in the mirror and love yourself exactly as you are every bit of your body.

You can’t hate yourself and expect to lose weight, I always say can’t hate yourself thin, you got to love yourself exactly as you are. And you can work to change that. But you have to accept what is. It’s when we resist what is when we resist and reject that half of our existence that we quote unquote, don’t like or, you know, don’t think is normal.

That’s what causes us the internal pain and the agony, we resist and reject any kind of unwanted emotion. Okay, that was a little a little tangent, I went off on there. But I just need you to understand that there are external circumstances that are going to happen in our lives. And those things are neither good nor bad, really, I’ll talk about that more in just a second.

But understand that you may feel some stress, you may feel some anger, you may feel some fear. And it’s okay. Don’t push it away. Don’t push it away, just accept it all. I love this quote from Henry Ford. He said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” This is perfect for what I’m talking about here today.

So like I said, at the beginning, there are basically two ways we can approach a challenge. So we have something challenging in our life, we want to lose a bunch of weight, we want to run a marathon, we can focus on why we can’t do it. Or we can focus on why we can do it. Let’s talk about these.

When you focus on why you can’t do something, here’s what happens. You find all sorts of excuses, all sorts of reasons you have stories you want to tell me about why this isn’t going to work for you want to lose weight, but stuff happened at work, you know, my husband doesn’t help as much as he should. The kids are screaming in the background.

And in your mind, these are all valid excuses. They are valid reasons why you can’t do this thing. Why you can’t stay on your protocol, why you can’t train for your marathon. But let’s look at this. Let’s look at how this works. Because here’s the thing, these are all just stories that you’re telling yourself. These are all just stories, you’re believing you’re choosing them, and you’re choosing to believe them.

So let’s look at how this works. You got stuff happening at work, the husband’s not helping the kids are demanding stuff from you. These are what we call circumstances. Circumstances in our lives are always neutral. The circumstances in our lives are facts. They don’t hold any meaning on their own. They only mean something after we have a thought about the circumstances. Okay.

Neutral circumstances are true for everyone. They’re just facts, facts that can be upheld in a court of law, let’s say. So, the kids have to attend school from home, that is a fact. My workload has increased at work, tat is a fact. These are just facts. Everyone would say, yeah, that is true.

None of this means anything, until you have thought about it, until you choose a meaning that you want to assign to this particular circumstance. You with me so far? Circumstances, always neutral. If it’s something happening outside of our thoughts, feelings and actions, it is neutral, we have no control over it.

So the kids have to attend school from home is a circumstance, millions of parents are dealing with this right now. Right? This is just a neutral fact. Kids have to attend school from home, it does not mean you can’t, you can no longer focus on your health. It doesn’t mean you can’t train for a marathon.

Those millions of parents that are dealing with this right now, you know, half of them are probably out there, focusing on their health right now. They’re probably training for their first marathon right now. They’re figuring it out. Kids doing school from home does not mean you can’t run. If that were true, it would be true for everyone. But it’s not.

You’re choosing not to focus on your health, you’re choosing not to run. And what you’re doing is you’re using your kids having to do school from home, you’re using that as an excuse. Because what you’re trying to do is hard. And you don’t want to do it. Because it’s hard, because it’s uncomfortable. Because it’s gonna take a while.

By the way, nobody said this stuff was going to be easy. It’s why it’s a challenge. But you want that thing. You want it with all of your being. But instead, you’re choosing to focus on all these reasons, you’re choosing to believe, you’re choosing these reasons. This amazing story that you’re creating in your mind about why this won’t work for you.

And then I come in as your coach and I say, listen, here’s what your mind is doing, your brain is just making up these stories about why you can’t do this. This is a choice you’re making. These are just neutral circumstances, you can figure this out, let’s figure it out together. And then that’s when I get the pushback.

I get people digging in and fighting like hell, for all the reasons why they can’t do it. Why, you know, it’s different for them. They have all these stories, all these excuses, all these reasons. They defend these things, to their dying breath. They are fighting tooth and nail for these beliefs that they have about why they can’t do it. Why? It’s too hard for them and they argue with me.

No, it’s just the way it is Patrick, there’s nothing I can do about it. But you know what, there is something you can do about it. These are just beliefs that they are choosing. They’re arguing for their limitations. They’re basically saying like, look, I have these limitations. I can’t do it. Here’s all the reasons why. And then they list them all out.

And I hear stories and stories and stories. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re basically saying I want this goal. I want this thing that I’ve wanted for so long, but I know it’s a challenge, but it’s it’s too hard. And here’s all the reasons why I can’t do it.

They’re like focusing on the reasons why they can’t, creating all the reasons, all the excuses in their mind. And choosing to believe them. That’s the scary part right there. You’re choosing to believe these reasons. You’ve got to stop doing this. Just stop it right now.

Stop arguing for your limitations. Because the more you focus on why you can’t do it, the more reasons you’ll find, the more excuses you’ll find. You look for reasons why you’re failing and you will see these reasons everywhere. When you start looking for all the excuses, you will find them everywhere.

My friend Samantha says it this way. She says, “When you argue for your limitations, they’re yours to keep.” Powerful. So there’s another approach. This is the one that I would suggest you take on. It’s up to you though.

Let’s go back to those neutral circumstances. Okay, so my boss is asking a lot of me at work right now. It’s really stressing me out. So you can choose to believe that this workload is stressing you out, you can choose to believe that this means you can’t focus on your running anymore. You can’t focus on your health, and you have to like quit running.

You can choose to believe that this extra workload means you can just sit around and watch Netflix eating a whole pizza and half gallons of ice cream. And that’s just the way it is. As if you know, it’s all happening to you. What results do you think you’re gonna get from that? From taking those actions?

I can pretty much guarantee you’re not going to be running a marathon anytime soon, I can pretty much guarantee your health will definitely not be improving anytime soon. All right, my boss is asking me to do more work right now is a neutral circumstance. So what if you thought, you know, my boss was asking more of me. And I’m up to the challenge.

Hey, I’m really good at what I do. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve done way harder things in my life. This is no big deal. You know, I might need to adjust my training plan a little bit. But hey, I got this. Wow, that’s a little more powerful, isn’t it? or what have you tried on a thought like, nothing is more important to me than my health.

And running a marathon has been a dream of mine for way too long. Now, I’m not letting a little extra workload stop me from reaching this goal. You know, what if instead of looking for all your limitations, because when you look for them, you will find them? I promise you? What if you looked for all of the possibilities? Focus on why you can’t and you’ll find reasons why everywhere.

Also focus on why you can and you’ll find reasons why everywhere. If you get to choose what you want to believe about your circumstances, because they are neutral, why would you ever choose to believe that you can’t do it? Why would you choose to believe that this stuff means you can’t reach your goal?

Why would you ever choose failure? Because that’s what you’re doing. By the way, I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as failure. You either keep going until you succeed, or you quit. These are two choices that you get to make. And they have nothing to do with anything outside of you know, kids screaming, no workload can change that. These are choices you’re making. You either keep going until you succeed, or you quit. For me, quitting is just not an option.

These are choices you get to make based on your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. It has nothing to do with COVID. Okay. Lots of people are training for a marathon. Lots of people are building a business during this global pandemic. Lots of people are improving their health. I see it every single day. Lots of people are getting amazing coaching and changing their lives for the better. Stop using it as an excuse.

Sorry, this is where the old Tough Love is coming in. I do love you guys. I hope you know that. Everything I’m saying I’m saying with kindness and love. I’m smiling. But listen, where are you in your life with this right now? Like where are you arguing for your limitations? Think about this.

Like, let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds? It’s pretty common for a lot of people I’ve talked to. Why do you think you can’t do it? Think about that. Why do you think you can’t do it? Why? Why isn’t this going to work for you? Ask yourself that question. See what your brain comes up with for an answer.

So maybe you came up with answers like well, I’ve tried everything, nothing’s ever worked before or you know understand I’ve time to figure all this out right now I don’t even know where to begin. These are just reasons you came up with, they’re just thoughts in your head. They’re not the they’re not the truth unless you choose to believe them.

Take a look at the circumstances in your life right now. Ask yourself this question: What am I choosing to believe about this particular situation, whatever it is? You know maybe it’s the kids being home. A lot of people are talking to me about their kids being home and doing school from home and it’s posing some challenges, some unique challenges for people.

What are you choosing to believe about that situation? Are you holding on to a story or a belief about it? That means you can’t do this. You can’t succeed at your health goals or your weight loss goals or your running goals. If that’s you, like, maybe think about that, and what do you want to believe instead? You get to choose what to believe.

By the way, this is a very important question to ask your brain, what thought can I choose to believe? What thought can I choose to believe that will motivate me, that will fill me with courage and passion and excitement about this big goal? It’s so important to me. Maybe something like you know what, I’m going to lose 50 pounds, no matter how long it takes.

I’ve tried a bunch of other stuff. It didn’t work. That’s all behind me now. Now. Now is the time I’m going to figure this out. I will not stop until I figure it out. I will not quit until I succeed. This is way too important to me. I don’t want to ever feel sick and tired again.

I don’t know, I don’t really know where to begin with all this stuff. But I’m going to start today. And maybe I’ll ask for help. I’m going to seek out a coach, I’m going to get guidance, I’m going to get direction, I am going to make this work. Damn, that is a much more powerful way to approach something, right?

What if you took all that fight, all that energy that you’re putting into arguing for your limitations, and instead, put all that fight and all that energy into searching out like the possibilities and all the reasons why you’re going to succeed? I wonder what kind of results you’d get if you did that.

Remember, whether you think you can or you think you can’t. You’re right. Okay, I hope you don’t mind. This little bit of tough love for me today. So here’s what’s coming up in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Remember, I talked about doing the September intermittent fasting challenge.

We’re talking about time restricted eating, meal spacing, that kind of stuff. This week, we’re going to be talking about training in a fasted state running on empty. Why do we do this? It sounds crazy. I know. But why is this good for us? And why would we want to do this? Why would we choose to train without calories and without fuel?

So I’ll talk about that this week. So join us in the Facebook group, just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. That’s all I got for you today. Lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

35. Embracing The Suck

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If you have big goals and dreams for yourself, if you’re the kind of person who wants more out of life, then achieving those big goals and dreams will require you to do hard things. To get there …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 35 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we’re talking about embracing the suck. I’m gonna say the word suck a lot today, just so you know, little forewarning.

But listen, if you have big goals and dreams for yourself, if you’re the kind of person who wants more out of life, than achieving those big goals and dreams will require you to do hard things. And to get there means there will definitely be a period of time when things were going to get hard things are eventually going to suck.

So today I’m talking about embracing the suck. Most people want to do the opposite, they want to avoid the suck. But here’s the thing, the suck is going to happen, whether you like it or not. So it’s better that you learn how to embrace it, rather than always trying to resist it. So that is coming up.

If you like this podcast, you have to come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a positive, informative, highly energized group of like minded runners and it kind of goes hand in hand with the podcast. I do weekly live trainings in there on a bunch of different topics.

We talk about nutrition, weight loss, some science stuff, some mindset stuff, and we got a big challenge coming up. This is my first time talking about this, we are doing a challenge for the month of September. So beginning September 1, it is intermittent fasting month in the Running Lean community. And no, it does not mean that we will not be eating anything for the entire month of September. Okay.

I will explain exactly what intermittent fasting is and what it isn’t. We’ll talk about how you can do intermittent fasting safely. And you’re kind of already doing it already right now, whether you like whether you know it or not, I’ll be busting all the myths about intermittent fasting like it will kill you. That’s a myth, it won’t kill you.

We’ll talk about how you can incorporate intermittent fasting into your training, all the amazing health benefits of intermittent fasting especially for running and weight loss. When you combine a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, along with intermittent fasting, this is like rocket fuel for your health and for your fitness and for your weight loss.

And we’ll talk about what all that means and how to do it. So just go over to Facebook, search for Running Lean the Running Lean community and join us for our September intermittent fasting challenge. It’s going to be cool. Also losing weight, becoming fat-adapted, learning how to do all these things like intermittent fasting. It’s hard to do on your own, I get it.

That’s why I’m here. I want to help you. And I do offer one-on-one coaching because we’re all different. We all have different goals, different needs, different lifestyles. Working with me, you’ll learn exactly how to do all this stuff in a way that works for you as an individual. In fact, here’s one of my very favorite clients Deborah had to say recently, she wrote this comment, so sweet.

She wrote, “I’m on day 14 of coaching with Patrick. I’ve seen many nutritionists and dietitians in my life, and also work with a dedicated running coach. Patrick is by far the most legit health coach I’ve had the pleasure of working with. He takes the whole body and the whole mind approach and helps you to battle through the tough stuff, cutting out sugar and carbs, and helps you to identify the reasons that are far bigger than calories or pounds. So you can stay with it. I was dying for a piece of supermarket birthday cake yesterday. And just knowing that Patrick is in my corner to make a smarter decision helped me to get through that craving.”

Thank you so much for those kind words. Deborah, you are so sweet and you are an awesome client. Also, that craving for that supermarket birthday cake is very, very specific. We need to talk about that. But it’s funny. That’s what sugar does to us. It has a powerful hold on as it causes all kinds of very specific cravings apparently.

But if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life if you’re ready to ditch the sugar and the carbs In the addiction to sugar and carbs and those crazy, specific cravings, if you’re ready to embrace the suck, at least temporarily, then you have to go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word, and apply for one on one coaching with me do it now I promise you, you will not regret it.

Alright, embracing the suck, embrace the suck is a fun phrase that is very popular in endurance sports, it means that it means this, it means things are gonna get hard. At some point during this event during this race, whatever it is you’re doing, things are going to suck, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to accept it, embrace it, and keep going.

And I first started hearing about this a lot when I was training for Ironman. There’s a great deal of suck during that race, there’s a great deal of suck in the training for that event too, just so you know, it’s a lifetime of suck when you’re into Ironman Triathlon, as a lifestyle.

But anyway, so during that event, there’s a lot of suck, that’s going to happen, right. And I knew that at some point, during that day, I was going to have to face the suck, okay. And I didn’t really know when that was going to happen or whatever, until the day of the race.

So the day of the race, you know, do this swim, two and a half, 2.4 mile swim, get out of the water and, you know, cycling for 112 miles. And then I laced up my running shoes and started to run while this was Louisville, Kentucky, August 95 degrees and humid.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, arguably. And this is when I was heading out to start to run my marathon after the 2.4 mile swim and cycling 112 miles of rolling hills. So I had been out exerting myself since 7am. And this was now three o’clock in the afternoon. So this is like eight straight hours of continuous physical exertion. And I started running and my legs just would not move. I felt horrible. It sucked big time. And it’s in that very moment right there. I was like, oh, yeah, this is what they’re talking about. Embrace the suck. This is the sucky part.

And I knew what it meant intellectually, like, I knew like, oh, yeah, this is gonna happen at some point. But until you experience it in the moment, it is just a concept. It’s just a theory. But when it hits you hard like that, and I will tell you, it hit me hard, it was very, very difficult, I would start running for maybe 10 seconds, and I just had to start walking and try to start running again for maybe 15 seconds. And I just couldn’t do it, I had to walk.

And it took a while for me to get a little momentum going where I could actually run for any extended period of time. I mean, there were people, you know, at the beginning of the marathon that were just like, sitting on the ground, just like on the curb, like laying down, you know, just already they were just done.

And it kind of freaks you out a little bit because you’re like, oh my god, you know, what have I got myself into here? But as you know, I kept moving. And when I was fueling and hydrating and things like that I was able to get up a little running, but I just let it be sucky. And I just kept moving forward. That little mantra was in my mind, embrace the suck, just know it’s gonna suck. And keep moving.

Another crystal clear moment of embracing the suck for me, was during the Hallucination 100. So this was the 100 mile trail race that I did up in Hell, Michigan, which is an aptly named play by the way. And the trail is 16, roughly 16 miles, a little over 16 miles. And so you got to do the loop six times to get to 100 miles.

So I finished my fifth loop. And so there’s right around mile 84. So I just had one more loop to go and you’d think I’d be like, Yay, just one more loop to go. Well, my feet were swollen like crazy. I had these giant blisters. My feet hurt every step. I was in excruciating pain. Every muscle in my body was like, just sore and tense and tight.

I had been running nonstop for over 24 hours at this point. So I’d rip around all through the night. No sleep and here I was, I still had 60 more miles of trails and hills to go, I wanted to quit. So I had to make a choice, in that moment, you know, because it sucked big time, it was really, my whole body just wanted to shut down and just lay down and be done with it.

I had a choice though, I could call it a day, and just be done with it. You know, say, Hey, I got to mile 84 good job, or embrace the suck, and finish. I mustered up all the courage, I had all the determination. I knew it was going to be painful. And I just put one foot in front of the other.

And I set out on that single track trail, and started that last 16 grueling miles. And it was very hard. It hurt a lot. It sucked a lot. But I just allowed it. I allowed the pain to ache, I embraced the suck. The exhaustion, the fear, the frustration, all of it, I just was like, it’s all going to be there. And I’m going to keep moving forward no matter what.

I have this mantra, there’s a mantra and trail running, which is, or ultra running, I guess it’s relentless forward progress. And this is kind of my mantra for life in general. But relentless forward, progress is like the thing that keeps me moving in those moments, like no matter what, just keep moving forward. And I did. And I finished that.

I finished both those races to the hardest things I’ve ever done. Arguably, like, those two moments are like, the most sucky experiences of my life, but I embraced them. And I kept going, I didn’t quit.

And then what happened to me, which surprised me, when I finished those races, the experience of of having gone through that sucky period, and like embracing it, and then keep moving forward. This was life changing for me, I became more of a person more than what I was before starting those events. You know, I got way outside my comfort zone. And I grew in more ways than I could ever have imagined.

And it didn’t happen because there weren’t any sucky periods or because it was easy. It happened because it was hard. You know, I’ve talked about this before, and, you know, we gotta like, accept the challenges that come our way. And that’s how we get to the, to the good stuff is we got to go through the challenges, kind of what we’re talking about here. embracing the suck, okay.

And this applies to many different areas of your life, you know, so I talk about my, my weight loss clients, I tell them that things are gonna get uncomfortable, you know, that they need to embrace the suck when they stop eating sugar. And they’re like, yes, Patrick, I’m down with all of that, bring it on, I’m ready.

And so they stop eating sugar. And a week or so goes by, you know, things are okay. But then they start having these withdrawal symptoms, you know, they get headaches they get, they feel lethargic, they start having these super strong cravings for sugar, they start dreaming of sheet cakes from the grocery stores and edible cookie dough.

And they start to feel like they’re missing out on all of life’s pleasures that their life really sucks now, and there’s never ever gonna be joy in their life again, their life is basically over. And I’m like, remember, when I said things were going to suck and get very uncomfortable? Well, that’s what we’re talking about. You’re in it now.

But they’re like, but I don’t want it now. I want it to go away. And I’m like, I know, I know. But here we are. Same thing with runners who want to, you know, kick the carbohydrate addiction and want to become fat-adapted runners. And I tell them very specifically, running will suck for a few weeks as your body adjusts to switching from, you know, glucose to fat as fuel, just it takes a while for your body to get to that process.

And they’re always like, I’m down with that. I’m ready, bring it on. So they stop eating the carbohydrates. And after a week or so the running gets really hard and they’re like, what’s happening? Running is really hard. I mean, it’s really hard and I’m like remember when I said you have to embrace the suck and you were all down with all that. Well, this is what we’re telling you. This is the suck. Okay.

You know, it just takes a few weeks to become fat-adapted. Once you do, it’s amazing. But there’s a period where it’s very uncomfortable and running is hard. And you just have to accept it. That is part of the process.

Okay, but here’s the thing. Anytime things start to get hard they start to suck, we have two choices. We can resist them, resist it, or we can embrace it, we can either resist it all, fight it, reject it, push it away. wish it wasn’t so hard wish it was different.

Or we can embrace it, we can allow it to be there, accept it, accept the fact that it’s going to be hard and keep going anyway. So when we, when we resist it, when we resist the sock, you know, we wish things were different. We’re basically not accepting reality. It’s like saying I wish the sky was red instead of blue.

Or, I wish running 100 miles didn’t hurt at all. Or I wish my sugar addiction wasn’t so real. These things are just the way things are. They are exactly how they’re supposed to be. And here’s a little pro tip, do you know how you know that this is how they’re supposed to be? Because that’s how they are.

You know, running 100 miles is going to hurt because it hurts. You know that sugar addiction is real, because it’s real. You know, this guy’s supposed to be blue, because it is. It’s when we don’t accept this reality, this is what causes us inner turmoil.

When we don’t accept things as they are, it actually makes the sucky part a lot worse. You know, and I get it, it’s like, I just want to feel better, like right now. But you know, it’s not how it works. It’s like trying to hold a big beach ball underwater.

So you push it down and you push it down, the more you push it down, the harder it is to hold it down, and you just can’t keep it up. And eventually, that beach ball is going to come up, it’s going to come splashing up into your face. And don’t ask me how I know how this works. But that’s what happens. Okay.

So we’re just like rejecting what is, we’re pushing away. This sucky part, when that is just part of the process of getting to those big goals and dreams. Anything worthwhile that we want to accomplish means we got to go through something sucky to get there, okay.

You can accept it, you can embrace it, or you can just resist it and fight it. Fighting it and resisting, it just makes it worse. Right. But when you embrace it, when you stop the resisting, when you stop pushing away, the reality of what it is, you let go of the beach ball, you just let it be there. All sucky and everything. When you can accept things as they are, even if they suck, and that’s okay. Just embrace it and keep moving forward.

You feel the pain, yeah. But you keep on running. You feel like quitting, but you don’t, you just keep going instead, you feel like eating a whole sheet cake to yourself. But you don’t, you just allow that craving to be there. And you don’t do anything about it. Maybe eat some bacon instead. Or you feel like going back to all the carbs.

So that running will be quote unquote, easy again. But you don’t, you just let it be hard. Because you know, you have to go through that sucky part to get to the amazing part. And here’s a little spoiler alert for you guys. Life is not supposed to be happy, and comfortable all the time. Life is like 50/50. it’s just not supposed to be happy, carefree, joyous, and amazing and super comfortable all the time. It’s just not.

It’s more like 50% of the time, life is amazing, and exciting and fun and uncomfortable. And then 50% of the time, it’s uncomfortable and kind of crappy and a little sucky. And that’s okay, this is normal. This is the way of life. This is what it means to be a human being alive on the planet today.

But if you think life is going to be good all the time, if you expect that you are going to be very disappointed and very miserable a lot of the time because you’re going to be rejecting and resisting the reality of what is. You have to accept it all. You have to embrace the suck.

Because without the pain, we don’t get to experience the pleasure. Without agony we don’t know what joy is without feeling sadness. We don’t know what happiness feels like without frustration, we don’t learn patience. Without feeling anxiety, we don’t experience peace. Without failing, we don’t want to know what accomplishment feels like.

You know, without uncertainty, we don’t know what confidence is. When you can embrace all of it, when you become willing to experience all of these emotions that we’re talking about a lot of emotions here fear, anxiety, frustration, anger, pain, when you’re willing to experience these emotions, when you’re willing to embrace the suck. There’s nothing you can’t do.

Most people, they’re afraid to feel uncomfortable. They are so afraid of the suck that they never do anything hard, they’re not even going to try. They don’t even get up off the couch. Because they know that to put on their running shoes and go start running when they haven’t been running forever.

And they want to run a 5k. They want to do that. But they know it’s going to be hard. And so they just stay on the couch. They don’t embrace the suck. So they never do anything hard. And guess what? They never accomplish anything. They stay comfortable. Yeah. They don’t have to experience the sucky things. Yeah. They stay in their comfort zone.

But what does that do for you? What does that get you? Is that what you want for your life? I don’t think so. If you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re listening to me, then I’m pretty sure that’s not you. That does not sound like you. Everything you want, but don’t already have, lies outside your comfort zone. So if you never embrace the suck, you never embrace the discomfort you never grow.

You never become more than what you are today, right here, now. You never accomplish anything bigger than what you’ve already done in your life. Like, this is it, this is where you are. And that’s it. If you don’t embrace the suck, you don’t get uncomfortable.

You never experience the amazing 50% of your life full of joy and satisfaction and accomplishment. You got to go through the 50% that’s hard and painful and sucky. Remember the sucky parts, you have to go through the sucky part, in order to get to the amazing part.

It just that’s just the way it works. So I want to encourage you to embrace it all. The good, the bad, and the suck, embrace the suck. Become an emotional badass, like allow all those things to come up. The pain, the frustration, the fear of missing out the exhaustion, whatever it is you’re doing, embrace it all.

Because when you do when you embrace the suck, you become a total badass you’d be there’s like nothing you can’t accomplish. Most people are so afraid to experience these emotions. Don’t be afraid to experience the emotions. And you’ll see what you can do. I guarantee you, it’s a much better way to live your life.

Well, we will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Just come and check us out. It’s really fun. And remember, September is going to be intermittent fasting month, we’re gonna be talking all about it, how to do it, why we do it, why it’s important, how it’ll help you.

And, you know, it’d be super awesome. If you enjoy this podcast. If you get something out of it. Just leave a quick little review on iTunes, just, you know, scroll down and your little iTunes podcast app, tap the stars. And then just write a couple words that that you’re getting something out of this, it would really mean a lot to me if you did that. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean. Embrace the suck. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

20. How to Become a Lean Running Machine Part 2

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This is the second episode of an eye-opening podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying every …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 20 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, Master Life Coach and weight loss coach. And today, I’ve got part two of my three part series on how to become a lean running machine.

This series is something that I’m very passionate about. This is something that is very near and dear to my heart, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort and energy trying to figure out how to lose weight as a runner, because I was really struggling with that. I put on about 25 or 30 pounds and was able to finally figure out how to lose the weight.

And it didn’t involve running a million miles, or restricting calories or anything like that. And so I’m sharing all this stuff with you here, okay. I’ve gotten back to my goal weight, you know, what I weigh now today, the same that I did when I was like in this heavy training for Ironman back in 2013. So it’s been like seven years, since I’ve been at this weight, I’ve just put on weight ever since then. But I finally got back there.

And it only took me a couple of months really to get there. So I’m going to share a bunch of that stuff with you here. My goal here, I just want to help you. I know there’s a lot of runners out there that kind of struggle with their weight. And it’s not something that we talk about, we don’t feel comfortable talking about that a lot.

It’s almost like a taboo thing to talk about in the running community. But I know there’s a lot of people that struggle with this. So I want to be an example of what’s possible. And I want to help you. So I hope you find some value from these episodes that I’m sharing here. I’m just sharing what I know. And I hope it brings you some kind of help. And I hope it gives you something that you can do, some action that you can take that you can put into place and that you can get some results from that.

Okay. So here’s something I wanted to share with you guys. I just got this awesome text from one of my weight loss clients. And he said that he’s lost 13 pounds so far. He has more energy than ever feels better than he has in a long time. And here’s a guy who’s a runner, who also has struggled with his weight for years. And he joined my program. And he’s now well on his way to his goal weight. And oh my gosh, it’s so amazing.

I love, love, love getting texts like this from clients, it makes me feel so good. This is why I do what I do. You know, I want to help people transform their lives, I want to help people change the way they think about their bodies and the way they think about themselves. I want people to love themselves more. I’ve learned how to do that. And I want to share that with as many people as possible.

But I know what it’s like to try to just run and run and run and not be able to lose the weight. And to go to the gym six days a week and restrict what I’m eating and feel terrible all the time and still not lose weight. Like I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. So this particular client has gotten some amazing results.

He’s well on his way and he keeps texting me all the time. Like, you know, I’m down another two pounds, I’m down another three pounds. And I just love it. I just give him big hearts and smiles and everything every time he texts that to me. So I learned what to eat, I learned how to manage my mind. I learned when to eat, learned how to stop using food as an escape from my life, I learned how to deal with all the cravings and hunger.

And I will teach you all of this stuff. And I have an upcoming masterclass that starts on Monday, June 1, and I will teach you how to do every single one of these things. I only take about 10 people through these classes. Okay. It’s an intimate class. And once it’s filled, I just closed the doors and we gotta wait till the next time.

So another couple of months before I do that again. But if you want to save your spot for this class, just go to innerfiretribe.com/overeating, and enroll now. I know for a fact that this is the solution to your weight loss struggles. I know for a fact that this is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program you will ever experience.

I walk you through everything step by step. I’m there for you. It’s a six week program. When you’re trying to lose weight and you’re changing a bunch of stuff. Those first six weeks are the hardest. But I got you through that. Okay. I will walk you through that and help you get through the challenging stuff so that you can have this success that you’re looking for listen, you deserve this, you are worth it. Go to Inner Fire, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. It’s easy to say and sign up today.

Okay, so today, like I said, this is part two of the three part series on how to become a lean running machine. And if you haven’t listened to the first episode yet, go back and do that. Now listen to part one. That was episode number 19. And to find any of these podcasts, you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/and, then the number 19. And, and that’ll take you right to that episode. So listen to that first, because it kind of lays the foundation for what I’m going to be talking about here. Talks about why losing weight is so hard. In fact, I’m going to recap that here.

So here’s what I talked about in that episode. Running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. It just doesn’t. Calories in calories out does not work. And eat more, run less, or I’m sorry, run more, eat less just does not work, which people just have been telling us for decades.

We just need to move our bodies more, move more and eat less and you’ll be fine. It does not work. And I explain why. But some of the reasons why are your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite when you exercise more, so you get hungrier, and you’re eating more, you end up eating more calories, than you can burn.

Also, progress is very, very slow when you take this approach, and it’s minimal at best. And then running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. Okay, you got hormonal hormonal imbalances going on, you’ve got mental cravings, you got emotional eating, and it just doesn’t address those things. Okay.

And then the calories in calories out, you know, everybody thinks this is the only way to lose weight and adjust does not work and never has is a myth, your body, the body will naturally work against this process to keep you from like dying to keep you from starving to death. So when you reduce calories, your body lowers its metabolism in response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism.

And you cannot run fast, run as many miles or reduce the amount of food you’re taking in order to burn off those calories. Right. So there’s some other things and some other reasons why that doesn’t work either. But basically, metabolism lowers when you limit the amount of calories you take in. And so it can only go so low, before your body starts to like to get into starvation mode. Okay.

So the first secret to understand the first thing you really have to understand is that running more and eating less just doesn’t work. Okay, and so I break that all down. And I talked about that in episode number 19, episode number one of this series, but the podcast episode number 19. Okay, cool.

So today, I am going to ask your permission to get a little sciency because I want to talk about hormones. And so I’m going to be talking about the three main hormones that are involved with weight gain, and why it’s really hard to lose weight and what we can do about that, okay.

But for a lot of us, we’ve thought that there must be something wrong with us because we keep gaining weight, even though we’re watching. We eat a good diet, and we don’t, we might be vegetarian or vegan, or paleo or something like that. And we exercise regularly. But we keep gaining weight, and we can’t seem to lose it.

And, and so we come to these conclusions like It must be me, I’m doing something wrong, I don’t have enough willpower. I’m not strong enough. This is just the way I am. I don’t have the self control other people have. Nothing ever works for me. Basically, there’s just something wrong with me. But here’s the truth, there is nothing wrong with you, my friend, at all.

It’s not your fault. And this is the thing I want you to understand here. And this is kind of the second secret I want to talk about to permanent weight loss is that it is not your fault. Your hormones, more than anything else are causing you to gain weight, your hormones are what are keeping you from losing weight. Okay.

If you want to lose weight, you have to be able to burn fat, you’ve got to become a fat burning machine right? And more than anything else your hormones are responsible for whether your body is in fat storage mode, or fat burning mode. And so if you want to get into fat burning mode, you’ve got to like make sure your hormones are regulated properly. Okay. So the three hormones we’re going to talk about today are going to be insulin, ghrelin, and leptin. And these all have to do with your body’s ability to become a fat burner or a fat store. We want to be fat burners, we don’t want to be fat storers. We’ve done enough of that so far in our lives. Okay?

So let’s talk about insulin first. Okay, this is the most important hormone when it comes to weight loss, insulin’s job, its main job is to lower your blood sugar. So anytime you eat any kind of food, and especially foods that are high in sugar, your body secretes, releases insulin to help keep that blood sugar low and keep things in balance, okay?

But here’s the thing. When insulin is high in your system, you are in fat storage mode. Because what insulin is doing is saying like, hey, we need to take this energy and put it somewhere, we need to store it. This sugar, let’s say, and so what we do is insulin stores it as fat for use later on, okay?

So when insulin is high, you’re in fat storage mode. The opposite is also true. When insulin is low in your system, you’re in fat burning mode, and you can start consuming your own body fat, which sounds disgusting, but you can start using your own body fat for fuel, okay? Until you get rid of the sugar that you’re burning in your system, you really can’t access that fat very well.

Okay, so we want to get rid of that, get out of that sugar burning mode, we want to get out of that fat storage mode, and we want to get into the fat burning mode, okay? And the way we do this is to lower our insulin, okay? When you have too much insulin in your system, you just cannot lose weight. Okay? Very, very important to understand. When you have too much insulin, you’re in fat storage mode, and you cannot lose weight.

So there’s two types of insulin disorders, basically, there’s type one and type two diabetes, okay? Type one diabetics, their bodies do not produce enough insulin. So it is very, very hard for them to actually put on any weight, because their insulin levels are so low. And so it’s kind of sad.

But back in the earlier 20th century, type one diabetics used to starve to death because they couldn’t get enough. Their bodies were not getting enough. They were not storing their fat, their bodies were basically just burning off everything that they took in, okay, so their insulin was way too low, until they figured out how to you know, inject insulin. And that was a life saving thing, which is awesome. But they didn’t have a way of storing fat. And so they were way too thin, and they ended up starving to death. It’s horrible, right?

Then there’s type two diabetes, and this is a disease of, of diet, basically. Okay, and type two diabetics produce way too much insulin. And type two diabetics are always in fat storage mode, so they can’t lose weight. And the treatment for type two diabetics, there’s a couple of different things, but one of the treatments, which is crazy, and I really don’t understand this, but the treatment for a lot of type two diabetics is to increase their insulin, so they give them more insulin, which produces the same fat storage mode.

And it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, which is the big problem anyway. And it just compounds the cycle, it creates a problem called insulin resistance. Too much insulin means your body is resistant to insulin’s effects, it just stops working. It’s like when you take too many antibiotics, you know, the bacteria becomes resistant to it, right? This is same thing here.

So what we want is we want our bodies to be sensitive to insulin, okay, so we want to lower the insulin so we can access our fat for fuel. And so this is the first thing that you just really have to understand. I know I’m talking about a lot of like, sciency stuff here. Okay? But what I want you to understand with this is that insulin’s job is to lower your blood sugar.

And when your insulin is high in your system, you’re in fat storage mode. When it’s low, you’re in fat burning mode, okay? So if you’re trying to lose weight, we want to get the insulin levels down.

Okay, the second hormone I want to talk about is ghrelin, and that’s the hunger hormone. So whenever you get hungry, there’s this hormone that gets released called ghrelin, and that kind of tells you that you’re hungry. It increases your appetite so that you’ll eat some food. And this works great. You know, we should be hungry at different times.

Like there’s every now and then we should be hungry, we should feel hungry. We should have an appetite and we want to eat some food. This way we don’t die. And all these hormones. They’ve been working this way for millennia. We’ve evolved for these hormones to work beautifully, okay?

Here’s the problem. When insulin is high in your system, ghrelin gets blocked, it does not turn off. And so it’s constantly producing these signals that are saying I’m hungry, I’m hungry, my it increases your appetite. And it’s saying feed me feed me. And you constantly feel like you need to eat more food, even though you don’t.

So high insulin levels blocks ghrelin, and so you feel hungry all the time and you end up just overeating. That’s a real problem, okay? So high insulin is kind of insidious, okay? It has one more insidious effect here, and that is how it affects the hormone leptin.

And leptin is the safety hormone. So leptin’s job is to tell your brain when you’re full, and so it sends signals that says, hey, I’m no longer hungry, stop eating, and you’ve probably experienced leptin. Everybody does, you know, but think about the last time you had like, Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re like, stuffed, and you’re like, I cannot eat another thing, you got a lot of leptin going on here, okay.

But here again, when insulin is high, leptin gets blocked, same way, and it cannot do its job. So you never really feel full. You end up overeating at every meal, you eat too much food. So high insulin levels block leptin, you constantly feel like you can still eat more food. It’s like after that Thanksgiving dinner when you’re stuffed in somebody’s like, hey, would you like another piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream? And you’re like, yes, of course I would.

That is a hormonal imbalance that’s going on there. Okay, because, you know, it’s really not good for you to do that. It’s not good for you to stuff yourself to the point of feeling miserable and terrible and sick to your stomach, okay? But because the hormones are all jacked up here, we do that to ourselves.

So high levels of insulin, cause this chain reaction with these other hormones that puts your body into the state of relentless over eating and relentless fat storage mode. So the big villain of this whole story here is insulin, okay? So too much insulin is the root cause of insidious weight gain. It’s the root cause of obesity. It’s the root cause of type two diabetes, okay? Too much insulin is bad.

So what causes insulin levels to get so high? So anytime we eat food, that food that we eat, no matter what it is, becomes, to some extent, sugar in our bloodstream, glucose. And so your body produces insulin to lower that glucose level to kind of balance things out to lower your blood sugar.

So anytime you eat any food, there’s an insulin effect. So insulin gets produced, okay, so whenever you eat, insulin goes up a little bit, okay? Which is totally normal. One of the problems though, is that when we eat all day long, our insulin is always elevated and never goes down. And so we kind of put our bodies into this consistent fat storage mode, like all day, every day, we never give our bodies the chance to regulate and for that, blood sugars actually come down, and the insulin levels go down and everything starts working the way it’s supposed to.

So eating any food causes insulin to go up, but eating all the time causes insulin to be always high. Okay? The other thing that causes insulin to be really high is certain types of foods. So sugar, and processed foods, especially highly refined carbohydrates, make insulin go way up. These are super concentrated foods, they have a huge glucose response in your body, which causes a huge insulin surge to try to bring your blood sugar down. This is a big problem.

When you’re constantly eating refined carbs and sugar, you are in way higher levels of glucose and way higher levels of insulin. Okay, and then the whole system is jacked up. So eating all the time, and eating processed foods with a lot of sugar will put your body in a state I have constantly elevated insulin, which puts your body in this state of constantly in this fat storage mode. Okay?

Which can lead to insulin resistance, which can lead to obesity, but it definitely causes weight gain, for sure. Okay. So the big question is, I know what you’re thinking, and I have an answer for you. The big question is, I didn’t get your insulin levels down. How do you get your hormones back in balance? How do you, you know, get that insulin production down, get it into the normal ranges?

So you can become that lean, mean fat burning machine. How do you get your body back into the fat burning mode and lose weight, because that’s what we’re talking about here. There’s two things you can do, you can change what you eat, and you can change when you eat.

So first, you need to change what you eat, you need to eliminate the foods that cause those huge insulin spikes. So mainly, you’re not going to like to hear this. But here’s the truth, you need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. What? I know it sounds terrible. But everything you eat causes insulin to rise somewhat.

Sugar and highly refined carbs create this intense glucose response in your body. And they cause the highest insulin spike. If you were to just cut out eating sugar and refined carbs, you are going to decrease your insulin like crazy and you will start losing weight, I guarantee it. It’s hard to do, I can teach you how to do it. It’s hard to do on your own for sure. But if you can do that, then you are going to be well on your way to getting your hormones in balance and starting to lose weight.

One thing that I would encourage you to do is to just eat whole food, eat the kind of food that we’ve been eating for millennia. Okay? If it comes with a, if your food if you’re buying food that has a nutrition label on it, it’s probably not what you want to eat. You want to eat the stuff that’s on the outside of the store, you know, the produce, the meat, the fish, the dairy, like, stick with this stuff on the outside, okay.

Try to get away from the sugar and refined carbs, you know, and then check those labels because there are so many different types of sugar that is put into food, especially food that says like low fat or whatever, like stay away from low fat stuff all together. But when you see food and it says like, you know, healthy, whatever, low fat look at the label and see what kinds of sugar are in there.

So a lot of times there’s not added sugar, or there’s added sugar, but it’s hidden. So it’ll be called like agave nectar, or brown rice syrup or maltodextrin. Like they have all these different names for sugar. I think there’s something like 78 different names for sugar. And they try to confuse us. So they actually put sugar in the ingredients like six times.

But it’s all these crazy names. And so you think like, oh, like sugar is like only the 12th ingredient on here, you know, and oh, this must be good for me. But then they’ve hidden sugar and all these other ways. So anyway, stay away from food with labels. How about that idea? Okay.

Really, the best thing you can do is just eat whole foods. Just eat like fruits, vegetables, meat, fish protein, dairy, poultry, like all the good stuff, right? There’s so many options out there for you. But the sugar and the refined carbs are poisoning us. And it’s making us overweight, it’s keeping us from losing weight. Okay, so if you want to lose weight, drop the sugar, drop the highly refined carbs. Okay. So that’s number one, that’s changing what you eat.

Number two, is you need to change when you eat. So basically eating less often. So you know, insulin levels go up every time you eat any kind of food. So one of the simplest things you can do to get your insulin levels down, is to just not eat anything at all. And here’s the thing, like, I know what you’re thinking like, dude, I’m not going to starve myself. And I’m not talking about that. Okay?

But um, one of the things you can do to extend the time where you don’t have food in your system to give your insulin levels a chance to go down, is to stop eating snacks altogether. Okay, let’s just start there. So there was this time back in the 50’s. Like and prior to that where there was no such thing as snacks. There was no snacking going on. People would eat their three meals a day. And that was fine.

But back then starting in the 50s, the big food companies were like, hey, we got to make more money, we got to sell more food. How do we get people to eat more food? And so they came up with this whole category called snacks, okay? And they could, you know, they would tell people like you need a little pick me up in mid morning. So have a mid morning snack. And feeling love lethargic after lunch, you know, have an afternoon snack.

And then after dinner, you need a little snack, you need some dessert, you know, so we’re basically eating three snacks and three meals a day, we’re eating six times a day, here in the United States. I mean, a lot of other countries don’t do that. But at least here I know, for a fact, most people eat five or six times a day.

So your body is always in this state of elevated insulin levels, okay, you’re always in this state of storing fat, we never give our bodies a chance to lower that insulin and so that we can, you know, become fat burners. Okay, so we always have food in our system. So one of the biggest things you can do, and the easiest thing you can do is to just don’t eat something in between meals, like that’s number one.

And it’s so easy, it doesn’t cost any money to do this. You don’t have to like add anything, you don’t have to figure anything out, you don’t have to decide what you’re going to do, like just don’t do anything, just don’t eat anything. All right.

Another thing you can do is extend the amount of time between meals. And I get into this in my program. And I talk about intermittent fasting. And I’m not going to talk about that right now. But one thing you can do is extend the amount of time between your dinner and your breakfast the next day.

So if you want to give your body just a little bit more of a chance to get those insulin levels down and get into fat burning mode, eat your dinner a little bit earlier, you know, maybe an hour earlier than you normally do, and eat your breakfast like an hour later than you normally do. Okay, so extend that what we call the fasting window, you’re you’re fasting every day anyway, unless you eat while you’re sleeping, which I do know somebody that does that, which is crazy.

But if you’re eating dinner at let’s say, you know, seven o’clock, usually, and then you eat breakfast at seven o’clock. So that’s like a 12 hour window of fasting, you know, maybe just extend it, you know, eat at 6pm dinner and then eat breakfast at eight o’clock. And so now you’ve got like a 14 hour window there.

So you’ve given your body two extra hours, and you won’t even notice that really, you know, have your coffee in the morning, whatever you need to do, but just don’t eat, just push that back a little bit, you will find that you will. These two things combined, like getting rid of the sugar and flour and then extending periods where you’re not eating will actually have a huge effect on your body’s ability to get into fat burning mode and lose weight.

These two ideas are gold, they are absolutely gold. What the idea here is we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on board, we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on our bodies, which is our own fat and we have tons and tons of this on our bodies we do we have pounds of it that we can use it.

And a pound of fat has way more calories than a pound of you know, whatever. Fat has more calories than glucose, okay, so like fat is a better fuel source for us than sugar is anyway. So get rid of their sugar, you know and start accessing your fat, you’re gonna have tons of energy, you’re gonna feel amazing, and you will start losing weight. It’s awesome. And this and what you do here with these couple of simple things I’m talking about is you get your hormones back in balance. Regulating your hormones is critical. If you want to lose weight, and if you want to start becoming a lean, mean, fat burning machine. Okay, got to get those hormones regulated.

So I know I talked about a lot of stuff here, a lot of science. Let me just recap really quickly. Okay. One of the main reasons why you can’t lose weight, your hormones are out of whack. increased insulin levels puts your body into fat storage mode. Elevated insulin also causes ghrelin and leptin to stop working properly. So you’re always hungry, you never feel full and you constantly overeat, which makes it even worse.

You can put even more weight on your body okay, so increased insulin causes your body to become a fat store. When you decrease insulin, when you lower the insulin levels in your body, you become a fat burner. It means that ghrelin and leptin start functioning properly. So your hormones are all in balance, you aren’t hungry all the time, you aren’t hangry all the time.

And when you do eat, you feel full and you feel more satisfied for longer. How do we reduce insulin, we change what we eat, and we change when we eat. So we eliminate the two main causes of insulin spikes, which is sugar and refined carbs, eat whole foods, and then we eat less often, we just eliminate the snacks, and maybe extend our fasting nightly fasting period by an hour or two.

So the second part of this three part series, the second secret to permanent weight loss is basically your hormones are causing you to gain weight. And it’s not your fault, it’s totally changeable, you can fix this easily. And I teach you exactly how to do all of this in my weight loss master class.

If you really want to become a lean running machine, you have to get your body out of the fat storage mode and into the fat burning mode. Reducing insulin is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to solve the physical aspect of permanent weight loss. So in the next episode, in part three of this series, I’m going to be covering the mental and emotional aspects of permanent weight loss.

So most diet programs, they tell you what to eat here, eat this food, do this and good luck, you should be fine. Just eat this stuff right here. They don’t tell you what to do when you have all these crazy cravings. When you have withdrawal from when you stop eating sugar, let’s say when you have these uncontrollable urges around food, when you have this unhealthy relationship with food, they don’t tell you what to do with all that.

They don’t tell you what to do when you start feeling your feelings, you just want to eat over it and you just say eff it and you eat all the food anyway, this is why most diets don’t work. This is why a lot of the approaches that most nutrition coaches take just doesn’t work either. Because they basically just tell you what to eat, they give you a nutrition plan to follow.

And my approach is very different. The way I work with my clients, it’s vastly more effective. It’s basically 100% effective, because I provide solutions for all of the factors involved, that contribute to being overweight and I provide solutions for all the things that are the root causes of weight gain, not just the physical stuff line, what to eat, but the mental and emotional factors as well.

Okay, so we’re going to talk about that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that you will not want to miss it. And then one more quick little reminder. The next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I only take a few people through the program at a time, each person gets a lot of my personal attention and they get personal coaching time with me. It’s actually like the probably the most affordable way of working with me as your weight loss coach. But you have to get signed up now because it will fill up innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to get signed up. Remember, if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

You know, if you want different results in your life, you have to take different actions. I know it feels uncomfortable, I know that it will be challenging for you. That’s why I created this six week program to basically walk you through all of the tough stuff step by step and help you to get to the other side where you become the person that you want to be.

Where you start to feel good about yourself again, where you start to love yourself again, where you feel good about your body and you feel you feel good about your mind. I want this for you. I’ve experienced this, I’ve learned how to do it. I’ve learned the formula.

So I’ve put together this system and this program that works wonders. I want you to be a part of this. So please join me. innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, sign up today. That’s all I got for you here. Can’t wait to see you on the next episode. And as always, I have lots and lots of love for each and every one of you. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

16. The Secrets to Achieving Any Goal

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Today I'm talking about the right way vs. the wrong way to set goals. The problem is most people pick some random goal, it's usually too small, and they kinda sorta come up with a plan for making it …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Well, hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, and the life coach for runners. And I teach you how to stop struggling and start getting the results that you want in your life. And that’s what I teach here on the podcast is how to manage your mind.

So you can take control of your life. So you can do things like lose weight, and stop drinking, and become the most badass version of yourself. Because you know what? You can do, be, and have anything you want in this world, you are capable of so much more, you are capable of magnificence. And once you really, really believe this, there’s nothing you can’t do.

This is kind of what I’m talking about today, how to set big, powerful goals for yourself, for your life, and how to make them happen. How to achieve whatever it is that you want. And so here’s the problem with the way most people set goals. So most people, they just pick some random goal out of the air, maybe it’s something they think they shouldn’t do, like, a lot of other people are qualifying for Boston, maybe I should do that.

And so they think, okay, I’ll do that. Or maybe they’re, you know, overweight, and they’re like, hey, I should probably lose 40 pounds, there’s a goal, I’ll just do that. You know, or maybe I’m kind of unhappy with my job, maybe I’ll just like, become an entrepreneur, I’ll start my own business. So they pick something, right?

And then they pick a date, and they’re like, okay, I’m gonna accomplish this by, you know, in six months, or whatever, some random date in the future. And then they might have some vague idea in their head of what they’re supposed to do to reach that goal. So they might kind of like, do a training program, if they’re trying to qualify, or the, you know, like I should pick some diet to try to lose some weight, or, you know, maybe they’ll watch some YouTube videos on how to be an entrepreneur or something like that.

And so they kind of sorta take some action, and then, you know, kind of work toward that goal. Doesn’t that sound terrible? The way I’m explaining this, saying this out loud actually sounds kind of depressing to me right now, honestly. But here’s the thing, this is the way most people do it.

And they think that they’re doing it the right way. They don’t really know any better, it’s fine. Not calling anybody out here. But then they don’t hit the goal. And then they feel like they are a failure. And goal setting doesn’t work. I’m a failure, they get down on themselves. And they just quit and just go about their life. And they never get anything done. They never accomplish anything great. They never reach any kind of goals.

And I’m saying all this because this, this was me. Like I know exactly what this feels like I’ve done all of this so many times. I’ve picked some goals, I’ve kind of set some, you know, put some action steps in place to try to get those goals and I’ve done it so many times, and then I’ve failed. And then I just continually beat myself up over it. And I figure I’m just a failure and I can’t accomplish anything.

I’ve learned the hard way that is a terrible way of setting and accomplishing anything. This way of goal setting is broken and has to be changed. So today, I’m going to walk you through a better way of setting goals. But more importantly, I’m going to teach you how to achieve those goals.

And it doesn’t matter what they are, the process is the same for whatever goal we’re talking about here. And a quick little side note on the word goal versus outcome. I like the word outcome better than goal. And here’s why. From NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming words, we believe that words are very important. Okay.

So when we say the word goal, our brain, our subconscious mind especially comes up with this pick that’s sure of something that’s way out in the future, something that we have not achieved yet. Something that’s, you know, out there somewhere, it seems far away. Whereas when we say the word outcome, this is almost like past tense, okay, it has been done, it has been accomplished.

And the subconscious mind paints a picture of you having achieved that outcome. So I can see it, I can hear it, I can feel it. And this is kind of a better way of thinking about it. So, I prefer the word outcome. And maybe you can start adopting that when we start talking about goals.

Okay, so this is what we’re talking about today, how to set and achieve all of your outcomes. So strap in, is going to be fun. So the first thing I want to encourage you to do, the first step in achieving outcomes, is to pick an uncomfortable goal. Most people think, too small, they pick a goal, that seems like something they could do.

And the problem with this is that we never grow, when we stay comfortable. When we stay inside our comfort zone, we don’t grow. And if you want to get somewhere else, somewhere different from where you are right now, you have to think big. You know, think about what you really want.

And when you think about that thing that you really want, it should make you feel somewhat uncomfortable. If it feels too easy and too comfortable. It’s not a big enough goal, okay? In order to grow beyond who you are, right now, in this moment, you have to do things you’ve never done before. But this scares people because they’re like, well, I don’t know how to do it.

And of course you don’t, because you’ve never done it before. The way you learn how to do it, is to do it. So you gotta get outside of that comfort, comfortable bubble that you’re in, okay? And think about this, what do you really want? Who do you want to be? What do you want to accomplish, let’s say in six months, or a year. So we’re really good at coming up with little tiny goals that we can achieve. Because it’s almost like we know we can do it. But what about those things you don’t know, those things that you’re afraid you may not be able to accomplish? Those are the things we want to be focused on. Okay.

So set a big, uncomfortable goal. Get outside your comfort zone, and then start, you know, your subconscious mind will start moving you towards that thing. And this is where all the beautiful things happen in our life. This is where we grow, where we learn, nothing happens in our comfort zone, nothing really good happens that way and we just stay where we are. Okay, so number one is pick an uncomfortable goal, something that makes you feel uncomfortable when you think about it.

Number two, is you have to have a compelling why. You need to know why this goal, this outcome that you want is so important to you take some time to really figure this out. So maybe you want to lose those 40 pounds, so you don’t end up dead at 45 from a heart attack. You know, you want to be there to play with your kids and to play with your grandkids.

You know, maybe you want to quit drinking so you can stop feeling hungover every morning and stop all the obsessing about when you’re going to get that next drink. You want to experience the freedom that comes from breaking habits like overeating and over drinking. These are very compelling reasons why you would want to change why you want to accomplish that goal.

So have a compelling reason why and your why has to move you. You have to feel it in your bones. It has to be something bigger than you. When you think about why you want to accomplish this. It has to create, there has to be, an emotional response inside you. Okay, if it does, and if you don’t feel it, it’s not big enough. The goal is not big enough, your reason is not strong enough.

So you need a compelling reason why this is important to you. This is the thing, this reason, this is the thing that’s going to keep you going when it gets tough because it will get tough. If you’re setting a big uncomfortable goal. Every step along the way is good. An uncomfortable goal is going to challenge you, it’s going to be difficult, there’s going to be difficult, there’s going to be failures all along the way, having that compelling reason why will help keep you going, okay?

Number three, you have to believe in yourself. First, you have to believe it, before you see it. You have to have the confidence and trust in yourself to know that you will get there no matter what. And the way you do this is by becoming who you need to be in order to get that outcome that you’re looking for.

We get this backwards a lot, we don’t get the goal, then become the kind of person that could get a goal like that. We become the kind of person first and then we get the goal. For example, when I was training for Iron Man, I had to become an Iron Man, I had to become an Iron Man finisher. If I wanted to be an Ironman finisher, does that make sense?

In my mind, in my heart, I had to become an Iron Man, in order to be the kind of person that I needed to be to do the kind of things I needed to do to get those results. So I had to adopt the identity of being an Iron Man, and start thinking and acting like an Iron Man, what would Iron Man do?

You know, my values had to be in alignment with my goals. So training became super important to me, I was sticking to my training schedule, no matter what that became something that was really important to me. My beliefs had to be in alignment with my goal, I had to believe without a doubt that I was going to accomplish this.

And that I had everything it takes to be an Ironman finisher, I had to tap into new potentials, I had to learn new things, I had to be the kind of person that read the kind of books that an Iron Man would read, I listened to the kind of podcasts an Iron Man would listen to. I did the research about the sport, like I researched everything about the sport, I’m a passionate researcher.

I did all of these things so that I could learn as much as I could and tap into that potential. My daily schedule of the things that I did, my behaviors, my actions, I changed all this stuff, because I became who I needed to be. So I could accomplish this huge goal. So in order to achieve that outcome, finishing an Ironman, first I had to become an Ironman. And this is where we get things backwards.

Typically, we think we need to do things in order to get results so that we can become who we want to be. Instead, we need to become who we need to be. So that we can do what we need to do to get the results that we want in our lives. And when you do it this way, all of your values, the things that are important to you become clear, your beliefs become clearer, the actions you take become clearer. And you’re almost guaranteed to get the results that you’re looking for.

Alright, the next thing you need to do is write down all the steps you need to take to achieve your outcome. This sounds pretty simple. At first, but a lot of people will say to me, well, Patrick, I don’t know all the steps. If I knew all the steps, I would do it but you know what you do know?

And here’s how you do it, you just get a blank page out, grab a pen, and do what we call a thought download. You just write down everything you can think of that you would need to do to get from where you are today to where you need to be to where you achieve this goal, which is get it all out on the page. And just keep asking yourself, what else would I need to do? What else would I need to do?

So we’re looking for all those tiny little action steps that you need to take so that you can achieve this outcome. Get it all out on the page once you get it all out on the page. And you should have a lot of stuff on there.

The next thing you do is just take all those steps and put each one on your calendar. That becomes an appointment on your calendar. And then, and this is the most important thing, is do every one of those things on your calendar. This is the key to achieving any outcome that you want. You put an appointment on your calendar, and it becomes a commitment that you make to yourself. You know, the path from where you are to where you want to be is paved with steps. Achieving a big goal is just a series of small steps that gets you from where you are to where you want to be.

There’s just small actions we’re talking about here. But once you do each one, once you achieve them all, then you have reached your goal. I like the analogy of like, you know, hiking up a mountain, you’re walking up a mountain, and you just keep taking one step after another one step after another. They’re tiny steps when you look at each one. But combined, they get you up to the top of the mountain. And the view from up there is pretty amazing. Okay, so get everything down on the page and get it all on your calendar, and then do them all.

Alright, the next thing is identifying obstacles. So when you write all this stuff down, and you start putting all this stuff on your calendar, all this resistance is going to come up, you’re gonna start to feel a lot of fear, and a lot of anxiety. And you’re gonna start coming up with all these excuses. And all these reasons why this stuff is never going to work or that you can’t do it, you’re going to come up with this huge list of all the possible things that will, you know, could possibly go wrong, okay, this is completely normal, it’s part of the process, we want to embrace this part of the process.

Normally, we start thinking about all these obstacles and stuff, and we kind of freak out and we just want to pretend like they don’t exist and just kind of move on. But this is not the right way to do it, we want to embrace the obstacles, okay. So the way we do this is we do another thought download, so we grab another piece of paper, and then we start writing down all the obstacles that we can think of, we just get them all out on the page.

This is a kind of a painful process, honestly, you start writing down all these things that could possibly go wrong, or get in your way, you know, maybe, you know, so and so, you know, thinks I’m stupid for trying to do this, or, you know, my family isn’t going to be on board with this, or I’m afraid of what people will think of me, or I’ve tried stuff like this before, and it’s never worked. Or I think this is going to be too hard, or whatever it is, come up with all those obstacles, get them all down on the page.

And then for each one of these obstacles, come up with a strategy for overcoming that obstacle. All right, and this is like magic right here. So if you’re looking at, you know, your obstacles, and one of them is, I’m afraid of what people will think of me. You know, maybe your strategy for overcoming that is working on your mindset, you know, creating thoughts around those thoughts.

Like, it doesn’t matter what other people think, I believe in myself. That’s what’s most important to me, like, that’s a much better thought, then, you know, other people will will think I’m stupid, or think I can’t do this. So for every obstacle that comes up, write down a strategy for overcoming that obstacle. And then every obstacle just ends up being a rung on the ladder to success to your goal. It’s really powerful exercise to do.

Okay, then after you’ve got your obstacle ladder, so to speak. The next thing is to follow through. And this is the difference between people who achieve goals and people who don’t is whether or not they actually do what they say they’re going to do. You need to learn to count on yourself to do what you said you’re gonna do. You need to practice making promises to yourself and keeping them you know, every action step goes on your calendar, right? And then you’re gonna have this huge list of stuff, this huge calendar full of stuff that you need to do. And you’ve said yourself, here’s the goal that I want, here are all the steps I need to take. They’re on my calendar now. I just got to do them, right? And you just do them.

But what happens is you’re going to come to that day and that time and you’re going to say you know what, I really don’t feel like doing this one thing you know, maybe I’ll just go watch Netflix for a while. I’m I’m kind of tired. I don’t really feel like training today. I don’t really feel like doing the work to build my business today. I don’t really feel like sticking To my protocol, my eating protocol, I think I’ll just, you know, go ahead and eat this whole pizza. I’ve been there, I know what it feels like.

But the way we build self confidence is is that we make promises to ourselves, we make commitments to ourselves, and then we follow through on those commitments, even when you don’t feel like it. So you make a promise to yourself, and you follow through, you make a promise to yourself, and you follow through, you make a promise, and you follow through and you keep doing this.

When you do this, you build this amazing amount of trust in yourself. You build unshakable confidence in yourself, to where you feel like you can achieve anything that you want. So this is what we call honoring the calendar no matter what. So everything you’re you’re going to do becomes an action item on your calendar. And you do them even if you don’t feel like it. Okay.

The last piece of this is failure. I want you to embrace failure. What did you just say? That’s right, I said, I want you to embrace failure. So what happens if you fail? Most people, what do they do when they fail? They just give up right? Honestly, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a failure. I just think there’s stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t work. In NLP, we say there is no failure. There’s only feedback.

This thing I tried, did it work? Yes or no? What’s the feedback? Did it work? Yes, it did. Okay, cool. I’ll do more of that. Did it work? No, it did not. Why didn’t it work? What can I learn? What do I need to change? How can I do things differently next time so that I get a different result?

And we just keep practicing. Now we try something, it works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, we try something else. And here’s the secret. Just keep doing this. There really is no such thing as failure. There’s only quitting. So people really don’t fail, they just quit, they give up. But the more times you do something and fail, the more confidence you build, because you keep overcoming this failures. So I encourage you to fail. I encourage you to plan on failing, plan on failing a bunch of times before you get things right.

No one’s ever really achieved anything of significance by succeeding every single step of the way. You get to success by creating a huge pile of failures. Failing is how you do it. It’s how you get there. I always say success is a terrible teacher, you don’t learn anything by getting everything right all the time. You learn by failing, and trying something else, and learning from those mistakes. So fail often.

So, quick recap. To achieve any goal, any outcome that you want. First thing is pick an uncomfortable goal, get outside your comfort zone has to be bigger than you. Number two have a compelling why. Why do you want to accomplish this, what’s going to keep you going when it gets tough? Number three, believe it first, believe it and then you’ll see it. Number four, get all the steps and get them all on your calendar. Number five, identify all the obstacles you can think of and then create strategies for overcoming each one of those. And this just becomes a ladder to your success. Number six, follow through. Honor your calendar no matter what, do what you say you’re going to do. And then number seven, embrace failure, fail often. And that’s it. That’s how you achieve anything you want in your life.

I know this might sound a little daunting to you just listening to this right now. And I will tell you, it can be challenging to do this on your own. And that’s what having a good coach does for you is to help you with every single one of these steps. And this is the work that I do with all of my clients. We look at every step I just laid out. And we make sure that we are always on track.

And I help my clients identify those things that they cannot see themselves. It’s really hard to to see yourself it’s hard to you know, see those your blind spots, you know, so that’s what a good coach will do to help you to see those things that you cannot see for yourself. So whether you want to lose weight, whether you want to quit drinking, you get the accountability, the follow through, you get the strategies, all of this by working with a coach.

You don’t want to create a pile of failures. And I help my clients work through all of that so they can achieve the result that they want in their life. Well, I’d love to hear what you thought about this particular topic, you can always reach out to me with questions or comments Hello at inner fire tribe.com And that’s all I got for you today. I hope to see you soon. Much love to each and every one of you.

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