Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
I talk a lot about carbs here on the podcast, mainly why it’s advised to keep your carbs low if you’re a runner who wants to lose weight and use body fat as fuel for running. I realized I haven’t …
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When it comes to weight loss tips, one principle stands out among all the others: counting calories. For decades, you’ve been told that the only way to lose weight is to make sure you count all …
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There is so much contradictory advice out there when it comes to losing weight. It’s really hard to know what’s right and what’s just BS. I’ve always taken the approach that you need to ignore …
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As runners, we’ve been told over the last 40 years or so that the only way to fuel for running is with carbohydrates. Loads and loads of carbs. Eat lots of carbs every day, carb load the day …
Continue Reading about 216. An Alternative Way To Fuel Long-Distance Running →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 216 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, an alternative way to fuel long-distance running. So as runners, we’ve been told over the last 40 years or so that the only way to fuel for running is with carbohydrates, carbs, loads and loads of carbs.
Eat lots of carbs every day, carbo-load the day before you run, carb up in the morning pre-run, consume ample carbs during your run. And then of course, you’re gonna want some carbs for recovery after your run.
This has been the standard approach since the 1980s. But it’s definitely not the only way to do things. The thing is, this approach just doesn’t work for everyone. Some people like me gain a lot of weight eating all those carbs regardless of how much we run. So in this episode, I offer an alternative way to fuel long-distance running one that doesn’t cause you to gain all that weight in the process.
But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about nutrition, weight loss, and improving your running. If you’re new to the podcast, it can probably feel a little overwhelming. And you’re like I don’t even know where to start with all this.
And if that sounds like you, totally cool, I got you covered. I created a free training. It’s about an hour long. It’s a video that you can watch, you can check it out anytime it’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronge Runner.
In this video, you’re gonna learn the basics of nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset, all these things that are geared towards you the long-distance runner. So if you’re ready to get leaner, and if you’re ready to get stronger, if you’re ready to become the most badass version of yourself that I know you are, then this free training is exactly what you need to get started. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training.
Okay, so let’s talk about an alternative way to fuel long-distance running. Why do I want to talk about this today? Because I keep hearing from runners and I keep reading articles online and social media posts for runners that talk about eating all the carbs.
And I’m like, gosh, are we still talking about this? Since the 1980s, the carb-loading approach has been the gold standard, so to speak for runners just eat all the carbs, and you’re going to find that most coaches teach this approach.
Most experts, quote-unquote experts, teach this approach. When I got my running, coaching certification, when I went through my coaching certification program, I was taught this approach. And this approach is fine. And it does work for some people. But it doesn’t work for everybody.
For some of us, like me, eating all those carbs caused us to gain a lot of weight in the process. You know, and I’m not against having carbohydrates. In fact, I think using carbohydrates strategically for running is a great tool.
It’s a really good tool that you have in your tool belt, why not use the carbohydrates as fuel, especially for the higher intensity stuff or races? But eating all the carbs all the time, is what we’ve been taught and it just doesn’t work for everybody.
You know, I’m one of those people that is very sensitive to carbohydrates. You know, I eat carbs and I gain weight. And so if I just take this standard approach to fueling for long-distance running, I ballooned up 40 more pounds, 50 more pounds, whatever.
You know, I’ve shared this before where I was training for ultra marathons, I was running all the time, I was doing a ton of mileage and gaining weight in the process. You can’t outrun the wrong diet, right?
So for me the all carbs all the time approach while I loved it. Who doesn’t love eating carbs all the time? Oh, pizza, sure. Ice cream. Yep, that’s going to, I mean, I’m a runner, so I gotta eat this stuff. Right? Spaghetti all the time. Like I was just I was eating tons of bread and pasta. And sugar, like this was my diet. You know, it was like a 90% carbohydrates, you know?
And I just kept gaining weight and gaining weight and I was like wow, even though I was running a ton, you know, I was training for ultra marathons and running ultra marathons regularly and then gaining weight in the process does not make sense, right?
You are supposed to lose weight when you start training. Well, the wrong diet won’t allow that to happen, right, so the wrong diet will cause the weight to continually stack up. So for me, this this all carbs all the time approach is one that I tried, and it just didn’t work for me.
You know, I also found that I would crash and burn during long-distance events. And I’m like, what’s going on here, because I’m using all the fuel. You know, I’m taking all the gels and I’m eating, I’m pre-loading with carbs and do all this stuff. But I keep crashing and burning and mile 18 to 22 of a marathon, you know.
And I was like this, this isn’t working, like there’s got to be a different approach here. Okay. And there is, there are, there is an alternative approach, there are probably multiple other approaches that you can take.
But there’s one specific that I want to talk about today, one that doesn’t require eating all the carbs all the time, and one that doesn’t require you to gain a bunch of weight in the process, if that’s you.
And listen, if you’re the kind of person that can eat all those carbs, and not gain any weight, and it works really well for you, then keep doing your thing. Keep doing that. My hat’s off to you. But if you’re somebody that’s like Patrick, that really doesn’t work for me, then listen up, because here’s the different approach you want to take.
You want to get yourself fat-adapted. So we’re talking about this concept of fat adaptation. Fat adaptation means that you train your body to burn your stored body fat as fuel for long-distance running.
When you stop eating all the sugar and all the carbs constantly, you give your body a chance to tap into your stored body fat as fuel. So the way this works, essentially, is think about your different fuel sources in your body as like a fuel tank, and the top layer of that fuel tank is what’s gets burned first.
And that top layer is going to be sugar, essentially glucose, glycogen, that kind of stuff. So that is going to be burned first. And as long as that’s available, that is what’s going to be constantly burned. Okay.
And so the concept, but behind all carbs all the time thing is like you want to keep that top layer of the tank filled at all times so that you’re constantly always burning that. The problem is that when you run out of that, maybe you get to mile 20 of the marathon and you just haven’t done a good job of keeping up with the amount of carbs that you need for that event, or you haven’t trained yourself to metabolize carbs that to that extent.
That top layer of the tank is going to run out and then you’re going to crash because you don’t, you don’t have access to that lower portion of the gas tank, which is the biggest portion, I’m going to say it’s probably like 90% of that gas tank is going to be your fat stores.
But you don’t have access to that because you haven’t trained your body to use that fat as fuel, like the pathways are not there. So what happens is that when you stop eating the sugar and the carbs all the time?
You start to train your body to use the alternative fuel source, the fat stores the stored body fat, you know, we all eat some, you know, we all eat food and some of that energy that we consume gets used towards working muscles, some of that energy gets stored as fat to be used later as fuel.
The problem is we’ve just gotten so far away from using our stored body fat as fuel, it’s kind of like we just constantly put wood on the woodpile, but we’re never burning the wood it just keeps stacking up that’s our fat stores just getting bigger and bigger.
So when you train yourself to tap into those stored to your stored body fat as a fuel, now you have this like almost unlimited fuel source for running. So that’s the concept of fat-adaptation, you’re removing the sugar and the carbs that that initial, like, let’s say 10%.
And I’m kind of making these numbers up but just think of it like you know, we only have the capacity to store like 2000 calories as of energy as glucose but we have our body fat can can store hundreds of thousands of calories of energy as stored body fat, so just know that yeah, it’s probably like 10% and 90%, something like that. It’s probably more like 99 and 1% or something okay.
Anyway, so we want to get ourselves fat-adapted we want to be able to adapt to using that stored body fat as fuel. Okay, now, people hear this and they’re like, oh, that’s crazy. That’s just some weird fringe thing, it’s probably a fad, and it’s gonna go away.
Listen, we’ve been doing this for millennia, as human beings, we’ve been doing it for more than millennia, for like millions of years. Fat Burning is our natural state as human beings. You know, we store some of that energy we consume as body fat, and we use it when we’re not eating.
This is the way the human body is designed, you know, there’s periods of feasting, and there’s periods of fasting during those periods of fasting, we should be tapping into our stored body fat as fuel. Humans are really good at this, we are naturally really good at using fat as fuel.
And we’re naturally good distance runners like we used to be hunter-gatherers, we used to be a persistence Hunter, so we would, we would chase down prey, and we would outrun them not from a speed perspective, but from a time perspective like we would, you know, cut an antelope out of the herd or whatever.
And they might be able to outrun us in the short distance, but over time, like over hours and days, we would run them down to where they just would die of exhaustion. You know, poor antelope. I know, but good for us, because now we have this nutrient-dense meal that would that would sustain us, you know.
So the human body is designed to use that stored body fat as fuel during those times when we didn’t have the other food coming in. Okay. So to say that, oh, you have to consume all the carbs, all the pasta, all the bread all the time, just to be able to run?
That’s actually the new thing. That’s actually the weird fad thing that we’ve only been doing for the last 40 years or so. Right? I mean, isn’t that interesting that people look at this fat-burning thing. And they’re like, oh, you know, that’s not the way you should do it.
And I’m like, well, listen, we’ve been amazing runners for millions of years as humans and we never had to eat all the pasta and bread and gels and stuff like that. Why now? Should we have to do that? Okay.
So not only is it not a fad thing, or some weird approach, like there are elite runners that have adopted this approach for years and years and years, and they’re at the top of their game, you know, I’m gonna mention a couple of them here.
And I’ve talked about these guys before on the podcast here. And there are countless others too, but these guys just are kind of like the top, you know, the top 1% or whatever. Jeff Browning. He’s an ultra runner. He’s finished nearly 200 ultra marathons in his career. He’s had over 40 career ultra marathon wins 29 of those at the 100 mile plus distance, making him second in the world for the most 100 mile wins in history.
Ranked seven times in the top 10 of ultra running magazines, North American Ultra Runner of the year, ranked third in Ultra running magazines, North American Ultra Runner of the decade. He builds multiple, multiple course records, including the Moab 240 course record, and he is a low carb, low carb, high-fat kind of he takes that approach to his training.
You know, he’s very vocal about his fat-burning approach, his fat-adapted approach to ultra running, you know, he doesn’t consume all the sugars and all the gels and all the pasta and all the carbs. All right.
And another one that comes to mind is Mike McKnight. He’s an ultra runner. He specializes in the 200 mile distance. And he posed several wins every year for different events. He’s kind of known because he ran 118 Miles while consuming zero calories, zero calories. He ran 118 miles. He was just relying on his own stored body fat for fuel and he’s a pretty, pretty lean guy. You know? He’s amazing.
And I actually tried this, I was like, hey, you know, I’m gonna I’m gonna give this a shot. I didn’t do 180 miles but I did two marathons and a 50k ultra marathon on zero calories just to say like, Oh, can I even do this? Yeah, I could do it and I was fine. Really no problems whatsoever.
And then of course, there’s Zach Bitter. He’s an American ultramarathon runner. He specializes in the 100 miler distance and he’s done like over 60 ultras. He’s known for his low-carb diet, which he uses for training and racing nutrition. He had the record for the 100 miler. One point of 11 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds. I’m gonna say that one more time because that is a crazy number, he ran 100 miles and 11 hours in 90 minutes. That’s insane.
He’s the holder of the 12-hour American record at 104.88 miles. He claims the 100-mile and 12-hour world records at the Six Days in the Dome event in Milwaukee in 2019. Competed for team USA world 100 Kilometer team three times.
So these are guys, these are just some of the guys who are benefiting and their, their elite athletes who are at the top of their game. And they’re taking this low-carb approach to distance running. They’re not consuming all the carbs all the time. Yeah, they do use some carbs for their events.
And they’ll tell you, you know, you can check them out, or their websites, check them out on social media, they have podcasts and stuff like that, you can totally listen to what these guys say. And they’ll tell you they do like maybe, you know, 30 to 50 grams of carbs per hour for these events, which is not a lot. But they’re not eating all the carbs all the time. They’re taking this fat adaptation approach to running and it’s working really, really well for them. Okay.
Another thing to consider here is that if your goal is to lose weight, then this is a great way to lose weight. Because listen, if you want to lose weight, what do you got to do? You have to burn a fat, right?
We’re not talking about weight loss, we’re talking about fat loss. So you have to burn the fat. If you are burning the fat, you are losing weight. And it’s really hard to burn the fat when you’re on that super high-carb runner’s type of diet, right?
Because of the whole fuel source prioritization, you know, you’re going to burn through the glucose first, then you’re going to tap into the fat but you gotta like, You got to eliminate that top 1% or whatever of your fuel tank.
So if fat burning is the key to weight loss, which it is, wouldn’t you want to do it? It that makes fat burning the priority? Yes, you would. When you eat for fat-burning, you’re running improves your endurance and improves and you lose weight in the process. Right?
So if you’re somebody who is interested in losing weight, this approach might work for you, it may be something you want to consider. Okay, and and listen, when we talk about a low-carb approach to fueling a low-carb diet, a low-carb, you know, nutrition approach; a lot of people think, you know, you’re talking about keto, or doing no carbs or carnivore or something like that.
No, it’s not about that. It’s about finding the right amount of carbs that keeps you burning fat, while also helping you’re running because carbs are helpful for running, right? You don’t have to be Mike McKnight and do the zero-calorie thing. But it’s cool that the human body can do that, you know.
That’s fat-adaptation. And it’s most impressive, like what that guy does, right? And by the way, this guy is not fat, right? You don’t need a ton of body fat, to be able to use your own stored body fat as fuel.
Even the leanest of athletes can benefit from fat adaptation as an approach. Okay, so this doesn’t mean that you’re never eating any carbs, you can still eat some carbs. I use carbs for fuel, and I encourage my clients to use carbs for fuel, but we prefer like whole food sources of carbs, you know, we might be talking about bananas or sweet potatoes or rice or something like that, right?
And obviously, everybody’s a little bit different. And you have to kind of experiment with what works for you. But there’s, there’s tons of great options just from the natural world like and sticking with whole food sources of carbohydrates is great.
Now I get it that when you’re in any event, like you can’t carry a bunch of sweet potatoes or bananas with you. I mean, it’s just really not that convenient. But what’s cool is that there are a bunch of brands out there that cater to the low-carb endurance athlete, and they have entire product lines that are geared towards helping you fuel for running while maintaining that fat-burning state.
So like Hammer Nutrition is one you can use. S-Fuels, Muir energy, and there are a bunch of other brands out there and new ones coming out all the time. So that’s a very encouraging thing that there are companies out there that are that are gearing their product lines towards the low carb endurance athlete. Okay.
Now, just like I said, at the beginning of this podcast that the high-carb approach isn’t for everyone, just like that, like the fat-adapted approach probably isn’t for everyone. So I’m not going to come out here and say that everybody should do this. And everybody will benefit from this.
Some people do really fine eating all the carbs and the sugar and the gels, and they never have to worry about gaining weight. And if that’s you, that is amazing. That’s definitely not me. But if you struggle with losing weight, and you love running, then this might be the approach that you want to try.
You know, the only way you can tell if it works through you, or if you enjoy it, or if you can do this as a lifestyle as to give it a shot, you might see the weight start to come off, you might experience running feeling easier than ever before.
You might see your energy levels are better all day long, no more afternoon crashes, you might begin to think more clearly be able to focus and concentrate better. And as always, if you want help with any of this, you can always reach out to me you can go to my website runningleancoaching.com.
Every day I help runners get fat-adapted, lose weight, improve their running performance and make all this a lifestyle. So whatever approach you take cool, but it has to be something that is sustainable for you. Because if it’s not sustainable for you, it’s not going to work because this stuff takes time.
You know, if you want to lose weight, and you want to improve your diet, improve your nutrition, improve your running and your nutrition for running specifically, then you’re gonna have to take a little bit of time to figure out what works for you. And it has to be something that you can do sustainably long term, right?
So I work with my clients, we work together to make sure whatever they’re doing is something that they can do on their own like for good, or it’s not about quick fixes, but lifestyle changes, right being fit and healthy isn’t a destination we’re trying to get to. It’s how we live our life. Okay. Consider the fat-adapted approach. I think it’s amazing. It works really well for me and countless people that I work with. Give it a shot. You never know. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
I recently sat down with Dr. Marvin Merrit and had an awesome conversation about what it means to be a healthy human being. In the world of health and fitness, there is a lot of information out …
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 201 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, reversing disease through nutrition and exercise with Dr. Marvin Merrit.
So I recently sat down with Dr. Marvin, and we had this awesome conversation about what it means to be a healthy human being. In the world of health and fitness. There’s a lot of confusing information out there. And it can feel pretty overwhelming. And a lot of this information can even be contradictory.
Okay, so how do you know what you should be doing? Well, rest assured that Dr. Marvin and I break it all down for you. And we offer up some very clear strategies for reversing disease, using nutrition and exercise so that you can become the healthiest version of yourself yet.
But first, I know I talk a lot about losing weight, and improving your health and fitness. And I know that all the stuff that even I talk about here can feel a little overwhelming.
That’s why I created a free training just for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. I wanted to make it easy for you, I wanted to break it all down, put all the stuff that I’ve been talking about here on the podcast for over 200 episodes now and give you some really actionable strategies.
So in this training video, you’re going to learn how to fuel your body properly so that you can lose weight and improve your running. You’re going to learn the incredibly important role that strength plays in being a lean healthy runner.
You’re going to learn how to make changes that are actually sustainable, because that is what it’s all about. We’re not interested in short term fixes. We want sustainability with our diet, and so much more. So if you’re ready to get leaner and get stronger, run faster and run longer than ever before. If you’re ready to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself yet, then check out this free training.
It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. You can find it by going to my website, runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training.
Okay, without further ado, let’s just get into this conversation. So much fun talking to Dr. Marvin, reversing disease through nutrition and exercise with Dr. Marvin Merrit.
Okay, today, I’ve got Dr. Marvin here, Marvin Merrit and Marvin reached out to me on Facebook, right?
Dr. Marvin Merrit
Yes.
Patrick McGilvray
And you were sharing with me that you teach a lot of the same concepts and principles that I talked about on my podcast, and I share on social media and things like that. And you said, hey, this would be a great kind of collaboration, or maybe we can have a conversation about this.
So we got on a call and you and I had a great conversation where I thought, man, we should really record this, you know, and do a podcast on this because you come out with this healthy eating and healthy lifestyle, from a little bit of a different perspective, being a doctor.
And I typically don’t talk a lot about, about the health, I’m sorry about the medical side of things because I’m not a doctor. I do quote a lot of doctors and I read a lot of the research and I and I understand a lot of the concepts.
And I absolutely know how a lot of these healthy principles can help us with medical conditions. But it’s you know, I don’t like to talk about that stuff, because I don’t have that MD after my name, you know. So that’s where you come in. And I want to just kind of talk to you about, you know, those, the medical side of things and how healthy eating and exercising can help us.
So first of all, before we get into all that stuff, just give us a little bit of background on who you are, and how you got to where you are today with all this stuff.
Marvin Merrit
Sure. Well, basically I’m a kid from New Jersey. I went to college as an undergrad at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Upon graduation from there, I attended Life University where I got my Doctorate, and I’ve been a practicing physician for almost 40 years.
My practice has taken many manifestations over the years. And now I kind of focus a lot on treating my patients very well. realistically very naturally, through exercise through diet and through nutritional supplements to manage what we call metabolic syndrome, which is type two diabetes, hyperlipidemia, which has high cholesterol, high triglycerides, and hypertension, which we commonly refer to as high blood pressure.
And being that these are all lifestyle diseases, people can go ahead and make that conscious decision. Do I want to live healthy? Do I want to eat healthy? Do I want to increase my exercise?
Because all of those combined together will help with the better control of all of these diseases that many people suffer from not just here in the United States, but around the world and just about all modern countries.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and when you say that lifestyle diseases, I think that is spot on, because these are things that are caused by lifestyle. Right?
Marvin Merrit
Exactly, exactly. You know, you, you eat poorly, you know, it’s the old story garbage in garbage out, you eat poorly, you’re going to end up with high cholesterol, there’s just no way around it.
You eat too much saturated fats, too much greasy foods, the fried chicken, the French fries, you’re going to end up with high cholesterol levels.
You eat a lot of products that have hidden sodium in it. And I say hidden sodium, because it’s okay to add a little bit of salt at the table, especially if you’re working out, you’re sweating, you want to replace some of those electrolytes.
But there’s so many foods that have hidden sodium in it because sodium for ages has been used as a preservative. And when you start reading things that are in a can, or things that are in a jar, you see all of this hidden sodium in there in its chemical names, such as, you know, sodium benzoate, you know, people don’t know what sodium benzoate is, they just see that it’s another chemical.
But without fully understanding the labels that are on the containers of the foods that we eat, they don’t realize what they actually have. So that’s where it all comes into play.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I’m gonna reel it back here in just a second. But I have to tell you, I saw this very funny meme once. And I love this, it really sums it up. It’s a guy, you know, talking to his doctor.
And the doctor says, well, you have all these lifestyle diseases. And the guy says to the doctor, okay, I guess I need to change my lifestyle. And the doctor says, oh, no, here’s a pill.
And I think that sort of sums up the medical, the general medical answer to these lifestyle diseases, which is take this drug, take that drug, don’t change your lifestyle, don’t worry about that. That’s all fine. Just, you know, take these drugs.
What’s your take on that? Like, how do you approach things differently than just prescribing medication for people who have these issues?
Marvin Merrit
What it really comes down to and it’s something that that you talk about is people have to be willing to be uncomfortable, they have to be willing to change their diet, they have to be willing to cut out the starchy carbohydrates, the breads, the cakes, the cookies, that candies, the ice cream, you know, the things that are the comfort foods, they have to be willing to get up off the sofa and move, whether it’s run, walk, ride a bicycle, you know, whatever the case, may be getting the pool and swim a couple of laps, just do something physical every single day, they have to be willing to do that.
And, and it’s, it’s all changing that comfort level, people have to be uncomfortable. There’s nothing wrong with okay, you go out for dinner with your, you know, whoever on a Saturday night and you want to have a little bit of something that you don’t normally eat, that’s okay.
But when you do it every day, that’s what gets them into the position that they’re in. And by doing that, that’s the way they’re able to lower and eventually get off some of these medications like the Metformin and the Glipizide. And, and that’s just for diabetes.
Or you know, the medications that we use for high cholesterol, the statins, which are horrible drugs to start out with, because people have so many side effects with them.
And then the hypertension medications, the ACE inhibitors that yeah, great. So it’s going to help lower your blood pressure, but it’s going to give you a chronic cough for the rest of your life. Why put those into your body when you can put natural healthy foods into your body and reverse all of these situations that you have?
And it’s like I always tell my patients, you know, you can keep a diary, and you can fudge that diary all you want. You can come in and talk to me and you can tell me any story you want. Blood doesn’t lie. When I run your blood, I know the truth.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s cool. So you see a lot of these metabolic syndrome issues with people and you treat them naturally and you see good results. Do you see a lot of reversal of these diseases?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, I actually do. If you if you get them off, you know, again, the starchy carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables are okay, but you get them off those starchy carbohydrates, all of those carbohydrates turn to glucose, that’s how we metabolize them, the glucose gets in the blood, and that’s going to raise your blood glucose levels.
Now when it gets a little bit too high, that eventually is going to get stored in the liver. And that’s going to get stored as glycogen. Glycogen is good, because we break that down between meals, we break that down when we exercise.
However, if you don’t do that, then that glycogen is eventually going to turn to triglycerides, triglycerides will get them back into the blood, those can clog some arteries, specifically arteries in the heart.
And that’s how people end up with myocardial infarction, heart attacks, they end up with blockages in the carotid arteries, and it just becomes a vicious vicious cycle.
So what I tried to do is change their diets, get them off the carbs, get them off the fats, get them taking some good healthy supplements to help alleviate some of these problems, such as red yeast rice. Red yeast rice is a natural statin. It’s been used for hundreds of years. Okay.
But most doctors don’t want to use it. And I don’t want to get into the whole theories behind, you know, drug reps and you know, and drug labs and things like that. But they are more prone to prescribe a medication than to use something natural because there’s an incentive there to write that prescription.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I hate that it works that way. So you mentioned like lowering fat intake. What do you mean by that? And like, what do you consider like good, healthy fats?
Marvin Merrit
Okay, so good, healthy fats. Good healthy fats are going to come from things like olive oil. I use a lot of olive oil when I personally cook, because it’s a good healthy fat because you can’t deep fry in it, you just saute in it. Other good healthy fats, avocados, good healthy fats, all your nuts, good healthy fats. Okay, those are all things that are healthy for us.
What’s not healthy is all the processed oils, all the seed oils, while those seed oils are these heavy oils that we just don’t digest well. And because we don’t digest them, well, now they end up getting stored.
And that’s how people also end up suffering from what we call fatty liver disease. The too much of the saturated fats, the fats get stored in the liver, and the liver becomes filled with fat.
It’s reversible, because the liver is one of the most versatile organs that we have in the human body. So we’re able to reverse that. But again, it’s getting off those fats and changing the diet up.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I tell people, generally speaking to stay away from those seed oils, canola oil, you know, that kind of stuff. Whatever is considered like vegetable oils, you know, because they were designed to be something that was like heart healthy, and they’re sold and marketed as being heart healthy. But I think there’s other implications that eating that stuff. There’s like some long term studies that have been done that have shown that this stuff is just toxic for your body.
Marvin Merrit
It’s extremely toxic. You know, if you remember years ago, they used to say, oh, stop eating eggs, eggs are high and cholesterol. But when you take a look at an egg, an egg is almost the perfect food.
It has protein, it has some fat, okay, it has a little bit of carbohydrate in it. And again, in moderation eating a couple of eggs a week is almost the perfect food. So there’s nothing wrong with that.
Where again utilizing these these vegetable oils, the corn oils. Canola oils. You know, those, those just do not metabolize well in the body. And one of the other things I tell my patients, olive oil aside, the lighter the color of the oil, the healthier it is for you, because it’s not as heavy.
So if you use something like sunflower oil, sunflower oil is a very, very light colored oil. It’s good for you, you can utilize it. It metabolizes well in the human body. You can’t fry in it, deep fry in it, because it won’t hold up, it’ll break down. So those types of oils, those are the oils that tend to be more healthy for us.
Patrick McGilvray
And then how do you figure olive oil and things like that play in? Because olive oil is pretty dark, usually.
Marvin Merrit
Olive oil is pretty dark, but olive oil is purified. And that’s the nice thing about it, you get that extra virgin olive oil, which is the better of the olive oils. And that’s been purified. And that because you can’t deep fry in it. You can only saute like some vegetables or a chicken breast or something like that. It’s not going to be soaked in that oil.
Whereas you take something like a vegetable oil, or an animal based oil like lard and you drop your chicken breast covered in you know whatever coating you put it in and you fry it in there for 10 minutes or so, that oil just soaks right into the meat. It soaks right into that breading. And now you’re eating that oil on top of it. And that’s where the downfall comes.
Patrick McGilvray
Gotcha. Gotcha. And so let’s talk a little bit about the exercise side of things. So tell me a little bit about your history because I know you’re a runner, right?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, yeah, I run, I cycle. I actually, I was a wrestler. I wrestled in college, I wrestled in high school. I was a lifeguard on the Jersey Shore. That’s the way I worked my way through college.
I’ve always been very, very active. You know, and I picked up running probably about 10 years ago, I got this bug to, I started out walking. And I said, you know, I’ll let me try a little bit of running. And one thing led to the next and before I knew what I was doing, 5K’s and 10K’s and then a triathlon and said, Well, that’s a lot of fun.
So I started doing more and more, I’m just letting through the whole lifestyle of it. And, you know, realize that, you know, you can’t smoke, you can’t drink heavily, you can’t eat poorly, to participate in these sports, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work with our bodies.
Although oddly enough, I’ve seen some weird things on some of these courses that I’ve run with what people do. But, you know, nonetheless, you know, it’s all part of that healthy lifestyle.
And by exercising, that helps you metabolize all of these good foods that you put into your body into energy. And that gives you the energy to go out there and run 5k, to go out there and run 10k, to go out there and jump on a bike for 30-40 miles. And you don’t feel tired afterwards, you feel energized. On top of that, you get that dopamine release on top of it. And it all just ties together. And that’s what I try to get my patients to do.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and you have like a running group that you do there. And you’re in Florida, right?
Marvin Merrit
Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah, what I do is on Saturdays, I know it sounds crazy for a doctor to work on Saturdays. But on Saturdays, I go to my office and where my office is located in Pompano Beach, it’s in an office building kind of off the beaten path, which I kind of like and it’s a beautiful lake right across the street.
So my patients, I have two groups of patients, I have my walker patients and I have my runner patients. My walker patients, I meet them early in the morning. And we’ll go out for a two or three mile walk, a brisk walk and get their heart rate up and exercise and stretching beforehand.
We walk, come back, stretch again, we talk a little bit about our nutrition and any challenges that they face during the week.
And then I get my running group and a little bit later on. And we’ll go out for a 5k a three mile run, not too hard of a pace, running about a 13 minute mile give or take. Because some of them are a little bit slower.
And I don’t like to leave anybody behind. So we’ll slow the group down if we have a slower runner. And same thing stretch beforehand, go for a run stretch afterwards, you know.
And everybody says oh, we should go to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, no let’s not go to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, let’s go get something healthy to eat. The coffee is okay, but the Dunkin Donuts isn’t gonna work. And that’s what I tried to do with them at least two to three Saturdays a month, we get together and we do that.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s cool because you’re building this relationship with people where you can share more than you can in a you know, 14 minutes that you have with your patients, you probably spend more time with your patients than a lot of doctors, the traditional doctors that are working for these big insurance companies, they get, you know, certain amount of time they’re allowed to spend with each person. Right?
And that’s it, and then they’re done. But you’re creating these relationships, and you’re having these conversations with people and you’re actually out there running with them. You’re actually out there having breakfast with them. I think that’s really cool.
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, you know, my philosophy has been and to give you a little bit more of the background of how this generation of my practice manifested. Sadly, my mom died from complications of type two diabetes.
And going forward from that I said to myself, I said, you know, and she didn’t take care of herself. That was all part of it I said, people need to be educated. People need to understand because it’s a hidden disease. People don’t really know that they have type two diabetes until something goes really wrong.
Or they just go to the doctor for their annual checkup. And they do blood and they’re, you know, their fasting blood sugar is like 190 or they give a urine and their sugar is like 800 milligrams per deciliter or something like that.
So that’s when they find out about it. For the most part, it’s a silent disease. And because it’s a silent disease, people don’t even realize that something is wrong.
Once they realize something is wrong, then we can get them on the track to doing better, getting better, feeling better, feeling stronger, and reversing most of the symptomatology of type two diabetes. And again, type two diabetes goes hand in hand with high cholesterol, high blood pressure. They all three seem to go together all at the same time.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you mentioned that diabetes as being sort of a hidden thing and I know a lot of the visceral fat that people have, you know, visceral fat is that internal fat, it’s growing around your organs and things like that’s the really the bad kind of fat.
And people don’t know that they’re, that they’re getting, they don’t know that they have that. Right. I think it was Professor Tim Noakes, who was a long distance runner, and he was running all these marathons he had done like, I forget how many 72 marathons or something crazy like that.
And went to the doctor and was diagnosed with diabetes. And he was like, that’s impossible. You know, I run all these marathons and, and he sort of, I don’t know if he coined this term or not, but he calls it tofi T-O-F-I, thin on the outside fat on the inside. You know, that is like people who are fit and they’re exercising, and they look pretty good from the outside. But inside, there’s stuff going on, they need to get fixed, you know?
Marvin Merrit
Right. Right. And that’s exactly it. The thin on the outside, they’re fat on the inside, because yeah, you carry this layer of visceral fat. We all do, because we use it for insulation when it’s cold. And you live up there in Ohio, you know about cold
Patrick McGilvray
This week for sure, yeah.
Marvin Merrit
You know, it’s, yeah, it’s that body fat, that does help keep us a little bit warmer, which is very, very important. Also, in times of crisis, our bodies will tap into that, you know, internal body fat, but we shouldn’t be carrying enormous amounts of it.
You know, it’s interesting in my, in my, I’m also a college professor, as you know, so when, when I teach, when I teach about the heart, we do dissection. And for years, we used to do these sheep heart dissections.
And one of the things I remember about the sheep hearts is they were very, very fatty, they did some research and sheep actually carry a lot of visceral fat. Granted, they don’t have to worry about diabetes and things like that, like we do, but they carry a lot of visceral fat.
And I still have one of the sheep parts in my lab, and I show my students the sheep part, as compared to a pig heart, which is what we dissect now. Now pigs, they don’t carry visceral fat, they carry body fat, which is a little bit different.
And we take a look at the differences between the two. And I say, can you imagine a human being that has such a poor diet that eats a lot of fat, and they have a heart that looks something like this?
Because they do, they will build up that visceral fat on the heart, which can also compress the heart, which now can result in cardiac conditions. So it all begins to tie in together. It’s how you take care of yourself. How do you choose to live your life? And that’s the bottom line.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s so interesting. So what are some of the main I guess, what is the right word for it, like complaints or whatever the people are coming to you with? Like, what’s the main things people need fixed? And why are they coming to you?
Marvin Merrit
Okay, basically, my practice is straight referral. I don’t advertise. I don’t belong to any insurance companies or anything like that. In fact, I take absolutely no insurance in my practice.
The reason why I do that is because I want my patients to have a commitment. I feel that if an insurance company is paying for them to come, they don’t really see what the insurance company is paying other than their copay, whether it be $5 $10, whatever.
So I want them to have commitment and commitment comes from them paying me, I make it very reasonable for them. But the thing is, is that when they come in to see me their referral, usually from a friend that has seen me or a relative that has seen me, and yeah, their complaint is, yeah, I’m a type two diabetic, I keep going into my medical doctor, all they do is they keep on increasing and increasing and increasing my medication.
And I don’t feel any better. I’m tired. I’m sluggish and rundown. I’m hungry all the time and drinking, like I own the water company, you know. And those are all the symptoms that you see. And then you have to try to fix that.
So the first thing I always do with these folks is, you know, keep a diet diary for me, okay, I want to know everything that goes in your mouth for the next seven days.
I don’t care if you think it’s minuscule, like a piece of gum, I want to know what it is. And then we start taking examination of that we start breaking it down to see what can we replace it with? What changes can we make?
How can we okay, you like gum? Well, I see you’re chewing bazooka bubble gum, which is high in sugar? Well, you know, let’s, let’s see if we can change that to something that’s a little bit less caustic on the body.
Okay, I’m not a big one in artificial sweeteners and things like that. But I’d rather have them chew a gum that has no sugar in it than a gum that’s all sugar. Okay, so these are just the little changes.
And like you do in your podcast, you know, you make these little steps with these people and make little changes in the diet and make little changes in their exercise. And we just start looking at this week after week, month after month.
And what’s really amazing they see it because they’ll see it in their blood work that hemoglobin A1C went from 11.2 to 9.7 they’re not, you know, normal yet they’re still diabetic. But that’s a significant change. And they feel better.
They get on the scale, and they’ve lost 10-15 pounds, they feel better, the clothes fit better. They realize that when they go out to dinner, they don’t have to eat half a basket of bread, you know, they can walk away from the bread.
And again, that is that psychological motivation that happens with these folks. And really what I do with them, Patrick is I give them 90 days, okay? If in 90 days, they can’t comply with my recommendations, I can’t help them. And I very politely, I verbally discharge them, and I send them a certified letter that they’re discharged, that there’s nothing more I can do for them.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s hardcore man.
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, you gotta be, that’s the only way to be because, because otherwise, you’re going to go on to another doctor, and they’re getting another pill, and they’re getting another medication and another prescription.
And then before you know it, they’re taking, I have a friend of mine, sadly, he’s, he’s my age, I’ll be 64. In January, he just turned 64. And he’s a type two diabetic, with all the problems, he will not listen to me.
So he goes to another doctor, he’s on four different diabetes medications, he’s on two different blood pressure medications, and a statin. And that’s just to start out with. And, you know, it’s just, it says, he doesn’t want to be uncomfortable, he’d rather, you know, go out and eat half a pizza.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, there’s this whole mentality that I think we really have to shift and you’re doing a great job of starting to shift this mentality of, I can just do what I want is I just go to the doctor and get a pill or get, you know, get on some kind of drug that’s going to that’s going to allow me to leave this lead this great, crappy lifestyle.
You know, I was talking to an older woman recently. I think she’s in her 70s. And she’s a type two diabetic and is on diabetes medication, and the doctor wanted to up her medication. And she was eating, you know, some cookies or something like that.
And this is a family member, and my girlfriend was like, hey, you shouldn’t be eating those cookies. You know, you got to go on this. If you got to take this medication, you shouldn’t be eating those cookies. And she said, oh, it’s fine, because the medications are free anyway. And so I don’t have to pay for it. So it’s fine. You know, that’s kind of like that is the wrong mentality. Right?
Marvin Merrit
And that’s why I take no insurance.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, exactly. And I love that. And the other thing I wanted to say, and one of the reasons why I really wanted to talk to you is because of that approach that you just talked about that you take with your with your patients, which is the same approach that I take with my coaching clients, which is, we’re going to look at what you’re doing today.
And we’re going to make a few modifications, and we’re going to see how you feel. And then we’re going to make a few more modifications and get your body adjusted to those changes. And then we’re going to like, see how you feel.
And then we’re going to just keep going with that process. I don’t have a diet that I’m going to hand over to them, because there’s no way I can know what’s going to work best for them.
Now, of course, I have guidelines like you do, and I have suggestions. But at the end of the day, everybody’s a little bit different. And everybody approaches this a little bit differently.
Yeah, we lower the carbs, Yeah, we tried to get off sugar, we want to stop using sugar as an emotional management tool. Yes, we need to increase the protein intake, especially if your activity levels are pretty high.
But for the most part, this is going to be very individualized for the person I’m working with. And so many doctors or coaches or, you know, trainers, whatever they have this like one diet, you know, in mind, and I just don’t think that works.
And so that’s what I really like, it was kind of refreshing when you and I talked about that, that, you know, you do take a very individualized approach and you work with each person, you treat them, like an individual because they are and you work around where they are and make a few changes and then continue with that process.
Marvin Merrit
And that’s absolutely, you know, I don’t just hand them a diet. I mean, you can go online and there’s a million diets for diabetics. Oh, do this diet. Oh, do that diet. Oh, do the keto diet, do the Atkins diet. You know, and we can go on and on about that. Oh, do Weight Watchers.
But that’s a cookbook, okay. We can’t do a cookbook. We have to make the recipe, individual to everybody’s lifestyle to everybody’s tastes, so to speak. And that’s what I tried to do because what might work for one patient may not work for the other patient.
And we have to find, you know, what’s that happy medium for that particular patient? What are we going to slowly begin to tweak in their diet? What is their, you know, their level of being able to exercise?
Some of them haven’t gotten off the sofa in 20 years, you know, I certainly can’t have going out and running, you know, 5K’s from day one. But you got to find out what their level of activity is.
I deal with a few patients, unfortunately, they’re either widows or widowers, and you know, they’re at home. And, you know, they don’t get out a lot. And I tell them, you know, what, get a dog. The dog needs to be walked. If you get a dog and you walk the dog, well, now you’re getting out there, and you’re doing some exercise.
And sometimes it’s as simple as easy fix as that and now they also have companionship, something that they’re responsible for, and they’re able to go out and do that. And that’s, that’s just a little easy fix that I do with some of our patients, not all of them, because they all can’t have dogs where they live. But those that can, that’s something that I strongly recommend.
Patrick McGilvray
Not everybody likes dogs, Marvin, okay. You can walk your lizard if you need to. There you go. Yeah. Well, from an exercise standpoint, what do you see as sort of the best types of exercises that kind of across the board, most people should do or get the best benefits from doing regularly,
Marvin Merrit
There should always be a balance between aerobic or cardio exercise and strength training. Again, very similar to the things that you talk about in your podcasts, you know, we talked about, you know, cardio exercise, again, it doesn’t have to be running, but walking, walking at a good pace, you know, not walking, like you’re going through the mall, shopping, but walking at a good pace.
And then some strength training and strength training doesn’t necessarily have to mean, you know, go to the gym and spend hours and hours on end in the gym. All it means is, go on Amazon, get some bands, you know, and, and start doing that.
Some of my patients, I’ll actually, you know, I have the bands in my office. I want to say I sell to them, I sell them for what I paid for it off of Amazon. It’s just a convenience thing. It’s like, here, let me show you how to do this. And I’ll show them a half a dozen exercises to do with the bands, maybe some arm curls, maybe some overhead presses, some, you know, deltoid work, just some things like that.
And I have them worked with bands, sometimes they’ll come to the office on the Saturday sessions, I’ll have them bring their bands with them. And as a group, we’ll do some band exercises. And that’s it just something to get them physically moving again.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I love that. And I’m a big fan of strength training, especially like actually being intentional about getting stronger muscles. Because as we get older, and I know you probably work with a lot of older people that, you know, one of the biggest issues with older people is that their muscle mass really declines, you know, they start getting very weak.
And then their bone mass also gets pretty weak. And then they fall and they have complications. And that leads to all kinds of issues because now they’re completely immobile, they can’t do anything. So building muscle, building strong muscles, building a strong skeletal system, skeletal muscle and bone sport. It’s so huge. Oh my god, it’s gonna put years and years and maybe decades on your life.
Marvin Merrit
It’s sustaining. You know, without getting too scientific, we have what’s known as Wolf’s law. And Wolf’s law states that the more stress you place on your skeletal system, the healthier your skeletal system is going to be.
And this is something that I find with my female patients is that as they get older, they suffer from what’s known as osteopenia, which is a loss of bone mass. Okay. So I put them on calcium and magnesium that helps with the with the bone mass a little bit from nutritional standpoint.
But they get that way because they haven’t done much in the way of exercise. Now you start putting more stress on the skeletal system by having them exercise a bit, and it’s not so much that you reverse the osteopenia, slowly osteopenia, so it doesn’t progress to a severe case of osteoporosis. And that’s what you really want to prevent. Because you don’t want this poor woman stepping off the curb and the pressure is just right. And boom, she breaks a hip. That’s the thing you don’t want.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, what’s the difference between osteopenia and osteoporosis?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, osteopenia is when you start losing bone mass. Osteoporosis is where the bone actually gets eaten away, and you lose all of this calcium. And it almost looks like in osteoporosis, if you look at it under the microscope, it almost looks like moths have eaten away at the bone, like moths will eat away at a cloth. That’s what it’s like. Osteopenia, you just start seeing on an x-ray, how the bone mass is getting thinner and thinner and thinner. And then it can lead to the next.
Patrick McGilvray
Wow, okay, interesting. Just learn something. That’s cool. So yeah, I think strength is like so huge. It’s like one of the best things you can do for yourself. And I think that if as we get older, if we continue building strong muscles and supporting strong bones, then you’re you’re going to live longer, you’re going to have a better quality of life, you’re less likely to get injured from doing normal day to day things, especially those of us who love to run. And you can run as you get I know people who run marathons in their 90s, you know.
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, there’s a video that I showed to my students when I’m teaching. It was done by PBS, and it showcases an 87 year old man doing the triathlon Escape from Alcatraz. I mean, that’s one of the toughest triathlons because you’re swimming across San Francisco Bay for a mile and a half, followed by I think it’s 20 miles on the bike, and then an eight mile run. And he’s 87. I mean, that’s pretty big. I want to be back. I want to be him. That’s my goal.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s no joke right there. That’s,
Marvin Merrit
That’s my goal. Yeah. That’s my goal.
Patrick McGilvray
That is amazing. Yeah, that San Francisco Bay is brutal. That is brutal. It’s a little stretch of ocean swim. Can’t imagine. People swim in that and they get seasick from this swimming because there’s so much up and down movement. This has been really good.
So let me ask you this. If people wanted to try to find you, how could they reach out to you and, and be able to find you and learn more about you and how they might be able to hook up with you?
Marvin Merrit
Sure, they can email me and marvinmerrit@bellsouth.net. But that’s one way they can call me. And I can give you my cell phone number. I have no issue with that. I always ask though, if you want to reach out to me text me before calling.
I’ll always get back and my phone number is 954-649-5280 Just text me before calling tell me what you need me for. And I’ll be more than happy to, you know, if I’m with patients or teaching, I’ll just politely text you back that I’ll get back to you. But I’ll always get back to people and I always do. That’s just the way I am. That’s the two easiest ways to get hold of me.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, cool. And do you work with people that are not local to Pompano Beach area?
Marvin Merrit
Yes, absolutely. I can do it. You know, via telehealth, you know, no problem with that at all.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Cool. What’s next for you? I know you just did a race about a week ago. Right? What did you do?
Marvin Merrit
Yeah, I did the Danger Point 5k I had a personal best that 3550. Which I was pretty happy with in my ripe old age. I think next I’m probably going to do the jingle bell jog on Christmas Eve. Okay, I’ll do that next.
And I’ll keep training but I’ll take a little bit of time off from from racing because I want to do the In April the Los Olas Triathlon, which is down here that’s, well it takes place on Fort Lauderdale beach and they call it the Los Olas Triathlon because it crosses Los Olas Boulevard which is pretty famous down here.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Is that a sprint triathlon? Yeah. Cool. You swim in the ocean?
Marvin Merrit
Oh, yeah, swimming the ocean. And then we’ll see where the spring in the summer takes me. There’s usually a couple of events that pop up. Last year I did the July 4 triathlon. It was a great weekend. Actually a great couple of weeks, I did the Memorial Day 5k followed by the July 4th triathlon, which was on July second, followed by the July 4th 5k, on July 4th, so it was a nice quick couple of weeks and then finished up the end of August with the Iguana Man 5K.
So I try to stay active. I tried to do you know, 5675 k’s a year, two, three triathlons, maybe a duathalon depending on how the water is.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. You are an example of what is possible, Marvin, I love it. Keep up the good work seriously. You’re doing some work in this world. And you’re helping people get healthier and helping people live longer and helping people figure out how to do all this because it’s confusing.
And there’s a lot of information out there that’s just like, it’s a lot of conflicting information, a lot of confusing information and it’s very overwhelming for people. So to have somebody like you where people can go and, you know, do a consult with you like even you know, over Zoom or however you do it. That’s awesome.
Because that gives people an opportunity to start to see that things can be different for them and they don’t have to be on medication for the rest of their life. Just because you have one of these lifestyle diseases, it’s not a death sentence. It doesn’t mean you can’t improve with the right diet and exercise.
So hats off to you, my friend for doing good work. Keep it up. Thank you for taking some time to chat with me here today. It’s been really fun.
Marvin Merrit
I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot. Patrick, thank you so much for having me.
Lots of runners look pretty healthy on the outside. They exercise a lot, maintain a decent weight, have low body fat percentage, low BMI, and generally look fit. But inside there could be a lot …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 191 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today: Fit But Unhealthy. So, lots of runners look pretty healthy on the outside, they exercise a lot, they maintain a decent weight, they have a low body fat percentage, low BMI, they generally look and feel fit. but inside there could be a lot more going on that no one really sees.
So I came across this study recently that looked at low carbohydrate diets versus high carbohydrate diets and their effects on athletic performance. And the results are pretty interesting from the athletic performance standpoint, but also kind of surprising from a health perspective.
So today, I’m going to look at what it means to be fit but unhealthy, and what you can do to make sure you are both. But first, as The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, I’ve helped hundreds of runners over the last few years lose a lot of weight; but here’s a little secret to the people who I work with, it’s not about losing weight. I know it sounds contrary, but hear me out.
Losing weight is great. And it inevitably happens, but the real goal of working together is to help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. When you make the commitment to change your relationship with food and exercise when you focus on building strength and endurance.
When you do the internal work of developing the right mindset, you will absolutely transform yourself into a leaner, stronger runner and the healthiest version of yourself yet. So weight loss is not the goal. It’s just a nice side effect of you becoming your fittest and healthiest self.
So make the commitment today to improve your health and fitness. And you’ll lose that extra weight along the way. And if you want a little help with all this, as always, you can join the Running Lean Coaching Project.
That’s my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about that. And if you want a little bit of help, just getting started with all this stuff, then I have just the thing to help you get started on the right track.
I put together a free training for you. It’s about an hour long, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and keep it off for good without running a million miles a week.
A few of the things that you’re gonna learn in this in depth training, why running more and eating less is not an effective way to lose weight, the one thing runners typically don’t do when they are trying to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your endurance and help your weight loss, and the right mindset shifts required to make all these changes last for life.
You’re going to learn how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals directly from me, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners. So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger, to run faster and longer and to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, then you need to check out this free training now just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Cool. Awesome.
Okay, so let’s talk about Fit But Unhealthy. So I came across this study recently. The study was called low and high carbohydrate isocaloric diets on performance, fat oxidation, glucose and cardio metabolic health in middle age males. Kind of a mouthful.
This was published in the Journal Frontiers in nutrition in February of 2023. So it’s a pretty recent study. And the study was conducted by some of the pretty well known researchers in the low carb endurance and athletic world like Professor Tim Noakes, Dominic D’Agostino, Dr. Jeff Bullock.
And one of the reasons that they did this study is that since the 1970s, there has been this shift towards a high carbohydrate, low fat diet for health benefits, but also for training benefits. You know, a lot of the professional athletes since the 70s have shifted to a high carbohydrate, low fat diet because they want to reap the benefits of all the carbohydrates in their diet.
So that they can, you know, run faster, right and, and improve their athletic performance. Most athletes hit a crossover point in their fuel system. So they go from burning mostly fat to almost exclusively burning carbohydrates.
So they reach this crossover point where fat burning effectively shuts down around 85% of the of their VO2 max. So around 85% of most athletes’ VO2 max, they hit this crossover point where fat burning pretty much shuts down to zero.
And unless you have ample stores of carbohydrate to use this fuel, you bonk you crash and burn, you hit the wall. So countering all of this, this is what’s been known and been followed and adhered to, since the 1970s or so encountering all of this is the fact that there’s a lot of athletes and a huge growing number of athletes that have been following a low carb high fat diet.
And they have been able to dramatically increase their fuel crossover point to well above that 85% mark previously seen. So they wanted to do this study, to just see what was going on here and really, you know, try to predict or try to show what would happen between these two groups of athletes, the low carb diet athletes and the high carb diet athletes.
They wanted to see what the results would be on athletic performance. So they conducted this study, it was 31 days, so it was four weeks long. And they compare the two groups of competitive athletes, these were middle aged men in their 40s, they were in good shape, they had low body fat percentages, like 12-16% body fat, low BMI.
They exercised around six hours a week. And so they were competitive athletes in their 40s, mostly runners, and they divided them into two groups, they had one group that was a low carb high fat diet, the other group was a high carb low fat diet.
They assessed both diets, and they were strictly controlling macros calories and their training load. So this study was really well done. And they were very strict about making sure the only difference in these two groups of men was that their one group was eating a low carb, higher fat diet, and the other was eating a high carb lower fat diet.
And then they had them do some performance tests. So each of the subjects in the test visited the lab on 10 different occasions during that 31 day period. And they performed tests periodically, but the two main tests that they did was a one mile time trial, and then six by 800 sprints.
And so they did testing throughout, but they did some time trials at the beginning. And then at the end of the study. And all these things were very tightly controlled, all the variables were tightly controlled, to make sure the only difference between the groups was their dietary intervention.
Now, the performance side of things was pretty interesting because the results showed that both groups performed almost exactly the same in these high intensity exercises. So there was no difference really between the performance of the low carb group and the high carb group.
There was a huge difference though in fat burning. So the high carb, low fat group, their fat burning peaked around .69 grams of fat burn per minute. Whereas the low carb group, their fat burning peaked around 1.85 grams per minute, which is the highest rate of fat oxidation ever recorded.
Okay, so the big difference between these two groups was the amount of fat that the low carb group was able to burn and they were at 1.85 grams per minute where the high carb group peaked around .7 grams of fat burn per minute. That’s a huge, huge difference.
So what this is saying is that depending on your dietary protocol, either way, you’re going to be able to perform at high intensities, about the same whether you’re doing a low carb diet or a high carb diet, okay?
So we can sort of take this off the table that a high carb diet is required to perform at higher intensities. Okay. So something else that I found really interesting and this is what prompted me to want to talk about this today is that in the group that was eating the high carb diet, they were doing all these blood tests on on all these people just to see like, you know, what, they were just measuring all kinds of things.
And one of the things they were looking at was blood glucose averages, and they did like fasting blood glucose tests. And one thing that was really fascinating is that the high carb group, 30% of them had average blood glucose greater than 100 milligrams per deciliter, which is consistent with prediabetes. So 100-125 is diagnosed as pre diabetes.
And there’s where in the 111 to 115 range, on average, 30% of these super fit competitive athletes with low BMI 12 to 16%, body fat, they looked great. They were very competitive runners, they appeared on the outside to be super fit, but are they healthy?
They’re being diagnosed with pre diabetes, because of their blood sugar being greater than 100 milligrams per deciliter on average during this 31 day study. And they did these tests many, many times. So this wasn’t like a one time deal.
The other interesting thing about this is that these people were also the greatest responders to carbohydrate restriction, which means that those individuals with a higher mean glucose, so the higher the individuals with those prediabetes numbers with the higher mean glucose, were more responsive to carbohydrate restriction treatment.
And all of their glycemic parameters were greatly improved if they switch to a low carb high fat diet. So average glucose was significantly lower, starting on day eight of the low carb and then remained lower throughout. And so the 31 day average glucose levels were down by 15%.
If they had switched to that low carb high fat diet. So some of the key findings that I’m just going to read this to you, these are some key findings from the study itself. So one of them is that athletes achieved equivalent exercise performance during a one mile time trial and a six by 800 meter interval session after a 31 day habituation to low carb or high carb diets.
When controlling calories training load, body composition changes across the groups. Another key finding during the later stages of the six by 800 interval sessions athletes achieve the highest rates of fat oxidation yet reported. According to current understanding, this is paradoxical since these high rates were measured in subjects exercising edit intensity, which was a which the rate of fat oxidation should be approaching zero.
Okay, so these were, the intensity level was greater than 90% of their VO2 max and their fat oxidation should have been at zero, but it was increasing. Crazy, right? And the low carb high fat consistently reduced glucose levels and glucose variability, which along with a large inverse relationship observed between main glucose on high carb and the percentage change mean glucose when switching to low carb.
So importantly, 30% of subjects who had a 31 day mean fasting glucose of greater than 100 on high carb were also the largest responders to the carbohydrate restriction, right? No subjects on the low carb high fat diet had a 31 day average mean glucose of greater than 100. Okay, so these results challenge the existing paradigm. The diets with higher carbohydrates are superior for athletic performance even during shorter duration higher intensity exercise which has been known or thought to be the case for a long time now.
Critically, these results demonstrate that lower carbohydrate intake may be a therapeutic strategy, even for an athlete, to improve glycemic index, particularly in those with or at risk for diabetes without requiring changes in body composition. Like you don’t need to lose a bunch of weight or physical activity, you don’t need to be exercising a ton more.
Interestingly, these results also demonstrate a unique association between glycemic responsiveness to carbohydrate restriction, fat oxidation rates, suggesting that there’s an important relationship here between glycemic parameters and metabolic responsiveness.
Okay, so my sort of interpretation, I was reading a lot of that from the study itself. It’s very scientifically written, a little dry, in my opinion, but my interpretation is this: that the low carb high fat diet produces the same results from an athletic performance perspective as the high carb diet.
And once you’re on that low carb diet for several weeks, weeks, your rate of fat oxidation goes way up. And this is key for both endurance. So being able to burn more fat helps you from an endurance standpoint, and helps improve weight loss, right, you have to burn fat if you want to lose weight, and that the high carb diet can lead to adverse health effects like pre diabetes.
And this is an interesting study because they looked at, you know, seemingly fit healthy men with low body fat percentages, normal body weight, normal BMI, all that they’re all competitive athletes, they exercise more than six hours per week, they didn’t have any medical diagnosis.
They weren’t on any medications, but 30% of them of the high carb group had, you know, blood glucose levels consistent with prediabetes, this is a problem, right? This is consistent with a prior analysis they did, which found that 30% of sub-elite endurance athletes, so this is like your average weekend warrior that’s just out there running for fun, like me, and you probably exercise, less than like six hours per week, had undetected prediabetes when measured via CGM, continuous glucose monitoring devices.
So a prior study has shown that 30% of athletes who seemingly are fit on the outside have this prediabetes condition. So they were fit but not healthy. And this is an important distinction. Do you want to just look healthy on the outside? Or would you rather look healthy on the outside and actually be healthy as a human being from the inside out?
So just because we see somebody on Instagram who looks healthy, they have lean body mass, low body fat percentage they’re ripped, they got abs for days, does not mean that they are healthy. It does not mean that they aren’t having some sort of internal issues or some, you know, condition like prediabetes.
And following the standard dietary advice, which is a very high carb diet, and low in fat, seems to cause metabolic dysfunction in around 30% of the population. And this is just the most fit population, whether you’re very competitive athletes or weekend warriors.
We’re not even looking at the people who do not exercise regularly, who are kind of sedentary. So it’s no wonder that obesity rates are what they are right now here in the US, which is over 42% of the US population is considered obese, over 42%.
This is the first time that here in the US the national rate of obesity has passed the 40% mark. And it’s further evidence of the country’s obesity crisis. The national adult obesity rate has increased by 26% since 2008. I’m gonna say that again, because it’s crazy.
The national adult obesity rate has increased by 26% since 2008.
And I say this all the time, you can’t outrun a bad diet, and this is what I’m talking about. These are very fit individuals who run a lot, who are very competitive, who all appear to be in perfect shape. But there’s more to the story. Your diet matters, what you eat matters. You cannot outrun a bad diet. Sure, exercise is important.
Keep running. Do that for sure, but it’s not going to solve all your health issues. You have to pay attention to the foods that you eat. And all this exercise and all this fitness won’t help keep you healthy unless you also change your diet. It’s up to you to take things into your own hands.
Don’t do what the powers be out there, the food companies, the government or whatever, what they’re telling you to do typically doesn’t work. You have to take things in your own hands. And listen, low carb, it’s not a fad diet. It’s not keto. It doesn’t mean you never eat another grain of rice your whole life, doesn’t involve eating sticks of butter wrapped in bacon, as good as that sounds.
If you want to learn more about my thoughts on carbs, I did an episode about this last week called Carbs Are Not The Enemy. Carbs are not the enemy. There are some carbs that are great and great for endurance athletes and great for weight loss, you just have to do them the right way.
So listen to that episode, for sure it’ll help you, you know, could get a good understanding of that. So if you’re a runner, and you want to improve your health, like really improve your health from the inside out, then making the switch to a lower carb diet might just be what you need.
And as always, I can coach you through all of this. We’ll put together a nutrition plan that fits your lifestyle and gets you to your health and fitness goals. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me.
Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
