Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
If there’s one sure-fire way to make sure you stay unhealthy and die early it’s eating the modern, westernized diet. We’ve gotten very far away from eating the way our ancient ancestors ate and …
Continue Reading about 132. Ancestral Eating to Improve Health & Fitness →
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 132 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, ancestral eating to improve health and fitness. If there’s one surefire way to make sure you stay unhealthy, and most likely die early, is to continue eating the modern westernized diet.
We’ve gotten very far away from eating the way our ancient ancestors ate, and it’s causing us irreparable harm. Chronic lifestyle diseases like obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are all linked to an unhealthy diet. And these afflictions were virtually non-existent in ancient populations for two and a half million years, humans evolved beautifully on a very simple diet.
So if you want to take control of your health and become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, and I know you do, then you might want to consider following in the footsteps of your ancestors.
So in this episode, I’m going to break it all down for you to explain how ancestral eating can dramatically improve your health and fitness. And listen, I understand that getting healthy, losing weight, maintaining your weight, training for marathons, and changing your diet and trying to fit all this stuff in becoming the strongest version of yourself and the healthiest version of yourself.
All this stuff is complicated. There’s a lot of confusing information out there. And this stuff is not easy to do on your own, becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. It takes time. It takes discipline, it takes consistency, it takes knowing what to do and how to do it. And this is everything that I do in the Running Lean coaching project.
This is my coaching program that gives you all the knowledge, the support, the accountability that you need, in order to reach your goals to improve your health, to get leaner, to get stronger, to run faster, to run longer. And to do it in a way that is sustainable. We are not about quick fixes.
In the Running Lean coaching project, we are about long term health and fitness, creating new habits that last for life. And this is about longevity more than anything else. It’s about improving your health, improving your fitness, improving your athletic performance, so that you can stay strong and healthy and live longer. Don’t you want to live longer? Yeah, absolutely.
I know, we all want that for ourselves, we all want to become healthy, we all want to live longer, we all want to, you know, become the most badass version of ourselves. Not many people are willing to do the work to get there, though. So that’s why I’m here to help you. If you’re feeling compelled to change your health for the better, and to do it in a way that is sustainable, then I want to encourage you to apply to join the Running Lean coaching project, you can go to my website, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out a short application, you and I will jump on a call and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you.
You know, it’s not for everybody. And I talk to people every single day. And a lot of people are like, you know, I’m just not sure if this is right for me. And that’s totally fine. You have to be willing to commit, you have to be willing to kind of get uncomfortable and do some hard things. Because what you’re doing right now feels good, it feels comfortable, but it’s not working for you.
So in order to change we need to do some things we need to get out of our comfort zone. Getting out of your comfort zone is by definition uncomfortable. So I’m here to help you with that process. If you want that kind of help, if you’re looking for that kind of help, if you want to improve your health and make it last, join the Running Lean coaching project that’s runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join me in the Running Lean coaching project.
Alright, let’s get into this topic today: ancestral eating to improve health and fitness. So why am I talking about this today? Well, there’s been a lot of talk out there and a lot of concern about some of these like crazy fad diets that people are doing right. There’s the South Beach diet and then there’s Weight Watchers and there’s Jenny Craig and there’s like keto and carnivore and paleo.
And all these other things that are for the most part, newer kind of diets based on you know, more modern research and, and some modern studies and things like that, but they’re pretty new. They’re pretty new there. And a lot of these are based on calorie restriction and trying to, you know, they’re focused on losing weight and things like that. And, and a lot of this stuff is, is really eating in a very modern, very new kind of way.
Okay, so the thing I want to bring to you today and the big, you know, the big sort of message that I want you to take away from this episode today is that when we engage in ancestral eating, we’re talking about doing things, the way we used to do them a long time ago.
And for millions of years, and you know, humans have evolved over the last two and a half million years, we evolved eating a certain type of diet. And we have gotten very far away from that diet. So what we’re eating today as human beings, is crazy compared to what we used to eat, for the vast majority of those two and a half million years.
And if you think about the way that we did things, we were more like wild animals of today than we are, you know, these modern thinking humans that we are in this modern society that we live in, in all the comfort and all that, you know, we’re more like wild animals, think about animals in the wild today, there’s no obesity.
In the animal kingdom out there outside of domesticated animals, there are obese dogs, I’ve seen people with dogs who are wildly overweight. And that’s because they’re, they’re eating a diet that wasn’t made for dogs, right? They’re eating a lot of grains. A lot of these dog foods have additives and they’re full of grains and things like that, that make dogs gain weight. Don’t feed your dog that stuff. Give it dog like real dog food, what do dogs eat? Meat mostly, right?
But think about animals in the wild. Today, there’s no heart disease, there’s no cancer, there’s no obesity, you know, there are some issues here and there. But for the most part, that stuff is non existent, that stuff is non existent. And why? Because those animals in the wild are eating a diet that is specific for them, they’re eating an animal specific diet, we want to go back to doing that.
So all these new diets that you see out there today, most of them are based on, you know, modern, you know, modern studies and, and modern ways of thinking about food, and nutrition. And my suggestion is we just kind of ditch all that BS, and just go back to doing things, the way we’ve always done them as human beings.
You know, think about us more like wild animals. You know, when you eat an animal specific diet, you thrive, all the animals out there in the animal kingdom that are eating, they don’t eat food that is not designed for them. They just don’t. You know, elephants are vegetarians, they eat grass, and whatever leaves and things like that.
And, you know, we don’t you don’t see elephants, you know, going off and eating a bunch of meat and you don’t see and vice versa. You don’t see cows, or I’m sorry, you don’t see lions snacking on grass and stuff. Like, they don’t eat that stuff, right? They eat an animal specific diet. Have you ever seen an obese lion? No, the lion doesn’t need to snack during the day because it eats the right kinds of food, and then it fasts. It doesn’t need to eat after it eats.
So I was looking this up. And I think this is really fascinating. Lions eat like every three or four days. And they need an average of about 11 to 15 pounds of meat every day. And lions can go without food for more than a week. And then they can eat up to 110 pounds of meat at a time. That’s crazy. I mean, that’s the way I feel. Sometimes I could do that. Right?
But that’s almost a quarter of their body weight. And they can eat that all at once. And then they don’t need to eat for another 3-5-7 days. So you know, lions don’t need to be snacking on food during the day because they’re getting all the nutrition that they need from eating those few times a week. It’s very interesting, right?
So, you know, when we snack as human beings, we’re doing it because we are eating the wrong diet and the diet that we’re eating is jacking up our hunger signals. It’s making us feel hungry all the time. When we eat food, it’s not filling us up. It’s not giving us the nutrition that we need. It’s not triggering the sensors to say, hey, you’re full, you know.
A lot of carbohydrates will do that, they will make you feel like you are constantly hungry, and you need to eat more. But then you eat more of that same type of food and you’re still hungry. It’s all messed up, just doesn’t doesn’t work, right. It’s not designed for humans that carbohydrates are really not designed for human consumption. We’ve, you know, we can eat that stuff. And it’s okay, you know, it gives us some nutrition, you know, a little bit of nutritional value, but not a lot, but it causes more harm than good.
So, when we live more like wild animals, we are going to see improved hormonal responses, we’re going to see food, we’re going to eat food that makes us feel full when we eat it, it’s going to satisfy us for longer and then there won’t be a need to snack between meals. So let’s just get off these foods that really aren’t designed for human consumption. I’m mainly talking about sugar, grains, seed oils, processed foods, that kind of stuff, right? And live more like our ancient ancestors did.
Now I’m not talking about, you know, sleeping in a cave, you don’t have to sleep on the ground in the dirt, you can still sleep in your big comfy bed with all the extra pillows, all the unnecessary pillows.
Why do we do that? By the way, here’s a little sidebar, but I have pillows on my bed that every night before I go to bed, I take them off, and I set them aside. Do you guys do that? Isn’t that weird? Why do we do that? Why do we have extra pillows? Anyway, just think about that every day when I’m taking those off my bed? Why do I have these extra pillows that I don’t use?
Anyway, but you don’t have to sleep in the dirt, you can still shop at Whole Foods. You can buy, you know your groceries at the grocery store, you don’t have to go hunt your own food or anything like that. That’s not what I’m suggesting here. What I am suggesting is that we go back to eating a proper human diet.
What happens when you feed a cow, which normally would just eat grass? What happens when you feed a cow grains? You know, they get fat, right? Have you ever seen grass fed, grass finished meat at the grocery store? If you see it, take a look at it, you’ll notice something in it, there’s very little fat in there, that muscle meat is like just red, there’s not those big streaks of fat in there.
And then look at the grain finished or grain fed grain finished meat and you’ll see that it’s very fatty. So when you feed cows grains, they get fat. This same thing happens to humans, when you feed us fat. Or I’m sorry, when you feed us grains we get fat. We store lots of that energy as fat that we’re eating from grains and sugars.
So if you want a surefire way of fattening yourself up like we do with cows then just eat a high carbohydrate diet. Right? I mean, this is just science, just the way it works. Okay. So my proposition here, my suggestion here is just to go back to doing things the way we used to, for two and a half million years of evolution. It’s not some new, weird fad thing.
Let’s just go back to eating the way we always have been eating. So how does this improve our health? Well, when we eat the proper human diet, we keep our blood sugar low. So we’re not eating foods that spike our blood sugar like crazy. We’re not eating foods that cause an insulin spike, which causes us to stay in that fat storing mode.
If you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, you’re constantly storing energy as fat, you’re never giving your body a chance to tap into that stored body fat as a fuel source. You know, going back to our lion example, that lion is really good at, you know, consuming large amounts of food, and then going for days and you know, up to a week at a time with nothing. And they do that because they’re able to burn fat very efficiently.
We do the same thing as human beings, we’ve evolved to be really efficient fat burners, and we’ve gotten away from them. Because we’re constantly eating a diet that keeps us storing fat and doesn’t allow us to sort of lock that fat in our fat cells.
You know that insulin will, you know, when insulin is high when insulin is present, locking up that fat in our fat cells and not allowing us to tap into it as a fuel source. When we change the diet, we become more fat adapted, we’re able to tap into that stored body fat and not only lose the weight, but we have this amazing all day energy.
So one of the best ways that eating ancestrally will help you improve your health is that it improves fat burning. So you keep your blood sugar low, keep insulin low. Have all your hormones get balanced, you know, and we’re talking about hormones like leptin, and ghrelin.
Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, and it gets jacked up and it gets really elevated when you are eating a high carbohydrate diet. Leptin is the is the satiety hormone. When you have leptin, leptin is present, that means, you know, leptin gets released when you are full. So if you eat a big ol ‘steak, by the time you’re done with that steak, you’ve got leptin present and you’re full, it says, hey, don’t eat any more, you’re full. Carbohydrates do not trigger that leptin response, so you stay hungry.
So ghrelin, the hunger hormone is increased, which means you’re gonna be hungry, and then leptin is suppressed, which means you’re not going to feel full. This is a bad combination, if you’re trying to lose weight, right? If you’re trying to improve your health, you’re just going to be storing and storing more fat, right? So we don’t want that, we want our hormones balanced. We don’t want our hormones all jacked up.
Okay, so eating the proper human diet will reduce inflammation, it will reduce bloating, it will reduce the water retention, it’ll improve fat burning and helps you balance your hormones and then helps improve athletic performance. When you’re an efficient fat burner, you can run for longer periods of time.
So endurance improves, you know, your adaptive hormones are working the way they’re supposed to. So when you work out when you do a hard workout, you will improve, you know more quickly, your strength will improve the intensity of your workouts can improve, your recovery improves because you’re you’ve reduced inflammation so you can work out harder, and you can recover faster, you can work out harder because more adrenaline is being produced.
Some other ways that eating the proper human diet, eating ancestrally can improve your health is you’ll sleep better, you’ll have more energy throughout the day. You’ll have more vitality, more longevity, live longer and improve body composition. So there’s all these amazing health benefits of eating ancestral eating the proper human diet. Okay.
So how do we do it? Like what do we do? So the first thing I would say is like, let’s just get off of all these modern processed foods, you know, Franken foods, foods that are like, you know, super processed, they don’t look like food anymore. Right? Shop the areas of the grocery store where you buy meat, and eggs and produce, dairy. Stay away from all the packaged foods right?
Stay away from sugar and seed oils and liquid calories. Stay away from refined grains and anything that would be considered like hyper palatable foods. And those things contain all those things I just mentioned, which will be sugar, refined grains, and seed oils, like hyper palatable foods or foods that have been manufactured in a laboratory to be extremely delicious and make you basically addicted to them. Okay.
So we want to eat what our ancient ancestors ate: meat, eggs, fish, fruit, dairy, some honey, some vegetables, like tubers, and other vegetables that are not super high in carbohydrates. So it’s a very simple way of eating, it’s not complicated. And our ancient ancestors ate the whole animal that ate nose to tail.
One of the best things you can eat, one of the best things you can eat as a human being, one of the most nutritious things and most nutrient dense things you can eat on this planet would be liver, and organ meats, but I have to tell you that I cannot eat that stuff. I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it tastes. So instead, I use a supplement. So I use a beef organ supplement that I take and you know, this is kind of my equivalent of, of eating nose to tail, okay?
And if you’re vegetarian or vegan or something like that, you know, you don’t have to eat animal products, and you can still eat very much like our ancient ancestors. Right? But here’s the thing, like what is the way we evolved as human beings. All I’m suggesting is that we go back to doing what we’ve always done. The way we’re eating today in this modern westernized world is very, very different today than it was 100 years ago, or 500 years ago, or 5000 years ago.
And for the vast, vast majority of human existence, we ate very simply we ate animals. We ate some fruit and eggs and fish and some dairy. And we just did not go to town. on sugar and refined grains, this is a new thing. And what if we just, you know, eliminated that stuff from our diet? How would you feel, I wonder? I think you’d feel pretty amazing.
And then people always ask me, but what about this, Patrick? What about that and just fill in your favorite cheat meal or treat, you know, fill in pizza ice cream, you know, whatever it is that you love gummy worms, you know?
What about this? And what about that, you get to decide what you do for yourself, right? And this all depends on your goals, you know? So I always tell people, like, let’s try to follow the 90/10 rule, right. The 90/10 rule states that 90% of the time, I’m just gonna stick to my plan. And that means that about once a week, I might have a meal one meal a week that is a little bit different, you know, it’s a little bit off that very simple ancestral eating plan.
You know, I had dinner with my girlfriend last night, and we went to an Indian restaurant, and I ate some rice. That was my way of sort of saying, like, okay, I’m gonna eat some rice tonight. Like, it’s not crazy. It’s a grain. And I have to be honest with you, I don’t feel good today. I don’t feel good today. And I’m thinking to myself, like, why do I do this? I feel much better when I stay on track. And so do most of my clients. We feel so much better when we just stay on the plan.
But every now and then, it just seems like a good idea. Or it seems like it would be no big deal. And yet, it kind of moves us away from our goals a little bit, right? And it tends to be all about comfort versus discomfort, like what are we willing to do in these situations, to stay comfortable? What are we willing to do to keep moving in the direction of our goals? Is this choice I’m about to make here at this moment, going to move me closer to my goals or further away from my goals?
What am I feeling in this moment that makes me think I want to make this choice? Is it FOMO, fear of missing out? Is it wanting to fit in and be normal and do what everybody else is doing. And I say, let’s be abnormal, let’s get uncomfortable. Because the norm is being overweight. The norm is feeling sick, most of the time, the norm is being sluggish and feeling out of shape and not having energy and dying early.
Dying early has become a thing. And like in 2020, the average life expectancy in the United States went down 1.5 years, this is the largest one year decline since World War Two. We are not getting healthier, living longer, that’s starting to go the opposite way. This is not a good thing. Think about this.
I follow a lot of doctors and I hear them. I listen to podcasts and stuff where they’re talking about, you know, longevity and health and fitness and diet and exercise and all these things. And I hear all these doctors talk about how they never see obese 90 year olds, you know, people that live to be 90 plus years old, are not obese, because they don’t live that well. And the people with all these chronic diseases are living or not living as long as our ancestors did, you know, even 100 years ago.
So we’ve got to be concerned about this. Right? Now, I understand that ancient humans didn’t live as long as we do now. They, you know, would you know, die of certain types of viruses and things like that, which, you know, we live longer now because of modern medicine, for sure.
But the fact that we have access to all this modern medicine, and yet we’re choosing to live a lifestyle that is killing us earlier, this is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing, right? The food that we’re eating a lot of times is more like a drug than it is fuel for our bodies. Especially carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are addictive.
There are people who cannot moderate carbohydrate intake. I’m not one of those people. If I start eating sugar, it’s hard for me to stop. And when you look at the definition of what a drug is, a drug is something that is a substance that is not necessary for human existence for human health and carbohydrates fit that category.
Fat is necessary for human health. We have to eat fat or we will die. Protein is necessary for human health, we have to eat that or we will die. Those two things are called essential nutrients. We have to get those in our diet. Our body does not produce those things. We have to eat them.
Carbohydrates are not an essential nutrient. We don’t have to eat carbohydrates. Your body produces the glucose it needs. It takes some of the protein you eat, it turns it into glucose, the process in your liver called gluconeogenesis. And this is just something that we have to understand. I’m not saying don’t ever eat carbohydrates, I’m just saying they’re, they’re not necessary for human health.
Okay, so the definite definition of a drug is something that is not necessary for existence. It’s something that when you eat it, or ingest it, or smoke, or drink it or whatever, it gives you an instant reward. It lights up your dopamine centers, your pleasure centers, and releases dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and endorphins and all that stuff, right.
So you get this buzz from eating or drinking or whatever. So it’s not necessary for human health, it gives you a reward, and then it causes harm in excess. So in excess, eating carbohydrates will cause negative consequences. If there’s no harm from the substance, there’s no addiction. Right? So people that drink alcohol, if you drink, moderately, if you drink, have, you have one glass of wine twice a week or something like that, and you can just put it down. There’s no addiction there. Right, because it’s not causing negative consequences.
But if it does, when you are in excess, when it does cause negative consequences in excess, that’s a drug. And that’s something that’s an addiction, that’s an addictive behavior. And then another criteria is if you try to control your intake, and you cannot, so the absence of control is, you know, means that there’s some addiction happening there, too. Right? Once you start, you can’t stop.
And for a lot of us eating sugar is our once we start eating it, we can’t stop. It’s the definition of addiction, right. And also, another criteria is that there’s a dysfunctional way of managing emotions. So this becomes an emotional management strategy. People use drugs like nicotine, alcohol, and things like food, especially carbohydrates, sugar, to manage their emotions, they just want to feel better.
So instead of dealing with the actual emotions they are experiencing, they eat this food that makes them feel good. And it’s impossible to get obese from eating food. You cannot get obese from eating real food. You can only get obese by eating carbohydrates by eating drugs. Like if you just ate an ancestral human diet. I mean, you might get overweight, you might gain some weight. But you know, a lot of that might be muscle weight. You might get a little bit overweight, but you’re not going to become obese.
You can’t get morbidly obese from eating real food. You only get that when you’re eating, you know, drugs, essentially. Okay? Food is not addictive. You don’t get addicted to eating steak and broccoli. You don’t. Carbohydrates are very addictive, though. Right? So we want to get off of the food as a drug and start eating the way our ancestors have eaten for millions of years. Just eat real food, food that still looks like food.
And listen, I get it, you probably have a million questions about stuff and everybody wants to complicate things, I’m trying to simplify things I want to simplify my life. I want my dietary choices to be so simple, I don’t have to think about it, I don’t have to make some extravagant meal with all these recipes and ingredients and things like that. Every meal does not have to be an amazing entertainment event.
Every now and then I will go out and have a nice meal in a restaurant. And I enjoy that I had a nice meal last night and I enjoyed that, you know, maybe overdid it on the rice a little bit. But besides that, you know, I can do that every now and then it’s fine. But for the most part for like 90% of the time, the way I eat is extremely simple. And it makes me happy. Eating a steak, or a big piece of salmon at night for dinner makes me happy. I look forward to it. And I might have a little bit of Greek yogurt with a little berries afterwards. You know, it’s like a little treat or something.
But this is all real food. This is all food our ancestors would say oh yeah, I guess I know what that is. We’ve been eating that for millions of years. Patrick, that’s cool. This cannot be simpler. We want to make things very, very simple. Go back to the simple ways of living our lives. Go back to those simple ways of eating and see how it might improve your health. Like what would it look like if you started living more like our ancient ancestors?
If you started eating more like your ancient ancestors, you know what if we all got off the addictive substances, alcohol, nicotine and carbohydrates you know, what if we just simplified? What if you improved your health? What if you got leaner and stronger? How would that feel for you? What if we all live to be 100 years old? Because we are so healthy and strong, going into old age? And you know, these diseases of lifestyle were no longer a thing?
And what if we modeled that for our kids? And what if they modeled that for their kids?
Think about the impact we can make in this world. Not to mention how badass you’re going to feel when you PR your next marathon. Because you’re so lean and you’re so strong, and you’ve improved your health, you’ve improved your athletic performance.
Or imagine how amazing you’re going to look in that bikini next summer because you’ve improved your body composition, you’ve lost the fat weight, you’ve gained the muscle weight and you feel amazing and you look amazing. Just imagine what that might look like for you. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
There are a lot of myths floating around out there in regards to proper human nutrition. Some of these concepts have been around for a very long time and just seem like they hold water but a lot of …
Continue Reading about 131. Busting the Biggest Nutrition Myths →
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 131 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’m busting the biggest nutrition myths. So there are a lot of myths floating around out there in regards to proper human nutrition. And some of these concepts have been around for a very long time, decades. And they just seem like they’re legit.
They seem like they hold water, but a lot of them just don’t, or at least they don’t anymore. So there’s a lot of new studies that are being published and a lot of new data that’s being looked at and analyzed. And we have to be able to decipher now, because it’s a different time, a different era, we have to be able to decipher now what’s true, and what’s not.
And it’s not always easy, I get that. And that’s why I put together this episode to hopefully shine the light on and bust some of the biggest nutrition myths. Okay, so today I’m busting the biggest nutrition myths, I’m providing you with some actionable advice to help you take control of your health, and get you on the right track.
And listen, getting healthy, losing weight or maintaining your weight. running marathons this stuff, it’s not easy, becoming the healthiest version of yourself. It takes time. It takes consistency, it takes discipline, it takes know-how. And I provide all of that in the Running Lean coaching project. This is my intensive coaching program that gives you all the knowledge, all the support, all of the accountability that you need to improve your health and make changes that last permanently.
We’re not interested in quick fixes. In my program, we’re not trying to teach you the fastest way to lose weight. This isn’t about weight loss schemes, or fad diets, we’re all about sustainability. What you can do, starting now to change your health for the better and how to maintain it for the rest of your life.
Remember that becoming healthy, it’s not a destination you’re trying to get to there is no finish line, I wish there was I wish I could tell you that at some point, you could just stop doing all this, you can stop eating healthy, you can eat all the junk food that you want, you can stop exercising, but that’s not the way it is. It’s not a temporary state of being, this becomes who we are and becomes what we do from here on out.
So you have to embrace this concept. And if you’re feeling compelled to change your health for the better, if you’re feeling compelled to lose weight, finally lose it for good for the last time. And if you’re longing to become that best and most badass version of yourself, I want to encourage you to actually do something about it today, take some small action steps today.
And if you want help, I’m here for you. I’m always here for you really, you can just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. You can fill out a quick application, you and I’ll jump on a call, we can talk about your goals and we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you. It’s not for everybody, that’s totally fine. Again, this is for the people who want to commit to this way of life.
Who will make these changes last for good, then this is a good program for you. Cool, runningleancoaching.com/apply, I would love to have you join us in the Running Lean coaching project.
Okay, onto busting the biggest nutrition myths. So I had some fun putting this episode together. And the reason I’m talking about this is because there are a lot of myths floating around out there around nutrition and around, you know what it means to eat healthy. And a lot of this stuff has been kind of propagated over decades. It’s been propagated in the media. It’s been propagated by, you know, Jim Rose, and all kinds of stuff.
And I just want to like, for once and for all like just talk about some of the stuff that comes up often. I hear these concepts come up often with clients, they ask me these questions all the time. And so I put together a list of some of the most common questions that people ask and the common questions that people have been sort of misunderstood over the last few decades.
And I wanted to kind of tell you like what’s legit and what’s not, like what’s real, you know, what, what are things that we can honestly say are concerns and what are things we should just ignore? Okay, so I wanted to make sure that we are getting on the same page with some fundamental concepts here. And that we don’t, we’re not being manipulated by old outdated information anymore. Okay.
So that’s why I’m talking about this today. And I’m just going to go through a list of some of the biggest myths that I’ve, you know, been kind of researching, and the biggest questions that I get from clients and potential clients. And I wanted to share this with you guys, I think it’s gonna be really helpful.
So the first one, and I’ve talked about this so many times before, but I’m going to talk about it again, the first one is that calories are all that matters, right? If you want to lose weight, you’ve just got to cut your calories, right, calories in versus calories out, run more and eat less. And this is called the energy balance theory, the energy balance theory says that the energy that you take in calories coming in should be less than the energy that you’re putting out through exercise, right?
And this theory, they call it a theory, because it’s not the truth. This theory works fine. If we were a closed system, like a steam engine, but we’re not steam engines, the human body is much more complicated. And there are some issues with this theory. And, you know, like I said, I’ve talked about this so many times in the past, but I’ll just give you a couple of quick bullet points here on why this theory just doesn’t hold water. Okay.
So if you cut your calories, yes, you can lose weight, right? When it comes to losing weight, if you cut calories dramatically, you can lose a lot of weight pretty quickly, too. The problem with this, though, is it’s not sustainable. If you cut your calories too low for too long, this will effectively slow down your metabolism.
When your metabolism slows down, the amount of energy that you’re taking in becomes the amount of energy that your body is willing to put out there. So your resting metabolic rate, that’s the way you burn calories at rest just hanging around being you, this is the most calories that you burn through the day, by the way.
So because it takes calories to keep your heart beating, and your lungs working, and your blood flowing, and all these other things that all the other processes are happening with your body digestion and your brain and all this stuff. So actually you consume more calories throughout the day by just sitting around doing nothing than you do through exercise, right?
So but your resting metabolic rate will effectively slow down to match the calories that you have coming in. So let’s say you have a resting metabolic rate of like 1800 calories, so you just burn 1800 calories a day at rest, then you start eating, you decide you want to lose weight, so you start eating like 800 calories a day. And you do this for some time, you’ll probably lose some weight at the beginning.
But what will happen is your resting metabolic rate will slow down to kind of match that 800 calories that it’s getting in energy because your body’s like, listen, we’re only getting 800 calories of energy a day, we’re going to slow down to kind of match what’s coming in. So we don’t die of starvation and we don’t emaciate ourselves and die.
So it’s going to slow down your metabolism to match what’s coming in. And so let’s say you’re messing with your resting metabolic rate and it changes and it drops to 1000 or, or 800 calories a day. Okay, now that 800 calories a day that you’re eating doesn’t work for weight loss anymore, you’re going to start to gain a little bit of weight and gain a little bit of weight. And you’re going to be like, wait a minute, why is this not working anymore? And this is why.
And this is why programs like The Biggest Loser, they dramatically cut calories and these people lose a ton of weight real fast. But they don’t keep it off. It’s not sustainable. This is not a sustainable weight loss strategy. It just isn’t. And so we have to do something different. We have to change the calories and the type of calories that we’re eating matters.
It’s not about the numbers, you know, a calorie. A calorie is just a unit of measure. It’s how we measure energy. It’s the amount of energy required to heat one gram of water or one milliliter of water. One degree Celsius like it’s just, you know, how, how long does it take or how much energy does it take to increase the temperature of the water by one degree? That’s what a calorie is. Okay, so it’s just a unit of measure.
And, but that’s not taking into consideration the types of foods that you’re eating, okay? And the types of food you’re eating absolutely matter, right? So when we’re talking about quality of food, quality of nutrition, it really does matter. So you could take 300 calories of doughnuts, let’s say you can have a couple of donuts, they’re equal, like 300 calories. And the that food though, that energy that’s coming in will raise your blood sugar like crazy, you’re going to be hungry all day, your body’s going to be stuck in this fat storing mode, a lot of that energy that you take in is not being is not able to be used by your body right away. So you’re going to store some of that as fat. And these are essentially nutritionally empty calories, there’s not a lot of nutritional value in Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, okay?
You could take 300 calories of steak on the other hand, and this does not raise your blood sugar much at all, maybe a little bit comes back down pretty quickly. It’s very filling, you’re not gonna be hungry all day after that, you’re not going to be putting your body into that fat storing mode, because insulin is not being generated as much. So you’re not storing extra energy as fat.
This is a new, nutritionally dense food that you’re eating. So your body is actually absorbing the nutrients from this food, it’s not generating the hunger signals that carbohydrates generate. And you’re going to be very satiated from eating that food and it’s actually nutritionally legit for your body. Okay, so calories are not the same. And anybody tells you the calories are all the same, just walk away from that conversation right there.
Okay, calories are not the same. I’ve heard people say, oh, yeah, I can help you lose weight. And you can just do nothing between keys all day long. And I’ll get you to lose the weight, but it is not sustainable. And, uh, don’t do that. By the way, Twinkies are one of those things that, you know, if you send it out on a counter, it’ll still look exactly the same in like, 100 years. So don’t don’t eat that stuff. Right? It’s bad. It’s bad for you, right?
So low calorie diets, they’re often void of quality nutrition, your health will suffer as a result of eating a low calorie diet, and it is not sustainable. Okay, so slowing down your metabolism like crazy is not a sustainable way of losing weight and keeping it off and being healthy, right?
And just understand that humans are complicated. We’re not engines, we’re not steam engines. There’s things to consider, like hormonal imbalances, metabolic adaptations, like a metabolic slowdown. There’s genetics, there’s health conditions that some of us have, like hypothyroidism, you know, there’s medications that we take.
All these things make, you know, losing weight a little bit more complicated for some people, right? So we just have to understand that we are complicated beings, and then it’s more, it’s more about eating high quality food than it is about the number of calories coming in and going out. Okay, so the biggest nutrition myth that I see out there is that calories are all that matters. And I just want to say BS, right, there’s more going on that we have to consider. Okay.
The next one, and this is one of the biggest concerns I hear from people, is that eating fat will make you fat. And I have to tell you something here, this is not the case. Eating fat does not make you fat, high fat foods are not unhealthy foods. For millions of years, we humans have been eating fat and animal fats.
And we have survived and thrived and our brains have gotten big, huge, like we’re the most advanced creatures in the known universe. And we got this way not because we’re eating a low fat diet. No, because we are eating tons of animal products and eating tons of fat. It’s the fact that we are eating that actually made our brains start to grow and become the kind of humanoid brains that we have today.
And fat is an essential nutrient. Fat and protein are both essential nutrients meaning that we do not produce these nutrients internally. We have to get these in our diet or we will die. If you don’t eat fat, you will die. If you don’t eat protein, you will die. You know what’s not an essential nutrient is carbohydrates. Humans are not required to eat carbohydrates in order to live. It’s not an essential nutrient. Right?
I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever eat carbohydrates. I’m just saying it’s not essential your body will produce the glycogen that your body will produce the glucose which you know becomes glycogen that you store in your muscles. Your liver will produce that for you internally. Your brain needs a certain amount of glucose to function every day. Your body makes that, right?
Your liver makes the glucose that your brain needs every single day, it makes the glycogen it gets stored in your muscles to keep you functioning properly to keep your heart beating to keep your legs moving, keep your arms moving all that stuff. Carbohydrates are not essential, fat and protein are essential, okay?
And eating a higher fat diet has been the norm for us humans for millions of years, okay. All of a sudden, in the late 1970s, somebody put out this document and said hell fats are bad for you, that’s a problem, you need to stop eating fat. This does not make any sense. Think about it. It doesn’t make any sense.
They base this off of some really crappy studies that were done in the 60s 50s and studies that do not hold water whatsoever. And they’ve done tons and tons of studies since then, that have absolutely disproven this, okay? This is an antiquated and incorrect theory, that fat will make you fat. And that, you know, eating fat is unhealthy. And it’s slowly being put to rest.
And many people still fear it though, they still fear high fat diets. They still fear high fat foods, and they follow these low fat diets, in hopes that like if they just cut their fat intake, that they’re going to become healthier, and they’re going to lose weight, and it does not work.
The American Heart Association used to be all about low fat diets, low fat diets, low fat diets. And some years back, they very quietly put out a statement that said dietary fat is no longer a nutrient of concern. They kind of hid this little, little snippet in their documentation. They didn’t make a big splash about it, because they’ve been preaching that everybody has to eat a low fat diet in order to be heart healthy, right heart healthy diet, low fat.
And even the American Heart Association has been like, yeah, you know what we were wrong. But they don’t want to say they’re wrong and make a big “to do” about it. So they just kind of snuck it in there a little bit. Okay. So it’s being outdated. It’s being antiquated, and people are starting to wake up to the fact that this is not an issue, right? That dietary fat is actually essential for human health.
And actually, they’ve done these studies where low fat diets have actually been linked to greater risk of health issues, including metabolic syndrome. And they lead to an increase in insulin resistance, an increase in try group triglyceride levels. And these are all known risk factors for heart disease. So the low fat diet is not good for you. Okay.
And when it comes to losing weight, they found that diets higher in fat have been proven just as effective or even more effective in encouraging weight loss. Okay, so don’t be afraid of fat, eating fat does not make you fat. And I just want to mention one study that I just think is so compelling.
This is the pure study, P U R E peer study. And they compared a high carbohydrate, low fat diet to a low carbohydrate, high fat diet. So they sampled 140,000 people in 18 different countries. And they follow these people for 10 years. So half the people were following a high carb low fat diet. And the other half were following a low carb high or higher fat diet.
And the conclusion was this: that high carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality. Whereas the total fat and the individual types of fat are related to lower total mortality. So total fat was not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction or cardiovascular disease mortality. And saturated fat. This is really interesting, saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke, meaning that people that ate more saturated fat had fewer incidences of stroke.
And the conclusion is that the global dietary guidelines that we’re all following should be reconsidered in light of these findings. So this is just one study, but a pretty compelling study that says that a higher fat diet is actually better for you if you want to live longer, eat the fat. Okay.
Another myth I want to kind of break down and this might bump some people out there, but sugar substitutes are healthy. I’m going to have to say that this is not necessarily the case that eating a bunch of sugar substitutes is not necessarily a recipe for good health. Okay, so one thing to understand about this is that there’s not a lot of conclusive evidence out there because a lot of the sugar substitutes we’re using today, things like stevia or erythritol, xylitol, allulose.
These kinds of things haven’t been around that long, so they don’t have a ton of research to back these things up. But here’s, here’s the gist of that. Eating sugar substitutes can ramp up your craving for sweet foods, even though it’s not really sweetening your food, it’s a substitute in your body that doesn’t metabolize a lot of these sugar substitutes.
But what happens is that it tastes sweet. And so it kind of tricks your brain into thinking you’re eating something sweet, which for some people can lead to higher sugar cravings and unhealthy eating patterns. Okay, so just understand that, you know, the sugar substitutes are being used, you know, people are having all these like low carb products out there and keto products that say, like, you know, only whatever, its grams of carbs, one gram and net carbs or something like that.
And the problem is that we’re eating these things, some people are eating these things to excess. And, and, and some people are, you know, when you’re eating these types of foods, they’re not necessarily health food. It’s not like eating some broccoli and a steak. Like you’re eating, you know, something that’s supposed to be like a cookie, or brownies or ice cream or something like that, right? So these sugar alcohols, the sugar substitutes are not necessarily healthy.
So I hate to burst your bubble on that one. You know, they can be used sparingly, and that’s fine. It’s kind of like an every now and then type of thing. Just, you know, the fact is that these are not healthy foods, okay. And some of these sugar alcohols like erythritol and xylitol, they can cause digestive issues for people because your body does not metabolize them, or at least it only metabolizes a tiny bit of it. So they can cause some digestive issues, especially if consumed in large amounts. So just be careful of that. Okay.
So they’re not necessarily healthy. They’re not, you know, not necessarily, you know, bad, but we just have to be careful not to overdo it with this stuff very, very sparingly with that kind of stuff. Okay? Okay.
Another big myth out there is that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We’ve heard this before. We’ve all been taught this right. In school, when I was growing up, it was always like breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And what I didn’t realize is that that concept was coined by the Kellogg’s company, right? This is just a marketing message. Right?
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. This is not based on science or anything like that. Kellogg’s came up with this because they wanted to sell more breakfast cereal, and breakfast wasn’t even a thing back in the day. Like Kellogg’s came up with the breakfast concept like in 1899.
This is not something that we’ve been doing for thousands of years as human beings, the human body is not designed to eat, you know, first thing when you wake up in the morning. And here’s the thing, like, skipping breakfast is not a big deal. And if you’re the kind of person who thinks that skipping breakfast is going to be impossible, I want you to try it. See what happens.
When you skip breakfast, you promote more fat loss. You know, if you exercise in the morning, you’re going to actually have an increase in adrenaline, an increase in some of the adaptive hormones when you skip breakfast, and an exercise in that fasted state. And human beings are just designed to eat a couple times a day. And to think that we have to eat breakfast and like it’s the most important meal of the day. It’s just wrong, it’s just wrong.
And especially if you eat a high carbohydrate breakfast, and they’ve done some studies that show that they did a study where they just compared people who ate eggs for breakfast and who ate bagels for breakfast, right. And the people who ate eggs for breakfast had a 16% greater reduction in body fat during the study period, compared to the people who ate the bagel for breakfast.
So right there is a good sign that the carbohydrates alone first thing in the morning especially, are going to you know, thwart your weight loss, progress or promote weight gain, you know, so just understand that you know, the types of foods we eat matters, right? But also that skipping breakfast may be just the best thing that you can do for yourself.
And it’s such an easy thing to do. Just skip your first meal and eat it later. Start eating around lunchtime and see how you feel. So many people feel so much better doing this. They don’t think it’s possible but they actually get there.
And then another myth that I wanted to bust here is that all carbs are bad. You know, I talk about a low carb diet and you know, maybe like carbs are the problem. And honestly, listen, all carbohydrates are not bad, right? They’re not essential. We don’t have to eat carbs in order to be healthy human beings. But some carbs are really problematic, right? And we want to really avoid those things, right?
Sugar. You know, carbohydrates are just sugar. It’s just another word for sugar. And they come in varying degrees of concentration. So you know that white sugar crystals that you stir into your coffee in the morning, that’s a very concentrated form of carbohydrate. So are things like maple syrup, or flour, like any kind of grain that’s been refined in ground up into a fine powder is a very concentrated form of carbohydrate, okay.
But then there are other types of carbohydrates, which we call complex carbohydrates that are not terrible for you, okay, they’re not bad. Things like white potatoes, sweet potatoes, other types of underground vegetables, tubers, some fruits, some dairy, these things have all been part of the human diet for millions of years, right?
Even honey has been part of the human diet forever. And so all these things can be considered to be what I would call good carbs, like there’s good carbs and bad carbs, sugar, flour, refined grains, bad carbs. Good carbs would be things like, you know, potatoes and some fruit, okay. So we just have to understand that there are different types of carbohydrates, and that some of these can be okay to be consumed in moderation.
You know, we don’t want to make our entire diet white potatoes, right, not nutritionally dense. And the carbohydrate load would just be too much for your system, right? But some of these things can be okay, you know, right now I’m eating mostly meat, and then some fruit, a little bit of dairy, like I’m just sticking to a very ancient sort of ancestral way of eating. And it works great.
For me, it’s very doable, very doable, it’s very sustainable for me. And I even consume a little bit of honey every now and then. And all these things have been part of the human diet forever. And we just have to understand that there’s a difference between the kinds of carbohydrates we’ve been evolving to eat like over millions of years, and the kinds of carbohydrates that are being marketed to us today. Very different, very, very different.
Okay, so let’s look at carbohydrates. From an ancestral standpoint, I think that’s a good way of looking at it, okay. And you can even use carbs, to enhance your running performance, if you want to kick into that extra gear for running if you want, you know, if you’re trying to smash a 10k time or something like that, and you want to be running at your peak performance and close to your VO2 max, then you’re definitely going to want to supplement with some carbohydrates to do that, right?
The fat burning is great when you’re a little bit lower when you’re 65-70% of your VO2 max. But once you get over that, you’re going to want to add some carbs into the mix, right? But the types of carbs matter, right?
Another myth is that high up foods high in cholesterol are unhealthy. Here’s the thing. I’m clueless why cholesterol rich foods have gotten a bad rap. Because people don’t understand how dietary cholesterol affects your health, right? So some people are very sensitive to dietary cholesterol, right, but this is the exception.
Overall, nutrient dense foods that are higher in cholesterol can be included in a healthy diet, including foods like eggs and full fat yogurt. So these have higher cholesterol in them, right? They actually might boost your health because they enhance feelings of fullness. So you’re going to feel more full.
And you’re actually getting a ton of nutrition when you eat these kinds of foods. Whereas when you’re eating foods that have zero cholesterol, you’re not getting the nutrients that you are that are actually required like kale has a lot of it doesn’t have any cholesterol in it right? But is kale something that you need to be eating? Because it’s going to give you all kinds of nutrition, it’s a lot of fiber, you’re just going to pass most of that through your system, you’re not going to absorb a whole lot from eating kale.
Sorry to bust your bubble about kale but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be right? So high cholesterol foods like eggs, full fat yogurt, these things are very nutritious, right? And like I said, some people because of genetic factors might be more sensitive to cholesterol and you’ve got to be careful with that. But for most of us, they can be included as part of a healthy diet.
Your brain needs cholesterol to function properly. Every cell in your body has cholesterol in it. We have to get cholesterol in your diet, or else we’re going to, our health is going to suffer, we’re going to start to break down, right? So we have to have cholesterol in your diet. So just understand that cholesterol does not mean you know, it’s not bad, it’s not the sign of an apocalypse, you’re not going to die from eating cholesterol, in fact, you have to eat it as part of a healthy diet.
Here’s one that might surprise you: supplements are not necessary. So this is a kind of a myth, like I’ve talked about eating real food and how you should be able to get all your nutrition from eating real food. And I kind of stand by that yes, to a certain degree. But I also think there are certain supplements that are okay.
And that actually kind of recommended for most people and especially runners like, I think creatine is a supplement that most people can benefit from most athletes can benefit from, it helps to build muscle, it helps you with recovery, it’ll help to improve running performance, because you’re going to be become a stronger human being, and you’re going to have stronger muscles and stronger connective tissues.
Collagen would be another one that I would recommend, just especially as you get older, you know, to help with connective tissue health and stronger bones. And then iron would be another one. So this is interesting, that long distance runners require more iron, because there’s some loss of blood through the gut that happens with running, because we’re, you know, diverting blood away from our gut in order to provide oxygen to working muscles, this is why a lot of people get stomach issues, GI issues, because they don’t have the blood in their gut.
So we’re diverting blood away from the gut, to arms and legs to keep us out there swimming, running, biking, whatever. And so we’re actually kind of losing blood through that process. And so we want to replace the iron. So eating a diet high in iron, iron can be really helpful. But for a lot of people, I think supplementing with iron, especially for long distance runners is going to be really helpful for you. Okay.
And then one supplement in particular, that I think is interesting. Calcium, a lot of people think they need to supplement with calcium in order to have strong bones. So people are told to just keep popping the calcium supplements, you’ve got to keep your bones healthy, especially as you get older. But there’s been new research out there that shows that supplementing with calcium may actually do more harm than good.
So calcium supplements have shown to be related to an increased risk of heart disease. And so if you’re concerned about your calcium intake, it’s best to focus on dietary sources of calcium, like again, full fat yogurt, sardines, some beans and seeds, things like that. But just another, a better, even better than just like trying to get calcium from your diet is to practice regular strength training, and get enough protein and avoid low calorie diets, low calorie diets, not good for your bone health.
Not getting enough quality protein is not good for your bone health. Not doing any kind of resistance exercise, or any kind of weight bearing exercise is not good for your bone health. So running, strength training, getting enough protein are all going to help you to maintain a strong skeletal system. And if you want to supplement use collagen, because that’s going to help you create stronger connective tissues and stronger bones better than a calcium supplement. Okay.
And then another another myth I wanted to bust is about low fat diet foods being healthy. We probably, I’m assuming that we all know this by now. But I’m just gonna like maybe maybe that’s a wrong assumption. Maybe some people don’t know this. But if you’re buying any kinds of foods that say, like low calorie or low fat, like you just got to stay away from that stuff.
A lot of the foods that are being peddled to us out there that say light or low calorie, low fat or fat free. These contain much more added sugar. And if you gotta read the labels and like just pay attention to what it is you’re getting right? But pretty much I would say stay away from anything that says light, low calorie diet, low fat, fat free. Avoid anything that says any of that, right? Go for though just regular full fat foods, because these are almost always going to be a healthier option and contain less sugar. So just keep that in mind. Okay.
Another myth that I hear all the time, and especially from, you know, bodybuilder type of people is that you’ve got to eat like six times a day in order to keep your metabolism going. And I just have to tell you that this is completely not true. That every time you eat food, you’re going to increase your blood sugar, right.
And if every time you eat if you’re eating six times a day, and you’re keeping your blood sugar high, especially if you’re eating a lot of carbs, this can really lead to more fat storage. And I can’t tell you how many people have come to me as clients and said, Patrick, I was working with a trainer. And they wanted me to eat six times a day, and I just kept gaining weight, and I just kept gaining weight.
And they were telling me that I wasn’t doing it right, or that I needed to exercise more. And I just have to tell you that this whole concept of eating six times a day is just total BS, the human body is not designed to eat six times a day, we’re just not. The human body is designed to eat like once or twice a day. And that’s it.
We did not evolve as grazers, you know, we’re not antelopes, or bison, like, you know, we evolved as persistent hunters, we, we evolved as gatherers, you know, we would gather foods and then bring them back to our tribe, and we would, we would eat that food together. But we we evolved to be people who, a species who eats infrequently. So this idea of eating all the time, just puts a strain on our systems and puts a strain on your pancreas, it puts a strain on the digestive system.
And you do not need to eat six times a day to keep your metabolism going. You know, you keep your metabolism going by just eating enough each day, getting enough calories in, eating a couple times a day, you don’t need to be snacking in between meals or anything like that. And this is how you promote fat loss. This is how you keep your metabolism actually going.
And you just have to understand that we are not designed to eat that many times a day, the human body does not like that. And we will keep storing a lot of that energy as fat and you won’t be able to tap into your fat stores. You know, we talked about, you know, fat burning being the goal, here we want to be, we want to get our bodies back to being efficient fat burners.
And when we eat all the time, we flip that switch and we just store fat, store fat, we store fat, stop doing that. It’s not healthy, it’s not a good way to go. Especially if you’re an endurance athlete, stop eating a million times a day, just eat a couple times a day. And take advantage of all the amazing adaptations that happen. When you practice this kind of meal spacing, this intermittent fasting, whatever you want to call it, this idea that we eat a couple times a day. And that’s plenty for us. And this is the way we’ve always done it as human beings. Yeah.
And then the last little myth I want to bust here is about tracking calories, tracking macros, and that this is something we have to do if you want to lose weight, you got to track your calories, you got to count your calories, you got to count your macros, and you have to stay on top of it for the rest of your life, you know, and I’m just gonna say just know, just know, you don’t have to do this. Somehow, for two and a half million years, as human beings, we managed to thrive without my fitness pal. Like we didn’t need to put our food into a food tracker in order to stay healthy and fit and lean and strong.
And in my programs, I help people to learn how to eat more intuitively, how to give their body what their body actually needs, when you need it, and how to tune into that. Now, just as full disclosure here, I do encourage people to track their food for a little bit of time just to understand what that looks like. And to understand what these numbers kind of can add up to.
Because when we tell people like hey, maybe we’ll switch to eating fewer carbs, or what does that mean? And so we just wanted to, you know, we want to quantify that with some numbers. So we’ll track for a little bit of time, maybe a couple of weeks or something like that, but then we put that away, we don’t need to do that anymore. Your body knows what it needs.
And if you’re eating the right kinds of food, you’ll know when you’re hungry. And when you’re not. You’ll know when you’ve eaten too much or if you need more. And if you’ve learned how to eat properly and you’ve learned about proper human nutrition, and you’ve learned about what works for your body and what doesn’t work for your body, then this should be very intuitive for you and that you shouldn’t need to be tracking calories and tracking macros.
I talked to somebody a while back who was so obsessed about tracking calories and making sure that she was always getting the right number of calories and making sure macros were always right that she would take a scale, a food scale, with her on vacation and take a foods go with her when she went out to dinner with, you know, business with colleagues.
And she would pull out her scale and set it on the table and weigh everything that she was eating, because she needed to know exactly how many grams everything was so that she could enter it all into her food tracker. This is not sustainable. This is not sustainable. This is not the way that we were designed as human beings to live our lives, you know.
And, you know, I think it’s interesting to track for a little while, and I have done it in the past. And every now and then I’ll just put my food into an app just to kind of see where I wonder where I am with this stuff. It’s kind of interesting, right? But it’s not necessary. I am very intuitive now and this is what I teach my clients to do, too, we want to be able to eat intuitively. And again, in my programs, we talk about sustainability, this is all about what’s going to work for the long term, because we’re not committed, we’re not committed to short term, we’re not this isn’t about like a quick fixes this is about long term, sustainable, a way of life. That’s what we’re interested in. So we want to get there. And that’s what we focus on.
So that’s, that’s the gist of, of, of what I do in my programs is that we work on sustainability, and we work on creating good habits that lasts for life. Okay. So those are the biggest myths that I wanted to go over today. And I’m sure you know, I’ll probably come up with some more, I’ll do another episode about maybe some of the other ones that didn’t quite make the list this time.
But I wanted to make sure that we’re all on the same page with some of this stuff, because some of it’s just, it’s just outdated. And that’s cool. Get it. So I hope this was helpful. Let me know what you think. You can always reach out to me on social media. And you can find me @runningleancoaching on Instagram and Facebook and all that.
And I would love to chat with you about coaching if that’s something that you’re ever interested in. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. And we’d love to have that conversation with you. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
There is a health crisis going on right now in the US. Metabolic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease are at an all-time high. Our collective health has been steadily …
Continue Reading about 130. Taking Your Health Into Your Own Hands →
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 130 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today taking your health into your own hands. There is a health crisis going on right now in the United States.
Metabolic diseases like obesity, type two diabetes and heart disease are at an all time high and our collective health has been steadily declining over the last 40 years. And it doesn’t appear to be reversing any time soon. And if you think that our healthcare system or the food industry or the government are here to help you to help reverse this, you are sadly mistaken.
So if you want to avoid being another statistic, and if you want to start becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, then this episode is for you. In this episode, I’m going to share some surprising reasons why we might be experiencing this current health crisis here in this country.
And I also want to explain the simple solution not relying on the powers that be quote unquote, but instead taking your health into your own hands. What does that look like? What does it mean for you? What can you do today to start taking your health into your own hands?
First, I just want to talk a little bit about my coaching program, which is called the Running Lean coaching project. So every month I pick a different topic. And in our program, we kind of take a deep dive into that topic and June, this month of June, is all about mastering your mindset.
Your mindset is the foundation of everything that you do in your life, everything that you want to accomplish in your life, whether it’s you know, health and fitness related, even business related relationship related, all requires you to have the right mindset. And a lot of times we don’t even understand what that means. What is mindset? What does it even mean to have the right kind of mindset?
So we’re taking a deep dive into this all month long. And if you want to join us, it’s not too late. Not only can you continue to join in the conversations we’re having about this, but you can also have access to all of the past coaching calls that I’ve done.
There’s kind of a couple of different components to this coaching program. There’s group coaching, and then there’s also one on one coaching with me, I designed this program to give you all of the support that you need to accomplish your goals, whether you want to lose weight, improve your running performance, become stronger, just become the most badass version of yourself whatever that looks like for you.
I’ve created this program to provide you with the knowledge, the support, the accountability, the inspiration, the motivation to help get you there, I want to help you stay on track, help you change your mindset, if that’s what needs to happen, develop good habits, so that we can create a healthier version of you that lasts.
This is about permanent lifestyle changes. This isn’t about short term fixes or, you know, lose weight quickly kind of thing. This is about long term health and fitness. So if you’re interested in that, if you’re interested in not the short game, but the long game, and about changing your mindset and changing the way you think and feel about health and fitness and diet and nutrition permanently, then I think this might be a great program for you.
But we have to have a conversation about it, we’ll jump on a call and we’ll kind of talk about the program. I want to give you more details. I’m going to talk about your individual goals because this this program is designed for you as an individual, it’s not about just you know, doing some certain diet, you know, this is about me, and you’re working together to figure out what’s the best plan of action for you as an individual, because we’re all different.
We all have different metabolisms, different goals, different likes and dislikes, different food preferences, and we want to put together a plan that works specifically for you. So if you’re interested, go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out a short application, book a call with me, and we’ll talk about it, cool. I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project.
And then just really quickly, I want to put out a little bit of a disclaimer about this particular episode. So I’m going to be talking about some things today that that you might want to change in your diet and I usually don’t talk about like, say I don’t usually suggest things has to do, because we don’t have a client coach relationship, me and you, you know, for the most part, right? So I can’t really offer nutritional advice here on the podcast.
But what I can do is suggest some things that you may consider changing. Of course, you know, get your doctor’s approval before you change anything in your diet before you start making any kinds of changes to your exercise regimen or anything like that, okay, I’m not a doctor, I can’t offer medical advice, I can’t really offer advice unless we have a relationship.
So nothing that I ever say here should ever be construed as medical advice. And just know that the things I’m going to be talking about today are just general sort of guidelines that I think we can all follow and maybe improve our health a little bit. But again, you got to talk to your doctor about making any kinds of changes. Cool. All right. So let’s get into this a little bit.
I have to say that I’m a little fired up about this topic. And I have been for a while. And I hope by the end of this episode, you get a little bit fired up too. Because there’s a big problem here in this country, with our health and with the health of the population of the people in the United States.
Now, this extends beyond the borders of the United States as this goes into most of the world at this point. But I’m just kind of focusing on what’s happening here, because I know more about what’s happening here in the US than I do about other countries. And I really can’t speak to that.
But we’re in the midst of a kind of a devastating health crisis here. We really are. Like I said at the beginning, you know, over the last 40 years, our health has been steadily declining, and hasn’t been getting better. You know, right now, obesity rates are at an all time high. In 2020 42% of the US population was considered obese. 42%. That’s up from 30% in the year 2000.
So just 22 years ago, that has changed dramatically. And then severe obesity, some people call it morbid obesity, but severe obesity is up from 4.7%, back in 2000, to 9.2% today in 2022. And the annual medical cost just of this one chronic condition, this the annual medical cost of obesity here in the United States is nearly $173 billion.
That’s billion with a B obesity related medical conditions include things like heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, and certain types of cancer. These are some of the leading causes of premature death in this country. And they’re all absolutely preventable. So they call these things lifestyle diseases, because they are associated with the way you live your life, the way the choices that you make, you know, around nutrition, around exercise, around alcohol and drug intake, those kinds of things are associated with these problems.
And it’s a big, huge problem in this country. Here’s something that I saw recently, and this just this makes me very sad. Okay, and this has to do with children. Right now, one in eight children have asthma. One in five children in this country have allergic eczema. One in twelve children have food allergies, one in five children have obesity, one in five children have obesity, one in six children have a mental health disorder. And one in 54 children have autism, children with chronic conditions, has increased by over 400% since the 1970s.
And people look at these kinds of stats. And they say, well, it’s genetics, it’s genetics. Our genes haven’t changed since the 1970s. It takes 10s of 1000s of years for genes to change like that, for genetics to play a big role like that. It’s not about genetics, our environment has changed.
At the start of the 1970s we were told, you know by our government by, you know, these dietary guidelines they put out there that we should start eating what they called the food pyramid at the time. And this pushed refined carbohydrates as the basis of our diet. That should be the majority of the food we’re eating. Up to 65% of our diet should be coming in the form of refined carbohydrates.
And at the same time we started doing that chronic diseases increased in both adults and children. There’s an obesity epidemic among toddlers in this country. What the hell? That is crazy. That is just crazy. Toddlers were not obese. Prior to the 1970s, it was a very, very, very, very rare thing. But now we look at kids today, one in five children are obese. This is crazy.
Since we started following these food guidelines, we’ve gotten fatter, and we’ve gotten sicker, chronic diseases are up, and we are not getting better. And there’s no sign of this changing, it’s only getting worse.
And what I want to talk about today, is that there’s something we can do about this. But what I want to talk about today, and I’ll get to that is not just bad news, okay. But there’s a lot of bad news. Unfortunately, this is what gets me fired up, though. Okay.
But today, when we look at the policies our government has in play, we look at our health care system, as a whole. We look at Big Pharma, big pharmaceutical companies, we look at all the big food companies in this country. And we think we have this idea, this beautiful idea that all of these systems are in place to help us to keep us healthy, to improve our health.
And the reality of it is, is that they’re not there to help us. They’re not there to improve our health and to help us to live long, healthy lives, they’re there, they’re around to make money. And there’s a lot of profit in keeping people sick. I know this may seem a little bit like conspiracy theory, but it’s really not.
This is something I’ve been noodling over for a long time for years, actually. And I just feel like we need to just call it what it is, you know. And so I’m gonna break down a little bit of why I feel this way. And it’s not just me, this is not just something I just thought of the other day, and I’m like, oh, you know, I think I’m just gonna start talking about how all this stuff is working against us now.
This has been going on for decades. And there’s millions of people talking about this. Okay, so I’m just another voice out there that’s talking about this, but I think it’s really, really important that we talk about this. Okay, so, here’s an example. Look at the big food companies that are out there. Okay.
So, when you look at the biggest food companies in this country, the majority of food produced in this country is created by these companies, Kraft Foods, Coca Cola, Nestle, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Unilever, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Mars. Okay, so what you’re noticing in this list is that there’s a lot, a lot of sugar. Right?
There’s a lot of, a lot of processed food, it’s a lot of sugar. And it’s a lot of refined grains. You know, we look at stuff like Kellogg’s and General Mills is just nothing but sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. That’s like the main three ingredients of all junk food, right? Stay away from those three things, by the way, and your health is going to start to change for the better.
But Coca Cola, Nestle, PepsiCo, Mars, these are all, you know, these are sugar, sugar, water and candy companies. And these are the biggest food companies in this country. And they’re the most profitable and they have deep, deep pockets and money in this country, money equals power. And these big companies, they have the power to change laws to create policies to promote more of their own products.
You know, an example would be the sugar industry actually came up with a study to prove quote, unquote, prove that salt was bad for us. Salt is bad for us. Alright, so they wanted to divert the attention away from sugar as being a problem. And most people don’t know this, but the salt, the sugar industry actually funded studies to prove you know that that showed that salt was a problem. It was causing hypertension, high blood pressure, and all these other things.
And the truth of the matter is, salt is something we have to have in our diet. Like if we don’t eat salt, we will die. Like we have to have sodium in our diet. And in the end, the sugar industry doesn’t want you to limit the amount of sugar you’re eating. So they are kind of saying well, oh, high blood pressure, heart disease, all these other things. It’s the salt in your diet.
And so they have these deep pockets and they can fund these kinds of studies. That’s just one example. This happens every single day in this country. These big food companies are funding studies that promote their viewpoint, right?
And a lot of the science, you know, the people that are actually conducting the science, they’re being funded by these food companies. So we have to understand that there’s a lot of skewed science out there and that we have to just take things into our own hands, we have to look at what’s going on out there.
And just don’t believe everything you read, for sure, don’t even believe everything I’m telling you, like, do your own research, if you want to go and look this stuff up, I’m not sharing anything that I haven’t researched thoroughly. And I’m at this point in my life where I just have to, I have to say what’s on my mind, and I get fired up about this particular topic.
Here’s another thing to kind of consider from the big food companies, sugar and refined grains, they are not nutritious. Alright, there’s nothing really good about eating this stuff. It doesn’t, there’s no health benefits from eating this stuff, okay. And the other thing you have to realize is that sugar and refined grains will turn off sensors in your body that will actually make you feel full.
So like, when you eat something like a piece of chicken, or, you know, some some vegetables with some butter, you know, like you eat some real, you know, good sources of protein and fat, you’re going to feel full, and then you’ll stop eating, how much chicken can you sit down and eat at one at one sitting? Not a lot. I’ve tried it before.
I’m like, I’m gonna eat a pound of chicken and then I’m 12 ounces into it. I’m like, I’m done, right? You just can’t eat anymore. But how many, you know, Twinkies can you eat at one sitting like dozens, right? Like, you could just keep going, you never stop. So eating these kinds of refined foods, especially with the sugar and refined grains, they turn off sensors of fullness and satiety. And so we can overeat that very easily.
And they increase our hunger signals. So when you’re eating these kinds of foods, you’re more hungry all the time. And this is by design, the food companies understand this, if we never feel full, if we’re always hungry. And we’re eating this non nutritious, you know, empty calorie, carbohydrate laden foods, we’re gonna buy more of that stuff, because it tastes amazing, right?
We’re gonna keep buying more and more, so it increases their profits. So what they’re doing is working for them. It’s working to build more and more profits for the big food companies. But it’s making us fat, or it’s making us sick or, and they don’t care about that. They just want to, they want you to eat more, they want you to stay hungry, they don’t want you to crave their stuff, eat more of their processed garbage food, so that you just continue to buy, buy, buy buy from them, they use the cheapest ingredients available, and they make these hyper palatable foods.
You’ve probably heard about the bliss point, they have scientists that are working on the actual science of craving and how, what ingredients can they use, and it’s usually sugar, flour and vegetable oil to produce the most, the most blissful feeling in our brains. And they’ve shown that sugar is actually preferable to certain drugs like cocaine, like they’ve done these tests on rats, poor rats, they always get tested on these weird things, right?
But they did this test on rats where they gave them cocaine or sugar. And over time, the sugar was preferable. The rats just stopped doing the cocaine, stopped drinking the cocaine and stopped and started drinking their sugar water because it gave them a better high. It gave them a better high. And if you don’t think sugar is bad for you, you don’t think sugar is addictive? Just look at that study right there. Rats will prefer it over cocaine. Okay.
So they’re getting us hooked on their product. They know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re giving us this garbage food and we’re just buying into it. We’re buying into it. We’re buying the stuff by the pallet full, just go into Costco and see what’s sitting out there on all these giant pallets of food, right?
And then, of course, there’s this idea of like, they have all this influence and power, you know, they squash any attempts to say that their food is unhealthy. You know, Coca Cola put out this whole campaign about how sugar wasn’t the problem, and you just needed to move more just like exercise more. And I forget the name of the campaign, it was something like you know, move more or something like that, but it’s basically like, oh, yeah, Coca Cola is fine. Just keep drinking Coke. That’s not the problem with you, the problem is you’re lazy. And you need to be moving more.
That’s just bananas to think about, right? What, when in human existence, have we ever needed to like, do a bunch of cardio? This has never been a thing for us. Why, since the incorporation of these guidelines in 19 in the late 1970s. Why all of a sudden do we have to do a bunch of cardio just to stay in shape and not get all fat and obese? But it’s crazy. It’s crazy. The diet is wrong.
And they’re pushing their junk on us. And we have to just stand up and say, no, thank you. No, thank you, I’m not going to buy into this anymore. Okay. And remember that, you know, he’s talking about salt being an essential nutrient salt is essential. If we don’t eat salt, we will die. Sugar, on the other hand is a non-essential nutrient, we don’t have to eat sugar in our diet, our bodies will produce the glucose that we need, our brain needs a certain amount of glucose to function, but your liver produces that just fine.
I’ve gone through stints where I’ve basically done no sugar, no carbs, basically, like just kind of a carnivore type of diet. And I gotta tell you, I’ve never felt better. I felt amazing when I eat that way. And, and I go back and forth, it’s not something I do all the time. I’m always kind of experimenting with things because I want to go to share different, you know, different diets and things with you guys and share different strategies to kind of help you.
So I’m always experimenting on myself. So I never do anything for too long. But honestly, I go back to that sort of carnivore way of eating, where it’s just basically meat and eggs for periods of time. And I’ve done it for 30, 60, 90 days, and I just feel amazing, and my body functions perfectly fine, I get all the glucose I need, my brain is functioning better than ever.
So just so you understand, I’m not telling you, you need to do that. I’m not telling you, you need to like stop eating vegetables or fruit or anything like that. Eat that stuff. It’s good. You know, fruit, veg, meat, eggs, dairy, some of that stuff. If you can handle dairy, like all good for you. But stay away from all that junk food, okay? And if the big food companies are telling you to eat something, do the opposite. Okay?
And then we’ve got this issue with the government. So our government here is there’s a lot of self interest going on here. There’s lawmakers, there’s lobbyists, and they’re tied in to the big food companies, you know, the big food companies put a lot of money into the government to help create policies, and even on the board of, and I’m gonna get this wrong, but it’s like the USDA, or the FDA can’t remember which one it is that actually funds that actually does the food guidelines. There’s a lot of people on that board that are being funded by the big food companies like Coca Cola and PepsiCo and Mars, it’s bananas like, this is not, this is not the way it should be.
The government does not really have our best interest in mind. When we look at the government, we’re talking about people who are being, you know, funded by big food companies, right. And it’s profitable, everybody’s making money off of this, you know, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthier doesn’t mean it’s the way we should be doing things. And there’s, there’s these big incentives to grow mono crops like corn, wheat, and soy. So these are the three three ingredients that dominate the food industry, right. And these three crops are subsidized heavily by the federal government, farmers received between 1995 and 2020, farmers received 424 billion with a B dollars in substitute subsidies.
And 50% of that were for just those three crops corn, wheat and soybeans. And corn was by far the largest at $116 billion in subsidy subsidies going to corn production, which accounts for about 20-27% of the total mono crop.
Mono-culture crops contribute to a large portion of soil erosion, they increase fertilizer and pesticide use. And Cornell did this study and found that pesticide use in the United States causes $520 million in crop loss, and over a billion dollars in health costs for us as humans. So buy organic by all means, okay. And we want to stay away from those mono crop foods, you know, corn, wheat and soybeans is a problem.
This is a problem these things are, are not necessarily they’re not good for us, you know, they cause all kinds of problems, right. And then just keep in mind that, you know, the government puts out these guidelines. And, you know, they basically put out these guidelines back in late 1970s or 1980 that says, you know, 65, up to 65% of your diet should be coming from refined carbohydrates. And the food guidelines are there not to make us healthy.
They’re not for health and well being, but they’re there to support a profitable food industry because the more you tell people you need to eat these, you know, these refined grains, the more money that you know, is being pumped into producing these grains, the more subsidies people are getting, and the whole system is kind of just messed up. It’s a messed up system.
And so we just have to understand what’s going on and try to take some, some control ourselves, okay. And listen, the food guidelines that are being followed. I know a lot of people say like, well, people aren’t just following, if they would just follow them, everything would be fine. But they’re not being followed. They are being followed.
I mean, and we are really good at following advice that is put out there. Like when they say, Hey, you know, smoking is bad, cigarettes are bad that causes all these problems. We follow suit, you know, all the side effects and diseases caused by smoking have gone down dramatically since we started these anti smoking campaigns right? Dramatically.
I don’t even know many people that smoke anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know maybe one person that I know of smoking, everybody I knew used to smoke, right? Maybe I’m hanging around different people these days. But these guidelines are being followed. And they’re not working. The guidelines are not working. The government is putting out these food guidelines that are not designed with our health and well being in mind. And it’s just not working.
The science that produces the guidelines is bad, the sciences never really proven. They’ve come up with so many new studies that show that, you know, saturated fats are not the enemy, the fat is not the enemy, that carbs are bad, the sugar is bad, and vegetable oil is bad. And listen, these guidelines are driving a lot of policy and a lot of food that goes out to like our kids.
So public school lunch programs, they use the guidelines to follow, to put together the school lunch programs for our kids, the military follows these guidelines, hospitals, nursing homes, VA hospitals, that kind of stuff. All follow the guidelines, they use the guidelines as the basis of how to structure and nutrition programs. And these things are just not working. They’re keeping us sick, they’re keeping us overweight, obese, they’re causing all kinds of problems with our health. So we need to take things into our own hands. Okay.
And, you know, here’s something interesting, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. So and this is the organization that where if you’re a registered dietitian, this is where you get registered through or whatever, right. So they’re having a conference coming up here in a few months. And it’s touted as the world’s largest meeting of food and nutrition experts. Oh, that sounds good. Right. So this conference is coming up. And you know, it’s supposed to be all these experts coming together. Well, here’s who’s sponsoring this, this conference, PepsiCo, the sugar Foundation, Nestle, General Mills, the canola oil Council, just to name a few.
So this is indicative of the kinds of relationships that exist between food companies, healthcare systems, the government, you know, the governing agencies that are governing all these registered dieticians, our nutrition is being dictated by the sugar industry, essentially.
So there’s all these conflicts of interest, right? And conflicts of interest come about when, you know, there’s big corporations marketing, potentially harmful products, and they have these financial relationships with research institutions, or individual researchers, or public health organizations.
And as obesity is becoming just more and more rampant in this country, these kinds of relationships are jeopardizing the integrity of scientific research. So if you want to know if what you’re reading is, you know, legit or not, see who’s funding the research. You have to do your homework on this stuff. Okay? I hate that it even has to be this way.
But there’s these big companies, you know, like Pepsi Cola, sugar Foundation, General Mills, Coca Cola, whatever, they flood the literature out there with science that they funded to make it very difficult for you to actually find legit science that’s not been funded by the food industry. It’s a problem. It’s a real problem. Okay. And then I talk about the healthcare industry as you know, it’s really not about our health or care.
It’s like another for profit business in this country, our health care system in this country is messed up. And, you know, we could go into that. And maybe I will go into a whole episode about how just the healthcare industry is messed up. But I need to say this, though, health care workers are amazing. And there’s a lot of great doctors out there. And there’s a lot of great health care workers out there.
That’s not what I’m talking about here. The health care workers are amazing people. And I have a couple of doctors that I go to, and I love, they’re amazing. And they spent a long time with me, right? There’s a lot of amazing people in the healthcare industry, I have a lot of friends who work in the healthcare industry. And these people are amazing people, it’s not about the people, this is about the industry as a whole, the big health care system is broken. Right?
What doctors can and can’t do largely is dictated by the insurance companies, you know, in their hands are tied, a lot of times they want to be able to help and they can’t, right, and they have to work within these strict guidelines, often without the patient’s best interest in mind. And they’re told to push drugs. They’re not trying to solve the problem. They’re just writing prescriptions. And if you go to your doctor and say, oh, you know, I’m overweight, and I have type two diabetes, these are lifestyle diseases, right?
And you go, yes, doc, I’ve got these lifestyle diseases, you would think the doctor would say, Well, what you need to do is fix your lifestyle. Instead, they say, oh, my gosh, here’s a drug you should take. Here’s something to lower your cholesterol, or here’s something to help you with your type two diabetes, to keep insulin levels low, whatever, they’re just treating symptoms, right.
And I just watched a video from a doctor, MD Paul Saladino, who said, that not one time, not one time, during his entire med school, or his residency, was he ever challenged to actually find the root cause of any illness, he was never challenged, as a medical student to ever, like, go find what’s really causing the problems and solve the problem at its root, he was always told to just treat the symptoms. And that’s, that’s what most of our doctors are told.
Now, there’s some good doctors out there. And I want to make it very clear that there are some very good doctors out there. And you just need to find the right one, right. But a lot of these doctors, they’re just writing prescriptions, right? The big pharmaceutical companies are making huge profits off of us, and they don’t want us to get healthy. They don’t want us to solve the problem, they don’t want us to solve the root problem, they want to keep, they want us to keep taking their pills. That’s it, because money equals power, right? So they drive policies that keep doctors writing prescriptions. Because listen, a cured patient is no longer a paying customer.
Think about that, you are a customer of these big insurance companies or big pharmaceutical companies. And if you get healthy, you don’t make them money. Okay? So a few things that I’m going to suggest you do here, number one, like find a good doctor, there are amazing doctors out there. And, for example, I go to a doctor who doesn’t really take insurance.
There, I pay a monthly fee to sort of be a part of their practices called concierge health care. And so I pay a monthly fee to be a part of their practice. They’re not pressured by, you know, pharmaceutical companies to write prescriptions. And like, my doctor spends time with me, like she spends, like 30 minutes with me every time I go to see her, and we talk about what the root problem is, and we try to solve things. So this is like old school, right? It’s the way doctors should do things, right? I think you can find a doctor like this.
But you’ve got to do a little bit of work and do a little digging, but find somebody that’s on your side that has your best interests in mind. And that isn’t going to just write prescriptions, right. And on the prescription thing, you know, I try to avoid taking medications. And I suggest that you do too.
Obviously, you know, there’s some medications that are very important that you have to take, you know, and that’s awesome. And I totally am down with that, right? But instead of taking a pill like to mask symptoms, like let’s do our best to change our lifestyle so that we can get off the medications. And a lot of my clients actually end up greatly reducing or even getting off medications altogether, with their doctor’s approval, of course, right.
But here’s what I’m trying to say: a pill is not always the answer. Like sometimes it is but you know, for some of these lifestyle issues I’m talking about here. Yeah, you want to continue taking your medication but wouldn’t it be awesome if you changed things and improved your health from the inside out without having to take medications anymore? Like maybe you can reduce or eventually get off those things right.
Another thing that I want to suggest here is that those dietary guidelines from the government just don’t work, they don’t work, like they do the opposite. If they’re telling you to stay away from fat, eat more fat, if they’re saying meat and eggs is gonna kill you, like eat more of that stuff. If they say eat a ton of grains don’t do that. If they say sugar is fine, don’t eat sugar, eliminate it from your diet and see how good you feel.
You know, they say, oh, keep salt really low, like just use salt, you need salt will die if you don’t need salt, right. And they say, you know, healthy fats like vegetable oil, stay away from that stuff, they’re dead wrong about that, that stuff is toxic, avoid it altogether, okay. And then that food industry, food industry is there to make money, they make money off of us.
So like, avoid food that comes with a marketing message. Avoid foods that don’t look like food. Avoid foods, or at least most foods that come in packages. And if you do buy food that comes in a package, read the label and understand what you’re reading, understand how to read the label, because the labels can be very deceiving. You know, there’s like 96 different words they use for sugar, because they want to confuse you and hide that stuff, right. So make sure you understand what you’re reading.
And then just eat real food, eat food that looks like food, eat food that you buy around the perimeter of the grocery store, you know, meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, right? Eat food that our ancestors would recognize, oh, beef, chicken, banana, avocado, like, stick with stuff like that, you know, if the food you’re eating is making you feel hungry all the time, this is not the right kind of food. Right? There’s, you got to change that, right? Eat the opposite,
Okay. So I get fired up about this, because I have this mission. And this mission that I have is to help you to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And in order to do that, I have to call BS on a lot of stuff that’s going on in this country, the current health situation in this country is dire, it’s dire. And we have to fix it.
And I share all this stuff with you because there’s this problem out there that’s bigger than me, it’s bigger than you and we need to take things into our own hands. Right? I’m compelled to help make this world a healthier place. And it happens like one person at a time, it’s me doing what I can to become the best and most badass version of myself. So it’s me being an example of what’s possible, and then hopefully inspiring you to do the same.
And then hopefully, you inspire other people to do the same. And I see this happen all the time. And I don’t have millions of people listening to this podcast, I don’t have millions of people following me. But I do have a lot and I have a voice. And I’m passionate about helping you. I’m passionate about helping you get healthy and stay healthy and stay fit.
So I want to create this ripple effect, this ripple effect of positivity and good health in this world, I want to make an impact. And when I share topics like this, I can help to make an impact, right. And I’ve worked with hundreds of runners who have gotten leaner and gotten stronger and taken back control of their health. And I’m gonna help you too. But it’s up to you to do things differently.
Stop following the dietary advice from the government, stop buying into the marketing messages from the food industry. Stop thinking that you know, our healthcare system and the government and the big food companies have your best interest in mind because they don’t. Right, take things into your own hands. You get to do this any way that you want, and you get to do whatever you want to do. You don’t have to follow the normal things that people are doing out there.
And when I say normal, I use like finger quotes like normal, because normal isn’t good. Normal is those stats I told you at the beginning of this podcast normal is like becoming obese. Normal is becoming having type two diabetes normals having this list of chronic lifestyle diseases, don’t be normal. Take things into your own hands, take a stand, make a different start today. It’s not hard. It takes a little bit of time.
I’m here to help you if you ever want help, but just listen, you can do this. I know that you can do this. But if we’re going to change things, it’s going to be up to me and you to do this as individuals and then hopefully inspire other people to do the same cool. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
If you’re a runner and you are not engaging in some form of consistent, intentional strength training, you are leaving a LOT on the table. This is another episode I’m doing in my “Back to Basics” …
Continue Reading about 129. Back to Basics: The Importance of Strength Training for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 129 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, another in My Back to Basics series: the importance of strength training for runners. So if you’re a runner, and you’re not engaging in some sort of consistent intentional strength training, I’m just going to tell you right now you’re leaving a lot on the table.
So this is another episode I’m doing in my Back to Basics series, where I’m talking about the basics of good health: improved fitness, improved running, and really becoming your healthiest and most badass self. Okay, so today is all about the importance of strength training for runners.
To be honest, most runners that I talked to are not doing any form of strength training, like at all, or they’re not doing it properly. So in this episode, I’m gonna go over why strength training is so important. If you’re a runner, how it can help you to improve your running, how we can help you to lose weight. And all the reasons I believe that strength training is actually one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So that’s all coming up here.
And I just wanted to let you guys know that this whole month, this month of June, is mastering your mindset month over in the Running Lean coaching project. The Running Lean coaching project is my coaching program. And this is our it’s it combines the best of my group program and one on one coaching with me, we put together a personalized plan that works for you, you get training, you get all the information you need, you’ll learn exactly what to do, how to improve your nutrition, how to take control of your food choices, how to lose weight and keep it off permanently, how to build new habits, how to get stronger, how to improve your strength, your endurance, how to fix your mindset.
This whole month, mindset is one of the most important things you can do. This shifting your mindset is one of the most important things you can do to take control of your health and fitness, you cannot succeed and cannot make these changes last, if you don’t have the right mindset. So we’re spending the whole month of June talking about how to improve your mindset. And don’t worry, I know it’s the middle of the month. But if you want to join us, you can.
And all the calls that we do and all the training I’ve been doing around mindset this month, they’re all recorded, and they’re all archived on to a private podcast feed that you can listen to, or you can watch the replays of the Zoom calls, you can watch the videos as well. So you won’t really miss out on anything.
So I just want you to know that anytime you hear me talking about what we’re doing in the current month, and every month, we pick a different theme and sort of just do a deep dive into that theme, you’re not really going to miss out on anything if you join in the first or second week or the middle of the month, okay. And then you can actually have access to all the back back months of trainings that we’ve done.
So if you’re ever interested in really taking control of your health and fitness for good, and understanding how to make these changes last permanently, then join us over in the Running Lean coaching project. There is an application process. This isn’t for everyone. And I want to make sure that we get on the same page before you jump into the program because I’m interested in working with people who are committed and who have what it takes, I think to succeed you so you have to have this commitment level, you have to sort of go all in on yourself in order to be successful with changing your health and fitness like this. So I want you to consider that. So we jump on a call and we talk about your goals and see if this program is right for you or not.
So if you’re interested in applying, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply We’ll jump on a quick zoom call you and I will have a conversation and see if this is good fit cool. But we’d love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. And especially for this month where we’re talking all about mindset that’s runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out your application and we’ll jump on and a zoom call and see if this is right for you.
Okay, another episode today’s another episode in our Back to Basics series. This is where I’m just kind of going over some things I may have talked about in the past. You know, maybe I’ve updated some of the information that today’s a good example of that I’ve got some updated information about strength training for you guys and about why it’s so important, especially for runners, especially if you’re somebody who’s trying to lose weight, especially if you’re somebody who wants to improve your health and fitness, I know you do. If you’re listening to this podcast, you want to become more, you want to become the most badass version of yourself. I know you.
So, you know, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Absolutely. People talk about, you know, how great running is for you. And I know I’m a runner, this shows for runners, I coach runners running is my life. It’s what I do. But I’m going to say something that may surprise you. I think strength training is more powerful and more important for you than running. Running is also important. Running is also important, okay.
But I think building strength is going to have ramifications that last longer, and will help improve your fitness in ways that I’m gonna explain today. So I hope you kind of agree with me by the end of this episode, how important strength training is for you.
But it can be more powerful and more effective on your overall health and fitness than running can be. Okay, I know it sounds crazy, right? But I believe it’s true.
So just to give you an idea of like, what I teach in my coaching program, there’s like four main pillars that I talk about in my program. And they are nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset. And all four are required. All four are important for different reasons. Nutrition, obviously, if you’re eating the wrong diet, and no amount of running is going to fix that no amount of strength training can really undo that. Okay, so nutrition I’m going to say is number one, and then I would put strength as number two.
And then endurance would be number three, you know, we need to build a strong cardiovascular system. So you know, running, run, walk, or whatever you like to do. For endurance, some people are cyclists, awesome rowers, swimmers, whatever you’re into from an endurance mindset. And endurance standpoint is awesome, do that. Do that.
And then underlying everything is mindset. Mindset is like, sort of the foundation that makes everything else possible without the right mindset. All this stuff is really hard to do. Okay, but armed with the right mindset, shifting your mindset, changing your mindset for the better, will make huge improvements, all these things you think are impossible for you become possible with the right mindset. Okay, so all four of these elements are required to be a fit, healthy, happy human being, you have to have all four, nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset.
And today, we’re gonna be talking about strength. We’re going to talk all about why it’s important. And I don’t want you to skip this. It’s probably the most important. Okay, next to nutrition. All right.
So the problem I see with a lot of runners is that they just don’t do any kind of intentional strength training, or the strength training they do is, is not they’re not doing it, right. I hate to say that. But I’m just going to tell you right now that there’s kind of like two different ways to do strength training.
There’s one where you’re intentionally building muscle. And there’s another way where you’re basically it’s more like a cardio workout. Right? You’ve seen this like Orangetheory, and, you know, certain, you know, HIIT classes maybe, or yoga, like power yoga and things like that. These are, these are great, I love all that stuff. They’re all good for you. But a lot of times these workouts tend to be more cardio based.
And that’s fine. But as runners do, we really need to be engaging in more cardio. It’s not a bad thing. Cross training is great. I love it. You know, if you’re a runner and all you’re doing is running, I think that can be detrimental after some time. You know, you start to get overuse injuries and things like that. So engaging in some other types of cardio activities like cycling or swimming. Great, awesome stuff to do.
But don’t pretend like what you’re doing is strength training because a lot of times it’s not, you know. So, bodyweight isn’t really enough sometimes, and I’m gonna get into that in just a minute. But we want to be intentional about building strength and building muscle.
And if you’re a runner and you’re not doing this, you are leaving a lot on the table, you’re not going to be as efficient as a runner, you’re not going to be as efficient as a fat burner, you’re not going to lose weight, if that’s something you’re interested in as effectively as you could be if you’re doing some intentional strength training. So running is just not enough on its own.
There’s three main systems that runners need, and they need to improve and need to work on. And that is endurance, strength and explosive power.
So most long distance runners especially we get into marathon runners, or ultra marathoners, they just focus on endurance. And that’s it. So again, you’re just leaving a lot on the table, you’re leaving out two very important systems that you should be improving in order to make writing that much better for you. Okay. So endurance is great, we want to build our endurance, but you’re leaving a lot on the table, if that’s all you’re working on.
Now, I get some times, you’re training for 100 miler, and, you know, that might be where you’re gonna focus on the long, slow distance, and totally make sense. But incorporating strength and explosive power into your training cycle, and into your regular workouts is going to make that endurance even better, you’re going to improve your endurance, because you’re improving these other systems.
Think about it like this, we need all three systems to function properly, to be at our best, to be at our strongest. And if you’re only working on one of them, endurance, for example, you’re just gonna leave out a lot of potential for improvement, you know, running improvement, performance improvement, power output, even endurance, like, just if you just work on endurance, and that’s all you’re working on, but you’re not getting stronger, you actually are not going to improve your endurance the way you could be, if you were if you were doing some intentional strength training, okay.
So, you know, like to build endurance, you just want to run more, you keep increasing your distance, you keep increasing the time you’re out there running, you know, to build explosive power, you can do things like HIIT training, plyometric exercises, stuff like that. And then to build strength, we have to lift weights, we have to have some sort of resistance.
Okay, so bodyweight usually isn’t enough. So we need to have some more resistance, some body weight can be fine, especially at the beginning. And there’s some exercises where bodyweight is plenty. But really, to work your entire body, you have to be overloading muscles. And so I’ll explain more about that in a second here.
But just understand that we need all three of these systems functioning properly, endurance, strength, and explosive power. And if you do have all those things, firing on all cylinders, so to speak, you’re going to be at your best, right, you’re going to be much more, you’re going to be much stronger and much more powerful as a runner, and a healthier human being overall.
So some of the things I see as a result of people not doing regular resistance training, regular strength training, is they have reduced power output. So they cannot run as hard, or as intense, or as fast as they want to, their running performance is impaired. Regular strength training will fix this. People that don’t engage in regular strength training, especially runners are more prone to injury.
You have a reduced ability to burn fat, if you’re not engaging in regular strength training, your metabolism is actually slower than if you were doing some regular strength training. And there’s just this overall kind of lack of energy that happens, that I see in a lot of people who aren’t engaging in regular strength training. Okay. So just understand that some of the negative things, and I’m gonna talk about how we fix these things right now, right.
But the important thing I want you to understand here is that we have to be engaging in regular consistent resistance training of some sort. And when I say resistance training, there has to be some sort of resistance in order for you to overload your muscles. So that can be free weights, it can be machines at the gym, sometimes it’s bodyweight, it could be those bands that you hook into a doorway or something like that.
I’ve got a set of those bands that I take with me on vacation. If I can’t get to a gym with actual weights, and they work really well. They work really well to do all kinds of resistance exercise, we just have to be, we have to push ourselves to the point of failure. muscle failure is what we’re looking for here. Okay.
So let’s talk about why strength training is so important for runners and what it does for you like, what are the benefits? Why would we want to be engaging in regular strength training? So one of the most important ones that I like to talk to, especially with the people that I work with who a lot of times they’re trying to lose weight, is that your strength training will play a big role in helping you to lose weight.
So when you are carrying around more muscle mass, when you actually have more muscles, your metabolism speeds up, you can actually burn more calories, and therefore burn more fat when you’re carrying around more muscle. So one of the best things you can do to lose weight and improve your body composition, is to do regular strength training. So your muscles require more energy than fat does.
So muscle requires more energy to be on your body than fat does, that doesn’t require a whole lot of energy for your body to carry it around. But muscle does. And so your metabolism will actually be faster if you’re doing regular strength training, and you’re building some muscle. So just understand that if you’re trying to lose weight, like if that’s a goal of yours, and you’re not doing regular strength training, it’s just going to take longer.
Okay, so don’t you want it to go faster? Yeah, I know you do. Another benefit of strength training is that it helps you to get fat adapted and helps you to stay fat adapted. So this whole idea of speeding up your metabolism helps to improve fat burning, it speeds up the fat adaptation process as well.
So if you want to get fat adapted, which is where we’re transitioning our body from being primarily sugar burners to being primarily fat burners, then regular strength training is going to help speed that process up, and it’s going to help you to stay there again, your metabolism is faster, you’re burning more fat in general, then you can stay fat adapted, if you’re doing regular strength training, it’s a much, it’s a much better way to stay fat adapted, and it’s really powerful. And if you can keep your metabolism operating faster, then you keep the engine burning hotter, basically, when you have more muscle on your body, okay, so it’ll help you to get fat adapted and help you to stay fat adapted.
Another benefit of strength training, especially for runners is that, you know, when you, when you build strength, you’re increasing the strength of your muscles, but you’re also increasing the strength of your connective tissues. So ligaments and tendons, this will help protect joints around things like your knees, and your ankles and your hips.
And if you’re a runner who’s prone to injury, and you want to know, like one of the best things you can do to help prevent injury in the future, regular strength training is going to do that for you. So having stronger muscles, having stronger connective tissues, having stronger joints will mean that you are you have a less reduced risk of injury. Right? So this is something that I think is very important, especially as we get older, okay.
Which brings me to another important benefit of strength training, which is it helps to increase bone density. So, bone density is one of those things that people think, oh, you know, you just need to, like, take calcium supplements or something and, and there’s actually some sort of controversy around that and how taking too much calcium can actually diminish bone density.
So it’s better to do something like strength training to improve bone density. So as we get older, one of the most common issues with people is that they lose muscle mass, and they lose bone density. And then they you know, as they get older, they do things like fall down. And when you fall down and you break a hip or something like that, you become sedentary and then your overall health and fitness declines very rapidly at that point.
This is one of the most common causes of death in the elderly is complications from falls, that can be prevented with regular strength training, just stay strong. I want to be like 101 years old and still be able to like, go for a run, lift weights, I want to be in good shape. So that’s my goal. I don’t want to fall down and break a hip or break a leg or something like that. Okay. So, if you’re an endurance athlete, and you’re getting a little bit older, you’re over 40 or whatever. You especially will benefit from strength training, because your strength declines faster than your endurance as you get older.
So you may still be able to run longer, but you could be breaking yourself down. Remember that running is catabolic. Running kind of breaks you down. And one of the best ways to reverse this or prevent this from happening is to maintain muscle strength.
I am currently 55 years old, and I have never been stronger in my life. And I just started this a few years ago, this very intentional way of strength training that I teach to my clients that is very effective. And if you engage in regular strength training, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you can improve, you can make improvements, you can become stronger. And you should be doing some sort of regular strength training, it doesn’t matter how old you are, okay, but strength training will help increase bone density and help you to kind of prevent aging, it’s like magic. Another benefit of strength training is that it helps to improve your overall energy. So consistent anaerobic exercise, like sprinting or intense weightlifting, you know, lifting heavier weights, this is going to give you more energy and give you more energy for your next bout of intense physical activity.
So this is actually going to improve your overall athletic ability, this isn’t going to improve your overall athletic performance. And this is going to improve your overall energy levels. So doing some sort of consistent, anaerobic type of exercise, like strength training, will help you to have more energy just throughout the day.
Another important aspect of strength training for runners is that if you want to improve your speed, if you want to become a faster runner, you need to be doing some regular strength training, there’s no better way to get faster. And then to build stronger muscles. When you start to build stronger muscles and you lose the fat weight and gain some muscle weight, you improve your power to weight ratio, so you have more power on a smaller frame. That means that you can run faster, you have more power output at that point.
So this is about body composition. This is about losing fat weight, gaining muscle weight, and it will help to improve your running performance, you can run faster for longer, okay. And that brings me to my next point, which is improving endurance. So being being stronger means you have more long lasting energy, you can run further, you can run longer distances and longer amounts of time, you can be out there running, because you have stronger muscles, right, you’re not going to break down and hit the wall, like you would if you were super weak, you know. So stronger muscles means you can sustain running for longer periods of time.
And it also has to do with increasing your lactate threshold. So regular strength training will help to improve your lactate threshold, increase your lactate threshold. So that means you’re just shuttling more lactate out of the bloodstream. So you’ll be able to work out harder and more intensely for longer periods. Right. So again, this is about helping to improve performance in general helping to improve speed, power, output and endurance. So all of that gets improved when you’re engaging in regular strength training.
Then there’s a couple of benefits of strength training that I thought were interesting. For example, regular strength training can help you fight depression, improve your mood. So regular strength training releases these feel good hormones and neurotransmitters. And we call this your daily dose. So its dose stands for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, D O S E. And the effect of these feel good hormones can last for, depending on the person, up to 12 to 24 hours.
So if you’re doing regular strength training, you’re doing regular workouts every day, every other day, whatever. You are just going to be a happier human being all around, you’re going to be nicer to be around, you’re going to be in an elevated mood. And so if you’re somebody that has struggled with some, you know, mental health issues, or maybe a little bit of depression, anxiety, that kind of thing. I know this was me.
Years ago, I really struggled with some anxiety issues and depression. And running regularly and doing regular strength training was one of the things that really pulled me out of that, and really helped me to stay above that. And, you know, I still had some of those issues. It’s not like it’s going to fix everything, I had to do some, you know, some counseling and therapy and things like that, which I think is so, so important.
But this regular release of these feel good hormones, just puts you in a little bit of a better mood, and it lasts for a while. And so this is one of the reasons why I continue to do regular exercise and regular, intense exercise. So when I go to the gym, and I lift weights, it’s a hard workout. When I go run, I usually do one of two things, I do super hard, fast runs, I did some sprints the other day, super hard, super hard. And then today, I did a very slow, easy run.
And I kind of balanced the two out, you know, so I’m not always just doing some medium hard runs, I’ve kind of balanced them out with some pretty intense runs, that release more of these feel good hormones, regular strength training, that can be pretty intense to release, these feel good hormones, and I’m just in a better mood all the time, I’m a lot nicer to be around when I’m exercising regularly. I like myself better and other people like me better.
And another thing I thought was interesting was that regular strength training can help reduce risk for some diseases. They’ve done some studies that show that increasing muscle in your body, increasing bone density can actually help reduce the risk for diabetes and heart disease. So if you’re somebody that maybe has a family history of these kinds of things, then regular strength training can be a factor to help to reduce the risk of some of these things. Obviously, your diet is gonna play a factor into this.
Genetics to some point. Don’t smoke cigarettes, that kind of thing, right? You don’t smoke cigarettes, right? I used to smoke cigarettes, I can’t believe I did that today, I look back on that and go like, that was dumb, right? I smoked for like 15 years. Terrible. Kids don’t smoke cigarettes. Okay, stay away from cigarettes.
Alright, now I want to talk a little bit about what it means to do strength training and like kind of how we do it and how we shouldn’t do it. So I was kind of mentioning this earlier, but we want to make sure that we are intentional about building strength.
So when I say that what I mean is like, we don’t want these workouts to just be another cardio workout. And I see too many people, especially runners who they’re like, well, you know, I just need to lift really light weights and do a million reps, you know, because that’s how you get toned. And really, it doesn’t really work that way.
In order to build strength, you have to create an overload in the muscles that you want to build strength in. And we should be working out the whole body here. Okay, so a whole body workout is what we’re talking about here. Tip to toe.
So when you do intentional strength training, you should be overloading the muscle group you’re working out. And this is a principle in strength training called progressive overload. So as you lift the weight, and you get to rep number 12, or 15, whatever it is, and you can no longer lift that weight, even though you’re trying with all your might. And it’s hard and it hurts and you’re like I can’t do it.
That’s overload, you have overloaded that muscle, you can no longer lift that weight. If you could still do another 20 or 30 reps, you’re not there, you’re not going to have an adaptive response. When you overload the muscle, the muscle responds by then, growing stronger, there’s an adaptive response to that overload.
Right? So what we don’t want to do as runners is more cardio, you don’t really need to be doing more cardio, most runners do plenty of cardio. So make your strength workouts very intentional about building strength and don’t make them about more cardio.
So we got to overload the muscle. And we want to do that in a very intentional way with some sort of resistance. So how much resistance Well, studies have shown that light weights will not create the overload required for your muscles to have that adaptive response and grow and get stronger.
So what you want to be doing is lifting heavy and I know what people are thinking you’re like, Oh, but I don’t want to become some big giant bodybuilder. And I’m just gonna tell you right now, do not worry about that. So many people tell me this, they’re like, oh, I’m not gonna I don’t want to lift weights because I don’t want to be all big and jacked. You know? I will tell you right now that to become big and jacked takes so long and it is so hard to do.
Go tell a bodybuilder that you know you’re not going to lift weights because you don’t want to get jacked like them. And they will just laugh in your face, they’ll just be like, yeah, whatever, don’t worry about it, you got to eat a ton more food, you got to be intentional about taking certain supplements, you got to, like work out really intentionally, really hard, like, five, six days a week at the gym.
If you want to get jacked, you can, but it’s going to require a lot of work, a lot of, lot of work. And I’m just going to tell you as a runner, if you’re a long distance runner, right there is going to be, that’s going to kind of be working against you a little bit. Because running, like I said, is catabolic, it breaks you down, running can break down muscle.
So in order to build muscle, you got to be pretty intentional about strength training, do not worry about getting huge. Do not worry about getting muscle bound, it’s just not going to happen. Okay, so lift heavy weights, lift weights heavy enough to create that overload, that’s what’s going to get you there, that’s what’s going to create the adaptive response and get you stronger, we’re not in you know, if you want to see some muscle on you, that’s fine, you can do that you can do that.
You don’t worry about getting huge. More importantly, is getting stronger, becoming a stronger human being. That’s what we’re really after here. So sometimes you’ll see some of those muscles, sometimes you won’t, it’s okay. But if you’re working, if you’re working out properly, you will get stronger. Now this is what’s going to create all these benefits that I talked about here.
When I say you’re going to gain muscle, I mean, you might gain a few pounds of muscle, you probably won’t even see it on the outside of your skin, you might even see bulging muscles coming out, especially women, if you don’t want that look, don’t worry, you won’t get that look. Okay.
It’s very hard to do that, it’s very hard to get these big jacked muscles, I’m trying to do that right now. And as a 55 year old runner, it’s challenging, it’s taking me a lot of effort to like actually build some bigger arms and bigger chest and things like that. So just know that is very hard to do. Don’t worry about it.
So lift heavy, make sure you’re doing some sort of intentional strength training twice a week, and you should be doing a full body workout twice a week, this is what’s going to improve your strength and you know, help to build muscle, once a week is enough, if you just want to maintain where you are. But twice a week, if you want to build, you know, if you’re doing it three or four times a week, that’s fine, too. But twice a week is all that’s really required if you want to build muscle, okay, and then you want to work all your muscle groups.
This isn’t about like just working your arms or just your legs, you know, we want to work the entire muscle groups, all the muscle groups in your body and your entire body from top to bottom. And we work these in order from largest muscle groups to smallest and yes, you’re going to do legs too. Just because you’re a runner, doesn’t mean you get to skip leg day.
It’s important that we work all the muscles and that you’re, you’re improving strength in all areas of your body, especially your legs. So runners will tell me this all the time. They’re like, well, I just don’t do legs because I run so much. So I don’t really need to do legs. You absolutely need to do legs.
Yeah, you might have pretty strong legs right now. But what if you could improve that what I know it would be amazing, wouldn’t it? And think about this. We store glycogen in our muscles. Even if you’re a low carb runner or a fat adapted runner and you’re really efficient at burning fat, you still need glycogen in your muscles for your muscles to operate.
And you get all that you need from you know, your liver like producing glycogen for you don’t need to eat a bunch of gels and stuff like that. But just know that glycogen is stored in your muscles. The biggest muscles in your body that store the most glycogen are like your legs, your quads, really. So if you have larger quads, you can store more glycogen, just something to think about as you’re considering whether or not you want to build muscle. Okay.
So all these reasons I just mentioned, are why I think it’s so important that if you’re a runner, and especially if you’re somebody who wants to improve their overall strength and overall health and fitness and you want to become your most badass self, you cannot skip strength training, you got to do it intentionally. You gotta do it consistently. And you gotta do it in a way that will help to make you stronger, and build muscle. Okay.
And if you’re interested in getting some help with all of this and you want to become a stronger leaner runner, you want to lose weight. You want to do it in a way that supports your running and you want to do it in a way where you get stronger as well as leaner then join us in the Running Lean coaching project.
I’d love to have you in the program, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply And as always, I love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I’ve been thinking about this podcast topic for a while now and finally just felt ready to share my thoughts with you. This is one of those “tough love” episodes, so fair warning in advance. If …
Continue Reading about 126. Are You Eating Like an Athlete? →
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 126 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, are you eating like an athlete? I’ve been thinking about this podcast topic for a while now. And I finally just felt ready to kind of organize and share my thoughts with you here.
So this might be one of those tough love episodes. So just a little fair warning in advance if you’re the kind of person who just wants to keep doing whatever you’re doing and, and just stay where you are, then this episode may not be for you. Okay, but if you’re somebody who’s interested in making changes to the way you feel your body, for not just your overall health and fitness, but you want to improve your athletic performance, then today’s message is definitely for you.
And I’ll be talking about the disconnect. There’s this disconnect that I think a lot of runners experienced when it comes to their diet and nutrition the way they eat. The truth is a lot of runners eat like crap all the time. And then they expect something amazing to happen on race day. And this is just not reality. Okay, so by the end of this episode, I want you to honestly know whether or not you’re eating like an athlete and understand why or why not. You might be or not be, okay.
Fair warning, a little bit of tough love is coming your way today. And listen, eating like an athlete seems pretty straightforward, right? But it’s not, there’s a lot of extra stuff that gets in the way of stuff. Like, you know, peer pressure marketing messages from food companies, worrying about what other people are doing, or what other people are gonna think of you.
And then there’s all the mental and emotional stuff that comes up, like just wanting to eat something amazing. So you can feel good, and all this stuff can work against you, it can make it very hard for you to actually make progress towards your health and fitness goals. This is why I decided to become a coach to help you navigate all of the BS that’s out there and in your head.
So that you can actually stay on track and hit your goal. So you can unleash that badass, it’s lurking inside you right now. So if you’re ready to become more, if you’re ready to take your health and fitness to the next level, and you gotta be ready to show up and do the work. That’s important, then you’re ready for the Running Lean Coaching Project.
In my coaching program, you’ll get all the knowledge, support and accountability that you need to make realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts, and start getting sustainable results. If you’re interested, cool, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. To get started, you’ll fill out a short application schedule call with me. We’ll talk about your goals and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join us in the Running Lean Coaching Project. Cool.
So first of all, are you eating like an athlete? The first question I want to kind of propose to you here is are you an athlete or not? Do you consider yourself an athlete and if you do, or don’t like why or why not? So the definition of an athlete is a person who competes in one or more sports that involve physical strength, speed or endurance. So that’s pretty much all of us, right? I would imagine.
I mean, if you run, you’re an athlete, if you lift weights, if you do yoga or CrossFit or you swim or bike or row or skate or ski or do Jazzercise or hike, or climb or play golf, softball, hockey, soccer on and on and on. Like there’s so many different ways that we can classify ourselves as athletes, you know, if you’re, if you’re competing or participating in anything that involves, you know, the use of endurance, strength or speed or any combination of any of those things, then you should consider yourself an athlete.
But I think we get it into our heads that oh, I’m not a real runner because I just run marathons for fun. Come on, you are an athlete, you know, or I just started running so I’m really, I’m really not an athlete. You know, maybe someday but no, no, no you’re an athlete. If you’re, you know, participating in any kind of endurance, strength or speed, exercise, then you’re an athlete.
You’re not an athlete. If your idea of a marathon is like binge watching Netflix all weekend, that’s a different type of athlete. That’s a non athlete. But that’s not you. I know that’s not who you are. So if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’re a runner of some form, maybe you’re just getting started. Maybe you’ve run 25 marathons, it doesn’t matter. If you run, you’re a runner.
And if you’re a runner, then you are an athlete. Okay, so I want to make this very, very clear upfront. So to answer the question, are you an athlete? I’m going to say probably yes. For most of us, yes. If you’re doing any kind of exercise on a regular basis, that involves speed strength, or, or endurance or any combination of those than you are an athlete. Okay? So let’s make that distinction upfront. All right, let’s all agree that we’re athletes, okay.
And the thing that I really want you to get out of this podcast today, is that you are an athlete, and you need to start acting like one. Okay, specifically, you need to start eating like an athlete. Think about that. And I want you to really ask yourself, honestly, this question, are you eating like an athlete? Are you fueling your body the way an athlete would fuel their body? Or are you just eating a bunch of crap and eating whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it? That’s not what athletes do.
So you’re an athlete, but are you eating like one? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and probably say that most of you the answer is probably no, no, I know, some of you are on board with all this stuff. And you’re good. And that’s awesome. Go you, keep doing you. But I talk to people every single day who tell me their diet is crap. They have, you know, they binge out on sugar and processed garbage.
They’re out of control, they feel out of control with their eating, right. They know their diet sucks, but they’re just they don’t know what to do about it. And they just feel out of control. And I get it. You know, you’ve been told to eat like, all this junk, all these high carbs. And whatever it jacks up your hunger, hunger signals, it messes up your body, it causes inflammation, it causes you to gain weight, but you keep doing it, because that’s what everybody says you’re supposed to do.
Especially if you’re a runner, you’ve got to eat all the carbs and all the sugar, eat the doughnuts, carb load pasta, fettuccine Alfredo the night before you run all that stuff, right? And if that stuff works for you, that is amazing. Love it, keep doing it. But I’m gonna guess for most of you, it doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t work for you, and you consider yourself an athlete, then stop doing that to stop it.
Now, stop treating your body like it’s a garbage disposal and start treating it like you are an athlete. So what would an athlete do? Like think about this, so maybe we should get little wristbands that say, well, what an athlete too. So think about any given situation where you find yourself needing to make a choice around food or nutrition. And, you know, ask yourself, what would an athlete do in this situation?
So let’s say you’re in training mode, right? You’re training for a marathon. And you’re getting leaner and stronger, and you’re, you know, you’re feeling good, you’re sticking to your schedule, your diet is pretty much on point. And then somebody’s like, hey, you know, I made these homemade cupcakes, they put a couple of them on your desk and, and they’re like, I made these cupcakes, and they’re homemade from scratch. And, you know, they’re made with love. So I just wanted to give them to you, and I really hope you enjoy it.
And what would you do? Are you going to eat those cupcakes? Maybe cupcakes are not on your plan. They’re not on your part of your training plan. And you know, that eating those cupcakes is moving you away from your goals. As an athlete, it’s moving you away from your health and fitness goals. Cupcakes, not on the plan. Okay.
So what do you do? Do you do what you always do, which is like, I just don’t want them to feel bad, they spent so much time and they put so much love into making these cupcakes for me. So I’m just going to eat them, even though I will regret it and feel guilt and shame for a few days afterwards. And you know, my weight will probably go up with all the inflammation and water retention, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because you know, I just don’t want to feel.
Is that what you want to do? No, this isn’t complicated. All right. Let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be right. If you’re an athlete, and you are then start eating like an athlete. Let’s just stop with the eating the garbage food, okay. I’m not saying you can never eat a cupcake. I’m gonna get into that in just a minute. I’ve got some thoughts about that.
But what I am saying is that you need to treat yourself like the athlete that you are, okay? So I could just stop right here, stop this podcast and stop talking. Because this is the main message I’m trying to get across today. In every situation, I just want you to be honest and ask yourself, am I fueling my body like an athlete would in this moment? Yes or no? Yes or no? It’s a very cut and dry black and white type of situation here. It is not complicated. Am I fueling myself? Like an athlete or not? And if not, I want to, I want you to ask yourself, why? Why not? Why aren’t you taking your health and fitness seriously? Why isn’t this important to you?
Because when you just eat garbage, you are basically saying to yourself, my health and fitness is not important to me. It’s okay. If I keep gaining weight, it’s okay. If I feel like crap, it’s okay. If my health continues to decline, it’s okay. If running continues to be hard for me. But that’s not what you want. I know, that’s not what you want. And you know what, I’m coming at this from a place of like, experience and empathy because I get it. And I’ve been there. And I did the same thing. And I had to ask myself, why am I doing this? Why am I treating myself like crap?
You know, I was training for marathons and ultra marathons. I was eating a terrible diet. I kept gaining weight, right there, that’s a sign that something is amiss, right? If you’re training for ultra marathons, and you’re put on like 40 pounds and that process over a couple of years, it’s like, whoa, something is not working right here. But I just was so stuck on eating all the sugar and junk food and, you know, processed food and just highly palatable food, all the foods, it’s like, amazingly delicious.
Like I just couldn’t get away from that stuff. It had its claws in me, you know. And that was hard for me to like, break away from that, but I did. So I get it. I’m not being unsympathetic. But I do want you to have this moment with yourself where you’re just like, you gotta be honest with yourself, am I feeling myself like an athlete or not. And that’s the moment I had, where I had to say, I’m not, I’m not feeling myself, like an athlete. I’m feeling myself. Like, I don’t care about myself, like, I don’t care about my physical health, or my mental or emotional health. And I had to make a decision. And that decision was not doing that anymore.
I’m not going to keep treating myself like this anymore. I am going to do something about it. I’m going to start acting like the athlete that I am, I’m going to start fueling my body like the athlete that I am. I am training for ultra marathons here. I cannot afford to treat myself like garbage 90% of the year and think that everything is going to go perfectly right on race day. It doesn’t work that way. Okay, so that’s the main message today. Just ask yourself that question. Am I fueling myself like an athlete or not?
An athlete sees food as fuel, right? The food that you put into your body as an athlete should help you to run longer, run faster, it should help you to build strong bones and muscles. It should help improve your cardiovascular health. It should give you steady energy. It should help you sleep better at night. It should help you recover from hard workouts and rebuild muscle tissue. That’s what food is designed for. For human beings for human consumption.
Especially if you’re an athlete, you put your body under all this stress, you’ve got to have the right fuel coming in to replace that energy to repair the muscles to continue to build strong, you know, bones and strong cardiovascular system and all the energy that you need. You have to like be fueling yourself properly. So the food that you eat as an athlete should be in alignment with your health and fitness goals. So here’s the next question for you. Is it be honest, it’s a yes or no question, right? Is the food you eat in alignment with your health and fitness goals? Is the is the food that you’re putting into your body helping you become a better athlete or not? Or is it just keeping you stuck? Or is it like moving you in the opposite direction? Right? Why? Why if not why?
Why are you choosing a diet that’s working against you? Why are you continually to Using foods that keep you gaining weight and feeling like crap, why the hell would you do this to yourself over and over and over and over again, you are an athlete. So start acting like one. Because when you do, I promise you, you’re going to feel so much better, you’re going to feel stronger, you’re going to have all this energy, you’re going to recover faster, you’re gonna feel better about yourself, you’re gonna feel like a total badass.
But if you don’t feel strong, if you don’t have all day energy, if you kind of feel like crap about yourself a lot of the time, why are you doing this to yourself? You deserve better. You deserve to love yourself. Better than this, to treat yourself better than this. You deserve to be the fittest, healthiest, most badass person that you want to be. It’s just a choice you get to choose. It’s a choice that you get to make with every decision you make around food.
And then it’s just recommitting to that choice every day. It’s a recommitment to that mentality of just like, hey, I’m going to feed myself like an athlete today. And then tomorrow, you sort of make that commitment again, and so on. Athletes don’t eat like crap 90% of the time, and then just clean up their diet for, you know, a short period of time, right before they have a race or something like that. They pretty much stay on track, they pretty much stay lean, and stay strong and stay healthy all the time. Because they know how hard it is to like, quote unquote, like get back in shape.
You know what I’m talking about? Have you ever tried to get back in shape, that sucks, that’s really hard. It’s so hard to like, gain and lose the same thing, like 20 pounds over and over again. Right? It’s very difficult to do, it’s very bad for you to actually do that, it’s really not good for you, it’s better to just stay overweight, to be honest with you than it is to like gain and lose. Obviously, the best choice is to just lose it and be done with it. Right.
So most athletes, what they do is they stay lean and strong all the time. You know, there might be a couple of pounds difference between offseason and training season or something like that, but it’s minimal. So they know how important it is to just stay on point all year long. Okay. And I’ve done the whole yo yo dieting, yo yo weight gain loss thing for years. And I gotta tell you, it’s, it’s frustrating.
And you’re, I was always in this state of like, never feeling good about myself, because I was never where I wanted to be. Or if I was, I knew that it wasn’t gonna last. But I’m done with all that now, I made a decision some years ago where I’m just not doing that anymore. And so today, I eat like an athlete all the time. I maintain my weight effortlessly.
And I still indulge in it on occasion. Alright, once I got to my goal weight, and I and I got to this place where I felt super confident in my ability to maintain my weight. Then I started to allow myself some indulgences here and there, something that you have to kind of experiment with a little bit. So I’m going to say something here that I’ve really never really talked about before. And maybe you never thought you’d hear from me, but this is what I call the 90/10 rule. Some people call it the 80/20 rule, but I think that’s too, too loosey goosey. So I call it the 90/10 rule.
So 90% of the time, you need to be disciplined about your diet, you need to be fueling your body like an athlete. And then 10% of the time, you can indulge so what this looks like, typically is about one meal a week, something like that. I maybe even do it less than that. So maybe twice a month, I indulge in a meal that would be considered a little indulgent or off plan.
You know, I talk a lot about going out for Mexican food because I just grew up on Mexican food. I’m from you know, LA/Southern California and I just love Mexican food, especially like good traditional Mexican food. And with that, I know it’s chips and salsa and guacamole and tacos and I love all that stuff. Right? And instead of like saying I can never eat that stuff again. I do it minimally, I do it like once a month, you know and then I might go out for sushi and some other kind of you know, indulgent foods, another time or whatever.
So I like this 90/10 rule because I know it’s hard for people to not eat a burger or to eliminate stuff from their diet. And when we get into this place where we’re feeling deprived, like we can never eat corn chips again in our life, that just makes you crave it more, right, it makes you one and even more. I’ve seen this over and over again with people. So you know, at the beginning, we’re a little more strict about our food plan because we got to get ourselves off of the sugar, we got to get ourselves off the processed foods, we got to get ourselves off the refined carbohydrates.
Once we do that, and we sort of, you know, balance our hormones, we’ve kind of gotten to our goal weight or are closer to it, and we feel confident or ability to to maintain our weight, then we can start indulging a little bit. And this is where the 90/10 kind of principle comes into play here. Okay. So I understand it can be very hard for some people to do this. For example, eating sugar can be very addictive. And if you have a problem in this area, it’s something you have to be very careful with.
Because for some of us, for me, it’s the same thing with sugar. For me, once I start, it’s very hard for me to stop, I had the same issue with drinking alcohol too like, I can’t just drink one I drink until I’m passed out basically, is the way I’ve always done it. And so there’s this phenomenon of craving that happens as soon as I get some alcohol into my body, I just want more and more and more, and I can’t stop.
And I have a very similar kind of dysfunctional relationship with sugar, I guess, you know, so instead of dabbling in sugar and trying to moderate it, I just don’t eat sugar, I really don’t. I can’t remember the last time I ate sugar was probably like, a year and a half ago or something like that. So I just don’t eat and it’s fine. It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t crave it. So for some of us, just total abstinence from some of this stuff is on point. It’s like what we need to do. If you can dabble in this a little bit and apply this 90/10 rule and eat some sugar and things like that. And you can do it in a way that is intentional, purposeful, and not like binging then good for you do it, okay, let’s not, let’s not deprive ourselves of things, but understand that some of these foods are not moving us in the direction of our goals that they will actually set us back, we might gain a little bit of weight, we might feel terrible, it might affect our training negatively.
So just know that that’s all part of it. Okay? Athletes, they do this too, they indulge in some of these things every now and then. And they do it at strategic times when it’s not going to affect their training when it’s not not before a race not before a long run or whatever they’re doing right.
So just know that if you’re if your goal is to lose weight, that you know indulging and things like this is going to you know, it’s going to kind of throw out your progress. It’s hard to eat sugar and lose weight. It just really is right? The whole idea of like putting your body into fat burning mode, getting it out of fat storing mode, sugar puts your body into fat storing mode, we got to limit the sugar for sure. Okay.
Okay, but all of this is to say that if we apply the 90/10 rule, and one meal a week, two meals a month, whatever you want to do, you can indulge, but then the rest of the time you stay disciplined, you’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be fine. Okay? Athletes don’t use these, like cheat meals, and I don’t even like the word cheat meal because they’re planned. They’re intentional. They’re purposeful.
A cheat implies that you’re engaging in something that’s deceptive. Like, you’re tricking someone, you’re not tricking anybody here, you’re just making a choice for yourself. You got to feel good about that choice you’re making for yourself. So do this intentionally. Right? We’re not cheating. Anyway, so we want to play in our exceptions, we want to plan these indulgent meals, okay.
So, athletes will allow themselves this on occasion, you know, to celebrate to feel a part of but it’s a minor exception. It’s not the rule. So that’s why I say 90/10. So my, my taco night is like one of my, it’s like part of my 10% right. Come on chips and guacamole. So amazing, right. It’s also a way for me to connect with people I love with family, with friends, and I do it in a way that is very intentional and planned.
And then before that indulgent meal, and after I eat, like super clean. This is the way an athlete would do it. Right? They’re not going to just binge out on you know, burritos and stuff for a week straight. You know, they’re going to just do a meal, feel good about it, do it intentionally and then get back on plan with the next meal. Okay. So this isn’t about deprivation, this is about 100% of the time you have to fuel your fuel yourself like an athlete food can still be enjoyable food can still be you know, amazing and all that stuff, you know um, but we got to do it a minimally, we want for the most part, we want to be fueling ourselves like an athlete. Okay.
So back to that question I asked at the beginning of this episode, you know, are you eating like an athlete? Yes or no? What’s the answer? And if you’re not, why not? Why are you choosing to eat in a way that goes against your long term health and fitness goals? Why would you continue to eat like crap, and then hope that somehow everything’s gonna work out on race day or whatever? Right. And I did this too for my first few marathons. I was trying to run out a certain I wanted to run like a 9 minute mile on race day, all my training runs were way slower than that, like I never ran faster than a 10 minute mile.
And then somehow I expected something magical to happen on race day, like, all of a sudden, I was going to be able to run a minute faster per mile for 26 miles. Like, that’s ridiculous. But we do the same thing with our food, we think we can eat like crap all year long. And then somehow around race day, everything’s going to just magically fall into place. It doesn’t work that way. It really doesn’t. Okay. So just know that you’ve got to be honest with yourself and ask yourself whether or not you are eating like an athlete. Okay?
And if the answer is no, like, really ask yourself, why or why not? Like, are you afraid that you’re gonna feel like you’re missing out on something good? How much pleasure is that cupcake can actually give you? How about being a fit, strong, badass runner, how much pleasure you’re gonna get out of that. My guess is a lot, a lot more than that. Very temporary, cupcake pleasure you’re gonna get, don’t get me wrong, the cupcake will make you feel good for a minute.
But how about being a fit, strong, badass runner. That’s gonna last, that’s what you’re after. Right? Maybe you’re worried that you won’t be able to make it last, maybe you’re worried that like, this isn’t gonna, you’re not gonna be able to sustain this. And I get that that’s super common. It’s a very common worry, among people that I work with, like, I just don’t know if I’m gonna be able to make it last. But listen, what if you applied the same mindset to your nutrition that you put into your running schedule? Think about this, you are super good at sticking to stuff already.
Like, you get to work on time. Every day, you hit all your runs, like you never miss a workout, right? You never cheat on your husband or your wife or your partner, you always pick your kids up from school on time, right? You are very disciplined in many, many areas of your life. But when it comes to food, we’re all like, totally loosey goosey. And we’re like, I’m at a control. I’m like, dude, you are so disciplined in every other area of your life. Why aren’t you just applying that same mentality to your food plan?
Just copy and paste that same mindset over here to your food, and you’re gonna be a total badass and no time? I promise you. Right? That’s how you make it last. But maybe you’re afraid it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be too hard. And I can answer this one for you right now. Yes, it will be hard. At first anyway, all change is hard at first, right? Until it isn’t. You’ve got to embrace the discomfort of change. Get through the hard part.
Because the only way to become the badass version of yourself is to go through the hard stuff, you can’t go around it. You can’t avoid it. You got to go through it straight through it. It’s the challenges that change you. You want to see the view from the top of the mountain, you got to climb the mountain. There’s no other way to do it. It will be hard. But you can do it. So accept this, accept this fact that it’s going to be hard and do it anyway. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean we don’t do it. We do it anyway.
Or you might be afraid to try something new because you’ve already tried quote unquote, everything in the past and nothing ever works for you. That’s totally cool. I get that two people tell me this all the time. And I used to think this way too. But now I have a very different approach to things I do in my life. I keep freaking going. I do not stop when it gets hard. I do not stop until I’m done.
I don’t quit when things get challenging. I don’t stop when it seems like it’s not working. I don’t give up until I reach my goal of relentless forward progress. I keep going no matter what Because if it’s going to work, I have to make it work, period. And I’m committed to reaching my goals, no matter what. No matter how many times I stumble and fall, no matter how long it takes, no matter how many times I fail, I’m not in a hurry. I’m not about avoiding failure. I am absolutely freaking relentless in my pursuit of my goals, and you should be too. So ask yourself, honestly. Are you eating like an athlete? Don’t fool yourself. Just be 100% honest with yourself. Yes or no? Are you eating like an athlete? Why or why not?
And if you want some help with this, I got you. We’ll do it together. I’ll help you get through the hard stuff. I’ll get you up that mountain. But you got to commit to showing up and doing the work, right? You’ve got to make this daily commitment to yourself when you do that. There’s nothing you can’t do. I love you all. Keep on Running Lean. And I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I’ve taught a lot of nutrition and mindset concepts over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast, and some of these topics are worth a revisit. Either because I’ve discovered new …
Continue Reading about 123. Back to Basics: Eating Real Food →
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 123 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, Back to Basics Eating Real Food. I’ve talked a lot about nutrition and mindset over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast. And some of these topics are worth a revisit, either because I’ve discovered new information about the topic and I want to share that with you.
Or because it’s just so important, it’s worth another look. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to be sprinkling in some of these back to basics episodes to share new and improved info, and then revisit some of the key concepts for weight loss and sports nutrition for runners. And today’s topic, eating real food falls into both categories.
So I’ve learned a lot since first talking about eating real food. And it’s also one of the most important things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So it absolutely deserves another look. And eating real food is a simple concept. But it looks a little different for everyone.
If you’re a runner, and you’re interested in making a change in your eating habits so that you can lose weight while also supporting your running goals, then I want to invite you to join the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program that includes group coaching one-on-one coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability that you need to learn what to do to learn how to do it, and to help you stay on track.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, you will fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me. And we’ll talk about your goals and see if coaching is a good fit for you. I would love to help you learn how to eat real food, lose the weight without all the frustration and learn how to build good habits that last for life.
If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started down. All right back to basics, eating real food.
So I’m just gonna jump in and talk about why I teach this concept. And the really the first reason why I talk about eating real food is that there’s something really wrong with the standard American diet. Alright. So for millions of years as humans, we did really well, you know, eating real food was just something we did naturally.
But then pretty recently, we screwed it all up, all right? The standard American diet is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it was created back in the late 70s. It was like 1977, I believe, I think they published it in like 1980. But they basically told us that we should all be eating a very high carbohydrate diet, like upwards of 65% of your calories should be coming from carbohydrates. And low fat, like fat is bad. They just decided this right?
And immediately upon implementing these guidelines, the health of this country began to decline. So why did they make this change? Well, there was this guy named Ancel Keys. And he was a researcher and a doctor. And back in the 50s, he proposed this idea. It was called The Diet Heart Hypothesis. And it was an idea that eating fat would cause people to die of heart attacks. So he did all these studies. And he did. He published a study called The Seven Countries Study.
And the interesting thing about this study is actually there were 22 countries involved, but he just cherry picked the seven that kind of fit with his idea of what he wanted the results to be and he only published the seven countries that that kind of supported his claims. Anyway, none of the stuff that he proposed in this study have actually been proven.
In fact, a lot of it has been disproven over the years. A lot of the stuff that he proposed in this Diet Heart Hypothesis has been disproven yet. We changed our dietary guidelines back in 1977/1980 and we’ve changed everything, this has affected everything. It still does today, the guidelines that they produce and they haven’t changed much over the last 50 years or whatever.
But these guidelines have a profound effect on all areas of our lives. So all school lunch programs are being generated based on those guidelines. Right now, 19% of school aged kids are obese. This is a problem. All military rations, all mess hall food and military is dictated by the guidelines. 7% of our troops are obese.
All the special nutrition programs for women, infants and children like WIC are being determined by the guidelines. 15% of toddlers and WIC are obese toddlers, all hospital food is dictated by the guidelines. Food Programs for the elderly are being dictated by the guidelines. Life expectancy in the elderly is going down.
There’s more Alzheimer’s disease, more diabetes, more cancer. These things are rampant among the elderly. And they’re all diet and lifestyle caused diseases. Agricultural production is dictated by those guidelines. It’s simplified, it’s incentivizing farmers to produce more and more cheap carbohydrates like soybeans, wheat and corn.
Those are like the main things that we produce here in this country. And then of course, the food industry uses the guidelines too, so they produce more garbage food that’s loaded with things like vegetable oil, right? And high fructose corn syrup and all this junk. So all these things I just mentioned, they all are using those guidelines to produce, you know, the foods that we eat, and the guidelines are just wrong. They don’t work.
Since implementing the guidelines in ‘80, 88% of Americans are today considered metabolically unhealthy meaning they’re overweight, they’re obese, their insulin resistant they have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and on and on, only 12% of us are considered healthy. This is wrong. This does not work.
“For the first time in history, we had a government telling us what to eat.” This is a quote from Ben Bikman. He’s a PhD, a Utah professor and a leading metabolic scientist and he says, “For the first time, we have a government telling us what to eat, encouraging us to eat far more refined carbohydrates, and much less healthy fats and proteins and our weight, and our health has only suffered for it.”
The results on the nation’s health and weight have been dire since the government first set dietary guidelines in 1977. The food industry has completely shifted the types of foods they produce to our overall detriment. According to the CDC, the weight of the average adult American today is nearly 30 pounds more than that of the average adult American in 1977.
This is a problem. What are we doing? There’s all sorts of issues and diseases related to eating this particular diet too, by the way. Obesity rates have more than tripled in the US because we’re following the guidelines. We have a diabetes epidemic. 14 different types of cancer have been related to diet, including breast cancer, colorectal cancer.
Alzheimer’s disease is diet related. They call it type three diabetes, PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, is diet related. All of these issues are mostly caused by you know too much insulin in the bud. And that’s called hyperinsulinemia. And how do you get too much insulin in the blood? Eat a lot of carbohydrates and eat a lot of sugar. Right?
So the diet is wrong. It’s making us sicker, it’s making us fatter, and we need to get off of that. Do anything else do anything else, then what the dietary guidelines are telling you to do? Okay. And I don’t think I’ve talked about this, but they did a study a while back, and this was called The Pure Study.
And they did this over a 10 year period. And they did it from 2003 to 2013. And they followed over 135,000 people in 18 different countries. And they basically, you know, divided these people up based on their macronutrient intake and basically there were people who are eating high carbohydrate and lower fat, and then low carbohydrate, high fat.
And the conclusion basically is this: I’ll just read the conclusion to you. High carbohydrate intake was associated with a higher risk of total mortality body death. Whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.
Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings. So that’s the conclusion from this study. The interesting part about that, I mean, the whole thing is fascinating to me, because basically they just disprove that Diet Heart Hypothesis right there, they’re saying fat has nothing to do with it.
In fact, the people with the high fat diet had lower risk of dying from all these diseases. And the saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke, meaning that the people who ate more saturated fat had less stroke than the other people. So that was really fascinating, right? That kind of blows all that out of the water, right?
Okay, so how does this affect you, as a runner? Aren’t runners just immune to all this stuff? Can’t runners just eat whatever we want? No, we cannot. Runners are humans too, in case you haven’t noticed, and lots of runners experience a lot of these health issues, weight gain, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes, right?
There’s this phenomenon called TOFI. And this is someone who is thin on the outside, fat on the inside. And this is especially true with runners who look pretty lean on the outside. But on the inside, they might have a lot of visceral fat. And they might have developed something like type two diabetes, and no amount of running more is going to fix this right.
This is a diet related problem, a diet related disease. And one of the famous examples of this is Professor Tim Noakes, who wrote the book, The Lore of Running, and this guy is a total badass, right? He’s a researcher, he’s run over 70 marathons, but he ended up getting Type Two Diabetes. As a runner, he looked fine on the outside, but his doctor was like, you need to switch your diet.
It opened his eyes, he switched to a low carbohydrate diet. And now he coaches world class athletes on this low carb approach and this fat-adapted approach to running. And in his book, The Law of Running, he has a chapter on nutrition in there, which he advocates for the traditional high carbohydrate approach that, you know, you’ve probably heard of that most runners have heard of, right.
But he famously like, tore that chapter out of the book, because he just could no longer support that he’s like, I was wrong. I wrote this stuff about eating all the carbs. And it’s completely wrong. It’s bad for you, it’s killing us, we’ve got to stop doing it. Okay. So this whole low carb approach to running to sports nutrition, it’s no longer some weird fringe thing.
This is becoming more and more common. So the NASM, the National Association of Sports Nutrition, this is where I got my sports nutrition license. They used to teach the traditional high carb approach to nutrition for endurance activities running and such.
Several years ago, they made a big decision in that they couldn’t do that anymore, they’re going to move away from that high carb approach, and move to a more of a low carb fat adapted approach to sports nutrition. This is a bold move for this organization. But they could not in good conscience keep telling people, especially athletes to eat this crap diet, this diet that is literally killing us.
So they said we can’t do it, no more. And the funny thing is, is that this decision was not well received by everybody. Like there’s people who, you know, we’re following that traditional all carb approach to sports nutrition, and they wanted to get trained in this and wanted to get licensed in this approach. And they were not happy about this, but they just decided that this was what they had to do.
They couldn’t, you know, in good conscience, they couldn’t keep telling people to eat this garbage food anymore. Okay. And this is probably the biggest reason why I signed up with NASN is because they promote the low carb approach to sports nutrition, they understand the importance of being fat-adapted and how it’s not just good for for us as humans and to become the healthiest people that we can be.
But also, it’s great for endurance sports. And then there’s doctors like Stephen Finney and Jeff Bullock, who wrote the book on low carb sports nutrition called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. And then there’s all these companies out there right now that are making nutrition products for low carb running like Mirror Energy, s fuels, you have Elemental Labs, and there are more companies coming on board all the time, they’re springing up all over the place.
Why? Because there’s a need. There are a lot of athletes like me and you who want to perform at our best without eating all the garbage. All those like nutrition food like substances like Clif Bars, I used to eat a lot of Clif bars back in the day when I was like doing the high carbohydrate thing. And I would eat a couple Clif Bars every day and I was like, well, this is healthy, you know?
And look at the ingredients, Clif Bars, these things are not good for you. In fact, I was on their website and I was like what is in a Clif Bar. And so I’m going to read you some of these ingredients: organic rolled oats, so that’s all carbs, organic brown rice syrup, sugar, soy rice crisps, which are made from soy protein isolate rice flour and barley, barley malt extract, which is a form of sugar. Organic roasted soybeans, organic tapioca syrup, that’s sugar, organic cane syrup, that’s sugar. Unsweetened chocolate, chicory fiber, soy flour, high oleic, sunflower oil, natural flavor, sea salt, cinnamon, there’s not a whole lot of nutrition in here.
Okay, this is a bunch of carbs. This one bar is 43 grams of carbohydrates, including 17 grams of sugar with 16 grams of added sugars. And only 10 grams of protein. So this is just a candy bar essentially, is what it is okay. And on their website, it says there’s like a FAQ section like frequently asked questions that says are Clif Bars good for you? And here’s their answer, “Clif Bar is the ultimate energy bar trusted for nearly 30 years by athletes and sports nutrition experts to get you started and help you keep going during long outings on the bike trail or slopes.” Notice how they don’t actually answer that question.
Because their lawyers probably were like, you can’t say that they’re not good for you. Right? So they kind of skirt that answer. But anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that instead of eating this, like processed garbage food, we need to be eating real food. And I’m gonna get into that in just a second. Okay, I’m gonna tell you what that means.
But we’ve evolved as humans to like, eat real food. We’ve thrived on eating real food for millions of years. And I just want to say that we’ve changed things recently, pretty recently, right? I mean, we’ve evolved as hunter gatherers, our diet was mostly animal based for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, we’re also omnivores, we can eat a lot of different foods. It doesn’t mean we should.
But for the most part, we were eating a diet of meat, tubers, fruit, not like the fruit we have today, honey, but there wasn’t broccoli. Broccoli didn’t come around until the 1700s. There wasn’t tomatoes, tomatoes didn’t come around until 700 ad. Even bread is a relatively recent thing, like refining grains that happened about 1000 years BC, so maybe about 10,000 years ago, right?
But in the grand scheme of things, two and a half million years of human evolution 10,000 years is not that much time. And prior to that, you know, we just didn’t need that stuff. You know, and if you look at the mummies of ancient Egyptians, they, you know, we can study the actual bodies, you know, because they’re, they’ve been preserved for the last few thousand years.
They have rotten teeth and distended bellies, and they’ve determined that this is from eating refined grains, a lot of refined grains, rotten teeth, distended bellies. Prior to that though, Paleolithic man, they found all these, you know, they didn’t find the bodies, but they found the skeletons and the skulls and they all have like perfect teeth.
So no refined grains, no tooth decay, you start eating this stuff, and it starts to be bad for you, right? The bottom line is that the refined grains are a problem, right? Alright, so what I mean when I say like, let’s eat real food. Let’s go back to eating real food. Real food is food that still looks like and it’s food that our ancestors would recognize.
So a Clif Bar does not fit into this description. Okay. So eating real food means you’re sticking with unrefined unprocessed food. Food that still looks like it’s supposed to look, if it’s a piece of salmon, it’s a piece of salmon. If it’s a sweet potato, it’s a sweet potato. If it’s broccoli, it’s broccoli. Not food that’s been ground up into powders or liquids, not food that’s been extracted from whole foods, but the actual food, okay.
I think it’s a good idea to stay away from most foods that come in packages. Most packaged food is basically processed food, okay, and I’m not anti packaged food, but most of it is highly processed. You just have to be careful, read the labels, right? Most processed food, most packaged food contains like the three worst things you can eat. I call this the Vile Triumvirate. Right?
It’s sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. If you stay away from packaged food, you’re not going to get any of that stuff. I promise you. Stick with whole foods, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit, natural fats, like olive oil, butter, some dairy like whole milk, Greek yogurt. Stay away from highly refined, highly processed food made with a million unpronounceable and unnatural ingredients. All right.
And then when I start talking about this, people get this idea in their head, and they’re like, isn’t this just like keto or low carb, high fat or paleo? And the short answer is like, no, it’s really none of those things. It’s similar. Paleo is pretty close. But even that isn’t quite right. Because here’s the thing. This is going to look different for each individual. And last week’s episode, I talked about this in depth, that’s episode 122.
Like we’re all different, we all have different goals. We all have different lifestyles, different food preferences, genetics, our metabolism, our culture, all that has to play a part in what you choose, as the diet that works best for you. Right? There’s not a one size fits all plan that’s going to work for everybody.
There just isn’t, there’s no such thing. And to be clear on this, this isn’t about eliminating a food group. This isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates, right? Or never eating a carb again, or anything like that. This is about shifting your body back to the way it’s supposed to function. The way that your body has been functioning beautifully, as humans for thousands or millions of years, right?
I think it’s ignorant to think that introducing all this processed food in the last like 60 to 100 years or so is not going to negatively impact our health it is it has, it’s a problem. So the best thing and simplest thing you can do for yourself right now is just eat real food, food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize.
So what if you do this what happens when you start eating real food? Well, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to. You know, the way that humans have been functioning for millions of years, hormones become balanced and regulated. You’re no longer hungry all the time. You’re getting all the nutrients your body actually needs. Things like insulin drop, like you stopped storing so much energy as fat, right?
You keep eating sugar, a lot of that sugar energy can’t be used right away. So your body stores it as fat. If you’re not eating that stuff, you’re not storing all this fat, you’re actually burning fat, your fat begins to be released from your fat cells and you begin to burn fat and you begin to lose weight.
You start sleeping better, you wake up feeling more rested. You have this steady supply of energy from burning fat, so you don’t have these afternoon crashes where you need that Starbucks Triple Shot, Caramel Macchiato with extra whip, just to get you through your workday. Right. So when you start eating real food, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to.
So what about running? How does this affect your running? Or why would runners choose to eat this way? Well, one of the biggest benefits of eating this way is that you become really efficient at burning fat. And fat is an amazing fuel source for long distance running. And when you become fat adapted, this is a pretty amazing experience. Like if you’re into running and I know you are, then I suggest you try this. I can’t explain it.
Like you have to go and you know, try this for yourself and see how you feel. Now there are some misconceptions about what it means to be fat-adapted. So I want to explain this a little bit more. Being fat-adapted means you are training your body to burn fat very efficiently. And we all have a virtually unlimited supply of energy on our bodies at all times in the form of stored body fat.
Okay, now, I want to go back to our prehistoric man for a second because in doing a little bit of research for this episode, I came across this fascinating study in this article. And I just want to talk about what it means to be fat-adapted and how we have evolved to kind of, this is like our normal state of being okay.
So we are born runners, we are really good at running long distances. We’ve adapted to become these amazing long distance runners, right? Modern humans, and their immediate ancestors, like Homo erectus, have several adaptations that make humans instead of being some ferocious, furry fleet creature, the animals, the animal world’s best, we are the world’s best distance runners. Right?
Early humans, scavengers, ended up becoming persistence hunters. So we develop these long springy tendons in our legs and our feet that function like large elastics like rubber bands, right? They store energy, and then with each running stride, release it and this actually reduces the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There’s also other adaptations to keep our bodies stable as we run.
So we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, we have these large butts and these large buttock muscles that hold our bodies upright. And we have this elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady. All of this stuff is designed to help us run very efficiently, right? Even the human waste, which is thinner and more flexible than that of our primate relatives, allows us to twist our upper bodies as we run to counterbalance the slightly off center. It forces exerted as we stride with each leg.
Okay, so once humans start running, it only takes a little bit more energy for us to run faster. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a ton of energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances, right?
Those adaptations make humans and our ancestors better runners, it’s our ability to run in the heat that may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game. So humans have several adaptations that help us dump the amount of heat that we generate when we’re running. These adaptations include being hairless, virtually, some of us more than others, our ability to sweat, the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, it allows us to take bigger breaths, and helps us to dump heat.
And we can run in conditions that no other animal can run in. So other animals, they get to get rid of excess heat, they pant, they have to pant and they can’t pant when they’re running, so they have to stop and rest and pant to dump the heat. That means to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans, they just kept that animal running. So altogether, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day, when most animals are resting right.
So we practice persistence hunting. We would chase a game animal during the heat of the day, make it run faster than it can maintain, we would track it, flush it if it tried to rest and repeat the process, just keeping the thing going until the animal would literally overheat and collapse. And so the animal would develop hyperthermia, which is like heatstroke in humans after about 6 or 10 miles of this.
And so, by the end of all this, even humans with their crude, early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. And adding credence to this theory is the fact that some Aboriginal humans still practice persistent hunting today. And it remains an effective hunting technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of nutrient dense fuel in the form of meat.
Okay, so all that is just to say that running long distances is part of our DNA. And running long distances means that we needed a steady fuel source available at all times, especially when we were not eating we would be fasting we would be, you know, running an animal for days until we, you know, caught up with it and whatever. That’s where our stored body fat comes into play.
We’re naturally born fat burners. And when you get off the sugar, and you get off the refined grains and the packaged garbage food, you can turn your body back into a long distance running badass fat burning machine. And right now, most people, like the average runner probably has around 100,000 calories of stored energy in the form of stored body fat, enough to run for days and days without stopping.
On the contrary though, your body can only hold about 2000 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glucose. So if this was our preferred fuel source, we would need a lot, lot more of that to be able to track animals for days, right. So the idea of getting fat-adapted should be really stated like getting back to being fat-adapted like we were meant to be.
The other misconception about being fat-adapted is that you make this switch from burning all carbs, you know in sugar, and then burning all fat. And this is never the case, you’re always burning both your body produces glucose, all the glucose that your body needs your body actually creates at your liver creates glucose for your brain and for your muscles to function properly.
And as long as your activity level is kept low enough, like during most long distance running, you will continue to produce enough glucose glucose for your working muscles while also utilizing fat as your main source of fuel. But as your exercise intensity gets higher and higher as you start burning more glucose and less fat, and you will probably need to add some sort of fuel in the form of carbohydrate to maintain the more intense effort, okay, and you got to practice this in your training.
And then you can dial in exactly how much carbohydrate you need, at what level of intensity. So you can keep that inner fire burning hot, right? So you can keep delivering a steady supply of fat and glucose to working muscles and kick some serious butt out there. Okay, so when you get good at this when you practice both, using both fuel sources efficiently, this is known as being metabolically flexible or metabolic flexibility.
So you train your body to use both types of fuel very effectively. Again, this isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates. This is about switching your body to going back to being an efficient fat burner, okay? The only thing with this is that if you go too high in the carbs, you kind of shut down the fat burning process. So you have to be careful with how you do this. And you have to experiment with it.
Okay, and everybody’s a little bit different. And so you have to practice with this in your training. This is not something you’re going to just do on race day, for sure. Okay. So eating real food, I want to recap real quick, what I just talked about, the standard American diet is wrong, needs to be changed.
Runners are not immune to the effects of this terrible diet. So just stop doing it. Running does not mean you can eat whatever you want, okay. Humans have evolved by eating real food. We’ve become amazing creatures, the most advanced creatures in the universe as far as we know. And we did it by eating real food. So we need to get back to that.
Humans have also evolved to be badass runners and badass fat-burning machines. We need to get back to that too. And the easiest way to get back to that to get back to our badass purpose is to eat real food. Eat food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize. Cool, this is fun. I love talking about this. I could talk about this all day. Hope you guys have an awesome day. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
