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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Nutrition

71. Zero-Carb Marathon Training

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I recently decided to do a little nutrition experiment on myself. I trained for a marathon while following a zero-carb diet, and then I ran that marathon without carb-loading and without the use of …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 71 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today I’m talking about zero carb marathon training. What the heck is this all about? Well, recently, I decided to try a little experiment, a little nutrition experiment on myself.

I trained for a marathon or at least, you know, did the good portion of my training while following basically a zero carb diet. And then I ran that marathon without carb loading without the use of any fuel at all. And why would I do this? Why would anybody do this? How did the training go? How was the race? Did I crash and burn? Is this something you should consider trying for yourself?

Well, in this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I answer all of those questions. I’m going to share my results of this experiment. And I’ll talk about what it was like to train for a marathon and then run that marathon without the use of carbohydrates as fuel. So that is all coming up shortly.

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So if you want a little bit of inspiration, you want a little motivation, you want a little support, encouragement, come and join the Running Lean community on Facebook, we have fun we do. We laugh, we have fun.

Here’s a another five star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from TimeToChange71. And they said, “Life Changing podcast. I’ve been listening to all the episodes many several times, and they’re so motivating and so informational.” Thank you very much, TimeToChange71.

If you enjoy the podcast, it would mean a lot to me. If you could just take a moment and leave a five star review. It’s a way of just saying hey, thanks, Patrick. I appreciate what you’re doing here. And it helps other people to kind of find the show.

So whether you listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or whatever, definitely leave a review if you can, thank you so much. Appreciate that.

And then here listen, I know I talk a lot about diet, nutrition, weight loss, and all of these things, you know, running without carbs becoming fat adapted and all this stuff. And it can probably seem a little overwhelming. And I get it I totally understand. And I got you covered too. You know, as a coach, this is what I do every day is I help people make sense of all this to help you apply these principles to your own weight loss or running journey.

Whatever your goals are. Listen, we’re all different. We all have different body types, metabolisms, different goals, different likes and dislikes. There’s not one approach that works for everyone. And what I’m talking about today, this whole zero carb training thing, this is not for everyone, okay. It’s just something I was playing around with.

I’m going to share that whole experience with you. I think you might find it kind of interesting. But if there was one thing that works perfectly for everyone, we wouldn’t be having these conversations, you know, there would just be one thing that we all did, but it doesn’t work that way.

So with coaching, what I do is I work with you to come up with a plan that works for you based on your metabolic profile based on your health and fitness goals based on your likes and dislikes. And then we put together something that is tailored to help you reach your goals. Okay.

And this isn’t just about losing weight. It’s not just about diet. This is about becoming the healthiest human being that you can possibly be physically, mentally, and emotionally. You know, I work with runners who are tired of gaining and losing the same 20 pounds over and over again.

I work with runners who are maybe already pretty fit but need help dropping those last 10 or 15 pounds, so they can run lighter and faster, maybe they want to qualify for Boston. I have worked with people who aren’t really runners, they want to lose, you know, 50 or 100 pounds, and they can’t run, but they want to be a runner.

They desire to turn their life around and become a healthy person who could be a runner, they want to become a runner, they wanted to their whole life to be a runner. But they need to lose this weight in order to get there.

So whatever your health and fitness goals, I’m here for you, I’m here to be your guide to show you the way to help you to become the most badass version of yourself. To learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply. And I’ll see you over there.

Alright, let’s talk about this zero carb marathon training. What did I do? And why did I do this? So first of all, what I did was, I adopted basically a zero carb diet. And some people would call this like the carnivore diet.

Okay, so I was not eating plants, I was eating, basically just animal based foods. So meat, eggs, cheese, you know, some dairy, but really no plants at all. Okay, so it wasn’t really like zero carbs, like, you really can’t do that. I mean, eggs have a couple of grams of carbs in there, I guess you could eat just like steaks or something like that. But I didn’t really want to do that.

So this is basically a very, very, very low, almost zero carb diet. And my goal was to do this for 30 days or so. And I decided to do this during the last part of my marathon training. So before I you know, I had all these long runs scheduled, and I wanted to see how it would affect my training. Okay.

So why would somebody do this? Why did I choose to do this? Well, I study nutrition all the time, and I’ve heard lots and lots of studies that show how eating plants can be somewhat toxic for human beings, like, plants have these built in defense mechanisms. Okay, so plants can’t really run away. So in order for them to defend themselves against predators, meaning animals that would eat them, they make it hard for animals to digest them.

So a lot of plants are not edible, right? And a lot of plants are very hard to digest for a lot of animals. The fiber content in a lot of plants gets passed through the human digestive system, right.

So we talked about, Oh, you want, you want to get your fiber, eat a bunch of plants, right, and you’ll get all this fiber. So there are some animals that have adapted to eating a lot of plants. You know, there’s, there’s animals like, you know, elephants and gorillas who are very well adapted to eating nothing, but plants eat a lot of grasses and things like that.

We cannot eat that kind of stuff. So it’s very, very difficult for humans to digest that stuff, our stomachs just don’t work that way. Some of these animals have developed ways of making plant materials more easily digestible.

For example, birds have this thing called a crop where they eat like seeds, and they sort of store them seeds and grains and things like that. And they store them in this little pouch in their like throat sort of. And in this little pouch, these grains or seeds will sort of ferment and sort of sprout a little bit and they become more easily digestible for some of these birds that have this crop.

Okay, so the nutrients from the plants are less toxic, and then more bioavailable. Some of the toxic traits of plants would be things like lectin, gluten from wheat, though, these are the kinds of things oxalates are the kinds of things that make it kind of difficult for humans to digest some plants, okay.

Also, nutrient absorption from plants is much lower than nutrient absorption from animal based foods. Alright, so you know, when you’re eating something that’s high in fiber, you’re not going to extract all the nutrients from that high fiber food because a lot of that is actually just going to get passed through you and digested.

Okay, with animal sources of food, like meat and eggs and some dairy, our bodies are really able to pull all the nutrients out of that very easily because there’s nothing blocking that process from happening, right? There are in plants, but not in animal based foods, okay?

Also, plant proteins are basically inferior to animal based proteins. Plant proteins are great for growing plants. You know, if you want to build plants, plant proteins are perfect for that. Animal proteins are designed for growing animals. And I’m not trying to say like, plant proteins are bad, I’m just saying that they are not complete proteins, they don’t have all the amino acids that you need.

And you have to combine them with other types of proteins in order to make it actually work. And there’s people that do this, and they have great results with that, whatever. But then animal based proteins are complete proteins. And they’re kind of the proteins that humans have been eating for millions of years.

And we’ve, you know, evolved from eating these things. And we’re very, very good at using animal proteins to, to build strong muscles and connective tissues and things like that. So they’re great for building humans. So I’ve been reading all these books, listening to all these experts sharing all these amazing results from, you know, going in more of like a carnivorous direction, like eating more of a carnivorous diet.

Okay, sticking with mainly just animal foods. And I thought, Okay, I just want to see what this is all about. I just want to see if this will make any significant changes in how I feel in my running performance. Like, is this all it’s cracked up to be? Is this a better way to go? Can you even run, you know, 20 miles or run a marathon without eating any carbs at all?

So these are some of the reasons why I did this. And these are some of the questions that I wanted to answer and just kind of find out for myself. So what did I eat? Mostly just, you know, meat, eggs, cheese and dairy. So I just skipped veggies, basically. Okay, so no big salad. I know, I love my big salad. And I just stopped eating that.

And stuck to a very high protein and diet of just, you know, a few basic food groups. Now the types of meats I would eat while I was eating were ground beef and steak, and pork. And, you know, fish, salmon, chicken. So I was eating a really wide variety of meats, eggs, a bunch of different ways, some cheese here and there, but not a ton.

And then some dairy, little full fat, Greek yogurt, maybe some sour cream, but not a ton of dairy either. Okay, so mostly the focus was on meat and eggs, you know, and like fish for the most part. So one disclaimer, I need to say this here, it’s almost impossible to eat zero carbs.

Like there are carbs in eggs, there are carbs in cheese and dairy and things like that. So it really wasn’t zero carbs, it was basically zero carbs. Okay, so for all intents and purposes, it was around, you know, my daily net carbs on eating a low carb diet, the way I have been eating for the past, you know, year, year and a half or whatever. Typically, my net carbs are somewhere around 30-40 grams a day, maybe less some days.

And my daily net carbs on carnivore were like seven or nine grams total, you know, and this is just from a couple of eggs, and a couple of grams of carbs that you get from eating eggs and some dairy. So but this is about as low as I could get them. Um, like I said before, like you could eat nothing but meat. But that just didn’t really appeal to me. So you know, these fine, tiny few little carbs were okay, no big deal. Okay. So that’s what I was eating.

And so how did my training go? Well, I gotta tell you, I felt pretty darn good. I just kind of stick stuck to my same running schedule. My same workouts, you know, I was running three times a week. You know, I started you know, I got into the longer 16,18, 20, 22 mile runs, and really was running fine.

Like I never ran out of gas. I had plenty of energy. I was doing my weightlifting twice a week. And I didn’t really notice any changes really. Okay, so I went from, you know, maybe 20 to 50 grams of carbs a day to like, you know, seven to nine, and really didn’t make much of a difference at all.

I’m already a very efficient fat burner, so I’m using fat as energy pretty much all the time. So as an efficient fat burner as a well established fat adapted runner, this was not a big transition for me, like it wasn’t that big of a deal. Now, I have to say this because I did not train to run a fast marathon. Alright. And you’ll know why I say that.

When I talk about the actual race, I was not training to run a hard, fast marathon. For the last several years, I’ve sort of backed off of like running hard and fast, I’ve just been like, headed, I’ve had this mindset, that I’m just gonna run slow. Like, I’m a slow runner.

The last time I ran a hard marathon was I think it was like 2016, or 2017, we’re talking like four or five years ago. And I had a terrible couple of outings. I remember having a terrible spring marathon and then a terrible 50k that I did about a month later. And I was just like, screw all this. I hate marathons, this is too hard. I don’t want to, I don’t need to run fast anymore.

In fact, I’m not going to do marathons or races, I’m just going to stick to like half marathons. And I sort of quit on myself. Right. And so for the last five years, I’ve been sort of like, you know, I backed off of running hard and running fast, and trying to hit some kind of time goal is just like, I’m just going to run and just, you know, get it done and enjoy myself and a strong that kind of that kind of goal for my races.

And that’s been my MO, right, even through last year, you know, I ran a marathon and 50k last year, but I didn’t like push the pace, it was just kind of like a, you know, casual, I guess, you know, kind of effort, right? Easy effort. So this is the way I was training. I was training to do an easy effort marathon.

Alright, so little foreshadowing, you’ll know why I’m talking about this in a minute. Okay, now I want to talk about fiber a little bit, okay. And I’m actually going to talk about poop for just a second. So if you’re eating right now, you may want to like take a break or something like that.

But here’s the thing. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how if you stop eating fiber, this is going to be a big problem for you, you’re just going to become constipated, you’re never going to poop again. You have to eat fiber, or this is going to be a problem. So I was like, fully expecting to like not poop for a week or something, right? And this is gonna be a big problem for me.

Okay, so I stopped eating plants, I stopped eating fiber. So I’m eating a zero fiber diet at this point, right. And up to this point, I’ve been super regular. I’m once a day pooper, I’m very consistent. It’s all good. No, no issues there. And then I have to say that I really enjoyed pooping on the carnivore diet, like it was fine.

I did not have any issues at all, no constipation, I was still completely regular, you know, once a day at the same like always, but the poops were maybe a little smaller, and a little more dense. Okay. And this is actually a good thing.

Because here’s what’s happening, the animal based foods that I was eating are much more nutrient dense. And since there’s no fiber to like, bulk up the stool, you are actually absorbing more of the nutrients from the foods you’re eating. So it means that your poops are generally a little smaller and a little denser.

So for me, my experience and a lot of people have this very same experience. No fiber is no problem. Okay. There’s a lot of misconceptions about fiber out there. Now, obviously, everybody has to like, experiment with this. But fiber I believe is kind of overrated. So people say like, Oh, if you’re constipated, you need more fiber, eat more fiber, eat more fiber.

Well, think about it like this. If you’re sitting in a traffic jam, the last thing you want to do is add more cars to that traffic jam. And that’s what it’s like if you’re constipated. To add more fiber, you’re adding more of the thing that’s kind of blocking you up in the first place. Okay.

So without having all this fiber to kind of block things up, things tend to just move very, very easily through the system. This is my experience, a lot of people have the same experience. Okay. So this part of the experiment, I will say, was a huge success and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed my poops on the carnivore diet. Okay, so I’m done talking about poop, I just want you guys to all know that it was not an issue.

Okay, so what about vitamins and minerals? What about all those vitamins that you get from eating, you know, vegetables, and don’t you need all the micronutrients? And, again, the animal, the animal based sources of, of macronutrients, so fat and protein contain all of the nutrients that we need to be healthy and to grow a healthy human being okay.

So all the fat protein we need is contained in animal based foods. Also, so are the vitamins and minerals, and they are much more bioavailable to the human body, there’s nothing blocking their absorption like there is in plants, okay, so you get more nutrients out of the foods you eat, when you’re eating animal based foods you just do.

Your body is able to absorb more of the nutrients out of the food. So let’s say you know you’re eating some liver. Now, I don’t really eat organ meats, I just don’t like them. You know, but the liver is just such a great source of all kinds of vitamins like vitamin C, and iron, right.

And if you eat a bunch of spinach, you know, the iron content or the vitamin C content of that spinach, you know, you’re going to get some of those nutrients from that some of those vitamins and minerals, but not as much as you would from eating liver because, again, the plants are going to pass through you a lot of that and digested, right.

So just know that you can get everything you need from eating animal based foods only. Okay, so that wasn’t really a concern at all. I wasn’t really worried about that at all. And I felt great. This whole time, I didn’t have any lack of energy, I didn’t have any nutrient deficiencies that I can really tell. So that was all good. All right.

So race week, here’s why I decided to do the week of the race. So about a week out. A week before the marathon, I made a decision that I was going to shoot for a time goal. Now this is what I was talking about earlier, when I was like I really wasn’t training to run a hard or fast marathon. But then I decided about a week out, I’m gonna like push the pace. I’m gonna run this thing hard. I’m gonna give it everything I got.

And so this was a little bit of a concern of mine, because I hadn’t trained to run a hard and fast marathon. Yet at the last minute, I’m like, Hey, I think I’m gonna run a hard and fast marathon. This is not recommended, by the way. I don’t think this is the way we should do things. Okay? So diet, nutrition, definitely a big part of the equation.

If you want to run a successful marathon, you have got to dial in your diet, nutrition, it’s so important. You’ve got to, you know, train, eat the right kinds of foods and train, you know, fueling yourself properly. Okay, whether that’s eating fat, you know, a lot of fat and protein and being fat adapted or eating a lot of carbs, whatever you want to do.

And listen, there’s no right or wrong answer here. That’s all good. You can do whatever you want. I’m just giving you a different way of doing things here. So diet, nutrition, are definitely a big part of the equation, but also specificity of training. This is a critical component of any type of physical endurance activity, like you have to train for the type of ratio you’re gonna run.

So if you want to run a fast 5k, you have to train, you have to run fast for that distance. You know, you got to train doing that. If you want to run a fast marathon. You got to do some fast long runs. Like those there’s just no way around it right? I didn’t do that. Alright.

I’d been doing my long runs like around a 9:30-ish pace or something like that, you know, which is okay. And that was so easy anyway, so that was kind of the goal that I was shooting for was alright, maybe I can just maintain like a 9:30-ish pace for this marathon, not something I had really been planning on.

So I just wanted to see what I could do. So here was the goal, the goal was to run a 4:10 to 4:15 marathon somewhere in that range. So, you know, that was the goal that I decided on at the last minute. And that was what I was going to shoot for, and just see what could I do? What could I do zero carbs, what could I do?

So now normally, when I even running, like in training, low carb, like I, like I have been for the past, you know, year and a half or so, I will add in some strategic carbs, you know, the day or two leading up to a race, you know, sweet potatoes, rice, you know, quinoa, oats, things like that, just to like, build up a little bit of glycogen stores.

And so you got a little extra fuel in the tank for a marathon or whatever. But this time, I decided not to do that at all. So no carb loading, not even one piece of rice, not even a sweet potato, nothing. So I just was eating the same animal based foods, you know, think the night before I had, you know, a steak or some chicken or something like that. And that was that no veggies, so no carb loading.

And and this was a big part of my experiment, which is, can I run a hard and fast marathon using just my own body fat as fuel basically having no glycogen stored up extra glycogen stored up in the muscles, just whatever my body naturally produces in our bodies produce, our liver actually produces glycogen, you know, glucose and it gets stored in our muscles. So we have all the sort of sugar fuel that we need and it just naturally gets produced.

So I wasn’t too worried about that part. But I’m so well fat adapted that I wasn’t really too concerned about that. But can I, you know, train for this marathon and then run a hard and fast marathon using just my own body fat as fuel? Would this be a success or would I totally crash and burn?

So the goal of 4:10 to 4:15, that was my time goal. And I really wanted to finish feeling strong. I didn’t want to be like dying at the end of this thing. So to me, that was also a big part of this. I wanted to finish feeling strong, feeling good. Okay, race day comes right Saturday, last Saturday, the morning of I do coffee as usual.

And then I considered taking, I have these newer energy gels which are very clean, slow burning fuel. They’re made for people that do low carb, they’re not super sugary. They use blackstrap molasses and sweet potatoes in the energy packets. And there’s just like four ingredients and they’re awesome.

So I consider taking one with me and like sticking in my pocket just in case I needed it. And then as I was getting ready and drinking my coffee in the morning, I’m like, you know what, I’m not even going to bring this with me. I’m going to leave it at home. So I’m just going to do this thing like naked I’m not even going to bring, you know, something you know as a backup just in case things go south.

No, I was confident. I was super confident right? So I do all my long runs fasted. I don’t eat beforehand. I don’t eat during, so I don’t take in any calories. I just drink water and electrolytes and I use that element recharged by elemental labs. It’s just a powdered drink that you can add to water and you can find it at drinkLMNt.com because people ask me all the time what do you use for electrolytes so that’s the stuff I recommend to people.

So I just brought that with me and I used that only, right, water and electrolytes. Okay, so the first half of the race, the first 13 miles I ran comfortably hard like I had that 9:39-40 ish pace, something like that. And maybe a little slower than that. And I was running comfortably hard now.

The reason I say maybe a little slower than that is because my watch died. around mile five. I have an Apple Watch. I use this for all my long runs. It’s works great. For the most part. I’ve had the battery die like during my 50k but I thought this is only going to be about four hours. It should be fine.

No, it wasn’t fine. My watch just stopped working. No more GPS, I had no idea how far I was going. I didn’t know what my pace was, I had a vague idea of what my time was. But that was just vague. So I was just kind of running blind. So I don’t even know, like, what my pace was, I can’t tell you what my splits were or anything like that.

So I’m a little bummed out about that, because I really wanted the data for this race. So I had to do this all by feel I was running on feel I was running on how did this feel to me, you know, we’ve got that rate of perceived exertion scale that RPE of like, zero to 10, like, you know, running like a three, four, it’s pretty easy pace, and then running like a five, six is harder, you know, that kind of thing.

So that’s what I was kind of using in my brain just to like, am I running fast? Felt like it. Yeah. Okay, so first half, comfortably hard. So I was, you know, trying to aim for that, you know, 9:30 ish pace or whatever, I have no idea where I was, it’s probably slower than that. And then I felt great at the halfway point. So I was like, Okay, I’m gonna pick this up a little bit, I’m gonna make the second half, uncomfortably hard.

So I’m going to run the next two hours, uncomfortably hard. And that’s what I did. I set out to with a faster pace, I picked it up. And that rate of perceived exertion, I kicked it up a notch or two. And I was just like, let’s see how long I can keep this up. And I gotta tell you, I felt pretty good. I never felt out of gas, I always have plenty of energy in the tank, like, but those last few miles were tough.

Those last few miles, my legs, were feeling pretty beat up, I was getting pretty sore and tired. And this is where the specificity of training would have helped me a lot. Because I didn’t really plan and train to run a fast, hard marathon. I planned and trained to run a nice, easy, casual marathon. But I pushed through the pain, I pushed through that feeling of like, I’m getting a little tired here.

And I just kept going and I finished feeling super strong and finished feeling amazing. And really the last half mile, I just was like not sprinting, but I was running pretty hard. And it felt so good. I literally had no idea what my time was, so I crossed the finish line. And this was a timed race, you know, we had a timing system and everything like that. So trip times.

So I didn’t know what my time was. And, you know, we could log into a website and you know, after about a minute or two, and then we could see where time was at. 4:16 was my time. This is almost exactly what I wanted to do. I felt so damn proud of myself because I was so close to my projected finish time without even having a clue what my time was while I was running.

So the fact that my watch wasn’t working, and that I hadn’t trained really, for this kind of thing is a testament to me being pretty fit, pretty efficient runner these days, and running only on fat as fuel like not having any carbs for my training, not having any carbs the day before. I did not crash and burn, I finished feeling strong. And I was so close to my time. I was so ecstatic with that performance really.

This is like the first time in five years or so that I set out to run a hard marathon and it was a big success. I felt super, super good about this. And, you know, I gotta tell you that there’s a lot of there’s a lot of talk about, you know, running and having to, you know, fuel up on all the carbs and carbo load to run things like that. And it’s just I think it’s a little overrated, honestly.

So here are some of the lessons that I learned from this experience. Okay, so number one is just that, like carbs, I think are a little bit overrated. I don’t think we need them. I don’t think they’re essential. Actually, they are not essential. And this is not just me, you know, my opinion that essential macronutrients are fat and protein.

If we don’t eat fat and protein, we will die as human beings. We have to eat those two things. But there’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There’s nothing from carbohydrates that we have to eat, or we will die like we can go fine. We’ll be fine without eating carbohydrates. Okay.

Do I think you should eat zero carbohydrates? No, I don’t. And honestly, I don’t know that I have any big, amazing changes by trying this experiment. I just wanted to see, is this even possible, okay?

So my biggest lesson learned is just like, the carbs are a little overrated if you’re a fat adapted runner, which I am, and you can get there too, and you don’t have to do zero carbs to get there, by the way, but if you’re a fat adapted runner, you could run just fine, you can do all kinds of amazing things, and even run a hard and fast marathon without them. Okay?

Another lesson learned specificity of training is very important. Okay. I’m going to do this again. Well, I’m going to train for another marathon in the fall, I’ve got another marathon coming up in the fall.

And I’m going to take a different approach to that one, I’m not going to do this carnivore thing like I did for this marathon. I’ll talk more about that later another day. But I’ll definitely be changing my training plan, I’m definitely going to train differently for that one, because I do want to hit a time goal for that one.

So my big lesson learned around this is like, set your goal early, and then base all your training around that goal. So if you want to run a four hour marathon, train from day one, to run a four hour marathon, that means you’re gonna have to do the speed work, that means you’re gonna have to do the long runs those tempo runs, you’re gonna have to do the, the those goal paced runs, you know, which I didn’t do.

Okay, another lesson learned is that there’s a lot of truth to the carnivore diet, being healthy and being effective. And being just fine. Like, you can do just fine eating a carnivore diet. Like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it necessarily. Okay. I think it’s a diet that humans have been eating for literally millions of years, and I think we’ve evolved eating a lot of animals and animal based product foods.

So I don’t think it’s bad, okay. And you can even train for a marathon and run a successful marathon without eating clients and carbs and things like that. Okay. Now, here’s one big lesson, I’ll just tell you, like, I didn’t see amazing results, I didn’t really see big changes to my energy levels, or how I felt or, you know, sleeping better or overall feeling better, I would say that I felt about the same as eating a relatively low carbohydrate diet.

So for me, there wasn’t that big of a change, honestly. And my original plan was to just do this for about 30 days, and then get through that marathon. But I felt good so I kept it going for I did something like 40 days of this, and it felt great, you know, but nothing, not a big difference from where I was before that, okay.

So since then, since the marathon, I’ve gone back to eating some carbs and eating my big salad every night. You know why? Because I love it. I love it. So I’m back to doing probably, I don’t know, 30 to 40 grams of carbs a day in the form of some veggies, avocados and things like that, I miss my avocados.

And I’ll report back to you in a few weeks and see if there’s anything big that I noticed that changes, but so far, after almost a week, like nothing is really different, no significant changes, everything is still functioning beautifully. Okay. So is this something I would recommend? Like should you do this? Honestly, I don’t recommend one way of eating or one diet over another.

Other than I suggest that most of us who are overweight, can probably benefit from eating a lower carbohydrate diet. So most people are somewhat carbohydrate intolerant, meaning that they, most people can’t handle carbs very well. And when they eat a lot of carbs, they tend to gain a lot of weight.

And I think most people can dramatically improve their health by ditching the problematic carbohydrates, okay, but other than that, like I don’t recommend anybody do plant based or vegetarian or carnivore, or whatever it is, you know, pescatarian I’m not going to tell you what to do. You’ve got to try stuff and see what works for you. I’m doing this because I’m just curious. I’m a curious person. I’m always learning and always curious and open to different things.

You know, if I was working with someone who was a one on one client, and they were having trouble losing weight, and you know, maybe they the weight was just not moving at all, or they were dealing with chronic constipation or something like that. I might suggest trying a carnivore approach for a few weeks to see if things change.

You know, like, I’m suggesting that for somebody that I was working with, and we would have to talk about exactly how you would do that, and what that would look like, and, you know, but here’s the thing, we are all an experiment of one, what works for this person over here may not work for you what works for me, may not work for for someone over there.

I didn’t see dramatic improvements in my health and well being on a carnivore diet. Right? It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t much different from what I was doing before. If you prefer to get fuel from plants, if you prefer a high carbohydrate diet, and this works really well, for you for running and for your health and for how you feel, that is amazing. That is awesome. Do you, absolutely. Right?

If you want to, if you’re a vegan, because of like, you know, religious reasons, or, you know, moral issues with animals and whatever, you don’t, don’t do this, like, it’s, I support that. I absolutely support that everybody’s different. Do what works for you.

You know, I’m not opposed to a plant based diet, I did it for like 10 years, and it just wasn’t, it wasn’t the right diet. For me, it wasn’t the best diet. For me, I feel so much better, eating more of an omnivorous diet. But if you trying something like this appeals to you, and you want to give it a shot, try it and see how it goes can’t hurt, can’t hurt.

So I’m always open to trying things for myself, I’m always kind of pushing the envelope a little bit to see like, what can I do? What can I improve my health? You know, will this help to improve my health? Will that make me healthier? Will make me stronger? Will it give me more energy? Will it improve my sports performance? I’m always trying stuff like this. Okay.

So one of the points I want to make here is that I wanted to show you and show myself but I really wanted to show you that we really don’t need carbs to function optimally, right? We don’t need carbs to run a marathon, we can do just fine without them. Okay, I’m not saying you should, but I’m just saying we can do fine without them. Okay. Listen, I love being a fat adapted runner.

I love the feeling of running a marathon and running it hard and relatively fast for me. Without having to worry about bonking without having to worry about hitting the wall at mile 18 or 19, which I’ve done so many times. I love all day energy. I love the clarity of mind that I get from eating a low carb diet. I love being fat adapted runner. The foods that I eat is very satisfying, very delicious and very satiating, right? I’m not hungry all day long. I don’t have afternoon crashes. I’m not thinking about food all the time. So I love this whole lifestyle.

All these things are amazing and really eating this way that I am now just being a kind of ditching the problematic carbs and being more of a low carb runner, and being fat adapted. This works really well for me and I feel really good eating this way. Right. And I can still be very fat adapted.

I don’t have to go strict carnivore, I don’t have to go zero carbs, I can still eat my big salad, and enjoy it. Alright, so that’s all I got for you guys today. I hope you got something out of this episode. I hope you pulled some little nuggets out of this today. And if you got something out of it, please consider sharing it with a friend. I would so appreciate that. 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.

68. Our Complicated Relationship With Food

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When it comes to health and fitness, there’s no topic more controversial or more complicated than which foods we should eat, and which we should avoid. Some experts tell you this diet or that diet …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to episode 68 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And today, I’ve got a really cool topic for you. This is our complicated relationship with food. So when it comes to our health and fitness, honestly, there’s no topic that’s probably more controversial or more complicated, than what foods we should eat and what foods we should avoid.

And experts will tell you like this diet is the best one for everyone or that one is the best for everyone and, or maybe that it’s not about the food at all. It’s more a problem of willpower and self-control. Just eat whatever you want, just eat less of it and exercise more, and you’ll be fine.

And I’ve come to realize that it’s just not that simple. We humans, we’ve evolved to have a very interesting and very complicated relationship with food. So why is what we eat so complicated? And what does this mean for us? And most importantly, what can we do about it? So in this episode, I share many of the reasons why our relationship with food is complicated. And my hope is that by the end of this episode, you’ll have a deeper understanding of this complicated relationship we have with food, and maybe be able to make some more informed decisions about your own dietary choices.

But first, if you haven’t already done so come check us out on Facebook, we have this amazing group of runners, the Running Lean podcast community, on Facebook, and it’s a place where you can ask questions get help feel supported, hey, we all need to feel supported. Sometimes, especially when it comes to trying to accomplish something big, like training for a marathon or an ultra-marathon or maybe, you know, getting lean and strong, maybe losing some weight.

All of these things. We support each other in the Facebook community. So come and join us. You can lean into this community you’ll find encouragement, inspiration, and motivation. Just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. I hope you join us. It’s fun, we have fun.

I want to dive right into this topic today. Because I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now. And I really wanted to share this information with you guys and acknowledge the fact that our relationship with food is complicated. And I think it’s, we do ourselves a disservice when we try to simplify it, you know, just eat this or don’t eat that. And it’s more complicated than that.

And I want to just really acknowledge how complicated this really is. And that there’s a lot more going on than just, you know, these foods are good, these foods are bad, you know, that kind of mentality. I don’t think that serves anybody. Okay. So before I get into, like, why things are complicated, I want to just give a quick history.

And this is nonscientific. But I just want to give you a rundown, kind of the way we’ve evolved. Okay, so we had these hunter-gatherer ancestors, okay, who I’m assuming did not have a very complicated relationship with food. Alright, food was a means of survival. So they would hunt, they would gather, and they had this survival instinct. They told them that they needed to go forage for food or hunt for food, they got some food, they ate it, they shared it, it was probably from what I understand is probably a community effort.

You know, the whole community got involved with the hunting and gathering, the preparing of the food, and then the eating of the food. And so we evolved with this beautiful, healthy sort of relationship, I guess you could call it a relationship with food. And over millions of years, we grew these amazing brains.

You know, we became the most advanced living creature in the known universe. Think about this. There is no creature that is as evolved as we are that we know about in the universe. There might be, it’d be very cool if we could figure that out and meet some of these other creatures. But for now, it’s just us, okay.

And we evolved this way, because of our dietary choices, really think about it. And then we live this way for eons, you know, from literally millions of years. And then something changed in the last few 1000 years, you know, we started to see things like, people becoming obese and diseased. And, you know, there was a lot of overeating, gluttony, and things like that.

And you can see this in history, if you look at, like the Roman Empire. So this would have been, you know, just a few 1000 years ago, during the Roman Empire, being fat was a sign of being ugly, like they really admired the ideal human form. If you look at the sculptures and paintings from that era, they had this ideal that they were reaching for.

And people that were fat people that were overweight, this is a sign of ugliness, and a sign of being mentally unbalanced, like an unfit mind. And so they created things like gymnasiums, where they would work out to get stronger and improve their fitness and their health. And they held beauty contests for women, just like interesting, you know.

And then, like, early Christians, they thought that being obese was a sign of not being spiritual. And early on in you know, the early few 100 years A.D., you know, gluttony was deemed, you know, one of the deadly sins. And so we started out with really no, sort of, like, emotional, spiritual or mental, like, hang-ups around food, and our bodies.

And then as we’ve evolved, you know, all of this has become more complicated. And being overweight, or obese, you know, has been vilified. Okay. So, just know that you know, only in the last few 1000 years have we started to really have this super complicated relationship with food. And I would say, probably, within the last 100-120 years or so, have things really amped up, you know, especially in the era of the Internet, and social media. And we’ll get into that a little bit more in just a minute here.

But here’s the thing. We do need food to survive. Food gives us life. Food can also cause us harm, it can create a diseased state in our body, we know this. Science tells us this it can create a state of obesity, lead to debilitating diseases, and can even kill us. So when I talk about our complicated relationship with food, we need food to survive without it will die. But eating the wrong types of food too much food can literally kill us. This is where things start to get complicated. Okay.

So, one of the first real big complications I want to talk about here is that you know, the foods we tend to love the most the foods that we’re most drawn to, the foods that we fantasize about, seem to be the ones that are the worst for us. For example, sugar is amazing, right? When we eat sugar, we feel amazing. Feels so good. We get this rush of dopamine, our endorphins, you know get released.

Eating sugar lights up the same centers in our brain as when you do cocaine. So this is great, right? Like we’ve evolved as humans to seek out these kinds of calorie-dense, very sweet foods, you know, like honey, and berries. And we would eat these foods every now and then. But nowadays, these foods that we’re eating are being you know, developed in a laboratory, by food scientists, they’re deemed hyper-palatable.

So they really hijack the pleasure centers of our brains. So when we eat some of these hyper-palatable foods, we can’t get them out of our mind, you know. So we’re really, really drawn to these foods. So that’s sugar.

Flour is the same way. So flour is like, white flour especially, is a very concentrated form of carbohydrate, just like sugar is, but I didn’t know this until recently, but flour actually spikes your blood sugar even more than actual table sugar does. Because it’s ground so finely. So it is a very refined carbohydrate.

But because there’s so much more surface area in flour, because it’s so fine, it will create an even higher spike in your blood sugar. So when you’re eating things that are made of flour, and sugar, this is just like, off the charts, right? So the foods we love the most, the foods that we’re like, most drawn to seem to be the ones that cause the most problems, you know. So this, this makes things complicated, right.

And these foods, you know, we know that too much sugar is bad, and it causes us to hold on to fat, and we store fat when we eat a lot of sugar, and flour. And it’s making us fat, obese, and sick, and it’s slowly killing us. We’ve never been more fat as a nation. In the US, you know, obesity rates have more than tripled since the 1970s.

And the major culprit, I would argue in the science would argue is the highly refined carbohydrates, especially sugar and liquid sugar and soda and things like that. So this is complicated, right, in, in conjunction with that is, you know, is this addictive nature of food. So, you know, I really, I gotta say, in the big food industry, they use this idea of hyper palatability, and they create this food that is super, super desirable so that they can sell more food.

And, honestly, we are being manipulated in a way. I’m not like a conspiracy theorist type of guy here, but we are being manipulated by the big food industries, especially the big packaged food industries because they just want to sell us more food. They’re not concerned about how healthy or unhealthy these products are. They are only concerned about making more money.

And so they put a lot of money into making these foods as highly palatable as possible. And so, you know, this is where the complication comes in, right? Because these foods that we know are not good for us are incredibly addicting, and we just like we can’t get enough of them. Right?

They’re like the most the things we desire the most. Our desire is like off the charts for these kinds of foods. Okay. So, you know, most of us, most of us cannot handle these, these highly refined carbohydrates and most people, the majority of people are what is called carbohydrate intolerant – just means like you can’t handle a diet that’s really high in carbohydrates.

These highly palatable high carbohydrate foods, they’re just as addictive as a substance as something like alcohol. In fact, they turn on those similar pathways in the brain, they turn on this thing called the phenomenon of craving. It’s like once you start thinking about donuts, you can’t get it out of your head and you just gotta go have a doughnut.

It’s very similar to somebody who has an addiction to something like alcohol. When they start thinking about it. They can’t get out of their head. It’s this craving that they just can’t shake. You know, and the food industry they know this and they make these foods that do this to us. So that will buy more.

They even put it on their packaging, you know, once you, once you pop, you can’t stop. Like we acknowledge the fact that you cannot just have one potato chip. You know, like, you’ve got to eat this whole bag once you open it up, that was my experience. Anyway, I used to love those kettle chips. Let’s see, I think it’s called kettle brand chips, I don’t even know anymore.

But they’re these potato chips with like salt and vinegar on them and just the saltiness and, and the bitter like vinegar taste to these things. I could not stop eating these things, I would go through a whole bag, and I could not just eat just one. You’re right, food companies, I cannot stop once I pop.

And so there’s this like addictive nature to and there’s this hyper palatability to food. And on one hand, there are people you know trying to make the food as pleasurable as possible. Remember, our brains are really good at seeking pleasure and avoiding pain that’s our, our amygdala, you know, that ancient part of our brain that primitive part of our brain that is always seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. And this does it for us.

You know, seeking out these highly palatable foods creates this incredibly intense desire and pleasure for us. Okay, but it’s also super terrible for our health. So this is complicated, right? And then you’ll hear people say things like, well, you can eat anything you want, just in moderation. All foods in moderation. This is the slogan that a lot of registered dieticians use: all foods in moderation.

And I just don’t think this is necessarily good advice because, for some of us, certain foods can trigger addictive-like responses. So wouldn’t it be better to just avoid some of these foods? Just a thought. I mean, it’s kind of like telling somebody who has a drinking problem. And maybe they’re an alcoholic to just have a few beers every now and then. You know you can drink. It’s fine. Just you know, one or two.

But the answer for some of us is that the answer, really, for some of us is that we just have to avoid these problematic foods altogether. Because if we start we can’t stop. You know, when I used to drink alcohol, I could not stop at just one. I had to keep going. Because it lit up that pleasure center in my brain. And my brain, you know, maybe it’s wired differently than most people. I don’t know.

But I couldn’t stop it. Just I couldn’t have just one beer, I would see people that would like drink a half a beer and like, leave it on the table. I’d be like, what is happening here? Does not compute. How do you do that?

And it’s the same way with food for a lot of us like we cannot stop we you know, once you if you ordered dessert at the table and everybody’s like, oh, let’s just share, just have one bite, we can each have one bite? No, man, I’m gonna get my own dessert. Okay, I’m gonna eat the whole thing myself. You can’t, I’m not sharing it with you. All right, because I’m not I can’t just have one bite it just triggers this response inside me.

So wouldn’t it be better to maybe just avoid that? Okay. I don’t know that all foods in moderation is like the best advice, you know. And I’m gonna go on a little bit of a rant here just about registered dieticians and I love them and I have friends who are RDS but the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics so this is the organization that kind of the Governing Board of Registered Dieticians. This is an organization that over the years has been funded by big companies like McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Company, Sara Lee, Abbott nutrition, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, you know people that make candy. Unilever and the sugar association.

So of course their slogan is going to be all foods in moderation, eat some McDonald’s eat some you know, drink some Coke and Pepsi, eat your cereal, eat your candy bars. Sugar is fine, just in moderation, right. So this organization, the AMD is kind of in bed with big food. And in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of people in the nutrition world, it’s coloring their stance you know, by telling people that cereal and soda and candy bars are fine.

I don’t think this is good advice necessarily. Okay. That does not mean that every registered dietitian is telling people to go eat McDonald’s and Coke and things like that. But I’m just saying that again, this is complicated, right? That there are these relationships that those big companies have with nutrition governing bodies.

And, for example, like registered dietitians, they are the only people that can prescribe meals for patients in hospitals. And for type two diabetic patients. This is no joke. They will prescribe a breakfast of coffee, orange juice, a bagel, Rice Krispies, a V8, and a package of white sugar. This is for somebody suffering from high blood sugar hyperinsulinemia, type two diabetes, this diet is going to spike their blood sugar like crazy. This is not what you want to give somebody that’s a type two diabetic.

And then their solution is well then we just inject them with more insulin and the problem is solved. This is crazy right here. Okay. And if you want to learn more about this, there’s a great book by Michelle Hearn. She’s a registered dietician. And it’s called the Dietitian’s Dilemma.

And she talks about this place where she got to in her dietitian practice where she was like, I just, I don’t feel good prescribing people with type two diabetes, these super high sugary meals, I just can’t do it. But this is what they have to give them. It’s a little complicated.

And here’s the thing, I absolutely believe that we should be able to treat ourselves every now and then. You know, so yeah, some foods are problematic. Maybe for me, you know, sugar is a problem. And maybe I want to not eat sugar most of the time. But can I treat myself every now and then? You know, if it’s Christmas, can I have some Christmas pudding? Or if it’s Thanksgiving? Do I want to eat a piece of pumpkin pie with some whipped cream on it? Yeah, sure. If it’s my birthday, am I gonna eat some birthday cake? Probably yes.

And then I just go back to my regular diet, you know, the next day. But if treating yourself is having negative consequences, or if it becomes something that you can’t stop doing, is this good for you? Is this really a treat?

So, you know, I don’t want to go through my life, never eating a good piece of fresh sourdough bread again, or, you know, pizza, I love pizza for the crust, I’ll be honest with you, I the toppings, whatever, I love pizza, because it’s the crust, I just love the stretchiness of it. And so good. So good.

And I want to be able to eat that, again, I want to be able to eat some ice cream again. But I don’t want to be obsessed with these foods. And this is where things get complicated, right? Because we want to be able to do this every now and then. But for some, we just can’t do that.

You know, so maybe it’s better to just avoid altogether, for the most part, you know, avoid it altogether. Except for maybe some special occasions. I haven’t eaten sugar in a very long time. I think the last time I ate some sugar was on. Well, was it Thanksgiving, probably. And we’re in April now. So this was a while back. And I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t amazing. And I didn’t get obsessed with it, you know.

So for me, I don’t really want to. I just don’t want to eat sugar because I can’t stop once I start. So I’m just you know, the reason I’m doing this today and talking about this stuff is because we do have a complicated relationship with food. And I don’t want to ever say that it’s easy. And that it’s super straightforward.

Because we all have a very unique relationship with food. We all have strong opinions, we all have certain desires and things that trigger us, and it’s complicated. And I just want to acknowledge that.

So another thing that we’re told is that and I kind of mentioned this earlier is that you know, if you just eat less food and exercise more, you’ll be fine. So eat whatever you want, just eat less and exercise more and got nothing to worry about. And honestly, this just doesn’t work. And we’ve talked about this before.

It has been proven that this doesn’t work for the majority of us, you know if you’re overweight. So this is their stance is like if you’re overweight, it means you overeat, you’ve just got to eat less. If you had more self-control, you wouldn’t be overweight, because you wouldn’t eat as much.

And I just think this is so crazy because it’s just not true. There are so many people that watch their calories, and they exercise a lot. And they still gain weight. It’s not necessarily about how much you’re eating. It’s like, what kinds of foods you’re eating? And how is your relationship with it?

I have this client who had a running streak going and still does. But he’s had this running streak going since 2007. So this guy is an absolute beast, he runs at least three miles a day, since 2007. This is like well over 5000 miles, I believe by now. And in this process, he’s gained over 50 pounds. So this is an average weight gain of 3.8 pounds a year.

If it really took that long, you know, it really only came on in the last half of this. So really, it was more like six pounds a year or so. And just so you know, the average adult in the US gains around two pounds a year after the age of 20. And so this is a problem like you’re gonna be pretty overweight, as you get older, right?

But this person, this client of mine, doing this running streak was exercising like crazy, like crazy, and still gained all this weight, like, the answer is not to exercise more. And this person was not a compulsive overeater or anything like that, you know, for the most part, try to eat up a pretty healthy diet but still gained 50 pounds, the answer is not, you know, eat less and run more, it just doesn’t work.

And, you know, there’s a lot of experts out there that are doling out advice. And trying to tell us what we should do. And a lot of this advice, I think, is well-intentioned, and it may work for them. But a lot of these experts are, are thin people, and they’ve always been thin. And they’ve never been overweight, and they’ve never struggled with eating, and they don’t know what it’s like to be a fat person to be overweight.

And some of these experts that are that have always been thin, trying to tell us, you know, well, you just don’t have enough self-control, I think is really doing us a disservice. I used to follow these ultra runners who were following a high carbohydrate plant-based diet, and they’re like, this is what you do, you got to eat all these carbs eat a plant-based diet. And I’m like, oh if this is the way to go, that’s what I’m going to do. Because this is what the experts are telling me.

Well, you know, these, these ultra runner experts are, have been thin their whole life. And they run like 200 miles a week. Okay, they’ve never struggled with their weight a day in their life, maybe they’re not carbohydrate intolerant, they may be part of that population that can handle a high carbohydrate diet. Plus, you know, if you’re running 200 miles a week, you know, it’s gonna be really hard for you to put on weight.

You know, also these people are like, elite athletes are like the top 1% of athletes in the world. You know, and here I am just some average dude with, you know, who’s overweight, you know, trying to follow their advice, and it’s not working for me. Right? This is complicated. It’s not as simple as just doing what they do, because I’m not them.

We’re all different. We all have different needs. We all have different metabolic profiles, we all have different desires, we all have different likes, and we all have different goals. And we have to meet you know, we need to meet ourselves where we are. And we need to do what is best for us and what works for us and having thin people trying to tell us what to do, I don’t think is doing us a much of a service. Okay.

And then we get into things like our relationship with food being so complicated, we get into things like eating disorders, you know, there’s this body dysmorphia, which is a mental illness, you know, and it’s, it’s when people think, you know, they see a flaw in themselves, you know that this flaw they see in themselves, could be very minor or it could even be just something they’re imagining, but they spend hours just, you know, trying to fix this flaw.

You know, they may try to excel at exercise, or they do cosmetic procedures. And they look at themselves in the mirror, and they say, oh, I’m so fat. Or look at that, look at my nose, you know. And this is an issue that causes you to know, other eating disorders. So this body dysmorphia, like we were comparing ourselves to maybe this perfect ideal image we see on Instagram or something.

And it can lead to, you know, depression, anxiety, and other types of eating disorders. You know, like anorexia, Anorexia is a very distorted body image, it’s a super, like, intense fear of gaining weight or being fat. And so a lot of people that have anorexia are very below normal weight, they’re very unhealthy, they starve themselves, they exercise, they over-exercise.

And a lot of these people, need medical treatment, to get themselves back to normal weight. A lot of times they need therapy to help with their self-esteem. And with these behavioral changes, they need to make.

Bulimia is a similar disorder. You know this is binging and purging, you know, and people with bulimia. You know, they’re, they feel compelled to binge eat. And then they want to avoid any kind of weight gain. So they’ll purge, and this can be life-threatening, right, because, you know, with anorexia and bulimia, these people are not getting the nutrition that they need to be healthy.

So, you know, we’ve taken this idea of like, a healthy ideal, and it can go to the extreme. And it can be very hard for people to see themselves as healthy as well, especially when we compare ourselves to others. And if you or somebody you know, is struggling with you know, dysmorphia, anorexia, or bulimia, you need to get some sort of medical help, honestly, because these are serious eating disorders and could be life-threatening. So definitely seek out help with these kinds of things.

But see, there’s this complicated relationship we have with food, you know, and it’s just been, it gets more intense, you know, it can be very intense for people. You know, we have this physical, we have a physical relationship with food, like where we have to eat food, or we die, okay. But like I was saying, you know, we have these hyper-palatable foods, and that creates a physical craving in our body.

So our body gets addicted to these feelings of bliss that we get from eating highly refined carbohydrates, for example. So the way it works is you eat some sugar, let’s say, like, you eat some donuts, right? Blood sugar spikes like crazy, but then it comes crashing down. And in order to get back to baseline, your body needs more donuts, to get back there. So you eat more donuts, and then the cycle repeats, you know, blood sugar spikes then crashes hard.

And you know, we get a lot of energy from eating donuts, we get this like a burst of, of energy, but then after a couple of hours, we have much less energy, we’re more fatigued than before we ate the donuts. Okay, so we have this physical, this complicated physical relationship with food with certain foods especially.

And then we have this emotional relationship with food. We use food to comfort ourselves, we use food to soothe ourselves so that we feel better. When we experience a difficult emotion like we’re stressed out, or we have anxiety, or we’re bored or angry, or we’re sad, or we feel hurt, a lot of times we turn to food to make us feel better.

Some foods we call comfort foods because they come for us. They make us feel good. And this is fine. It’s fine to do this, okay. But if your comfort food has negative consequences, this may not be such a good idea. Obviously, it depends on the food you’re using to comfort yourself. You could cover yourself with a whole pizza like I used to do.

A large pizza and a pint of beer and Ben and Jerry’s and oh, that’s very comforting. But lots of negative consequences. I just kept getting fatter and sicker. You could also come for yourself with other types of food and people don’t think of it this way. But you could come for yourself with a big colorful salad. Or a thick ribeye steak. Or a piece of grilled salmon or yeah, with like butter sauce on it.

Oh my gosh, amazing. And it’s very comforting to eat healthy foods as well, it can be. So we don’t have to go to the highly palatable foods to comfort ourselves, sometimes we can use I know. It’s like, oh, really, Patrick? Like, I’m just gonna go eat a big pile of broccoli? And that’s going to comfort me? And, you know, sometimes, yes, sometimes, yes. Okay.

But we can actually choose comfort foods that do serve us, and that will support our good health. So we have a physical relationship with food that’s complicated, we have an emotional relationship with food that can be complicated. And then we have this mental relationship with food.

You know, just thinking about food can produce a physical craving, just the anticipation of eating food. It’s actually more enticing than the actual experience itself. Like, I remember. Yeah, for Thanksgiving, last year, I was all obsessed about this pumpkin pie. And I’m like, this is gonna be so amazing. And I’m gonna get the, you know, the whipped cream on there. And it’s just, I can’t wait to do it.

And the anticipation, I had this idea in my brain that it was going to be so amazing. And then, when the event actually happened, and I ate it, I was like, all right. It’s like no big deal. It wasn’t as good as it was in my brain, you know, beforehand leading up to it. So we have this mental sort of obsession with food. This is complicated, right?

We have food we see in our Instagram feed, you know, food porn, they call it, you know, and just do a search for the hashtag food porn on Instagram. It’s amazing, like, pictures of burgers and pie and cake, and doughnuts and all kinds of stuff. It’s pretty amazing, your mouth will just start to water just by looking at these pictures. And then there’s the role that, you know, the media plays, and we see these billboards with giant pictures of pizzas on them.

We were out running this past weekend and I don’t like, you know, pizza, really, from this one place here in town. But there was a big giant billboard with his huge pizza on it. And like I said, I don’t even like their pizza. But I saw that billboard. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I go for a big piece of pizza right now, because I’m looking at this thing. And it’s creating this trigger in my brain. Right. And they know that it does that to us.

You know, we see these ads on TV ads, social media ads, and magazines and stuff like that. And the food that they just, you know, they’re just pumping us full of, you know, these images of how amazing this food is, okay. And then we have the social aspects of food. So a lot of times, you know, we want to stay on our plan, but then we, we go out with friends or something, and we feel like we’re being judged by other people.

You know, we want to celebrate with food. But then we feel like we’re, we’re doing something bad. You know, there’s a lot of stereotypes to like, oh, you’re a runner. Oh, all runners are skinny people, all runners can eat whatever they want. They don’t have to worry about getting fat.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not my experience. I was fat. And I felt judged by people, like, oh, you’re a runner, and you’re overweight? Like you must be doing it wrong. And then we have all this fat-shaming that goes on, you know, there’s like so much judgment around this stuff, right? When we’re being judged by others, we tend to want to, you know, crawl back to safety. And so we don’t stick to our program because we feel judged.

You know, we don’t want to be the weirdo at the dinner party, or in the restaurant with our friends. You know, everybody’s eating bread, and you’re like, oh, no bread for me. And they’re like, what’s wrong with you weirdo? Now, of course, people probably don’t say that. But that’s what we think. And we feel judged by people.

There’s this social pressure and food pushers, you know, people that are telling us just eat, just eat it. It’s fine. It’s not fine. It’s not fine. And then, you know, we have this. Speaking of restaurants, we have this problem, I think with portion sizes and how much we eat and how often we eat. And we’re told that we need to eat three meals a day plus a couple of snacks plus dessert and so we end up eating six times a day.

So we’re snacking all day long, and we go out to eat and our portion sizes are humongous, and I think that overeating has become the norm, you know. And then there’s this, like self-torture that we, that we do to ourselves, like, we torture ourselves around food, like, I shouldn’t eat this, or I can eat that. And in order to lose weight, I have to suffer, I have to suffer my way to better health.

You know, if I’m not suffering, I must not be doing it right. So I’ve never had a diet where I didn’t suffer and feel terrible. And then there’s this guilt and shame, we feel and we don’t stick to our plan. And there’s an internal shame of feeling, you know, ugly or overweight. And we have this emotional distress around how much we weigh on the scale.

And if we gain a pound, it means we’re a bad person. And we’re a failure. And we have a bad day. And so we just go back to eating the garbage food, you know. And if you want to know more about the scale drama, check out episode number 66, all about eliminating skilled drama, because I take a deep dive into that topic.

So all of these things I’ve talked about here today, I know I’ve kind of been all over the place. But I did this on purpose because I just want to I want you to know that this is complicated. It’s not a subject that, you know, we can just talk about in black and white. It’s not black and white, there’s so much gray area here. And what works for one person doesn’t work for somebody else.

So what do we do with all this? What do we do with all this information? Yeah, it’s super complicated. So what do we do? Well, I want you to know that the reason I created this is because I wanted to create a massive amount of awareness, I want you to see how complicated our relationship with food has become. And that this is not easy.

This topic is controversial, it’s complicated, it’s complex. There are a lot of nuances here, a lot of gray areas, I want you to be able to make informed decisions about your own health. And I want you to feel good about what you choose to eat and choose not to eat, you got to do what feels good for you. I also want you to be open to different ideas. So maybe not the ideas that are pushed down from the big food companies. But maybe some more grassroots kinds of ideas.

You know, we are all an experiment of one. You need to figure out what works best for you take control of your own health and your own fitness and your own diet and do what feels best for you. If you want to be a vegetarian or a vegan, or do the Mediterranean diet or Weight Watchers, whatever you want to do is completely fine. I have no judgments about any of that stuff.

But if what you’re doing isn’t working, I want you to be open-minded to try something else. You know, I talk about this a lot here I have a bias towards a lower carbohydrate approach. It seems to be the high carbohydrate diets seem to be a problem for most of us. Okay. And so, a lot, just lowering some of these problematic carbohydrates seems to help most people achieve peak physical health.

And, you know, if you can adopt a lower carbohydrate approach, and become a fat-adapted runner, oh, that’s amazing. And if you want help with this, like, reach out to me, I’ll walk you through that whole process step by step. One of the main reasons why I chose this field to specialize in sports, nutrition, health, and fitness coaching for runners is because it is so complicated.

And because I want to take all of these complicated issues here, and I want to do my best to distill them down for you so that they make sense and that you can make informed decisions and you can take control of your own health and fitness. So I do my best here on this podcast and in my coaching programs, to help you to make good decisions and do what works best for you because there’s not one diet that works for everyone.

My job is to help you and help my clients figure out what’s best for you. What’s the best for your body type what works best for your metabolism, what’s going to help support your health and fit goals? What supports your likes and dislikes? Complicated, right? We have a complicated relationship with food. I’m hoping that you got something out of this episode today.

And if you did, if you could please consider sharing it with a friend that would mean a lot to me. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Thanks for letting me rant a little bit here. As always, lots and lots of love to every single one of you 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.

64. Warning Signs and Dangers of Overtraining

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Overtraining is something that a lot of runners experience but very few actually know that it’s happening. You might be feeling overly sore or fatigued but you keep pushing through those tough …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to episode 64 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, sports nutritionist personal trainer, health and fitness expert, and the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’m talking about the warning signs and dangers of overtraining.

Now, overtraining is something that a lot of runners experience. But few runners actually know that it is happening. So you might be feeling overly sore, or overly fatigued, but you just keep pushing through those tough workouts because, hey, that’s what you do as a runner, right?

The problem is that if you keep this up, it can result in overtraining. And overtraining can lead to all sorts of health issues like poor performance, burnout, and even injury. So in this episode, I’m going to go over some of the warning signs of overtraining. And some of the dangers of overtraining and the things that you want to try to avoid. Okay.

And I’m gonna also offer some solid strategies for what you can do to avoid overtraining, we don’t want to do this, we don’t want to be overtraining. Okay, but first, please come check us out on Facebook, if you haven’t already, you can join the Running Lean podcast community. And all this month, the month of March is motivation month.

So all month long, I’m talking about motivation, how to get more motivation, how to maintain motivation, and how to get your motivation back when you’ve lost it. It is a fun group. It’s a bunch of positive runners who are all sharing their experiences, who ask great questions, support one another, and encourage one another.

And we’re all trying to hit certain health and fitness goals. And we all support each other in this group. So just come check us out search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us. Also, just a quick announcement that the Running Lean monthly coaching group will be open again for enrollment very soon, just a couple of weeks here.

So the monthly coaching group is my membership program. And it is a community of runners who support each other working towards the same goals, who are trying to, you know, become fat-adapted, who want to lose weight, and who want to become the healthiest versions of themselves.

And there’s an entire library of online training materials that you get access to when you’re a member of this program as well. And then we do twice-monthly group coaching calls where we get on a Zoom together and you can ask questions and get help from me and other people in the group as well.

So if you’re looking to dial in your nutrition plan so that you can, you know, become fat-adapted, sleep better at night, have all-day energy, start losing weight, feel better, all that stuff, then you need to join this membership program. I’m in the group, I’m here to answer your questions. And it’s pretty effective.

So I only open the group once every few months, like once a quarter basically. And that opportunity is coming up very soon. So you don’t want to miss out on it if you want to get on the list. So you can be the first to know when I do open the doors. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join.

Okay, and then here’s a quick five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from BLS2003 and BLS2003 says, “Love the inspiration. I love this podcast. Listening to this podcast gives me the inspiration to keep moving forward toward my health goals.”

I love it. Share the love. If you enjoy this podcast, it would mean a lot to me if you could just take a moment and leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts. Okay, let’s get into this topic because I’m kind of excited about talking about this. I know I’m weird, right? The warning signs and dangers of overtraining fun. That’s just me.

So I just got back from a run. And I will tell you, I usually run in the mornings and I got up this morning and I was just feeling a little tired. We recently changed the clocks. You know we spring forward and that always messes me up for about a week and so I’m not sleeping really well. I’m a little bit like my circadian rhythm’s a little out of kilter.

And so I was a little too tired this morning, and it was pouring down rain as well. And so already, I’m just like not looking forward to going out and running five miles. But this is what I wanted to do. And I thought, okay, how am I feeling?

I really checked in with myself and was like, Am I in danger of overtraining if I go out there and try to smash this five-mile workout, and I had to really, you know, think about this and check in with my body and with my brain and just say, like, no, I think I’m okay. I’m definitely not overtraining, but I was feeling a little tired.

So I made a decision, I was gonna go out and go slow, and just take it really, really slow, like super low heart rate. And just, you know, I didn’t care about the time or how long it took, I just wanted to get out there and enjoy the outdoors in the pouring rain. And so as I set out to run, and with this intention of going really slow, which I did, but about five minutes into the run, it stopped raining.

And I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I got done with my run, took it nice and easy throughout the whole thing. Got done with my run, got upstairs into my apartment, and I heard this noise outside, I looked outside, it was pouring down rain again. So somehow, magically, I went out there and ran at the perfect time to avoid the rain, which was totally awesome.

But the other thing I want to say about that is that I was really cognizant about this idea of like pushing too hard when you’re tired or just not feeling it. And this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about this today, okay, because sometimes we just need to take it easy and slow down. Okay. So we’ll talk more about that in a minute.

But let’s get into like what it means to train right. So if we want to talk about overtraining, first, we want to know what normal training looks like. So in order to develop our muscles to get stronger, all skeletal muscle tissue has to be developed if you want to get stronger.

And there are three basic principles that underline all training progress. And these three principles are the principles of specificity, overload, and progression. The principle of specificity states that you must exercise the specific muscles you want to develop, right? I think we all know that if you want bigger biceps, you got to like, do some bicep curls.

You know, if you want to develop stronger legs, you got to do squats, right, if you want to become a faster runner, you got to run faster. Right? So specificity, you must follow specific exercise guidelines to produce the specific type of change that you desire, whether that’s muscle strength, muscle size, or muscle endurance. Okay?

The second principle is overload. So this is the principle that states that a muscle has to be overloaded in order to develop this is the principle of all training programs, right? Anything that you want to improve has to be overloaded or first forced to work harder than normal. The overload and this is the important part, the overload must be enough to stimulate improvement, but not enough to cause injury. That’s the important part.

And then the third principle is progression. So once a muscle has adapted to a given workload, so once you’ve overloaded a muscle, and you’ve done it enough times where you’re you’ve adapted to that workload, okay, your muscles are no longer overloaded, the workout must be increased progressively, as the muscles adapt to each new demand. Right? So the progression in the workload needs to be enough to continue to stimulate improvement. But again, not so much that it causes, you know, some sort of injury.

So, these three principles are the basis of all training. All right, so we want to do specific workouts specific exercises, and we want to overload our systems, and we want to progress. Alright, so this is all good. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

And when I say the system, I’m talking about your muscular system, your connective tissues, ligaments, tendons, your cardiovascular system, your nervous system, all of these things make up your, your whole body, basically your physiology, but all these things I’m just calling lumping them all together to talk about stressing the system.

But all these things work together to keep you running fast, running strong, and running further. Okay. But when we take these principles, and we don’t adhere to them properly, or we push ourselves beyond the limits, this can result in overtraining. And then there’s a host of issues that go along with that, a bunch of bad things that happen in our bodies when we overtrain.

So overtraining is basically putting your body under chronic stress, never letting your body recover and adapt. So you’re basically overstressing the system. stress on your body is good, right? We’re talking about overload, we’re stressing a muscle or stressing your cardiovascular system. But it has to be done in a way that is specific, and slowly progressive, or else you risk injury and burnout and all kinds of other things.

Okay, so stress is good. But it has to be done the right way. So there’s this thing I’ve talked about before called chronic cardio. And for a lot of runners, overtraining looks like this, it looks like chronic cardio. So here’s, here’s what I mean by chronic cardio. All of your runs are done pretty hard, like medium-fast, right, they’re not slow enough to be considered a true recovery run.

So recovery runs should be done well below your aerobic threshold, they should be done at a very low heart rate, something you could literally run all day at that pace. And that’s kind of what I did today, I chose today to be a recovery run, I did five miles at like a 10:45 pace. Normally, I would run about a 9:30, something like that.

And so I just purposely was like, I’m just gonna go super slow. And it felt great. I could have run all day at that pace, I was not burned out by the end of it. Slow. So chronic cardio is where all of your runs are done faster than that recovery run, but they’re not fast enough to be like true speed work.

So speed work is where you’re, you’re hitting close to that anaerobic zone. So you’re getting into those higher zones, those higher aerobic zones. And when we do fast speed work, we’re eliciting an overload response from the body, right, so you do sprints, I did a sprint workout on Tuesday.

And I did a quick little one-mile warmup, and then I did 6/32 all out sprints as fast as I could, with about a minute rest in between each. And that is really hard. And that is like an overload. I’m overloading my cardiovascular system, when I do that I’m getting super close or into that anaerobic zone, when you’re gonna hold anaerobic efforts for you know, 15-20 seconds, maybe because your anaerobic means without oxygen.

And when you’re in that anaerobic zone, you cannot do that for very long, I could feel the lactic acid building up very fast, and I had to stop, you know, so 30 seconds is about the limit for that kind of speed work. So really slow runs are great, really fast runs are great, and they both have a place.

But instead, what a lot of runners do is they just do all their runs at the same sort of medium-hard pace. And it’s always just kind of stressful on your system. So you’re chronically stressing your system, you never give your body a chance to fully recover. And then you go back and just do that same running effort again, and again. And again. And again, I see so many people just I did this for many years, I’m totally guilty of this. And this is why I want to talk about this today because you don’t need to do this. Learn from my mistakes.

But this kind of chronic cardio thing, can really start to degrade your performance. And you’ll start to not be able to run as fast or as far and it will degrade your body too. Right, you’re going to start to feel fatigued, and your training will suffer. Next thing you know you’re injured, you’re out for the season, that kind of stuff.

So we do not want to partake in chronic cardio, we want to mix it up, okay. But here’s a little bit more of what’s going on in your body because I want you to really understand what this kind of looks like from a physiological perspective.

So here’s an example of what is going on. And this is a very common scenario for a lot of runners. And you might be able to relate to this. So let’s say you start training for a marathon. So you go out there, and you’re doing all your runs at this medium-hard effort, like I mentioned, right?

So you’re not really doing much speed work. You’re not really doing recovery runs when you’re supposed to do recovery runs you’re still doing them at that same right medium-hard effort, right? I know what you’re doing. And things are probably okay for a while. So you might be getting a little bit faster, you might be able to increase your distance and you’re feeling pretty good.

You don’t know it, but your body is not recovering properly. Okay, your sympathetic nervous system, this is your fight or flight system is put on high alert, right? So you’re constantly engaging the sympathetic nervous system, which releases cortisol. So cortisol is the stress hormone. So cortisol is constantly elevated in your body.

So you’re under stress, mentally and physically. And elevated cortisol causes your body to increase blood glucose production. So you’re going to be producing more glucose because your body’s in this constant fight or flight mode. And it’s like, we need the energy to run away or fight. And so the increase in blood glucose causes an increase in insulin, right.

And now we’ve gotten to where insulin is a problem, right? We know this. Now, your body’s in this chronic fat storage mode. So you’re stressed out, you’re starting to like, store all this x as glucose, then maybe your diet isn’t helping with this either. So maybe you’re storing all this excess glucose as fat.

So you start gaining weight, even though you’re like, hey, I’ve been training for a marathon for like, eight weeks now. And I’m gaining weight, right? I know, I know exactly what that feels like, I know what this looks like, I hear this all the time from runners who are struggling with this, okay.

Part of it could be this chronic cardio, this chronic state of stress that you’re putting your body in, okay? The state of chronic stress also disrupts your sleep cycles, your circadian rhythm gets kind of messed up, right. So you have trouble falling asleep at night, or you’re no longer sleeping through the night, you’re restless all night long tossing and turning, that lack of sleep adds to the stress that your body is under. Okay?

So all these things are a very common scenario. And I’m not saying that, you know, if you go out there and train for a marathon, this is going to happen to you no matter what, like, this isn’t the case with everybody, but it’s pretty common. This is a pretty common scenario.

So your body is under stress. You’re not getting enough sleep, you know, everything’s just kind of thrown out of whack, but you keep on running. And it’s like this badge of honor for runners to get out there and do all their training runs, no matter what, no matter how terrible you feel like oh, I just gotta go crush this time. Even though I feel like crap, you know, and we never give ourselves a break.

Your body is not recovering properly or not, your body’s not rebuilding properly, and your body will begin to break down, and your cells will become damaged. Muscle tissues cannot repair themselves, you will become fatigued, your energy levels will keep dropping, your immune system becomes compromised, you might get sick, you might get injured.

And then you got to put your training on hold for weeks while you’re getting your body back to healthy back to homeostasis back to normal. This is not some fairy tale Adventure Land story. Okay, this is very, very common. This is my experience and the experience of many, many other runners.

I’ve overtrained so much you guys I’m like a professional over trainer. I’ve developed stress fractures from overtraining. Muscle tears from overtraining. Groin pulls. I even did this recently. Back in the fall of last year, I was lifting weights too much too soon, too fast, too heavy.

And I developed a shoulder injury I pulled or tore some sort of muscle in my shoulder. And it’s still bugging me. It’s taking a long time to heal. So I didn’t follow those principles of, you know, progression and overload and I didn’t do it the right way. So this is not something that is like super rare. This is very common. Overtraining is very very common, but you may not even know you’re doing it.

You may not even know that it’s an issue for you. Okay. So here are some warning signs. Here are some warning signs that you might be overtraining. So if you have lingering muscle soreness that just doesn’t ever go away. That might be a sign that you’re overtraining.

Now, sore muscles are normal. If you go out there and do some speed work. Your legs are going to be a little sore. I did a pretty heavy lifting session yesterday and my quads are sore today. And I’m like that’s normal and they’ll be fine by tomorrow, you know, or the next day for sure. Probably back to 100%. That’s normal to have a little bit of soreness.

But if you are chronically sore, this can be a sign that you’re overtraining, if you don’t seem to be recovering as fast as you used to this can be a sign, you’re overtraining. So you should be able to get out there and run the next day after a long workout, or a hard workout, you should be able to run or walk the next day, you shouldn’t have much soreness or stiffness like you should just you should, you know, your recovery.

You know, when you’re recovered, like when you’re feeling ready to go again, I have to tell you that since I changed my diet since I started eating more low carb and high fat, my recovery is much, much faster, much, much faster. And a lot of that just has to do with the reduced inflammation from not eating all the sugar and refined grains.

So those things can cause a lot of inflammation in your body. Now I’ll talk more about that I’m going to talk about some nutrition that we can do to help with all this stuff here. But if you’re not recovering, like used to this could be a sign that you’re overtraining. So if you’re feeling chronically fatigued, physically and mentally, so if you have zero energy for anything, you’re always tired, you’re always run down, this could be overtraining.

Or mentally, if you’re like, the brain is just burned out, you can’t focus, you can’t concentrate, you have that brain fog, this can be a sign of overtraining as well. If you have increased irritability or mood swings, this could be a sign of overtraining, like different from normal, if you’re already an irritable person, we’re talking like, different, you know, maybe it’s more than normal, okay.

Or if your running performance has plateaued, or is declining. So if you don’t see any improvement in your running, and you’re trying to improve, it’s like you’re not getting faster, even though you’re working on getting faster, or you just hit some plateau with your workouts and you just can’t seem to improve at all, this might be a sign of overtraining.

Again, if you can’t sleep well at night, if you can’t fall asleep, or you’re tossing and turning all night long or if you wake up off and you can’t get back to sleep, when you do wake up, this could be a sign of overtraining. Also, if your resting heart rate is higher than normal, this could be a sign that you’re overtraining, this is actually a pretty good indicator that you’re overtraining.

Now you would have to track your heart rate and your resting heart rate over a period of time, so you know what your baseline is, so you know what your normal is. But elevated resting heart rate, is a sign of chronic stress and could be a sign of overtraining. So those are some of the warning signs.

So what do we do about this? Like, what can we do to kind of prevent overtraining? Well, the first thing to do is to train smarter. So you want to stop it with the chronic cardio, stop doing all the medium, hard efforts, and slow it down every now and then. And then sometimes you need to speed up.

Variation is key, though, okay, so you want to do your recovery runs at a true recovery, pace, like really, really slow down. And then when you are, when you are doing speed work, really, really smash it, like, crank it up, okay? Variation is key.

Now it’s okay to do some of your runs that medium-hard pace, you know, some runs should be comfortably hard, especially if you’re doing like tempo runs and things like that. But every run shouldn’t be like that. Another thing you can do is to remember the training principles, specificity, overload, and progression.

And make sure that everything you’re doing all of your training, whether you’re doing, whether you’re lifting weights, doing a HIIT or some sort of cross-training, yoga, even any kind of like CrossFit or running all of your training all of your exercise, make sure you’re hitting the principles of specificity overload and progression properly and not overdoing it.

And the other thing you can do is to think in terms of training cycles. So here’s what I mean by that. Training cycles would be periodization. That’s one way of doing a training cycle. So breaking down your training into periods of stress and recovery. So some weeks you go hard, some weeks you go long, some weeks you go easy. Some weeks, you go short, right, some days you’re doing speed work, other days, you’re going really slow. This is periodization, right?

You can also think of training seasons, like think of your whole year, and then you can break it down into seasons. So like right now this is March and this is like marathon training season for most people who are doing a spring marathon. So we want to think in terms of seasons so that we’re not always in training mode the whole year-round.

It’s okay to have an offseason, let your body recover for a few weeks or a month or two, especially after a really hard event like a fast marathon or a long ultra-marathon. One of the most important things you can do to prevent and avoid overtraining is to get enough rest. And this seems like a no-brainer, right?

But I will tell you, people. I talk to runners who are notoriously not good at resting, like you need to take a rest day seriously. And then just like, rest, get horizontal. Especially like after a long run, it’s okay to kick your feet up.

Like I love Saturday afternoons, Netflix on the couch. This is my jam. Like I run I do my long runs on Saturday mornings. And then Saturday afternoons, I get horizontal, I’m on the couch, I’m you know, hydrating, I’m eating good food, and I’m watching some Netflix like I do let myself recover.

You know, you might want to work out every single day like you might want to like just, you know, make sure you’re getting some sort of exercise in every single day. And it’s okay if you do that. But you’ve got to take at least a day where you go a day or two where you go easy has to be a recovery day.

So usually for me, Fridays, and Sundays are my kind of rest days. So I don’t do any hard workouts on those two days, I usually take a walk, and I’ll go for a two or three-mile walk through the park. And listen to some podcasts, get outside, get a little walk in, it feels great.

But it’s definitely a recovery, those two days are recovery days. For me. Another thing you can do is to make sleep a priority. And this takes a while to get good at it takes you got to train your body, you got to train your body and your mind to get good at sleeping. But it’s so well worth it.

And most people should be getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night. This is what we need as human beings just to be healthy, right. And sleep is when the majority of our muscle and tissue repair happens this is when we recover when we sleep. So if we’re not getting good night’s sleep, we’re never recovering properly.

And then another thing you can do to help avoid overtraining is to just reduce stress and other ways in your life. So whether that’s doing something like meditation, taking long walks, yoga, reading, dancing, whatever works for you to kind of reduce stress. Do that in addition to your exercise, because it’s so important to keep your stress levels down.

Because again, overtraining is just overstressing your body. Now, I do want to talk about nutrition. And nutrition is a role in overtraining because I think it plays a role and can help you if you pay attention to what it is that you’re eating. So you know, you want to make sure that whatever nutrition regimen you’re on that it is support supporting your training and your recovery as well.

So, you may have heard this before, but you probably want to limit or eliminate sugar and refined grains, and other high glycemic foods. Also, processed foods, vegetable oils, and alcohol, these types of foods tend to create a lot of free radicals in your body that damage your cells. That makes it even more challenging for you to recover from these tough workouts. Okay.

Sugar and refined grains especially tend to spike your blood sugar, and then they cause blood sugar surges and then crashes. And these energy ups and downs can be very stressful on your body.

Also, you’re putting your body into a state of high inflammation when you’re consuming sugar, refined grains, processed foods, vegetable oils, alcohol, that inflammation can lead to your body not being able to recover properly, and not being able to build the tissues that it needs to recover and repair.

And so this can be very stressful on your body as well. So limit those things or just eliminate them just get rid of that stuff. You know, eating that stuff. Watch the calorie intake. So I don’t talk a lot about calories because I just don’t think it’s the one thing we need to be paying much attention to or you know, we should pay a little bit of attention to it.

But when it comes to overtraining or chronically stressing out your body things can have a problem or increase the problem with that which is you’re not eating enough so you’re in a calorie deficit all the time.

This can actually lead to actually being undernourished, you know, and again, putting your body in into a highly stressful state, and contribute to overtraining and all the stuff that goes along with it.

Eating too much can also be a problem. So you’re overloading your body with too many extra calories. This can also create a stress response, right? High blood sugar and insulin response. And you ended up storing a lot of that energy as fat. And especially if you’re not eating the right kinds of food, if you’re eating too much, then you’re, again, creating a stressful situation in your body.

So you just want to make sure you’re getting, you know the right amount of it. Also, you want to be getting the right amount of protein. Protein is key to repairing muscle and connective tissues. And most runners just don’t get enough protein. You know, most runners are a little, little low in the protein department, you know, most runners are, are good at getting enough carbs, and we love our carbs.

But when it comes to protein, we tend to not be getting enough. So you want to make sure you’re getting enough protein to initiate that muscle protein synthesis where your muscles can synthesize protein to help build and repair. So getting the right amount of protein will help you to recover faster, and you’ll be less sore. And it’ll help stave off overtraining, too.

So how much protein is the right amount of protein? People ask me this. And it’s hard to say, like for an individual, because it is kind of an individual thing. But I will just give you a couple of ballparks here and you can kind of see what you think about this. Adjust accordingly.

Obviously, this is not the same for every single person in the world. But it’s just some general information, right. So how much protein is the right amount? Somewhere between 25 and 30% of your daily caloric intake should be from protein. And we’re talking high-quality, nutrient-dense sources of protein.

For me, I’m 165 pounds, I eat around 2500 calories a day, roughly. And so that works out to about 150 grams of protein per day. And I’m actually eating probably more protein than that because I’m trying to build muscle right now. So I might be in the 161-165 range. And that’s normal. And that is a safe amount of protein for me.

So you need to kind of figure out what works best for you. Those are some guidelines you can use though. And then the last thing I’ll say about the nutrition piece here, and again, this should go without saying you guys but water, you got to hydrate, you got to be drinking enough water. Water is just so key to maintaining human health and fitness.

And most people just don’t drink enough water. Every single cell in our body uses water and is made up of water. Our bodies are made up of so much water, we have to be drinking enough water. So what is the right amount of water again, here’s a ballpark for you. Like take your body weight and cut it in half. And that’s how many ounces of water you should be drinking a day.

Again, for me, um 165 pounds, divide that by two, around 83 ounces of water a day. And that works out to about five pints of water a day. So I have this pint glass and I just fill it up like five times a day and I’m good to go. I know I’m good to go with that. Okay.

So, the bottom line here is, overtraining is a real issue for a lot of runners, right? It’s not just some fringe thing. This is a problem for a lot of people. So if you think you might be overtraining, if you’re experiencing any of the symptoms I mentioned earlier, then you might be overtraining. So think about it, get off of that chronic cardio merry-go-round, start training, smarter training cycles, prioritize sleep, get your nutrition dialed in to make sure you’re supporting recovery and rebuilding of your system.

Okay, and then get enough rest. I mean it, you have to recover properly. You have my permission to kick your feet up every now and then and binge-watch some Netflix. That’s cool. I gotcha. All right, you guys, I hope you got something out of this episode. I hope you all have an amazing day as well. And as always, lots of love. Keep on Running Lean. Now talk to you soon.

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

59. Myths and Misconceptions of Low-Carb Running

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There are a lot of myths and misconceptions floating around out there around the topic of carbohydrates and running performance. Some say you can’t run without them, others say you should ditch …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to episode 59 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today we are talking about carbohydrates. Again, it’s carbohydrate month over there in the Running Lean community on Facebook. I’ll talk more about that in just a second.

But today, we’re talking myths and misconceptions of low carb running. Listen, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions floating around out there around the carbohydrates and running performance. Some say you can’t run without them. Other people say you should ditch them altogether. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there.

How do you know which answer is right for you? So today, in this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I hope to clear up some of the biggest misunderstandings, myths and misconceptions of low carb running. By the end of this episode, I want you to have the information you need to be able to make an informed decision about which approach is best for you, personally, for your personal health and fitness goals. So that is all coming up.

I did mention the Facebook group, we’re doing a 28 day low carb challenge here all this month in February. And the idea is that we’re just ditching the problematic carbs, you know, the highly refined grains and sugars and just giving it a go. And people are having some great success.

People are having tons of energy and losing weight and feeling good. And there’s all kinds of positive results coming out of this. Okay. It’s not easy. It’s not easy for everybody. That’s why we’re doing it in the group, we’re doing it as a group. And that’s why it’s called a challenge too. Because it’s a challenge. It is hard.

At first is little uncomfortable when you stop eating all the sugar because your body’s like, Where’d that sugar go? But we’re having fun over there. So definitely check us out, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us it’s not too late, you can still jump in there and start with us.

Also, people have been asking me about how they can work one on one with me. And you know, I talk about this every now and then. But if you’re interested in personal coaching, working with me, where you’ll get the individual guidance and support you need, you know, we’ll work together to dial in your macros, we’ll help you to get fat adapted.

We’ll do it in a way that supports your long term health and your fitness goals. I’m there as your guide, I’m there to guide you every step of the way to encourage you to do the things that maybe you don’t want to do. So that you can become the healthiest and fittest runner that you can be you I want you to become the person that you’ve always wanted to be that healthy fit athlete.

So if you’re interested in working with me, let’s let’s do it, I’ll get you there. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/coaching. And when you get there, you have to apply you have to apply to work with me. So what that looks like is you just fill out a quick little form a couple questions, and then we’ll jump on a call and we’ll see if we’re a good fit for each other. And for some people, it’s not a good fit, and that’s totally fine. No problem.

There’s no cost for this assessment call. There’s no obligation, it’s just me and you talking about your goals, and we’ll see if we can make it work working together. Okay, so just go to runningleanpodcast.com/coaching to apply.

And then lastly, here’s a quick little five star review of the Running Lean podcast from SerenityBob I don’t know how to pronounce that, but SerenityBob, and it’s titled heartfelt help for runners and beyond. “I happened upon the Running Lean podcast in my pursuit of strengthening my running but also, in attempting to solve the puzzle of unwanted weight gain and problematic body composition. Patrick offered heartfelt sincere support from a place of personal experience, which I found helpful.”

Thank you SerenityBob for sharing the love and if you enjoy the podcast, it would mean a lot to me if you just took a minute to jump on Apple podcasts is the only place I know where you can actually leave a review You and just scroll down and tap the five stars leave a nice review. And I’ll read it here on the show. Cool.

So let’s get into this topic today, myths and misconceptions of low carb running. Right. So I was talking about how we’re focusing on carbs this month, you know, we’re talking all about carbohydrates. I’m trying to give you guys a fresh look at this low carb approach for runners and endurance athletes. And I’ll be honest with you, this is not for everyone, I wouldn’t, I would never say that this is the only way to go. Or this is the best option for everybody out there.

Like it’s just everybody needs to go low carb. I’ll never say that. But I will say that I think it’s a fantastic approach to sports nutrition for a lot of endurance athletes. And for a lot of people in general, I think going low carb has so many health benefits, that I’m not afraid to talk about that stuff.

And here’s the world we’re living in, you know, it’s been shown that like 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. 88% of us need some sort of help. And taking a low carb approach to your to your diet is one great way to help, you know, improve your metabolic health. And if 88% of us are metabolically unhealthy, I mean, that includes a lot of runners too, okay, I’m sure there’s a lot of runners out there that are not metabolically healthy.

And if you’re part of the 12%, that’s considered healthy, like, that is amazing, that is awesome. Whatever you’re doing is obviously working, keep doing it, stick with it, I would never tell you, you should change it if it’s working for you. And I’ve said this a million times, but there’s no one ideal human diet, you need to find the one that works for you.

And a lot of times, you know, I start working with a client and we we talk about this because it’s very important that we dial in the right macronutrient and the right caloric intake and the right types of foods that work for the individual, it’s a very individual thing.

We all have different metabolic profiles. You know, we all have different, you know, weights and heights and needs and likes and dislikes. We all have different health and fitness goals. And there’s just no way that you could say like, oh, this is the best option for everybody. Because there isn’t, there isn’t one answer that works for everybody. Okay.

So this is why this is like, this is why I talk about this so much. This is why I have this podcast and my Facebook group and my coaching practice because I want to help people and it really does take some individual coaching and and knowledge and working one on one with a professional and expert in order to really dial in what works for you.

And some people can do this on their own. But it’s it’s a challenge because a lot of times people in this my experience, I’ve tried to like dial this stuff in on my own. And as soon as it gets a little uncomfortable, I’m like, well, that doesn’t work. Let me just like, screw it and I go on to something else.

And I talk about how this diet doesn’t work or that doesn’t work. So having somebody there with you is very helpful. And I’m not trying to push my services on you or anything like that. But I definitely think that having an expert there with you makes it so much easier for you to stick with it.

Okay, so there’s not one ideal diet, you need to figure out what works for you. I’m going to give you some of these myths and misconceptions about the low carb deal today. But again, this is not for everyone. I just want to make that clear, okay. And runners are not immune to health issues. Runners are not immune to metabolic issues. Okay. A lot of runners are considered unhealthy. You know, they’re addicted to sugar.

They’re insulin resistant. They’re pre diabetic. A lot of runners are overweight or obese. You know, even lean runners can be unhealthy. And there’s a name for these people. They’re called tofies, t o f i, and that means thin on the outside, but fat on the inside. You can look lean on the outside but have a lot of visceral fat.

Visceral fat is fat that is around your organs. There’s a condition called non alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is a problem where fat develops around the liver. And it has it’s directly linked to carbohydrate intake, and in sugar, basically. So eating a diet that’s very high in carbs, maybe too high in carbs for some people can cause a lot of visceral fat.

And this is not healthy. This is a sign that you’re pre diabetic or you could even be insulin resistant and diabetic. And so it’s one of those things where, you know, if you don’t, if that sounds like you are, you know, you’re worried about that definitely go to go to have your your blood work done with your doctor have it checked out and everything.

But, you know, I just think that, you know, even runners and even lean runners need to be conscious of the diet and what we’re what we’re eating on a regular basis. The food that we eat affects every cell in our body, every cell, and if you think it doesn’t, then that’s just a misconception.

And so we really need to be mindful of the kinds of stuff we’re eating. It’s important. And I’m biased. I’m going to tell you right now, right now, I’m going to be honest with you. I’m very biased. I advocate for a low carb approach. You probably knew that already. And I find that most of the people I work with, most of my clients have great success with a lower carbohydrate approach.

But it’s not the only thing that works. And I absolutely acknowledge that. And for some people, eating a low carbohydrate diet is not a good option, totally fine. But you need to figure out what works for you. Okay, so just all that being said, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you want to try a low carb approach, especially for a long distance runner, if this appeals to you, if you want to become fat adapted, and this is something you want to try, then this is what we’re talking about today, okay?

And if you’re interested in doing the whole low carb thing, but you have concerns because people are like, you know, if you don’t eat carbs, you’re gonna die. Or you can’t possibly run fast without eating carbs, then this episode may clear up a couple of those things for you. Okay.

So my goal with this episode is to dispel some of these myths and really give you the information you need so that you can decide, you know, which approach might work best for you, especially for endurance athletes. Alright, so let’s get into this.

The first myth that I want to talk about, and I just mentioned, it is that you have to eat carbohydrates, or you will die. And I’ve probably talked about this before, but I just want you to understand this is not true. Okay, there are essential nutrients that we have to have essential nutrients are those things that we have to get in our diet, because our bodies do not manufacture them.

Right, we have to eat them, we have to find them in our diet. And these include things like fatty acids, amino acids, certain vitamins and minerals, electrolytes, and water, okay, if we don’t consume these things, if we don’t find them outside of ourselves and eat them or drink them, we will die. So fatty acids would be fat, basically.

So we have to have fat in our diet, we have to eat fat, we have to get amino acids. This is found in protein. And we need protein. In order to live, if we don’t eat protein, we die. We need vitamins, we need minerals, we need water, we need electrolytes, all of these things are very important. If we don’t have these things in our diet, if we have a deficiency in fat or protein or vitamins or certain minerals, this will cause illness in the human body. Right?

If you don’t eat enough protein in your diet, this will cause illness. If you don’t get enough vitamins, you know, there’s all kinds of issues with vitamin deficiencies. You know, our iron deficiencies like these things are important and you will get very sick if you don’t have the right amounts of these things in your diet.

But the interesting thing is this is not the case with carbohydrates. There’s no correlation with illness or disease in the absence of carbohydrates, so there’s no such thing as like, carbohydrate deficiency. So like if you don’t if you don’t eat carbohydrates, honestly, you’ll probably be just fine you know?

And so this is like, people don’t like to hear this. They’re like, oh, but what about the food pyramid? What about the my plate that says we should be eating 65% of our, of our calories in the form of carbohydrates? Yeah, they do say that. And I don’t even want to get into why they say that.

But some of it has to do with the people that created the food guide, you know, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, sponsored by big food companies. And that’s a problem. But besides that, you know, it’s just a, it’s a different approach to diet. But if you look at the science, there is no essential carbohydrate, okay, just just let’s just be very clear about that.

So, if you don’t eat enough protein, you’ll die. If you don’t eat enough fat, you’ll die. If you don’t eat enough carbs, you’re going to be just fine. All right. And this is true for people all over the planet. You know, you talk about indigenous cultures, like the Inuit diet, they mostly ate just like fish seal, walrus, mostly fat, very fatty. Diet high in protein, and fat, and pretty much no carbohydrates.

And these people have survived and thrived as a people for millennia on this, almost zero carbohydrate diet, right. But here’s the crazy thing about these cultures around the world like the Inuit, by the 21st century, they have been westernized so they have been exposed to the good ol American western diet. And they’re, you know, purchasing more food from stores.

Now, they’re eating a lot more highly processed foods, refined grains, sugars, vegetable oils, that’s what we mean by the Western diet. And people like the Inuit, they’re starting to experience all the same illnesses, and metabolic issues that we’re experiencing here in the United States, you know, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancers, those kinds of things that they really have never seen before.

And so cultures all over the world have had this same experience. So they eat this traditional diet of whole foods, lots of fat and protein, very little, almost no, no refined grains, or sugar and pretty low carbs, you know, there are some cultures out there that eat a higher carbohydrate diet, which is fine.

But some of these cultures, they become westernized and they start eating the traditional, you know, American diet, which is terrible. And then they start experiencing all the same health issues. And it’s not good.

So I just want to make this first, clear up this first myth, which is that you have to eat carbohydrates, or you’ll die, it’s just not true. You can do just fine without them. And this does not mean that we should not eat carbohydrates. I want to make this very clear.

In fact, this brings me to Myth number two, which is a low carb means no carb. So a lot of people think that if you, you know, go to this low carb, high fat diet or a ketogenic diet or something like that, it means you don’t eat any carbs ever. And I want to make this very, very, very clear, low carb does not mean no carbs, right?

People freak out on me to talk about low carb. You can’t take my carbs away from me and listen, I have no, no desire to take your carbs away from you. All right, I’ve never once suggested that we should eat zero carbohydrates, right?

Too many carbohydrates can be problematic for runners. Okay? Runners are notoriously carb addicts. You know, we just we love our carbs. We love our doughnuts and our beer and our pasta and carbo loading and all this other stuff, right?

But eating a diet that’s super high in carbs, like refined grains will cause some problems for runners, especially for endurance athletes. One of the things that it can lead to is nutrient deficiencies. And, you know, carrbridge foods, like refined grains contain phytates and phytates act like it’s like a fiber in your gut. But instead of, you know, binding to things you don’t want they phytates bind to nutrients that your body actually needs, and then they, you know, pull them out of your system.

So, this is something you don’t want, okay? You know, a higher carb diet, especially one that’s high in grains. Because, you know, we all know sugar is bad. I’m kind of shifting a little bit to talk a little bit about grains here, especially because a lot of refined grains is a problem. Like gluten.

Gluten is a big major offender here, gluten has been shown to be mildly to severely inflammatory in most people. So most people have some sort of inflammatory response to gluten. So Gluten is a problem. And when your body is inflamed, it leads to all kinds of other issues.

And gluten has also been shown to compromise our digestive function and our immunity, our immune system, it actually lowers your immune system, we don’t want that. Okay, so it appears that pretty much all of us, to some extent, are sensitive to gluten, some more than others, obviously, you can be mildly sensitive and just have mild inflammation, you can go all the way up to having celiac disease where you have a severe reaction to any kind of gluten at all.

But my take on it is like why don’t we just not have any inflammation at all. So just kind of avoid the the gluten altogether. And then another problem with a higher carbohydrate diet for long distance runners especially is that we become more susceptible to oxidative damage from the stress of training. So when your body is in this state of like chronic and chronically inflamed, and you add additional stressors on your body, like a super long training run, you’re actually way more susceptible to damaging to oxidative damage.

And that means that it does damage to your fatty tissues to your DNA and to proteins in your body. And this oxidative damage leads to a host of other diseases. So enough of this oxidative damage over time can lead to insulin resistance, diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, heart disease, neurogenesis, neuro degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and even some cancers.

So oxidative damage is a problem. We don’t want that, okay, high carbohydrate diets tend to make us more susceptible to this kinds of oxidative damage. And again, I’m not saying that runners should like stay away from all carbohydrates, we’re not talking about zero carbs, here we’re talking about the problematic carbohydrates, especially refined grains and sugars. And it means that for some of us, a diet high in these, these substances can create a very unhealthy and troublesome environment in our bodies, all right, and it can put us at high risk risk for metabolic diseases.

And it also just thwarts your progress. If you want to get healthy and you want to get fit and you want running to be better, you want to become a faster runner, you build and run on longer distances, you want to improve your performance, this is just going to like tank you, it’s just doing a lot of damage to your body.

You know, if your body is in a state of chronic inflammation, this is going to be very difficult for you to make, make strides in your running, you know, pardon the sort of running pun there. But like you’re not going to be able to hit your PR if your body is in a state of inflammation all the time.

And interestingly, most people when they first stop eating sugar and refined grains, and they get off those problematic carbs within the first week, they say they they lose weight, they usually lose a couple of pounds in that first week. And a lot of that is the inflammation that they’ve been experiencing that they didn’t really know they were experiencing. They say they immediately feel lighter, and less like bloated and puffy, you know, and they feel leaner just from just from making this one change. Okay, so inflammation is a problem.

But what was I talking about? I’m talking about runners, okay? We don’t have to stay away from carbs altogether, we can actually use carbohydrates in a strategic way and make this part of our running performance actually helped to increase our performance.

Okay, so I always talk about eating good, the good types of carbs if you’re going to choose carbs, choose things like dark leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, some dairy products, like full fat Greek yogurt, I’ve talked about that before, very beneficial for our health. I love my big salad every night I ate this big salad with tons of veggies, dark leafy greens. There are other kinds of carbs you can incorporate to help your running as well like you know, sweet potatoes, wild rice, quinoa, oats, these things all have their place for endurance athletes, okay?

We can utilize carbohydrates strategically, to actually improve our performance. Even in fat adapted runners, it doesn’t mean that you don’t ever use an alternative fuel source, it doesn’t ever, it doesn’t mean you never eat another carbohydrate in your life, okay?

And actually carb loading before a race is still a strategy that you can incorporate even if you’re doing a low carb approach, you can still ramp up your carbohydrates before you’re a race and you want to, you know, PR or something like that. Use some carbs, it’ll help you, um, you just do it with different types of carbs.

So slow burning carbs, don’t go for the pasta, don’t go for the spaghetti dinner, you know, do some of the things I mentioned, you know, the sweet potatoes and the likes. And if you’re interested in learning more about this, go to episode number 56, Good Carbs, Bad Carbs, because I break it all down and talk about all the different carbs that you can include and what you should maybe avoid. So I dive a little deeper into that in that episode.

And here’s the cool thing, once you become fat adapted, your body can actually use utilize carbohydrates differently, then a carb adapted athlete, okay, so because you are a fat adapted athlete, you burn fat very efficiently, your glycogen stores, this is where your muscles store, the carbohydrate energy, right, so carbohydrate gets turned into glucose, which gets stored in your muscles as glycogen.

Because you’re a fat adapted runner, those glycogen stores are pretty low. So when you eat some carbs, most of that energy is readily available in your muscles for energy to be burned for fuel. When you’re a carb adapted athlete, you know, your, your glycogen stores are pretty much full all the time. So when you eat carbohydrates, some of that gets most of that kind of gets stored as fat. And that’s where it becomes a problem. Okay.

So even if you’re a more efficient sugar burner, when you’re an efficient fat burner, right, it’s just, it kind of just kind of works together. And your body can kind of burn both of these things while you’re doing these long distance events. You know, typically your body wants to burn the glycogen first, but you can actually burn glycogen and fat somewhat simultaneously. It just depends on the person and how fat adapted you are and things like that.

But so for, you know, most of us, if you’re doing fat adaptation, you’re doing a low carb, your glycogen stores are pretty low. When you do take in carbohydrates, you’ll be able to utilize those to enhance your running performance. Without you know, the negative side effects that most carb adapted runners run into, which is, you know, they get into like, GI distress.

And you know, eating a lot of carbs, they end up gaining weight, they have excessive hunger, they have inflammation and things like that. So we can actually use some carbs strategically to enhance performance. Okay, so that was, you know, the myth of low carb means no carb, we’re not talking about no carbs, we’re talking about a lower carb approach, okay?

Another myth is that like, long distance runners, you just have to eat carbs, like you just have to eat them, or else you can’t run, you know, and I hope this is pretty obvious to you by now. That this is like totally bogus, right? Like, you don’t have to have carbs to run, you really don’t.

You know, people will say like, well, you know, this is what they’ve been teaching us since the 80s. And I’m like, well, they’ve also, you know, gave us this food pyramid, and we’re much fatter and much more unhealthy now than we used to be. So maybe that’s not the right approach. Maybe there’s another way to do it.

Again, it’s not for everybody, but maybe, maybe this works for you. So the way our fueling works usually is that our primary source of energy is glucose, like we want to use the glucose, you know, for energy. And so most runners think well, you have to have this glucose where you can’t run.

And then, you know, glucose gets put into our muscles and stored as glycogen. So once that happens, you know, any extra glucose that comes in, in the way of carbohydrates gets stored as fat and so this is why a lot of runners who eat a lot of carbs, just keep gaining weight, you know, because they’re just, they’re eating too much. They got too much glucose coming in.

Most runners carry around too much body fat in general. Okay, so glucose is a great source of energy. It really is, but we can only carry around about 1000 calories of glucose at a time, we only store about 2000 calories of glucose as energy. And we have to keep consuming it, especially during endurance activities or we will hit the wall, we will bonk.

So we want to tap into a better fuel source and we all have one, it’s a better alternative fuel source, it’s fat, right. But it’s really hard to get to, if you’re if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates. So long distance runners don’t have the carbs, they can run on fat very, very efficiently. You just have to like get rid of the glycogen stores and keep your body in a low carbohydrate state to force your body to tap into that stored body fat to use for energy, right.

And here’s the cool thing. You know, if you can only carry around 2000 calories of glucose at a time. On average, even the leanest runner will be carrying around more than 20,000 calories of fat as fuel at any given time. So you don’t need to restock the shelves during a long distance event, you just keep running. Right?

So you know, and 20,000 is a very conservative estimate. And that’s for lean runners, if you’re maybe carrying around a little extra body fat, then you have probably closer to 50,000 calories of fat as fuel available to you.

And remember, carbs provide us with about four calories of energy per gram. Fat provides us with over nine calories of energy per gram. So it’s a more energy efficient source of fuel to like more than twice the energy, and you can carry around more than 10 times as much. To me, this is a no brainer, okay.

I’ve been experimenting with fat adaptation for a year now. And I’ve done it before in the past, but this past year has been very intentional and very, very different for me. And so I’ve been doing all my runs, fasted all my runs in this state where I’m just using my own body fat for fuel.

And I do that to show you what’s possible. So you know, not everybody has to do all their runs, fasted or do them without bringing any fuel with them, I do it because it feels great. It’s really easy to do, I can run all day on bonk proof, I feel bonk proof, I just never worry about hitting the wall, I run a marathon and a 50k on zero calories, just to show that I can do it just to prove to myself that this works, right?

I have become virtually bulletproof. Right. So runners do not have to eat carbs to run long distances, you just don’t have to do that. And there’s all kinds of benefits to becoming a fat adapted runner. In fact, I just did a podcast another one, I recommend you listen to number 54 called The Benefits Of Becoming A Fat Adapted Runner. And this will give you a solid understanding of all the positive benefits that this lower carb approach being fat adapted can have on your running performance.

And, and this is not just me, and I know I’m just an experiment of one here. I’m just one average guy that has had great success with fat adaptation. But a lot of my clients have really great success with fat adaptation too. But there’s also elite athletes that are finding great success with a low carb approach.

And that leads me to my next myth or misconception, which is that you can’t run fast without carbs. Like you have to have carbs if you want to run fast and you know, most people think, Okay, this is gray, Patrick, like running slow, long distances is great. We understand that, like you’re in that fat burning zone, you know, just keep your heart rate low. And you can run all day like that. Right?

But what about running fast? You have to have carbs for that, right? Yes and no. And I’m gonna break this down for you here. So yeah, the fat adapted athlete can basically run all day, right? As long as you’re, you know, staying below the point where your body isn’t producing lactate, you know, faster than you can flush it out, right.

So lactic acid buildup will lead you to bonking right? There’s two kinds of bonking really that most people experience – lactic acid build up. I mean, you’re just going out too hard. And, well, another kind of bonk, there’s actually three. There’s a glycogen depletion bonking, which is like your body’s just out of fuel, right? And then the third is like a mental bonking.

All right, so just keep that in mind that we can eliminate a couple of these at least, with changing our diet, but lactic acid buildup is a problem. And this occurs when your body can’t metabolize the lactate being produced during the higher intensity events, you know, during high intensity exercise is why you can only sprint for short bursts. You know, Usain Bolt is not going to go run the half marathon at that pace, right?

He can’t do that, like you cannot run, you can’t sprint for long periods, periods because that lactic acid would build up and then you would just totally crash, right? But you can run slow all day long.

And the fat adapted athlete, here’s one of the benefits of becoming fat adapted is that you produce less lactate, and therefore you actually have a higher lactate threshold, meaning you can actually increase your exercise intensity so you can run faster, while still being able to metabolize the lactate, because you’re not producing as much as the carb adapted athlete. Alright.

And if you want to learn more about this check out there’s a great book. It’s called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Oerformance. It’s by two doctors Jeff Bullock and Stephen Finney. And these guys literally wrote the book on low carbohydrate performance. And it’s, it’s awesome.

So I don’t want to get too nerdy with some of the science stuff here. But just know that you can actually run fast and be fat adapted and run for not only longer distances, but also faster. Another example of this is Zach Bitter, who is the current world record holder in the 100 miler and the 12 hour events, right. So he did, this guy’s a beast, he broke the world record in the 100 miler with a time of 11 hours and 90 minutes. That is a 6 minute 48 Second pace for 100 miles. This is insane.

And then his 12 hour world record, he ran 104.8 miles in 12 hours. So Zach, I talk about him because he’s kind of the poster child of the low carb approach for high performing athletes. He’s a leader. He’s like one of the best in the world, right? He trains very low carb. And he’s an extremely efficient fat burner, this guy can just burn fat like crazy.

So here’s where I kind of talk about this myth of like, you can’t run fast without carbs, being sort of true and false. So for Zach, he’s going to use carbohydrates strategically during a race to give him that edge that he needs the extra gear that he needs to be able to compete or to win an event like this. Okay? So Zach does something like, like when he did his world record 100 miler, he did something around 40 grams of carbs per hour for that event. So he added carbohydrates to give him an extra little edge.

Why not use them, right? 40 grams an hour is not much. If you compare that to what most average, like marathoners, like weekend warriors like us do. Most people do somewhere around 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour for like a marathon where they’re gonna run like a four hour marathon.

So he’s not doing a ton, but it’s enough to give him the competitive edge that he needs is enough to push him to a world record time as an elite athlete, he’s using carbs very strategically, he trains very low, but then races higher, so he uses carbs to improve his performance at times. We can do this too, we can use carbs to help us run faster.

You don’t have to, like, I’m sure that there are. This is different for everybody. So what I’m about to say just like, please understand this is different for everybody. But most people probably wouldn’t need carbs hardly at all for a 5k or 10k, maybe even a half marathon like depending on your intensity.

Like you can probably go out there and smash a half marathon time, you know, an hour and 45 minutes or something like that. Really not need much if any carbs at all, because you’re not going to like deplete the stores that you have and you’ll probably be okay.

But you know that that’s an individual kind of thing, but you can certainly use them right? If you’re staying in that kind of fat burning zone like below your anaerobic threshold you can run pretty far. Like you can run faster for long periods of time. But as soon as you kick into that anaerobic zone, you’re going to like need to keep your muscle glycogen stores topped off.

So you have to experiment with this. This is not the same for everybody. But you might be surprised how hard you can go, like how fast you can run without needing carbs. I’ve had some interesting experiences this past year, running faster without carbs.

So this time last year, I was probably, you know, averaging. If I went out and ran like 10 miles, I’d probably average around a 10-10:30 pace. And today, if I were to go out and do that same 10 mile run, at what, to me is like the same perceived effort that I was doing a year ago, it’s probably more like a 9:30, or a 9:15 pace.

So I’ve improved my times by, you know, roughly a minute, per mile faster. And I say this, because I’ve, you know, switched from being a carb adapted athlete to a fat adapted athlete. And I don’t use carbs on these runs, especially when I’m out there doing the longer runs, I just don’t use anything at all, no calories at all.

And I know this is just my experience is one person. It’s kind of anecdotal. But you need to try this for yourself and see how it goes for you. I’ve been doing a couple of time trials with my running group lately, and my 5k time which I haven’t run like a race, I haven’t raced a 5k in a long time, several years. But my time was like, under 24 minutes, I averaged a 7:43 pace for 5k.

And I did it without any kind of carbs or anything like that. And so when on the shorter distances, it’s like, you don’t really need the extra carbs, because you’re not going to burn through your your energy stores. But to me, though, I was pretty proud of that pace, like that was pretty, pretty hard. I went out hard, and I felt really good.

So you can definitely, definitely run faster, and improve your running performance without having to be a high carb runner, you can do it using some carbs strategically, if you want to. Why not use them, right? I mean, when you’re an efficient fat burner, using carbs, we’ll send that glucose straight to your muscles to be used for energy. So why not do it if you want to enhance your speed and performance, you have that tool available to you. Okay. So that was the myth of like that you can’t run fast on carbs.

And then the last one I’ll talk about today is that, you know, this whole low carb thing is just not sustainable. I hear people tell me this all the time. And I do get it, I really do. And honestly, I used to believe it too. You know, there was a couple of years ago where I went out to become fat-adapted, and I did it. And I loved it. And running was great. And I was able to run all day, I remember doing a couple of 50K’s that summer, and I just felt so good. I was like, this is like the easiest this has ever felt.

But for whatever reason, I got it into my head, that this is just not sustainable. Like I can’t keep this up. And people were telling me, this was stupid, this is not a viable approach. You can’t do this long term, this is bad for your health, you’re gonna die. And I let all these people get in my head honestly.

And I started to believe in myself, you know, I let their misconceptions dictate how I felt about myself. And I started to doubt myself. And I started to doubt if this was the right choice for me. And full disclosure, I was not eating a really awesome diet at the time, I was eating a lot of processed foods.

So on one hand, you know, we just have to understand that you know, what I was the way I was doing, it was not, I wasn’t doing it the right way. Not the way I’m doing I know a lot more now. So I got into my head that this was not something I could keep doing. And eventually I caved, and I just went back to eating the high carbohydrate diet that I was eating before that.

And honestly, that’s when things started to kind of go south for me, I put on somewhere close to 20 pounds a year for the next two years. I gained over 40 pounds. Because I went back to my high carb diet. I kept running, I was still running, I was still working out all the time. I was doing all kinds of exercise.

I was even like counting my calories and like you know, making sure I was getting my steps in and you know doing all this stuff and I just wasn’t I wasn’t losing weight. I was gaining weight consistently. So the funny thing is, that was not sustainable for me. The whole going back to the high carb diet was the thing that was actually not sustainable.

Because if I kept going in that direction I’d be, you know, who knows, another 20 pounds heavier. So for the past year, I’ve been fat adapted eating, low carb, preaching about it, and coaching people on it. And I’ve had great success. I love it. It’s easy. It’s effortless, I enjoy everything about it. I love the food. I love the way I feel. I love how it affects my running in a positive way.

You know, I’m sleeping better. I have more energy. I’m thinking more clearly. And I’ve been sharing my journey with you here on the podcast in the Facebook group for the past year. And I will continue to do that. I will continue to share my journey. I absolutely believe that this is very sustainable. And as I learn new things, and new science comes out, I’ve tried to pass them along to you.

And just as a side note, Zack Bitter, you know, he’s been following this very large, low carb approach to endurance running for over 10 years now. And he continues to break records. And he’ll tell you like this is like, totally sustainable. But here’s the thing: the best diet is the one that works for you and is sustainable for you. You may not enjoy eating low carb like I do. Fair enough, do you.

But here’s my message for you today. There are a lot of misconceptions out there. And I want you to know that low carb is healthy. It’s great for weight loss. It’s great for maintaining your weight. It’s great for long distance running. It’s great for fast running. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s sustainable.

And there’s a couple of resources. I mentioned one already The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. Definitely check out that book. It’s great. Another great book is Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson. Two great resources that you guys can check out.

Okay, that’s all we got for today. I hope you all have an amazing, amazing day. And if you liked this episode, and you got something out of it, please share it with a friend. You guys got this. Lots of love. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

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

58. How Stress Is Making Us Fat

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Stress is not something that can be avoided, it’s just a fact of modern life. In fact, we all need a certain amount of stress to function normally. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress; we …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 58 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about how stress is making us fat. That’s right, stress is making us fat.

Now, stress is not really something that can be avoided. You know, it’s just a fact of modern life, that we all need a certain amount of stress to function. Normally, a little bit of stress is okay, it’s normal, it’s healthy. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress pretty well. We have these built-in mechanisms that kick into gear to help us deal with stressful situations very effectively, this works great, but too much stress or the wrong kind of stress can have some pretty serious health consequences.

Stress can make us sick, stress can lead to a host of other chronic diseases. And stress can make us fat. So in this episode, I’ll be taking a look at stress from several different angles. I’ll explain how stress is making us fat. And I’ll provide some options for how you can reduce stress in your life.

If you haven’t already done so please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, all this month, this is February 2021. We’re doing a 28 day low carb challenge. So the focus this month is to try to reduce the problematic carbohydrates for a couple of weeks. That’s all. It’s not like, you know, zero carbs or anything like that. It’s just like, let’s see what it feels like to ditch some of the problematic carbs, and see how our body responds.

Each week, I’m doing a little bit of training in there. To show you how to do this simply and safely. We’re also encouraging each other people are asking great questions. They’re posting great results they’re having already. And it’s a lot of fun. We’re all supporting each other this month, through the 28 day, low carb challenge. So come join us over there. Just jump on Facebook search for Running Lean community.

Here’s a recent five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from RTM71. And RT says, “This is not just about running. I’m an almost 50 year old malel, I quit smoking five years ago, never really thought about becoming a regular runner until I found this podcast. And it’s not only about running, it’s about a lifestyle. I love it. And Patrick interacts with his listeners on different platforms as well.”

Thank you RTM71. And if you feel so compelled, if you get something out of this podcast, I would love it if you jumped on Apple podcasts and you can just scroll down and leave a quick review. And who knows I might even read it here on the show. Awesome.

Okay, so let’s talk about this how stress is making us fat. So first of all, let’s define stress. What is stress? What do we mean when we talk about stress? Stress is the mental, emotional, and physiological response of the body to any situation that is new, threatening, frightening, or even exciting. Okay.

So it’s like a mental, emotional, and physical, physiological response to situations that are new or different, that seem threatening, frightening, or exciting. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s normal, you know, we all need a certain amount of stress in our lives, you know, there’s a certain amount of optimal stress that happens in our lives that helps us to you know, maintain our homeostasis and maintain adequate health and our athletic performance okay.

But when stress levels reach mental, emotional, and physiological limits, stress becomes a problem. We no longer function optimally, right we become sick we become diseased, we gain weight or it becomes very hard to lose weight or we get injured. You know this is when stress becomes a problem, okay.

So stress is one of the most common problems people face today. And chronic stress really undermines your ability to just stay healthy. An August 2020 Gallup Poll reported that 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. And this is up 14% from the previous year.

So in 2019, only 46% of Americans said they felt daily stress and worry, by the way, that 46% is pretty much what it’s been for a long time, many, many years, it doesn’t really change much. 46% is about what it normally is. But because of this global pandemic, you know, 2020 is like the most stressful year we’ve had, in a long, long time, we’re more stressed out than ever right now.

And current estimates indicate that the annual cost of stress and stress-related diseases in the United States exceeds a $300 billion 300 billion with a B dollars annually. And this is mostly due to health care costs. It also is due to lost productivity, and absenteeism as well. So stress is a big, big problem. It’s very common.

It’s a chronic issue here in the United States and other parts of the world, but especially here, we do everything being here, tell me. So we just have to understand that stress can be problematic. Okay.

Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of stress. So how do we react to stress? What is stress? What are the two main types of stress we want to talk about here? So you know, there’s two types of stress, I’ll talk about those in a minute.

But it’s really how we respond to these that makes all the difference, okay, because we’re all going to experience stress, it’s not like you can, you know, wave your magic wand and you’re going to have a stress free life, that’s just doesn’t work. That way, there’s always going to be something that happens to create that mental emotional, and physiological response in your, in your body in your mind.

So you have to just be able to learn how to handle what comes your way. Okay, so it’s how you respond to stressful situations, that makes all the difference, all right. So, the main two types of stress first of all, we have eustress and that is spelled eustress, eustress. This is the beneficial kind of stress.

This is the kind of stress where health and performance continue to improve even though the stressor is there. Okay, so here’s a good example of a type of use stress, lifting weights, this produces a good type of stress. This is the principle behind lifting weights, one of the principles is the principle called overload.

And if you want to develop muscles, you need to apply the principle of overload so when weight training, the muscle must be forced to work harder than normal, and the muscle must be overloaded, in order to stimulate improvement. So you overload the muscle by lifting a weight that’s heavier than you would normally lift, your muscle adapts, by getting stronger.

And then you continue this process. And that’s how you build muscle. You build muscle during the rest phase, actually, right? So you stress your muscle for a short period of time at the gym. And then the next day you rest. And that’s how you build muscle. So that’s an example of a beneficial type of stress, you stress.

Another example of a type of use stress would be doing interval training or speed work as a runner, right? So you would run very hard and very fast for a short period of time. So maybe you do a sprint workout. You do hard, you know all-out sprinting for 30 seconds at a time. Rest for a couple of minutes and repeat that maybe four or five times that’d be a good stressful workout.

But it’s very short. It’s very intense. You’re stressing your body, but then you back off When your body responds by adapting the same principle as the weightlifting here, you’re overloading your muscles by sprinting, you’re overloading your cardiovascular system by sprinting. But your body responds by adapting and getting stronger, getting more efficient and delivering oxygen to your muscles, and building muscle.

So this is the beneficial kind of stress, you become a faster, stronger runner. So this is like the good kind of stress. And this is fine, we want this, we need this in our life in order to grow in order to continue to be a healthy human being, you want some of this good kind of stress in your life. Okay.

Now let’s talk about the other kind of stress. This is the kind most people think of this is, it’s not us stress, this is distress. And this is the negative kind of stress this is the unpleasant or harmful response to stress. When your body has a distress response to stress, this is where your health and your performance deteriorate.

So it would be like, if you lifted heavy weights every single day, without ever giving yourself a rest day, you totally like tax your muscles, they wouldn’t be able to grow because you’d never give them a chance to rest and go through that repair phase. And you’d probably cause injury. And running is the same. Running is the same thing.

Like if you just ran the same like super-fast tempo, every time you go out and run and you ran every single day, you never gave yourself a rest day you never let off the gas. You’re not slow enough to be in the aerobic zone. You’re not fast enough to be creating adaptive responses like doing speed work, you’re in that chronic cardio stressful running mode.

And by the way, a lot of new runners do this. And this causes a lot of injuries in new runners or burnout. You know, it’s really hard to keep your body under that chronic distress for long periods of time. Okay, so those are some examples of distress, okay? Chronic distress can be very problematic, okay, when your body is chronically distressed.

You can increase your risk of all kinds of health disorders. Chronic distress has been related to coronary heart disease, which is the number one cause of death in the United States. Chronic distress has been linked to hypertension, high blood pressure. It’s been linked to eating disorders, ulcers, diabetes, asthma, depression, migraines, sleep disorders, chronic fatigue.

Chronic stress has also been linked to the development of certain types of cancer. Chronic stress is not good. It is not good for us, it causes all kinds of problems, okay. So there are basically two types of stress. Eustress this is the short term beneficial, good kind of stress, our body responds positively by adapting and improving.

And then we have distress. This is long term chronic, harmful type of stress, our body responds in a negative way, our health and our performance decline, and it could kill us. It has a lot of very bad effects on our body and on our health.

So let’s talk a little bit about what happens when we experience stress in the world. Okay. So again, stress is stress in itself is not inherently bad. You know, we’ve evolved as humans to have an amazing response to stress, you know, something in our environment, you know, would stress us out?

We would hear a rustling in the bushes that we’re not familiar with, well, what’s that that’s something new. So we would, you know, our senses would get heightened, you know, and then out pops a saber toothed Tiger. And when that happens, all these things like kick into gear, our brain sends messages to our hypothalamus, you know, into our adrenal glands. We activate the sympathetic nervous system.

This is the fight or flight nervous system, right? The adrenal glands produce adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone, you know in our body responds by increasing blood pressure, increasing our heart rate, increasing blood glucose, our liver will actually create more glucose and send it out into our bloodstream because we need that energy to be able to fight or flight right. In turn, our insulin levels go up.

We do some more blood flow to the brain, more oxygen uptake we are breathing increases, our muscles tense up, our muscles strengthen. And we have this sense of heightened awareness. These are all the things that happened in our body in response to stress, okay, so this is all good. This is normal, if there’s a saber toothed Tiger there, okay? This is all good if the stress can be released in some way.

So when you set your body up into this fight or flight mode, you’re getting ready to like do some battle or run away very, very fast. Okay. So in my case, if I see that saber toothed Tiger, I am running away as fast as I can, I am not going to take my chances with saber toothed Tiger, right. So, you know, if the stress can be released in some way, you know if we can run away, or if you want to stand and fight the tiger, awesome. And if you win, then good for you even better.

But you know that stress will be released by either one – we fight the tiger or we run away, something has to happen to get our body back to homeostasis, we got to get back to normal. So we are we need our heart rate to drop our blood pressure to normalize, we need to burn off that excess glucose we would do that by running or fighting or whatever, our insulin levels will get back to normal or muscle tensions would release our muscles would relax, our bodies would relax.

So this is all good. This is the way the stress response system is all set up. This is all good, right? But what happens if there’s no release of the stress? Your heart rate is gonna stay high, your blood pressure is going to remain elevated glucose and insulin levels are going to remain high, your body is going to remain tense, and your muscles are going to be all tensed up.

And this condition I’m describing right here, this chronic stress is how 60% of Americans live their entire lives. Right, there’s no saber toothed Tiger today. There’s other things that stress us out instead, but our bodies have this exact same response to whatever we determine is stress in our lives. Okay.

So that stress could be, oh, my boss is a jerk. You know, I got these three projects, he wants me to get them done by the end of the week, or, you know, I gotta homeschool my kids, or you know, just driving to and from work in rush hour traffic. That can be very stressful, right? Or feeling like there’s never enough time to do everything that has to get done. Maybe you’re not sleeping well.

This can keep your body in a state of chronic stress. Feeling overwhelmed by you know, emails and text messages and social media, being distracted by social media. So we never get anything worthwhile done, right? Information overload. constantly comparing ourselves to others worrying about money and finances. Worrying about COVID.

All these things are what stress us out on a daily basis. All of these things create that same mental, emotional and physiological response in our bodies. They all produce that same stressful response as though there were danger in front of us something frightening, right?

And so it’s very easy for us as, as humans today, in the modern world, especially in the United States, to get stuck in this state of chronic stress is not good. It’s not good for us at all. It’s creating a very healthy, very unhealthy environment and our bodies and our minds. And it’s leading to all sorts of, of illness, disease, ill health, and it’s making us fat. So how does stress make us fat?

Well, your body’s response to stress. One of the things that happens is that your body produces cortisol, that is the stress hormone. Your body produces cortisol, adrenaline, blood glucose, so glucose levels go up; adrenaline, cortisol, and insulin.

And again, this is all great if you’re going to fight off the saber toothed tiger or runaway, you’re going to burn that glucose off the cortisol will lower the adrenaline will lower insulin lower and everything will get back to normal. You would use the glucose for energy right and insulin would kind of level out but that just doesn’t happen today, right, because you’re like stuck in traffic or you never get a good night’s sleep or whatever it is.

So your blood glucose your cortisol levels remain high, your blood glucose levels remain high, your insulin levels remain high. And remember, if insulin is high, your body is holding on to fat. If insulin is high, you are in fat storage mode, your body is holding is not releasing fat from your fat cells, it is holding on to it, you’ve got to get the insulin low in order to release the fat in order to become a fat burner to get your body into fat-burning mode, right?

Cortisol increases our blood sugar. And insulin goes up in response to that. And here’s a little side note, cortisol also suppresses your immune system. So it makes you more susceptible to all sorts of illnesses, including some things that you don’t want these days. COVID-19. So cortisol, you know, it’s a stress hormone, it’s fine to have some cortisol in our system, but we, we don’t want an inordinate amount of this.

And we don’t want stress, and cortisol in our bodies all the time. This is how stress is literally making us fat. Cortisol increases our blood sugar increases our insulin. That’s the main reason we hold on to weight when we’re stressed out. And if you want more proof of that, they make a synthetic form of cortisol. It’s called prednisone.

This is a corticosteroid that they use for some people. Some people use this and they get some good results from using it. But the number one side effect of using prednisone is weight gain. People that take it weight gain over 70% report, I’m sorry, people that take prednisone over 70% of them report weight gain, and the higher the dose, and the longer the duration of, of use of prednisone, the more weight they gain.

So if they keep taking this steroid, they keep gaining weight. And as soon as they stop taking it, they stop gaining weight. And sometimes it takes a while to lose that weight. It’s very hard. But that’s just a little sidebar. Like you know, prednisone is the synthetic form of cortisol. So cortisol is not good. No bueno.

We don’t want a lot of cortisol in our system all the time, a little bit every now and then it’s fine. And that’s what the short term, they use stress. That’s why it’s good to go to the gym workout, you know, stress your whole body out, stress all your muscles out quickly, and then let it repair. That’s good. That’s what it’s designed for, right?

But when we’re stressed out all the time, our hormones are just whacked. Hormone regulation, it’s like one of the most important factors in maintaining a healthy body weight, when your hormones are out of whack, your weight is out of whack.

When your hormones are normal, you tend to be at your normal healthy body weight. So just we got to like get this stuff in check, right? Like stress is literally making us fat. If you’re having a hard time losing weight, then you got to check your stress levels. Okay. So how do you know if you’re stressed? I mean, I think most of us know.

But if you’re not sure, I’ve got a list of some symptoms that you can kind of check out. But you have to be aware, the first step is like you just have to be aware that stress is an issue in your life. And I asked my clients this a lot when we hit a weight loss stall, or a plateau and I say, Hey, how’s your stress level? Oh, you know, everything’s great. I’m eating great, you know, blah, blah, blah, but oh, yeah, work is really stressful.

And, you know, gosh, the kids are just driving me crazy. And, oh, yeah. And I find out that their stress levels are super high, and they’re not taking care of themselves. And we dig into it a little bit deeper. And we find that once we start working on the stress, the weight starts to kind of come off again. So we kind of can break through some of these weight loss stalls or plateaus by reducing stress. It’s amazing. Totally cool.

So you may be chronically stressed and not even know it. Here are some common system symptoms of stress. These are this is not a comprehensive list, but these are things that if you experience these things on a regular basis, any of these things on a regular basis, this could just be that you’re overstressed headaches, sore muscles, like neck, shoulder, back muscles, and I’m not talking about from working out.

I’m talking about just like my neck and back and shoulders are always sore. What is that all about? Well, if your shoulders are up in your ears all the time because you’re so stressed out, that’s what we’re talking about. If you grind your teeth all the time, maybe you have a nervous tic like a finger tapping or toe-tapping, a sudden increase or loss of appetite, insomnia, nightmares, could be a cause of stress, fatigue, just chronic fatigue all the time, high blood pressure, impotence, loss of sex drive could be stress related to pry depression, irritation, irritability, anger are all kind of related to stress.

If you’re like hostile, or you experience a lot of fear, panic, or anxiety, this could be stress-related. Stomach pain or nausea. You know, stress can cause ulcers, you know, so if you’re experiencing some stomach pain or nausea that lasts kind of on a regular basis, and you can’t really identify the cause of it could be stress. Lack of concentration, rapid heart rate, low-grade infection, and just a general feeling of restlessness. These are all signs that we’re chronically stressed out, and we need to do something about it.

Okay, if you’re experiencing some of these are a lot of these, you know, kind of symptoms. Definitely work on kind of reducing stress, see a doctor obviously, if some of these things are going on, and see if, you know, make sure there isn’t something else happening. But definitely work on things to reduce stress.

So if you think you might be chronically stressed, don’t, don’t freak out on me here, there’s some things you can do to kind of reduce the stress. And one of the most powerful tools to help reduce stress is exercise. You know, go back to this saber toothed Tiger example, you know, our body is being primed. When we get stressed out, our body’s being primed to take action to fight or flight. So exercise is like kind of mimicking that in our lives. Okay. So this is like one of the best things you can do to help reduce stress.

So let’s say for example, you’re super stressed out at work. You had a tough day at work, your boss was a jerk all day, you spent the last eight hours being chastised. And then to make matters worse, you’re driving home. And the car in front of you is driving like way slower than the speed limit. And you’re just like, freaking out, right?

The fight or flight response has already been activated from your stressful day at work, right. So now driving home, this guy is going super slow and it’s in high gear, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure shoots up, you’re breathing, quickens your muscles tense up, cortisol and adrenaline are released. And it’s all systems go, right.

But you can’t do anything about it. Because you’re just sitting there in traffic, you can’t dissipate the stress, there’s no fight or flight response that can happen. So you’re just going to sit there and feel terrible, right. And we do this all the time. Like I used to have to commute to work and oh my gosh, I remember just like it was so stressful.

So really just doing some sort of exercise will help to relieve that stress, okay, you got to do something, you got to like dissipate this stuff from your body, you got to give your body your work your muscles so that they can relax. You got to, you know, do something aerobic to or anaerobic, you know, do some moderate or intense, vigorous exercise to get that blood sugar out of your system. So your insulin levels can go down, right.

So even just like you get home after that commute, and you do like some aerobic exercise for 30 minutes, this can start to relieve tension in your muscles, it can use up that extra energy that you’ve got in your body. And even moderate to vigorous-intensity exercise even produces better results.

And it produces things like endorphins, endorphins or morphine-like chemicals that actually act like painkillers in our body. So they kind of help to kill the pain. But they also have this soothing, calming effect. Research has shown that exercise has an immediate effect on your mood, and that that effect lasts up to 12 hours following the activity. So you want to relieve stress. Get some exercise. It’ll put you in a better mood.

You ever hear people say like oh running I love running, running is my therapy. Well, now you know why. Running reduces stress. It improves your mood for up to 12 hours. After running, people who run regularly are just less stressed out. And generally, they’re just happier, they’re in a better mood. And I would totally agree with this right?

I am in a great mood pretty much all the time. And all the people that I know that are runners are so positive, and, and generally happy and in a good mood and fun. And, and I love that about runners. And this is one of the reasons why I love working with runners is because we’re all in a good mood, we all have a lot of fun, and we laugh a lot.

And by the way, if running makes you stressed out, you’re doing it wrong. Okay? If you run and you’re just constantly stressed, every time you run, you’re not doing it right. So two things you can do.

Number one, you can slow down a lot, like do some really slow runs every now and then just stay in that zone one or two, you know, stay in that aerobic zone. And really just work your aerobic engine, just build some aerobic and don’t overly stress your body. And you can do this for long periods of time, you can run like that. And this is really good for you.

The other thing you can do on the other end of the spectrum is to speed up a lot like do some intense speed drills like sprints, like I described earlier. Those will produce high amounts of stress. But the release afterward is what you’re looking for, you’re looking for that adaptation. You know, and you do this for a very short amount of time, like you’re this isn’t a chronic thing you’re going to do, okay?

So the slowing down or the speeding up the slowing down, you can do for longer periods of time to slow, the speeding up, you want to do very short. But these both produce positive adaptations in your body and in your brain. They both make you feel good. Obviously, there’s many other ways to reduce stress. I just love running. I think this is like the best way to reduce stress.

But other things could be walking, journaling, meditation, getting a massage, yoga, stretching, sleeping, well getting a good night’s sleep. All these are amazing. Like there’s so many things you can do to reduce stress, like you can’t do too many of these things, right? Just find a few things that work for you. For me, every day I get outside and I walk or I run no matter the weather. So it could be pouring down rain, snowing, four degrees doesn’t matter. I’m outside, I’m walking, or I’m running.

I do strength training a few days a week, I do some meditation every single day. I do journaling every single day. I connect with friends on a regular basis. This is one of the best stress relief. Things that I do for myself are connecting with friends. You know, sometimes it’s over zoom, sometimes it’s in person, maybe on a phone call, whatever it is, we have fun, we laugh. And that human connection is so important. And it really does help me to reduce stress.

And then I get it, I try to get a good night’s sleep. So that’s the like little combo that works for me walking, running, strength training, meditation, journaling, connecting with friends, and getting a good night’s sleep. Figure out what works for you. Pick a few things and try them, apply them on a regular basis and see if you can help reduce the stress in your life, it cannot hurt, it can only help you.

And if you’re somebody who’s really struggling to lose weight, or maybe you’ve hit some sort of a stall, then this is a great way to kind of breakthrough that. So I want to encourage you to check in with yourself, how are your stress levels? If you might think you’re a little chronically stressed out, you can do something about it, right?

Pick some pick a few things that work for you, but do something. And if it is the weight, that’s a problem and your diet is good, you know, you’re sticking to a low carb type of diet, maybe you’re practicing some intermittent fasting, you’re not overeating, and you just can’t seem to move the needle. It could be stress-related.

Okay, so this is one time where I think I think running really does help with weight loss in this case, you know, it’s not from a burning calories perspective, but more from a stress relief perspective. So just consider that and pick a few of these things and start applying them and start getting rid of the stress in your life. Well, I hope you all have an amazing day. And if you liked this episode and you got something out of it, please share it with a friend. You guys totally got this. Lots of love. As always keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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

56. Good Carbs, Bad Carbs

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Some of the most often-asked questions I get from runners revolve around the topic of carbohydrates. Most runners I talk to are either straight-up addicted to carbs or at the very least obsessed …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 56 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we’re talking about good carbs and bad carbs. Some of the most often asked questions I get from runners revolve around this topic of carbohydrates. Most runners I talk to are either straight-up addicted to carbs, or at the very least a little obsessed with carbs.

So when I come in, and I start talking about a low-carb approach to running and weight loss, they kind of freak out a little bit. They just can’t imagine a world where carbs are not the main focus of their nutrition game.

So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to answer some of the biggest questions runners ask about carbs, like, what are good carbs, what are bad carbs, also want to talk about the quality of your carbs, the quantity of your carbs, and the timing of your carbs, all of which are very important. And they all play a different role in your long-distance running and in your weight loss. Cool. So we’re gonna get into that in just a minute.

First of all, I wanted to remind you that we have this amazing little community on Facebook, called the Running Lean community, come and check us out. I do some teaching in there once a week. We post in there every day, there’s over 5000 people in the group now, which is just crazy amazing. And they’re so positive.

And there’s so much good feedback I’m getting from people in the group, they tell me all the time, how they love the group and how it’s been changing their life. And they’re learning so much. And they’re getting so much support and encouragement from other runners that are trying to do similar things. So come and check us out, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, and come and join us over there. It’s a lot of fun. We’re doing a lot of good stuff over there.

And then here’s a recent review of the Running Lean podcast that I received from someone in a message. And this is from Wendy and she says, “Hey, Patrick, I stumbled across your Running Lean podcast in November 2020. And I’ve intently listened to every episode. Since then I’ve learned so much valuable information from your knowledge and experience.” Thank you.

And then she goes on to say, “Some of the most profound lessons I’ve learned from you are one, you’re either in fat storage mode or fat-burning mode. I was totally in fat storage mode. I was doughy and it felt awful. Number two, you can control your thoughts. Things that happen to you are neutral. It is how you think about those events that create your feelings and your response. Number three, don’t let your lizard brain control your goals and dreams. Number four, eat real food. Number five, satiety is a beautiful thing. It feels so good. It feels so much better than the strong cravings that come from eating a diet high in refined carbs and sugar.” Totally agree with you there when need.

“Number six, embrace discomfort or choose your discomfort. You can either be uncomfortable from working hard and stepping out of your comfort zone to achieve a goal or you can be uncomfortable because of regret.” Whew, that’s a really good insight. “And then number seven, not all oils are created equally. Wow, I had no idea what goes into producing vegetable oil. Yuck. Thanks again for the work you are doing. It has helped my life tremendously. I look forward to Friday so I can listen to a new episode of the Running Lean podcast.”

Thank you, Wendy, that was super sweet of you to reach out and send me that message. And if you want to share the love, and just as a way of just saying thank you if you get something out of this podcast, and you just want to say thank you.

You can just go on Apple podcasts and scroll down on the podcast where it says to write a review and review. Just write a few comments. You know, tap the five stars and I’ll read your review here on the show. It means a lot to me that you guys take the time to reach out and tell me how this is improving your life and how it’s making you know changes in your life.

This is really important to me. My goal, my mission is to help make an impact on the unhealthy state of the world today. And to know that my messages about you know, eating healthy, and controlling our thoughts and emotions and things like that is actually resonating with people, it means so much to hear that. So love to hear from you guys.

Okay, so let’s get into this topic today, good carbs, bad carbs. And I purposely named this because we have this idea that, you know, carbs are bad. And I think people when they hear me talk about a low carb approach to dieting, to weight loss to running whatever you want to call it, you know, I talk about becoming fat adapted and needing to take more of a low carb approach. I think some people have this misconception that it just means that all carbs are bad.

And that you have to stay away from all carbs. And that is not what I’m saying at all. And I want to make sure that, you know, I clear that up here right at the beginning, I’m going to talk about some of the carbs that are good, and some that you know, maybe not so good. There’s really no good or bad here.

But some have a different effect on your body and on your metabolism on your running, your weight loss efforts, and on your overall health. And there’s just so much new science around all this stuff. So let’s get into this a little bit. And we’ll talk about good carbs and bad carbs. Cool.

All right, first of all, what are carbs? What are carbohydrates? Carbohydrates are basically forms of sugar, you know, where you take, like refined sugar, table sugar that you would just like eat out of the bag, just take a spoonful of that. And that’s like pure carbohydrate, right? And lots of foods contain sugar, lots of foods contain natural forms of sugar or carbohydrate. Okay.

So when we’re talking about sugar, we’re talking about carbs and vice versa. Okay, so carbohydrates are basically, you know, the sugar content of foods. And all carbs get turned into glucose in your body. So 100% of carbohydrates that you eat will become glucose in your body. All right, glucose is very easily available for your body to use for fuel.

You know, so you eat an apple, it’s got, you know, carbohydrates in there, that gets turned into glucose, which is the version of sugar that your body can use for fuel and so boom, eat an apple, get some fuel, right. Some of that glucose, though, gets used for energy, but some of it gets stored as glycogen in the muscles.

So some of that glucose will be readily used right away. It’s kind of floating around in your blood, let’s just put it that way. Some of it is like, oh, you know, our glucose is pretty high. And let’s just put some of this away for later. And it’ll store some of that glycogen in your muscles for use later. That’s all good too.

Once your glycogen stores are full, though, in your muscles, your body’s going to be like, Hey, we got this extra glucose or glycogen stores are full, let’s just store this away for use later in the form of fat. Right? So typically, this is very generally speaking here. Typically, the more carbs you eat, the more fat that gets stored on your body.

So overconsumption of carbohydrates, leads to can lead to incessant weight gain, among other things. Alright, so when we talk about carbs, we’re talking about this version of sugar that our bodies can use for fuel. But too much of it can be, you know, start, we can start storing that as fat. All right. So that’s just a very broad overview. I’m going to get into this a little bit more and talk about some of this more in detail.

But I want to talk about this other idea, first of all, before we get into all that, so there’s this idea that I’ve thrown out there before, which is that there are no such things as essential carbohydrates, okay? When you look at all the essential human nutrients, you know, we talk about fat protein, certain vitamins, and minerals, carbohydrates are not on that list. Okay?

In fact, there’s a report done by the US Institute of Medicines, food and nutrition pinboard in this report, it says, the lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed. So what they’re saying is, the lower limit of carbohydrates that we need to survive is basically zero, as long as we’re getting enough fat and protein, okay?

If you don’t eat fat, you will die. If you don’t eat protein, you will die, our body does not make those nutrients. So we have to eat them, we have to eat, get them in our diet. If you don’t eat fat and protein, you will die. But if you don’t eat carbohydrates, you’re gonna kind of do just fine, you will survive.

Now, I’m not saying you should do this. And I’m not saying that it’s the best way to go. But what I’m saying is that you can survive without carbohydrates. That tells you something about the human body. It tells me that carbohydrates are not essential and that they’re not the most important thing. They’re pretty low on the list of them of importance from a macronutrient standpoint, if you ask me, okay.

And this makes sense. Because of the way we’ve evolved as humans, like when carbohydrates were scarce during the winter, or during these ice ages were carbohydrate-based foods were unavailable, we would survive just fine. During these long winters. Without any carbohydrates at all, we ate more fat and protein, and we were just fine.

In fact, there are many indigenous people around the world today, who do just fine eating zero carbohydrates. You know, the Inuit Eskimos are one example of people that do not eat carbohydrates. They don’t, they don’t grow a lot of vegetables up there, in the frozen north, you know, so they eat fish, and you know, whatever else they eat, I don’t know seals and things like that, but a lot of fat, a lot of protein, and they do just fine.

But here’s the crazy thing, and this is where you stuffed makes you scratch your head and you’re just like what the heck? The current USDA guidelines suggest that up to 65% of your diet should be from carbohydrates. Based on what? Why would they suggest this if carbohydrates are not even an essential nutrient for us, this is this is what I just don’t understand.

So that leaves only 20% for protein because they suggest 20% protein and 15% for fat. So these are the two things that your body actually needs, or you will die. And they’re like putting those things pretty low on the list. Okay? So I look at this, look at this dietary guidelines and they suggest like 45 to 65% of your diet be from carbs.

And then we wonder why 88% of people in the United States are considered metabolically unhealthy. I don’t even know what to say about that. Just, it’s bananas, right? The whole thing is bananas. So what does this mean?

This does not mean you should not eat carbohydrates, okay? This does not also mean that 65% of your diet should be from carbohydrates. I don’t think that is a very good approach. And I don’t think zero carbohydrates is a very good approach either, okay. So carbs can be good.

Carbs can be bad, there’s like some good and bad, we’re going to talk about all of that. I love carbohydrates, I really do. But the type of carbs that I eat matters, okay? The type of carbs that we eat in our diet does matter. They’re not all the same.

The amount of carbs that you eat matters, right? You just can’t go hog wild on eating carbs. You can’t just like make that the majority of your calories and expect everything to be fine inside your body. And then the timing of when you eat your carbs matters. Okay? So the quality of your carbs, the quantity and the timing all matters.

So I’m going to be talking about all of those things today in this episode. Okay. Are you excited? I’m so excited. Okay, so let’s talk about when carbs go bad, you know, when they go off the rails here. So when we eat carbohydrates, this raises our blood sugar, right, our body then produces insulin to bring this down. And when we do this all the time, more and more insulin gets produced. And when your body’s producing insulin constantly, it doesn’t, it stops working the way it’s supposed to, it doesn’t respond the way that it should, and your body becomes resistant to the insulin effect.

And so this is called insulin resistance. When this happens, your body can no longer regulate your blood sugar properly. So your blood sugar is going to be up a lot, it’s gonna be up all the time. And when this is the case, you start storing more fat, and you know, more of the energy that you need is going to be just stored as fat.

So instead of taking this energy that’s coming in and using it is just getting put away for later, right. So this is the problem with high insulin is that you’re in this fat storage mode. Okay? Another way of saying this is that you become carbohydrate intolerant. So this just means that you can no longer handle the carbs and the whole glucose, blood sugar insulin response that goes along with it, okay?

As we get older, our tolerance for carbohydrate intake tends to go down. I remember in my 20s, I would be able to eat like a whole pizza, loaves of bread, mounds of pasta, drink tons of beer, Gatorade, what is that stuff called Mountain Dew, like all this coke, whatever, I would not gain an ounce, right? But once I got into my 30s and 40s, things started to become very different for me.

Now, if I just like smell a doughnut, I gain a pound. So things change. As we get older, we become less tolerant of carbohydrates as we get older. This is why a lot of runners who are heavily addicted to carbohydrates, and they’re like, well, this always worked for me in the past, why isn’t it working anymore?

It’s because of this whole carbohydrate intolerance thing, okay. So the carb intolerance can lead to being excessively hungry. So if you find yourself like, pretty hungry all the time, all day long, we’re having these incessant food cravings, you know, these really strong cravings for food.

If when you eat, you’re not feeling full, you’re not feeling satisfied. If you have energy spikes and crashes throughout the day, if you’ve been gaining weight, all of these things are signs of carbohydrate intolerance. This can also lead to chronic diseases like type two diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, chronic inflammation, irritable bowel syndrome, Alzheimer’s, and more. Right?

So there’s all these like, really bad, healthy things, unhealthy things that can happen when your carbohydrate intolerance goes down. And typically, as you get older, and as your carbohydrate intake goes up, all these things tend to happen, okay? So it’s not that like carbs are bad, right, but rather, to many can be problematic, right now, not everybody is going to have all of these the exact same response to carbs.

In fact, there are some elite athletes out there who are in their 40s 50s, who are super lean, who eat a ton of carbs in the form of, you know, very refined carbs, and in simple sugars and stuff like that. But they tend to metabolize that very effectively. Okay, this is not normal, but this is like there are people that are at that end of the spectrum that can still do tons of carbs, and it’s not a problem.

But for most of us, this is a problem, it becomes very problematic, we start to have all these different negative side effects from too many carbs. Okay? So when we talk about how many carbs, like what’s good and what’s bad. So this kind of varies for everyone, you got to figure out what’s right for you. This is all about, you know, this is an experiment of one. Everything I talk about is always about you.

You need to figure out what works best for you what feels good to you, what’s helping you to reach your goals. Are you becoming fat-adapted? Are you losing weight? Do you feel good? You have tons of energy? Are you thinking clearly all these things matter? It’s not just a number on the scale we’re looking at. We’re looking at all these different factors.

So you need to figure out what kind of works for you, okay, but I’m gonna give you a little place to start So a good place to start, if you want to lower your carb intake, start with about 100 grams of carbs per day, that’s a good place for most people to start, I think the average Americans probably consume four to 500 grams of carbs per day.

So this would be like lowering your carb take quite a bit, but without going like full-on like keto or whatever, right, which would be like less than 20 grams a day, which is, you know, fine for some people. But you don’t have to do that to start experiencing some of these benefits of lowering your carbs and start feeling better. So shoot for like 100 grams per day and see how you do.

See if you start feeling good. See if you have the energy, if it comes back, try it for like, two weeks, right? See what happens. This is a good experiment for you to try. Most people who try this like two-week experiment, you know, keep their carbs for 150 to 100. Somewhere in that range. They start to feel amazing.

They can’t believe how much better they feel after just two weeks of doing that they have more energy, no afternoon crashes, they feel more satiated, they’re not hungry all the time, and their inflammation goes down. They may stop having the bloating and gas, they said. And they almost all lose weight, too. Right. So this is just like a very simple thing that you can try for two weeks and see how you do.

For me personally, I probably am somewhere around 40 to 50 grams of carbs a day. And that seems to work great for me, I don’t really count this stuff I don’t measure, I did. Every now and then I do I still do like measure my daily macros just to kind of see where I am ballpark-wise, but I’m not obsessive about this at all. I keep my carbs low. And I eat a lot of nutrient dense carbs, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

But as far as the quantity of carbs, you know, shoot for 75-100, something like that, try it for two weeks, see how you feel good experiment, okay. And so I want to kind of talk about the way our bodies used fuel really quickly here. So glucose, which is you know, freely available sugar that we can we get when we eat carbohydrates. And then there’s glycogen, which is where we store that sugar in our blood, these things are fine, right? Your body uses these fuels easily. Your brain also loves this fuel, okay?

The problem is that when we get too much of this kind of fuel coming in, okay, so I’m not saying that, you know, carbs are bad, or glucose is bad. Sugar is bad, but too much is bad. Okay, so your fat burning gets diminished. When you eat more carbohydrates, you are more in fat storage mode. So when you eat fewer carbs, that typically means you’re more in fat-burning mode.

And your body uses fuels this way, freely available glucose number one, number two glycogen that’s stored in your muscles. And then number three stored body fat. And the idea is that we want to kind of rid our body of the freely available glucose, you know, get that glycogen to be used from our muscles so that we can start to access that stored by body fat.
So that’s one of the reasons why we want this low-carb approach we want to be able to burn fat, right? You burn fat, you can run all day you burn fat, you start to lose weight, you burn fat, you start to have all this energy. So that’s what we’re trying to get to here. Okay. So I just want to make sure that that made sense to you guys. If it doesn’t make sense, then you can go back and listen to that again.

Okay, now let’s talk about the quality of carbs the kind of carbs that you eat matters. Okay. So we’ve talked about how many carbs let’s talk about the difference between good carbs and bad carbs. So like I said, there are no like really good or bad carbs, but they’re they have different effects on your body, right?

The higher the concentration of the carbohydrate, the more of an effect it’s going to have on your blood sugar, your insulin production, and the more it’s going to keep you in that fat storage mode. Okay. So some of what I would consider to be the bad carbs would be number one, Sugar.

Sugar is the most concentrated form of carbohydrate that’s out there. And really, there’s no real there’s not a lot of good that comes from eating sugar. There just really isn’t. It’s connected to so many health problems that it’s probably best to avoid, like 99% of the time. So sugar is like the number one sort of what I would consider to be like the bad carb, the other kinds of carbohydrates that I would try to like really limit to almost none would be super-refined carbohydrates like flour, and anything made with flour.

So that would be like bread and pasta and cookies and crackers and muffins, and oh my gosh, there are so many things that have flour in them, right? Flour is a very, very concentrated very refined carbohydrate, it spikes your blood sugar like crazy. So we want to kind of stay away from that. All right, so that would be also on the naughty list, right? The bad list of carbs.

The other carbs that are kind of considered to be higher in carbohydrate content are the other category of foods I should say they’re higher in carbohydrate content would be starchy vegetables. So for the most part, we’re talking about underground vegetables, root vegetables, white potatoes, that kind of thing. Legumes like beans are very, very high in carbohydrates, and very starchy.

So any of these considered starchy vegetables would be sort of something you want to stay away from, you know, while white rice, that kind of stuff, okay, it doesn’t mean not any. That doesn’t mean you can never eat beans again, or never have a white potato, the rest of your life, it just means like these things are going to have a higher effect on your body, they’re going to increase your blood sugar more, they’re going to put you into fat storage mode more.

And you want to limit your intake of these things. Okay, not saying none, just really limit. And the other category of foods that super high in sugar content. And maybe best to avoid would be the super high sugar content fruits like bananas, apples, pears, grapes, pineapple, mango, those kinds of things, super high in sugar.

You know, the fruit we eat today has been modified over the last three to 500 years. And it’s just incredibly high in sugar content. It’s not like what it used to be. So it’s best to avoid some of these fruits that have super high sugar content because it’s just going to keep you in that fat storage mode. Okay. So those are kind of the lists. A very short list of you know, some of the things to avoid that would be considered sort of bad carbs.

You know, sugar and all forms of sugar. You know anything with added sugar, refined grains, flour, anything made with flour, starchy vegetables, and high sugar fruits. Now, let’s talk about some good carbs. Right? There’s good news here.

There are so many amazing vegetables that you can eat that contain carbohydrates that are just completely fine to eat, and suggested to eat because they’re, they provide tons of nutrition, and vitamins and minerals, and micronutrients and they help with your gut health with your microbiome and they help with your weight loss efforts and they taste great.

These would be things like all the nonstarchy vegetables. So think about things like avocados, olives, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, I mean, I could just go on and on and on, right.

There’s so many amazing vegetables that you can eat, that support a low carbohydrate approach that are delicious, that provide tons of nutrition. You know, all these things I just mentioned, are nutrient-dense, each one of them provides a different array of vitamins and minerals and micronutrients and they’re so good for you.

So include tons of this type of vegetable, the nonstarchy vegetables, okay. And then low sugar fruits would be a good type of carb as well. Raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, those kinds of things are very good for you. They also provide tons of nutrients and vitamins, minerals and support that gut microbiome too. So, a good rule of thumb just generally speaking, when we’re talking about different kinds of carbs, good carbs, bad carbs, avoid the sugar, flour, starchy vegetables and the high sugar fruit and include more of the nonstarchy above ground vegetables.

Okay, so those are some different types of carbs and the type of carbs you’re eating does matter. Now, here’s something that I find really fascinating. This is the timing of your carbs, like when should you be eating carbs, right? Let’s talk about good times bad times, right?

So, a bad time to eat carbs would be eating more carbs at your first meal at breakfast, or whatever you call your first meal, lunch. Early in the day, this is not when you want to eat the majority of your carbs, okay, because what happens is, when you eat carbs at that first meal, it tends to lead to more hunger throughout the day, and also tends to increase your fat storage.

So a study in the journal Appetite, found that people who ate a high carbohydrate breakfast consisting of a bagel were hungry again soon after that meal, whereas the people who ate a low carbohydrate breakfast with more fat and protein, so they had eggs, they felt more full for longer, same exact number of calories, but a different feeling afterwards.

And the people that ate the eggs lost more weight. During the period of this study, the people that ate the bagel for breakfast gained more weight, and they were more hungry. Right. So eating your carbohydrates early in the day tends to make you more hungry, help, you know, makes you put on more weight. And then you don’t want to do that, right.

This is not going to support your weight loss efforts, that’s for sure. So what would be a different way of doing this? So a different approach would be to consume the majority of your carbohydrates in the evening. Right, so they did this study.

And this was a six-month study that they published in the journal obesity. And this put people on one of two different diets. They were both reduced calorie diet, so whatever they each were eating the same amount of calories. But the one group ate the majority of their carbohydrates. At their first meal in the second group ate the majority of their carbohydrates at their second meal at dinnertime.

At the end of six months, the people who ate most of their carbs at dinner lost more weight, had a greater reduction in waist circumference, and had an overall greater reduction in body fat mass. They also had better fasting blood sugar, better insulin sensitivity, improved cholesterol ratios, reduced inflammation, and improved levels of the hunger hormones or satiety hormones leptin and adiponectin.

So meaning their appetite was diminished. And they weren’t feeling hungry all the time. So fewer food cravings, just from the timing of their carbohydrates, as opposed to eating the majority of their carbs. In the first meal of the day, they just ate them at dinner. And so this is something that I do pretty regularly, which is I eat a pretty low carb, first meal of the day, that would be called like breakfast, and I do that around noon.

That would be like bacon and eggs and avocado, pretty much what I do most days. And then at dinner time, I eat this big salad, and I eat tons of leafy greens, spinach and kale, and lots of veggies. And then I eat some protein and there’s some fat in there as well. But pretty much I would say 90% of the carbs 95% of the carbs that I eat each day are eaten at that second meal at dinner time.

Okay, so the timing of your carbs does matter. And it will help you to oxidize more fat more efficiently. And it will help you to feel more satiated when you eat the carbs in the evening as opposed to during that first meal. Okay.

So here’s something else I wanted to touch on really quickly. And this has to do with training on a low carbohydrate approach. Okay, and this idea of metabolic flexibility. So one of the concerns that a lot of runners have is that you know, oh, if I switch to eating a lower-carb diet, I won’t have any energy for running okay.

And the idea here is that what you want to do is what you want your body to become very efficient at using fat for fuel. And the way you do that is you, you go low, you go low carb, and you train low carb, okay? That means that your body can burn fat very efficiently, which is great fuel for long distance running. And it supports weight loss, you know, you’re gonna feel better, you know, all this energy, all the amazing things that come with being a fat adapted runner.

Now, when it comes to race day, you can take a little bit of a different approach, okay? Because you’re fat adapted, because you can now use stored body fat for fuel, you’re more metabolically flexible, this is a really cool thing. Because that means that when you do bring in some more carbohydrates, you know, you can actually use that carbohydrate and the stored body fat as fuel very effectively, you can kind of switch between the two, okay?

This gives you an advantage, especially in endurance activities, like long distance running, right, you can train low and race, high train, low carb race, high carb, more high carb, not high but high Earth. So you can train low, and then you top up your glycogen stores the day or so before a race, you know, something like eat some sweet potatoes, and you don’t need a ton, you can do 150-200 grams a day before a race.

And that’ll kind of top up your glycogen stores and your muscles. And you’ll have all this slow burning energy for use the next day. But it gives you the flexibility to use more than one energy source.

Right, because most people if you’re not fat adapted, you cannot access your fat stores for energy. Not at all, you can only use store glycogen, and freely available glucose, you have to continue eating carbs for that event, you know, so you’re sucking down the goos and the gels and the drinking this sports drink and all this other stuff, right, which leads to weight gain leads to GI distress and all kinds of other issues.

But when you become more metabolically flexible, you have these different energy sources. This gives you a competitive advantage, why not take advantage of it, okay, so you can still use carbohydrates to your advantage for running. And I really suggest you try this, you know, pick a day where you want to do a long run.

Obviously, you want to practice this before you use it on race day. But top up your glycogen stores the day before and see how that gives you a little bit more energy for that long run the next day. So carbs can be good, like carbs are good for some things, you know, they’re they can help you as a tool to help you race more, give you a little more gas in the tank for race day.

They help to promote proper thyroid function, right they keep, they help to keep cortisol levels in check. So this is the stress hormone cortisol. And so you know, having some carbs can help to reduce the cortisol levels in your body. Eating carbs have been known to help with testosterone production. And carbs are a good source of dietary fiber, which we all need, right?

When carbs are bad, though, this is like when you have too many or the wrong type of carbs. Or maybe you’re eating carbs at the wrong time. This can lead to increased hunger, decreased satiety, so you never feel full, can lead to increased inflammation, bloating, gas, irritable bowel syndrome, increased fat storage, insulin resistance, weight gain, decreased fat burning, and all these chronic diseases I’ve already talked about right?

So the good and the bad bottom line here is that if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this episode, it’s that carbs are not necessarily good or bad, but the timing, the quality and the quantity of carbs all matter, okay? All of these factors can affect your overall health. They affect your metabolism, your ability to burn fat, whether or not you’re fat adapted.

All of these factors affect your energy levels, your weight loss goals, your aerobic function, your running performance, and just your overall health and well being. Right, the wrong kinds of carbs and the wrong amount at the wrong times can lead to an array of health problems, but the right kinds of carbs in the right amount at the right time, can support your weight loss goals can help you with your fat adaptation and can actually improve your running performance. Right?

You need to figure out what works for you, right? We are all an experiment of one, find a formula that works for you. And then maybe try that two-week test. Aim for 75-100 grams of carbs a day. See how you feel after two weeks, right? And then you can always adjust that up or down depending on what’s working for you. Okay, awesome.

Well, I hope you guys got something out of this episode. I had a lot of fun kind of putting this one together. And again, if you enjoy listening to the podcast, if it helps you in any way, please consider just leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It’s a great way to say thank you for all the stuff that I do here for you. Cool, awesome, you guys totally got this. Lots of love to each and every one of you. As always keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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