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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Nutrition

94. Which Diet Is Best?

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There’s a lot of chatter out there in the world about which diet is best. You see this play out on social media where proponents of one diet will bash another diet, and then proponents of 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 94 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, which diet is best? So there’s a lot of chatter out there in the world about which diet is best. You’ll see this play out on social media, especially where proponents of one diet will bash another diet and then proponents of that diet or bash the other one and then on and on it goes.

And with all of this conflicting information out there, it can be very difficult to make an informed decision about which diet is best for you. How do you know which is right for you? What happens if you’re wrong? So in this episode of the podcast, I’ve decided to make things a little bit easier for you.

I’m going to explain, first of all, why there’s so much conflict around which diet is best and offer up some actionable tips on how to make the right choices to help you reach your particular health and fitness goals. Cool. Awesome.

But first, if you like this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook. This is a group that I created that goes hand in hand with podcast. We do some coaching and training over there in the group. It’s a positive, encouraging, motivational, inspirational group of people that share goals like wanting to lose weight, wanting to become a fat adapted runner, wanting to run without bonking just running to run faster, or maybe just want to run more.

Whatever goals that you have around weight loss and running around health and fitness. We’re here to support you. So come and check us out. It’s a fun group and I do some weekly coaching and training in the group and people get a lot out of it. At least that’s what they tell me. Just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, and you’ll find it over there. Cool.

And then here’s another five star review of the Running Lean podcast and this one is from Lance and Lance says:

“Running Lean is easy to understand. And it works. This podcast does a great job explaining complex subjects by using everyday terms. The podcast uses updated studies in science nutrition debunking a lot of methods. The vast information out there is the vast information is out there for all of us, but Patrick takes all the information and gives us the Cliff Notes and it works for me. Love that. I read nutrition food labels an entirely different way. Now I eat entirely differently and it works for me. My hunger pangs are gone over the past two months, I feel full I’m losing weight without some crazy calorie counting. And I get my nutritional needs met. Keep up the great work you are my nutritionist for exercising. Best, Lance.”

Thank you, Lance. That is awesome. I love this. I am your nutritionist, Lance. I love that that’s so fun. And if you feel like it, if you want to leave a review, that would be awesome. You can just go to iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts and leave a review. Leave some feedback. I love getting messages like that. It just lets me know that the message is resonating with you guys. And that you’re you’re getting something out of this. So cool, awesome.

And then people ask how they can work with me. And there’s really two ways. So I have the Running Lean coaching group. And this is a group that meets once a week we do a group zoom call. And we talk about what’s going on we talk about how was your your weight loss goals going? How is your running goals going? How is your health and fitness goals guide? Like how are things going for you?

And it’s a place where you get support encouragement and you get to ask questions and get questions answered. I do some coaching and teaching in the group. I bring in special guests to do some coaching and teaching in the group. I have an entire online library of training materials that you have access to.

I have a private podcast that you would have access to with all the replays of all the trainings, you never have to miss anything you can take this stuff on the run with you. And it’s just really a great way to help you reach your goals and get some support doing it. So that’s number one.

Number two is you could hire me as your coach I’m a coach, this is what I do. This is my jam. working one on one with a coach is probably the best way for you to get your to get to your goals. And I’m not saying that like oh yeah, I’m the only one that can do this for you.

Now there are lots of coaches out there. But if you ever want to really like supercharge your your goals and really get there faster and easier and more efficiently than hiring a coach is a great way to do it doesn’t have to be me, it can be somebody else. There’s lots of great coaches out there.

So if you’re interested in working with me, you can just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply, and you can apply for coaching. And if you’re interested in joining the group, the monthly coaching group, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. So those are two ways of working with me.

And you know, I’m always here for you, my my goal in life, like, my purpose, my mission in life is to help as many runners as possible to get healthy, to, to get fitter, to become stronger, to become just better overall human beings. And it takes a little bit of work to get there, you know, so I teach some stuff on the podcast, but really to take a deep dive and, and really almost guarantee that this is going to work for you, then you can do some some coaching. Cool.

Awesome. All right, let’s get into this topic of which diet is best. So I want to say this before I start, because I’m going to use the word diet today a lot. And I usually don’t use that word, because I don’t like the connotations that brings up because when we think about a diet, we think about something that is temporary, or something that is, you know, just for the purpose of losing weight.

Like saying I’m on a diet to lose weight, and then it also implies that somehow you’re going to go off the diet. So that’s not how I’m using the word diet today. What I’m using the word diet today is just to refer to your food plan, your protocol, your nutrition program, the types of foods that you eat, whatever you want to call it, okay? It’s like the way you eat.

Okay, so, you know, we can, here’s some examples of diets like vegetarian, pescatarian, ovo, lacto, vegetarian, vegan plant based carnivore, low carb, high fat, Paleo, keto, high carb, the standard American diet, the Mediterranean diet, like there’s all these different types of diets out there. Okay.

So that’s kind of what I’m referring to in the course of this episode today, okay? So when I talk about diet, and what sparked me wanting to talk about this today, I’m a little fired up about this subject, because I see so much information out there, where people are, you know, they’ll talk about their, their particular diet, the one that they believe is the best.

And they sort of like put it out there as if all the other ones are terrible. And this is the only way to do it. And I’m right, and you’re wrong. And I’m just kind of like over that, you know what I mean?

Because clearly, there’s lots of people that that do things like, vegetarian or vegan that, like don’t eat meat. And then there’s people that do things like carnivore that eat only meat, and both groups of people seem to be pretty healthy. You know, I mean, like, I think there’s a lot of evidence that would show that, like, you can be very healthy on either side of that equation. Right.

And for us to argue with each other about this, I think is it’s an exercise in futility. Because, as I’ll get into in a minute here, the science will tell us that this one is, is the better diet, and then the science will also tell us. No, this one over here is the better diet and they conflict each other and it’s like, why is this? Why is this happening?

And I got a message recently from someone who said, you know, hey, I’m kind of confused about all this because every, you know, nutritionist that I follow or dietician or coach tells me that as a runner, I need carbs, like, that’s the only way I can fuel my running, and I have to have carbs or I can’t, you know, run a marathon or whatever.

And you’re over here telling me that low carb is, is something that’s possible, and it’s a better way to go. And so which is right, is that everybody else? Or is it you? How can the science support both of these views? And I’m going to get into that in just a second. Like why the science is so conflicting on these matters.

But I just want to say that sometimes we get into what’s what’s called a bias. So we have this, this bias as to what our beliefs are. So we tend to believe something like, like, I tend to believe that a low carb diet is a good way to go. I’m not saying it’s better or best. I’m just saying that this is a good way to go. And so I read a lot of information, and I follow a lot of people, doctors and elite athletes, who talk about the low carb diet as a way of enhancing your performance of losing weight of becoming the healthiest person you can possibly be of reversing chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes and heart disease and things like that.

And so I’m following all these people in the world. And I’m very connected to a lot of people in the low carb sort of community. And so for me, I see this everywhere I see evidence of this low carb being effective, I see it everywhere.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who believes that, you know, the traditional sort of high carb approach to running is the way to go, you’re probably going to be following people that talk about that. And that’s why you might say to yourself, like, well, everybody that I see and hear and talk to, says that you have to have carbs, well, you’re just not following the right people, or you’re just only following this small group of people over here, okay.

So just know that we all have this sort of perception bias, like when it comes to our own beliefs, you know, so we believe something. And so we tend to gravitate towards people towards resources towards podcast or its books, towards literature toward studies and all that stuff that supports our viewpoints.

And I’m telling you that I do the same thing, I totally do this, I follow tons of podcasts and read tons of books on, on how the low carb approach to endurance sports is a great way to go. And, and I feel really, you know, convicted in my beliefs, I feel very strongly about my particular beliefs. Okay.

I also have to say that what I believe is not necessarily true for everyone. And this is kind of the point I’m trying to make here today is that there are a lot of people out there that say, like, there’s only one way to do it, and this is the way to do it. You know, plant based, you can’t eat meat, because it’s killing you. It’s killing the plants, killing everybody.

And then there are other people, they’re like, listen, we’ve been eating meat for 2.5 million years, I think we’re gonna be okay, you know, why all of a sudden, do we need to stop eating it? You know what I mean? So, and both people have valid points, and both people can make the claim that you know, that they get good health results from eating this way.

And so we’re going to get into why there’s conflicting information and all that stuff here. So let’s talk about this a little bit here. So science, I love science. I am a fan of science, I’m a logical thinking sort of like science person, I want to see the facts. I don’t take much on just face value, you know, I’m not much of a man of faith, I’m more of a man of science, okay.

And when we get into studies, and we get into scientific studies, especially around food, the science can be conflicting, and the science can contradict one another. So the studies can kind of contradict each other. The problem with the way they do science in the in around food. Is that is that the science is not perfect when it comes to food. Okay.

So there are different types of studies. And there’s two main types of studies that I’m talking about here and they they have good and bad points. There is a study called a randomized controlled trial, RCT. And then there are what are called observational studies. And I want to explain what these two things are. And I’m going to just take a dive into this just for a minute here. If you will allow me, will you allow it? Thank you, because I want you to understand the difference between these two types of studies.

So randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, are the most straightforward of studies, to design and to interpret, they’re often considered to be the gold standard of clinical and epidemiological studies. This is because if they are conducted properly, it is often possible to be fairly sure that the results are correct, at least for the type of people who took part in the study.

In a randomized control trial, two or more groups of people are compared. So there’s an experimental group who receives maybe a new treatment or a different type of food or something like that. And then there’s a control group who receive the current standard treatment or the current standard food, whatever it is.

Information from the control group allows the reacher researchers to see whether the new treatments are more or less effective than the current standard. It is important that in a randomized controlled trial, the two groups have people that are as similar as possible except for the treatment they receive except for the diet they’re getting.

For example, this is very important because it means that the researchers can be sure that there aren’t any outside influences that are skewing the results. And they call it randomized because the decision about which treatment each participant gets is random, it’s based on chance, rather than decided by the participant or by a doctor or something like that. Okay.

So, randomized controlled trial, the gold standard, you’re basically taking two identical groups of people, and you’re controlling all of the factors, you’re controlling everything except for one variable, like the food that they’re eating, okay?

Then there are things called observational studies. So in fields like epidemiology, social sciences, psychology, statistics, and observational study will draw inferences from a sample to a population where the independent variable is not under the control of the researcher, because of maybe ethical concerns or logistical constraints.

So these are called observational studies, because the investigator observes individuals without mean manipulation or intervention, they’re just sort of observing what’s happening. Okay? This is in contrast to randomized controlled trials where investigators do do intervene and look at the effects of the intervention on an outcome.

Although randomized control trials are useful in determining causal relationships, between treatment and outcome, there are often instances where randomized control trials are not appropriate or ethical, right? So observational studies are needed. Observational studies are good for things like you know, long term effects of food on a population.

Like you can’t control every aspect of an entire population, you can’t make them all do the same thing, live in the same, you know, neighborhood, work, the same job, have the same level of stress, have the same type of relationship status, like all these things, you know, factor into your health and things like that, right? So it’s very difficult to do randomized control trials with food studies. So I’m just going to put that out there. Okay.

Randomized control trials are considered the gold standard, because their goal is to prove causation, what is causing the problem, if we remove all the variables, if these two groups of people are exactly the same in every single way, except this one thing, like one person’s eating high fat, one person’s eating low fat, does this food cause obesity? Does this food cause diabetes? Does this food cause heart disease? This is what we’re trying to get to.

But it’s very hard to do, because it’s hard to control everything in two groups of people, right? That’s why there are so many observational studies around food. Okay, so the best we can do. Sometimes a randomized control trials are possible with food. But the most studies around food are called observational studies. Observational studies cannot prove causation. That’s the thing you have to understand they can they can cause they can show correlation but not causation.

So correlation is where like, let’s say, everyone in this group who ate brussels sprouts had a 90% higher risk of lung cancer. So you’re inferring you’re making a correlation of lung cancer to brussel sprouts, okay? You’re inferring that the brussel sprouts caused the lung cancer, but you can’t prove that the brussel sprouts, you’re not proving causation. They didn’t cause the lung cancer. They didn’t factor in that maybe all those people smoked cigarettes. Okay. So that’s what the difference between an observational study and randomized control trial.

So the bottom line with me talking about all this stuff is just saying like the science is not always 100% perfect when it comes to food. And that’s why you can find studies that show that a high carb diet is the only way you can run long distances. And you can have other studies that show the completely opposite effect that a low carb diet is just as beneficial for endurance athletes.

And I’ve talked about some of these studies in the past, you know, like the faster study is a great one that showed groups of elite athletes, one group who did the traditional high carb diet, the other group did the was on a low carb, high fat diet for a period of time. And they had them go through all these, you know, rigorous exercises and things like that, and then they measured their blood glucose levels and their performance and their output and all this stuff.

And both groups were very, very similar. The high fat group, the low carb, high fat group was burning tons more fat than the other group. But besides that, like their performance was almost exactly the same. And so what that tells me is like, either way is is going to work. Like there’s not just one way, there’s not one way is better than the other necessarily, okay.

And I’m not saying that the science is bad, or it’s wrong or shouldn’t be trusted, but I’m saying is that science can be skewed a little bit based on some of these types of trials that they do. Also, this is very important. Sciences is often biased, you know, by who’s funding the study. Or science can be incomplete, you know, making so they’re making assumptions, you know, they’re jumping to conclusions sometimes.

But unfortunately, a lot of science is biased, because it’s bought and paid for by, like the big food industries with deep pockets. They pay for these studies to support the results that they want to get, like, they want to say, like, let’s show sugar is not the problem. So let’s pay for these studies that support this outcome. And you better show us the results that sugar is not the problem here.

Here’s an example in 2015, The New York Times revealed how Coca Cola was funding high profile scientists and organizations promoting a message that in the battle against weight gain, people should pay more attention to exercise, and less to what they eat and drink.

In the aftermath of that investigation, Coca Cola released data detailing its funding of several medical institutions and associations between 2010 and 2015. From the Academy of Family Physicians to the American Academy of Pediatrics, all told, Coca Cola says it gave $132.8 million towards scientific research and partnerships that supported the message of you need to exercise more and don’t worry so much about what you eat and drink, but they paid for those results. This is not uncommon. This is just one example. Google this, you’ll find all kinds of examples of the food industry, paying for studies that support whatever their particular views are.

So you can see how it can be sort of hard and a little frustrating to sift through all the science out there and come up with anything that is like perfectly irrefutable. Alright. So I just want to like wrap up this whole science piece by saying, like, there is a lot of great science out there, there’s no doubt about it.

But do your, like research, do due diligence, you know, look for yourself, who’s funding these studies? Are they epidemiological studies, like observational studies? Are they randomized, controlled trials? How big are the studies? Because oftentimes, the larger the study, the more sort of accurate the results will be.

So it’s a good idea for you to just kind of do a little bit of like research on your own and just kind of come up with, you know, like, if you see a study was, you know, funded by, you know, Nabisco or like Hershey’s, or something like that, I would be very wary of something like that. Okay.

There’s a lot of medical studies out there that are funded by these big food companies, too. There’s tons and tons and tons of them. They saturate the market with these studies. And they do it on purpose. They do it to make things complicated and confuse us. Honestly, they do.

Okay, so there was a little bit of rant I just went on about the science. If you’re still with me, then let’s talk about which diet is best. Okay, so according to the science, they all are, right, every single one of them will work for everybody. But here’s the fact – there is not one perfect diet that works for every human being on the planet, there just isn’t okay.

In order for you to find out what works for you, you’ve got to get into some trial and error. Okay. I talked about this idea of being an experiment of one we are all an experiment of one. We call this an n equals one or n of one. N means the number of people involved in the experiment. So if it’s an n of one that means there’s one person involved in the experiment, you, you get to try whatever you want. You get to experiment on yourself, so to speak, and see what works.

Now, here’s where most people sort of get this wrong. So let’s say you want to try something like you try, like, I just want to go plant based, I keep hearing everybody talking about plant based whatever. So like, you go read a book, or you watch some YouTube video and you’re off to the races, you start, you know, stop eating meat and you start eating more tofu or whatever, right?

And you’re doing this for a while, you might lose some weight, you might feel pretty good. But then it stops working. And you know what, it really doesn’t matter which diet you pick, like, most diets will come to a point where maybe it stops working for you, or you need to change something and you just don’t know what to do.

And so, but here’s the thing, most people at this point, they just quit, they give up. They say that diet doesn’t work. ‘Oh, I tried that. It doesn’t work for me.’ I had somebody tell me this the other day, they were feeling really good. They were, you know, kind of like doing the low carb thing. This is somebody that I’m working with. And she’s like, “Oh, man, I’m feeling so good. I’ve lost some weight. I’m just feeling it got a lot of energy. And somebody at work was like, oh, yeah, I tried that for a while. And it didn’t work after awhile. It just stopped working.”

And she was a little concerned. She’s like, well, what if this stops working for me? I was like, hey, you know what, that person, you don’t know what that person was doing? First of all, they could have been doing something completely different. They could have been like totally cheating.

Most people, when they say they tried it, and it didn’t work. Most people aren’t doing it 100%. Like most people are sort of cheating. Unless you have somebody holding you accountable. It’s very easy to just sort of like, half ass the diet, you know what I mean?

And we know we don’t half ass anything, we full ass everything we do, right? So most people just sort of don’t do the right way. So this person probably was trying to be helpful, I don’t know. But it’s kind of a jerky thing to say to somebody, in my opinion, it’s like, let this person figure it out for themselves. Like so it didn’t work for you, that’s your experience that has nothing to do with you.

It has nothing to do with whether this is going to work for another human being, you know what I mean? But that’s where most people get to they get to this place where they’re like, Oh, I tried that diet, it doesn’t work. So they just quit. And then they go on to the next one.

Oh, the Mediterranean diet. Let’s try that one, you know, and they just keep doing this, and they just keep getting the same results? Because I don’t know, maybe they’re not sticking to it. Maybe it’s just not the right diet for them. Maybe they aren’t doing it right. Or you know, they’re not doing it 100%.

Or, you know, maybe they just need to tweak it a little bit. And that’s where I do a lot of work with my clients. This is where we we tweak things, like we’re always kind of making minor changes to your nutrition plan and to the diet, because I don’t know what’s gonna work for you, and neither do you. Like, we don’t know exactly what’s going to work.

It would be amazing if there was just one simple, straightforward way and one diet that works for everybody. But it’s not it’s not straightforward. It’s not simple. It’s complicated. We’re all different human beings. We all have different complex systems at play here. We all have different genetics, different metabolisms, different goals, we have different tastes, different likes and dislikes.

We have different lifestyles, we come from different cultures, we have different families we have, some of us have allergies, we have different body types, and we have to fit factor all of these things in when we’re deciding which diet is going to work for you. And you have to sort of try different things and stick with it, you know, instead of just giving up, you have to like just make some minor changes, just like you would an experiment.

You make a minor change to one thing you try for a while. And then if that doesn’t work, you try something else. You don’t give up. You keep going. And if there was just one thing that worked for everybody, this would be so much easier. I gotta tell you, I could just write a book and give it to you guys and just be like, here, I’m done. This is exactly what you do. This will work for you perfectly.

But it’s not that easy. I’ve read a lot of books on diet and nutrition. And a lot of these books come with, like menus, they’ll say like, here’s what you do, here’s what you eat. And week one, week two, month, one, month, two, whatever. But like, what if you don’t like that food? What if that doesn’t work for you? Like, you can’t possibly write a book with pre written meal plans that will work perfectly for everyone. You just can’t do it.

When I write my book, which I’m thinking about doing here, and I’ve got, you know, sort of an outline going already, so I’m working on it and let’s just say the book is in progress at this point. I’m going to instead teach that you have to figure out what works for you, instead of just giving you like, here’s what you do. Because when you learn how to do it yourself, this is a much better way to go.

This is one of the main reasons why I don’t like just tell my clients what to eat, I make suggestions, I might tell them what to avoid, like, don’t eat sugar, that’s bad for you. That’s just a no, nobody should be eating sugar. I’ll say that, okay.

But I offer guidelines offer a blueprint, a framework, but not like done for you meal guide, right, you need to learn what works for you, you need to learn how to make your own decisions around your diet. And I’ve talked to several people recently tell me they’ve worked with like a dietitian in the past and this person gave them a menu each week.

So each week, they would like send them a menu of here’s what you’re going to eat each day. And you can’t deviate from this, this what you have to do. And then after months of working with this person, they had developed zero skills, they couldn’t make their own decisions, they didn’t know what to do, they had no idea what to eat, because somebody was just like figuring it out for them and just telling them what to do.

They weren’t telling them why they should do it, or what’s the theory behind it? Or, you know, why would you avoid this? Or why should you eat that instead, they were not empowering their people, you know what I mean? They weren’t in control of their, you know, these people weren’t in control of their own health, they were like relying on somebody else, to make all their decisions for them.

Okay, so my approach is different. What I do is I help you learn what works for you, I teach you how to make your own food choices, I teach you how to make good decisions, I teach you why we’re doing this stuff. And you’re gonna make some mistakes along the way. That’s good. That’s actually part of the process. That’s how you learn. That’s how you develop good skills.

That’s how you begin to intuitively learn what to eat that works for you, as an individual human being, and what doesn’t work for you. The best diet for you is the one that works for you. And it doesn’t have to be paleo or keto or vegan or carnivore or anything like that. It could be whatever the heck you want it to be.

Now, let’s address the big ole lean elephant in the room. So I have a bias towards a low carb approach. The low carb diet, I think works for the majority of people that I have worked with, I would say like probably 98 out of 100 people have gotten really good results with a low carb approach.

And we’re not talking about you know, necessarily like keto, or paleo or anything like that. I don’t like to put labels on it. But the reason I think the low carb approach works for a lot of people is because when I switch runners to a low carb diet, if their goals are to, you know, lose weight and to improve their health and fitness and improve their running, when they make this switch, they do lose weight, they feel better, they have more energy, not less.

Their hunger levels go way down, their cravings for junk food just go away. Their endurance improves, running becomes easier, they become bonk proof, they can run for longer distances without hitting the wall. Most of the time, they get faster and they recover faster from these hard workouts. They start sleeping better and waking up feeling more rested. They have way less inflammation, the bloating goes away their clothes fit better.

People tell them how amazing they look. They love how they look in the mirror, they feel better about themselves, they have more confidence. And if you’re experiencing all of these amazing positive benefits, why would you go back to like a standard high carb approach? I say do what works for you.

And if this this approach that I just described the low carb sort of approach to to overall health and fitness. If that works for you, do it. I don’t think it works for everybody. Or I don’t think everybody well, honestly, I don’t think everybody wants to do it first of all, but I think there are other ways to do it.

I know people that eat a very high carb diet, lots of sugar and pasta and bread and stuff like that. They seem to be in very good health. Okay, great that works for them. A lot of us we’re sort of carbohydrate intolerant, we can’t tolerate carbohydrates very well and so we get bloated, we get inflamed. We gain weight, it starts to affect us in a lot of negative ways, okay?

You know, when when you eat high carbs, you also increase your blood glucose levels, which means you have high insulin levels, which means you’re in fat storage mode, which means you end up like having less energy, you become more hungry, you gain weight.

Your intense cravings for junk food tend to go up, running gets harder, your recovery time becomes longer sleeping is more erratic, you feel more bloated, inflamed, your clothes keep getting tighter for some reason. And you don’t feel good about yourself. Like, that’s what happens with a lot of people who who eat a very high carb diet.

Okay, so that’s just my observations and sort of my bias, you know, so I do have this bias. But I think when it comes to my recommendations for runners, especially runners who want to lose weight, I tend to recommend a low carb approach. Now, it can be low carb and plant based, it can be low carb, and carnivore, or it can be low carb and somewhere in between.

And we’re really talking mainly about sugar being the number one offender here. And other concentrated forms of carbohydrates like flour, you know, white flour, that kind of thing, right? Will this approach work for everyone? Probably not. There’s no guarantee that this approach will work perfectly for you or everyone, but I think it’s a very good place to start.

And, you know, remember that low carb doesn’t mean like an all meat diet, like lots, lots of runners do amazingly well, eating low carb, who do like maybe some fish or they’re, they’re vegetarian or even vegan. I’m just a little biased, because I’ve just seen way too many runners do amazingly well with this approach. And as long as it’s working, I’m gonna keep recommending it.

Okay. Now, for me, personally, I’m always experimenting with my diet, with what I eat. I tried different things to see what works best for me for my buy for my running and stuff like that, right? I started out, I lost a lot of weight, doing sort of a kind of a paleo-ish diet, like no sugar, low carb, some fruits and lots of veggies.

And that works pretty well for me. And then I switched to a very low carb, maybe carnivore type of diet for the first part of this year. Basically, all animal products, no vegetables. And I did this during the training for my marathon I did in the spring of this year. And you can I did an episode all about that. And you can listen to that it’s Episode 71, zero carb marathon training.

And I had a really good experience doing that. But then I kind of went back to eating my more paleo-ish way, you know, eating more salads and veggies and stuff like that, then I switched back to carnivore again. Now I’m back on the salads, again, I mean, some berries here and there. And, generally, you know, more carbs than I’ve been doing for most of this year. And I’m just trying this approach.

This is more of like a paleo type of an approach, if I had to put a label on it for this particular marathon, so I got a marathon coming up here in about three weeks. And so I’m just trying this approach, because what I like to do I like to experiment and then be able to share this stuff with you guys be able to share with you like, how did it go? How was your training? How was that marathon? How did you feel? How’s your week been? Like, all those kinds of things.

Okay, so I’m gonna report in on that after the marathon at the end of this month. So this is all my approach. This is what works for me, you need to figure out what works for you. And how do you do that? Well, you just try something. For starters, I would say, try cutting out sugar and flour and processed food and vegetable oil, like those things are terrible for you, right? And just start eating real food, see how that goes for you.

Maybe try increasing your protein intake. A lot of runners don’t get enough protein. I think if you aim for something around 30% of your calories coming from protein, you’re off to a much better place. Okay? But whatever you do, it has to be sustainable for you.

Most diets operate with this idea of like, restriction or deprivation or, you know, temporary, it’s temporary. Most of these diets sort of make you feel terrible. So they’re not really sustainable. So whatever you choose for yourself has to be something that you can do going forward it has to become part of who you are, and what you do.

And the real secret here to making all this last and making it permanent is just don’t quit. This is not well, ‘I tried this one thing it didn’t work for me, so I’m done’ situation. This is a I’m going to stick with it no matter what situation. And then you’re going to make incremental changes along the way.

How are you feeling? Is this making you feel good or not so good? Is this you know, giving you more energy or less energy as you’re running, improving? Or is it sucking more? You like you just have to like figure it out as you go. Only you can make those decisions for yourself, okay?

The best diet is the one that makes you feel good. The best diet is the one that helps you to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. The best diet is one that supports your weight loss goals, your running goals, your overall health and fitness goals. The best diet is the one that feels easy for you and practically effortless.

Your diet can’t stress you out, it has to be something that’s just easy to do. The best diet is the one that’s sustainable for you because it’s something you have to be able to do from here on out. And there’s only one person that can decide what that is going to be for you and that is you. Cool.

And listen, if you’re looking for a little help with all of this, this is what I do. I can offer you the guidance, the support the encouragement, the accountability, may be a little tough love that you need to make this work for you. No matter what your goals no matter what your lifestyle no matter what your tastes. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and we’ll see if coaching is good fit for you. All right, you guys, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.

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

93. How to Tell When You’re at Your Natural Weight

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I talk a lot about losing weight and eventually getting to your “natural weight” but I’ve never really taken the time to explain what your “natural weight” is. Several people have been asking me …

Continue Reading about 93. How to Tell When You’re at Your Natural Weight →

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 93 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m talking about how to tell when you’re at your natural weight. You know, I talk a lot about weight loss here on the podcast. And I talk about eventually getting to your natural weight, whatever that is for you. But I’ve never really taken the time to explain what that means.

What is your natural weight? What does this even mean? And people have been asking me about this lately. They’re like, Patrick, what does this mean? So I thought it’d be a good idea to dig into this topic here on the podcast today.

Listen, I get it, losing weight is a very challenging and very personal thing, there’s not one right way to do it. Okay, lots of different things work for different people. And the same goes for what your natural weight should be. It’s a very personal thing. And yet, lots of people have different opinions about what your natural weight should be. So in this episode, I’m going to talk about some of the standards we use to determine ideal weight, why they don’t really work for everyone, what natural weight really means and how to tell when you’re at your natural weight.

But first, if you liked this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean podcast community. On Facebook. It’s a group that goes hand in hand with the podcast, it extends the conversation, it gives you a voice, you can ask questions, get answers, and be a part of a very positive, very supportive, very encouraging group on Facebook, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us in the fun.

And then here’s a message that I received from a listener the other day on Instagram. And I just have to tell you guys that I love getting messages like this, and I get them all the time. And I really, really appreciate it. And it means a lot to me. And it means that what I’m doing is having an impact on you. And so I really appreciate these kinds of messages from you guys.

Anyway, this person wrote, “Hey, I really appreciate your podcasts. I found it at a troubling time in my life. And you’re helping me get my mind straight and help me motivate myself to be a better me.” Thank you. Wow, I love that. This is why I do what I do, guys.

Okay. Speaking of what I do, people ask me how they can work with me two ways you can get more out of the Running Lean program. Number one is the Running Lean coaching group. This is my group where we meet once a week, and we do a group Zoom call, I do a little bit of coaching and training in the group.

But it’s a place where you get to ask questions. It’s a place where you get to feel supported, and you get to have your voice heard and get some answers and hear from other people like you that are going through the same kinds of things. Each month, we kind of dig into a different topic.

The month of October, we’re talking about injury prevention, we’re talking about building strength and increasing our flexibility. And I’ve got a couple of special guests coming in to share some of their expertise on the subject. So it’s going to be super fun.

If you want to join the group, you can do that at any time, just go to lunch runningleanpodcast.com/join. And then the other way to work with me is you can hire me as your coach, I’m a one on one coach, this is what I do. working one on one with me is probably the best way to get whatever results you’re looking for.

If you want to become a different person you want to, you know, make some sort of transformation in your health and fitness, having a coach there to help you every step of the way is probably the best way to do it. And hey, it doesn’t even have to be me, it can be anybody, any coach that you feel like you have a connection with. Okay, so I just want you to know that coaching is extremely effective, extremely effective.

And when you sign up for one on one coaching with me, you also get access to the group calls and all the group stuff too. So it’s kind of a win win. If you want to apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply.

Okay, let’s talk about this natural weight thing. What does this even mean? People ask me all the time, like what is your natural weight mean? And I thought about it. I’m like, I guess I really haven’t taken the time to explain this very well. Some people keep asking about it. So I thought I would take the time today to do that. So we’re going to talk about what what your natural weight means and how you can sort of tell if you’re there.

How do you know? When you’re at your natural way? What does what does all this mean? Okay? First I want to go back a little bit and talk about sort of some standards that we use to determine ideal weight. And one of those standards, kind of the big standard out there you guys have heard of is probably BMI, right? This is your height to weight ratio. That’s all it is.

It’s like how tall are you? How much do you weigh? Oh, you know, you’re either this either says you’re, you know, average or below average or above average, or is it’ll say you’re overweight or obese or whatever. And this is not a really good measure of of where you are on the health and fitness scale because it’s not considering things like your age, or your gender, or your muscle mass, or your body type, or whether you’re an athlete or not.

When I plugged my numbers into the BMI calculator on the National Institute of Health’s website, it says I’m overweight, I’m in the overweight category, because I weigh like 175 pounds. I’m 5’11.

And I’m just going to tell you right now, in my opinion, I’m exactly where I want to be, and I am not overweight, my body composition kind of looks like I’m about a 12.9% body fat right now. And this is down from about 15% at the beginning of this year. So I’ve gained about 12 pounds of muscle and lost some percentage of fat, I can’t remember the exact number, but I’ve lost like 8 or 10 pounds of fat or something like that. So I’m like, if you look at like some other ways of measuring your your body composition, I’m in the excellent category like gold star for me, okay.

And another example, and I’ve mentioned my son Jack before, he’s a bodybuilder and this dude is huge, right? He’s the same height as me. But he weighs probably 25 pounds more than me, he would be considered like almost on the obese side of things, according to the National Institutes of Health, but he’s super fit. He doesn’t have a ton of body fat on him. He has a ton of muscle, right?

So when we look at BMI, it’s not telling the whole story, there’s a lot more stuff going on. And there are other like, ideal weight calculators that you can find online, and they will factor in things like your age and your gender. But it’s still like age, gender, height, weight. That’s about it. You know, there’s just more to the story. Okay.

So this is like the one big standard out there is like BMI. Another standard, and I’m using this word standard in quotes here. Okay, I’m doing finger quotes right now, the other standard we tend to go by is what other people think our weight should be. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what your weight should be, right?

Even well-meaning people like your husband or your wife, they might say things like, you don’t need to lose weight, you look fine. You know, I love you just the way you are, oh, I don’t want you to get too skinny. When are you going to stop losing weight? Like these things are not helpful. These kinds of statements are not helpful. These people they mean well, but they don’t get decide what your body weight should be.

And when people start to say things like this, I just have to tell you, when people see you start to lose weight and maybe get healthier, it makes them uncomfortable. And when they say something like, “You don’t need to lose weight, you’re fine. You know, you need to eat something, don’t get too skinny. You’re too skinny.”

Like people will say these things. And they’re saying this stuff because they feel uncomfortable about themselves. So these kinds of statements are really about them and not about you at all. They start questioning their own choices. They start questioning their own body weight to they start questioning how they feel about themselves.

And when you’re on a different path than them, maybe you’re improving yourself, they start to feel a little uncomfortable. So when it comes to other people not feeling comfortable about themselves and trying to sort of like look at you and maybe pull you down a little bit.

There’s this theory called crabs in a bucket and it’s just a funny thing. And it’s like if you have one crab in a bucket, it’ll it’ll crawl out of the bucket and it’ll figure out a way to sort of grab on to the edge and sort of crawl out of that bucket. Okay, apparently this is what crab fishermen do or whatever they figured this out.

But when you put more than one crab in the bucket, as that one starts to crawl out, another crab will pull it down, the other crab in the bucket will pull it down, because it doesn’t want it to escape. It’s like, oh, you’re not going anywhere, you’re gonna stay right down here with me.

And this is the way people in our lives are, sometimes they’re like crabs in the bucket, right? They pull us down to their level, they pull us down, because us leaving and going somewhere else and getting out of the bucket, it feels uncomfortable for them. Okay.

So just understand that when other people have opinions about what you should weigh, or what your diet should be like, or how you look or whatever, that’s all about them and not about you. Right, and you don’t have to listen to those people.

Okay, another sort of like standard of weight out there. It’s not necessarily like a standard of weight. But it’s a theory, it’s called the set point theory. And the set point theory states that our bodies have sort of a preset weight, that is hardwired into our DNA, it’s like a genetic thing. And according to the setpoint theory, our weight, and how much we can change our weight from this, whatever set point is, might be limited.

And the set point theory says that some of us have higher weight points, and some of us have lower weight points, and then it’s like our bodies are fighting to stay within this range that we have, okay. So your weight may go up or down temporarily, but eventually, it’s going to try to return to whatever this comfortable like setpoint is, okay.

So you may gain some weight, you may lose some weight, but there are these biological signals that are being sent to help you stay at this, whatever is like normal for you, okay. And according to the setpoint rate, you can change the setpoint. Right. So it’s not something that is like, necessarily fixed, but it requires a little bit of work.

So a lot of people can lose weight and keep it off for good. Like many, many, many people do this, right? A lot of people find it very difficult to but your your metabolic setpoint, you know, maybe right now, maybe like 50 pounds overweight, basically, right? That just because that’s where you’ve been for a long time.

And to change that setpoint, you have to lose some weight, and you have to keep it off for a period of time. And once you keep it off for a period of time, your body begins to adapt to this new normal sort of setpoint, this becomes your new normal setpoint. And the longer you stay at the lower weight, the easier it is to maintain.

Now, I just have to say, this is very important. This is just a theory, it’s not really proven in science. And I don’t necessarily think this is 100% true, because I’ve seen many, many people, in my experience and my coaching experience, I’ve helped many, many people to maintain a lower weight without much of an issue. I think maintaining your weight has more to do with your mental and emotional states and your relationship with food than it does with some hardcore, hard coded like DNA setpoint or whatever.

Okay, so that’s just something I wanted to throw out there as something some people have mentioned and asked about, and is this, you know, kind of regulating our natural weight? And there may be some evidence there that says, yeah, could have something to do with it. There’s also some evidence that’s like, no, it doesn’t really matter. Like, you can change that. Okay.

So I don’t believe these ways that we measure, quote, unquote, ideal weight, I don’t think they’re super helpful, because they don’t work across the board for everybody perfectly. They might get you in a ballpark. But then again, it’s like what, what is your natural weight? What’s gonna work for you as an individual? And these standards, they don’t factor in things like your body type, your body shape, how athletic you are, how much muscle mass you have, how long have you been at this weight, etc. So this is why I kind of use the word natural weight instead.

And so what do I mean by natural weight? And how do you know when you get there? Well, your natural weight is something that is very personal to you. It’s not how you measure up according to some government chart. It’s not how you compare yourself to people on Instagram. It’s where you feel good about yourself. Your natural weight is where you feel your healthiest.

So many people come to me and they’re like, I just want to feel healthy. I don’t feel healthy right now. So they would just want to get healthy. So when you feel healthy when you feel your healthiest, then you’re probably going to be close to your natural weight. When you feel confident about yourself. You’re probably getting close to your natural weight.

Lots of people don’t feel confident about their body. They’re always trying to hide their body. They wear baggy clothes, they don’t like being in photos. They do things to cover up their body because they don’t feel confident they don’t feel comfortable. When you feel comfortable and confident in your body and your skin, you’re getting close to your natural weight.

Can you wear clothes that flatter your body, maybe show off your body? Maybe you rock a bikini, this could be a sign that you’re at your natural weight. Can you wear those jeans you used a lot, but the ones that make your butt look amazing? Yeah, that’s you feeling good about yourself, where you feel sexy, where you feel like where you have this positive self image, where you can look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see.

What do you see when you look at yourself in the mirror today? Are you seeing just flaws and wrinkles and sagging skin and all the stuff that you hate about yourself? When you look in the mirror and you like what you see this is a good sign that you’re at your natural weight, where you feel good about your whole self.

And this is not necessarily a number on the scale. If you’ve like been listening here, I haven’t really mentioned the number on the scale, or how much weight you should weigh or what you know that number should be for you. It’s more about how you feel about yourself. And it’s also where you feel comfortable maintaining your weight. When you can easily maintain your weight, with little effort, where it all just feels pretty easy and effortless. You’re getting there. You know, if you’re busting your ass every day at the gym and starving yourself just to maintain your weight. That’s not easy. That’s not effortless, that’s not sustainable. You know, that’s, that’s a struggle.

When you stop the struggling and you just feel good about yourself. This is when you’re at your natural weight. And honestly, only you will know, when you get there, it may not be the number you think it should be on that scale, it might be more might be less, like, let’s say you, your your ideal is like 140 pounds, you’re like you know, if I can just get to 140, I’m gonna feel great about myself.

But then you get to that number and you keep losing a little bit of weight. And maybe you get to 135 pretty easily and you kind of stay there great, that’s kind of your natural weight for you. Maybe this is easy and effortless for you. And you can maintain this boom, you’re there good.

So maybe you think you should be at 140. And you sort of hit a good place with yourself at 145, this feels good to you. You’re confident, you’re happy, you feel healthy. You love how you look in that bikini, boom, you’re at your natural weight, right? Only you will know when you get there. It’s like how you see yourself on the inside matches what you see on the outside, then you know you’re there.

And I’m guessing that you may have never thought of it this way before but your natural weight is a decision. It’s a decision that you get to make and only you can make this decision only you can decide what your natural weight is for you. You get to make the decision for yourself, not your wife, not your husband, not your personal trainer. Only you I want you to take ownership of this, I want you to take ownership of your weight, your health, your fitness, all of that.

I want you to be empowered to make your own decisions about what’s best for you because only you know what’s best for you. I don’t even know what’s best for you. When I’m working with clients we decide you know around where they should be. But we usually kind of target a range and then we see where they feel the best.

So even I can’t make this decision for you. It has to come from you. And this may sound weird, but like you can’t decide this today, what your natural weight is going to be. You’ll know it when you get there. Because it’s more about how you feel than anything else. It’s not about a number, you know.

So you might think, Oh, it’s 140. But then you’re like, I don’t feel good at 140. And you won’t know it until you get there. So the important thing is is to do the work to commit to the process. Commit to learning and growing and bettering yourself every single day. Commit to being disciplined about your nutrition, being disciplined about exercise, sticking to the plan no matter what. And you’ll get there and you’ll know it when you’re there.

Now one more thing I wanted to share. I want to make sure that you guys understand that this is not in contrast to body positivity. Body positivity means loving yourself exactly as you are right now. No matter what that weight is, the weight doesn’t matter. It means you don’t look in the mirror and criticize yourself. Doesn’t mean you’re disgusted with yourself or ashamed of who you are because you weigh a certain number of pounds, whatever.

It means taking a good long look at yourself in the mirror and loving every inch of who you are right now, this is what body positivity means. You have to love and accept yourself exactly as you are always.

And here’s the part a lot of people miss when it comes to this idea of body positivity. A lot of people think you can’t love yourself as you are and want to change it like it’s like these two things have to be mutually exclusive. And they’re not.

You can feel amazing about how you look right now and still want to lose some weight. If that’s what you want for yourself. You can love and accept yourself exactly as you are right now, and still want to change. They’re not mutually exclusive ideas. It’s not an either, or you can have both.

In fact, if your goal is to lose weight, you can’t do it by beating yourself up every day, you’re gonna have a much, much harder time losing weight. If you’re talking trash about yourself all the time, you can’t hate yourself thin.

And if you’re comfortable where you are right now. Awesome, do you, you don’t have to be skinny, you don’t have to be lean. I know this is the Running Lean podcast. But this is not a mandate, okay? You get to decide what feels good for you.

You know, I talk a lot about becoming a lean runner about losing weight. This message is for people who want that for themselves. I’m in no way saying that everyone has to lose weight. I’m in no way judging anybody for how much they weigh. It’s not about what I think. It’s about what you think about yourself.

The beautiful thing about being a human being is that you get to decide who you are, you get to decide what you do, you get to decide what you want for yourself. And only you can decide what your natural way should be not a BMI chart, not your husband, not your friends, not someone you follow on Instagram. Only you can decide what your natural weight is. And you’ll know when you get there.

This is what I want for you. I want you to show up every day, and do the work and love who you are in the mirror every day work to change if that’s what you want for yourself. And when you get to that place where you feel good and you feel confident, and you feel comfortable. And you’re rocking that bikini or that pair of jeans or whatever it is for you, whatever.

However you want to measure what your natural weight is for you and where you feel good about yourself. When you get there, you’re going to know it. And this is what I want for you. I just want you to to know when you get there. I want you to do the work to get there and love yourself through the whole process. Cool. Awesome.

That’s all I got for you today. Remember, October is strength and flexibility and injury prevention month over in the Running Lean coaching group. We’re going to be talking about building strength becoming more flexible, so we can stave off injuries. Runners get injured a lot. We want to make sure we avoid that.

Okay, so just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And I hope you’ll join us over in the Running Lean coaching group. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.

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

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 …

Continue Reading about 71. Zero-Carb Marathon Training →

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.

If you have not already checked us out on Facebook, you need to come join us join the Running Lean podcast community over on Facebook, it’s a group of runners who share similar goals, who encourage support and motivate each other to reach goals to accomplish things they maybe feel like are hard for them to stick to it when they don’t feel like it. It’s a cool community of people that is just there for each other and we can lean on each other. Okay.

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.

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