Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Have you ever caught yourself eating something that you know is bad for you, but you do it anyway? Have you ever changed your eating patterns for a period of time and then found yourself going back …
Continue Reading about 197. Why You Keep Going Back for More →
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 197 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Why You Keep Going Back For More.
So have you ever caught yourself eating something that you know is not good for you, but you do it anyway? Or maybe you’ve changed your eating patterns for a period of time and then you find yourself going back to the junk food you used to eat even though you know, you probably should steer clear of it.
This was me for sure. I found myself going back for more to the junk food I used to eat even after long periods of healthy eating. Why do we do this? And what can we do to stop it from happening in the future?
In this episode, I hope to shed some light on why you keep going back for more of the foods you should probably not be eating and what to do to stop it. And this includes over eating, eating to excess. Okay.
But first, if you want a little bit of help getting started with all the stuff that I talked about here on the podcast, I put together a free training that you can check out it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
I put together the last three years of podcast materials, everything that I’ve taught here on the podcast, I kind of distilled it all down into about a one hour training that’s totally free, you can go through it, you can find it on my website, just go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training.
But the goal of this is to teach you how to lose weight and keep it off for good as a runner. A lot of coaches, a lot of dietitians, a lot of nutritionists out there, they have advice for losing weight, but it’s really not geared towards runners.
And this is where I specialize in helping you as a runner, not only, you know, improve your running and get stronger, run longer distances, run faster, but also to be able to change your body composition for the better to lose the weight to get leaner.
A lot of people say you can’t do that, or you shouldn’t do that. I disagree. I wholeheartedly disagree. And you can learn at least a good chunk of how to get started with all this stuff by going through this free training. Like I said, it’s just about an hour of your time. That’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. Check it out, go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training. And I hope you enjoy it.
Okay, let’s get into this topic here. Why you keep going back for more? So one reason that I wanted to share this with you guys is because I’ve been working with a lot of people recently who find themselves slipping back into old patterns or craving the food that they used to eat even though we’ve changed their eating patterns, or their their chronic overeaters, you know, they just keep going back for seconds and thirds and fourths or whatever.
And there’s this idea that you know what, there’s something wrong with us, if we keep going back to the foods that we used to eat when we weren’t eating healthy, or there’s something wrong with us, because we tend to eat past the point of being full. Okay.
This has definitely been my experience in my life. So I can relate to both of these concepts of going back for more, I’ve changed my eating patterns. I started eating really healthy, and then I found myself slipping back into old patterns again, because what I was doing was uncomfortable, it was hard.
And maybe I wasn’t getting the results that I wanted. And then I’ve also been a chronic overeater in my life. This is one of the reasons why it was really hard for me to lose weight. Even though I was eating, you know, I was trying all these different diets, but I was just eating way too much of a lot of the foods even when I was doing the plant based thing.
Of course I was eating nothing but carbs, because that’s basically what a plant based diet is, is basically all carbs, tough to do for some people. Some people love it, and that’s great, more power to you. But for me, it was really challenging because I’m very sensitive to carbohydrates, number one and number two, I tend to overeat. I’m an overeater.
And you know, I don’t think calories are the whole picture. I think calories do come into the equation at some point and they definitely did for me when I would go back for seconds and thirds, and eat until I was way past the point of being full.
You know, there was a Comedian Jim Gaffigan, who used to say, “I don’t stop eating when I’m full. I stop eating when I hate myself.” I was like, Oh, my God, I feel so seen. Because that was definitely me and my experience around food.
And even today, I struggle with this sometimes, you know, I can, I can go out to dinner, I’m eating a nice big steak and maybe, you know, a baked potato or something on the side. And I find myself just eating until I’m past the point of being full. And why do we do this?
So I’m going to give you guys a couple of reasons why I’ve got like five reasons why we keep going back for more. More of the junk food that we’re not supposed to be eating, or we want to try to stay away from, or we’re chronic overeaters. And why we do this, and I want you to think about this in this concept of that there is hope for you that you’re not broken.
I’m certainly not broken, you’re not broken, we all do these things, you might be able to relate to a couple of these things I’m going to share with you here more than others. But we all have done these or some some of these in our lives. And it doesn’t mean that just because you can relate to some of these issues that there isn’t hope for you, there is hope for you like you can change.
Most of the things I’m going to be talking about are learned behaviors, and if a behavior has been learned, it can be unlearned. Alright, so just I want to put a context on this as you’re listening to this episode of you know, that these are things that you have probably taught yourself or been conditioned to over the years and that you can on teach yourself that you can decondition yourself to these patterns.
Okay, so the first one is this. The first one is that the foods that we tend to overeat are the foods that we tend to go back for the junk foods and stuff like that. It just, it feels good to eat that stuff. Let’s be honest, it tastes amazing. And it feels really good. Your brain loves pleasure.
Your brain is always seeking pleasure. Your brain’s job is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Your brain’s job is to keep you safe, is to avoid discomfort. Seek out comfort, seek the familiar, seek out pleasure. That’s your brain’s job. And you know what does a really good job of that? The comfort foods that you love. Junk food feels amazing, right?
A lot of times, it’s because these foods have been engineered to produce the maximum pleasure possible. That’s why people don’t binge out on broccoli. I hear people all the time. They’re like, oh, I just needed a snack. I’m like, okay, go eat some broccoli. And they’re like, I’m not gonna use broccoli as a snack. And I’m like, yeah, but if you’re really hungry, and you need to eat something, broccoli is great, you know, or some like raw carrots.
People are like, I don’t want raw carrots, I want some chips. I want some nuts. I want a candy bar, I want something that’s sugar, or salt or crunchy or a combination of all those things. Snickers, there you go. It’s got all those things all blended together, right.
But we don’t go for broccoli as a snack because it doesn’t light up our brain the way that this junk food does. So your brain loves pleasure. And this is one of the reasons why it’s really hard to change your diet. Because if you’re used to eating a diet that is full of pleasurable foods, pizza is a great example. You know, pizza is one of those things that like, oh my gosh, it’s like gooey and cheesy, but it’s also all that bread.
The crust is so amazing and chewy and it’s warm. And it’s just like, oh my gosh, that’s a very pleasure inducing food right there. So if you’re somebody that’s eating pizza on the regular, and then and then you switch your diet you’re like okay, pizza’s off the table, you’re gonna be dreaming about pizza. Your brain is gonna be like, where is the pizza, bro? Like, how come you took the pizza away from it? You know I want that pizza. So we seek out pleasure and junk food gives us lots of pleasure.
You know, you got to remember that there’s a dopamine response when you eat these pleasurable foods. Even thinking about the pleasurable foods gives you a dopamine response and it feels good to just think about it. If I start describing the most delicious chewiest pizza crust with the red sauce that’s just hanging off and the pepperoni on top and the melted cheese that’s got just a little bit of burned on there you know I’m you know, I’m talking about right.
You start to drool like your brain is like lighting up right now just even thinking about that just listening to a description of pizza like that will light up your brain and provide a dopamine response, but also when you eat as food, you get oxytocin release, serotonin, endorphins, all the feel good chemicals get released.
And listen, eating pizza, it feels amazing. Eating ice cream feels amazing, eating candy bars feels amazing. All these hyper palatable foods increase this dopamine response to increase the field good hormonal response. And why wouldn’t you crave that stuff, right?
We don’t tend to go back to eating hoards of broccoli or chicken or something like that. Even though that stuff is great for you. That stuff is what your brain and your body actually needs for nutrition to keep you healthy and safe and alive. But that’s not what we crave.
We crave the junk food, we crave the hyper palatable foods, the foods that have been engineered to be amazingly delicious. Okay. So number one, you have to understand that your brain loves pleasure. And that’s just your brain doing what it’s supposed to do. Seek pleasure, avoid pain, you know, it feels painful to your brain.
Eating broccoli feels painful to your brain, because it’s like, oh, I know, it’s good for me. But I really want the pizza, but I mean, the broccoli and so that seems terrible. It’s like a terrible place to be like, who wants to do that?
Okay, so your brain wants to seek pleasure and wants to avoid pain. So there’s your brain doing what it’s supposed to do. So just understand that part of the thing that we’re fighting against here, if you’re trying not to eat this stuff, is that your brain is going to drive you in the direction of the junk food.
Alright, so we got that kind of going against us here. But just listen, that is one of five different reasons why you might be going back for more.
Number two, a lot of times you are using your eyes instead of your body to know when it’s time to stop. And this refers to overeating. So a lot of times we look at our plate, and we look at you know how much is on our plate and we need to finish every bite that’s on that plate no matter what even though we’re full, even though we don’t feel good.
Now, this was me. And this is one of the reasons why it’s been decades of me trying to stop this overeating habit. But it was drilled into me as a kid that I had to finish everything on my plate no matter what or I would get in trouble.
And I had to sit at the table and everybody else left the table was able to go eat their dessert and get on with their life and I had to sit there and eat everything. Eat the tuna fritters that my mom made. I just bring that up because I just thought about, I haven’t thought about tuna fritters in like 40 years, honestly.
But I just thought about those because it was one of those things I was like this gross I don’t want to eat this stuff. You know, just imagine like a crab cake but not as good and it’s tuna instead. Okay, and it’s hot.
But I would have to sit there and eat that stuff. And if I did need it, I couldn’t leave the table. And if you didn’t eat everything on your plate you had you didn’t get dessert either, which doesn’t make any sense. Okay? Like, if you don’t finish all this plate and make yourself miserable, you don’t get more food afterwards.
So these ideas were drilled into my head that it didn’t matter how you felt, it didn’t matter if your body was like you’re full. Like your eyes and what was in front of you had to be devoured no matter what.
This is really, this is weird that we do this to kids. Don’t do this to your kids. If you want to, like help your kids now, don’t do this to them. Let them eat whatever they want. Who cares? You know they’re kids, they’ll figure it out like eat what feels good to you. Oh, you don’t want to eat much. You don’t want to eat the brussel sprouts. Fine. Don’t eat them. It’s fine.
But don’t make your kids eat everything because that is not teaching them good eating habits that’s like disordered eating in a way. Okay. So I was trained that I had to eat everything on my plate no matter what.
And mentally right now it’s really hard for me to leave food uneaten. Like my girlfriend, she’ll go out to dinner, or even eating dinner here, and when she’s done eating, she’s just done. And she’ll sit there and they’ll be like one bite left.
And I’m like, you’re not going to eat that? Oh my god, you’re driving me crazy. Just eat that last bite. I don’t want anymore. I’m done. I mean, I just got to this point where I was done, and then I’m done. I don’t have to keep eating and I’m like, how do you do that? I don’t understand how you do that. That’s not me. I gotta eat whatever is on my plate.
And a lot of times I’ll put too much on my plate but I got to eat it anyway. And so that’s one of those things where I had to really work on that and I’m better about that now. I can leave food. I’ve been better about that lately, especially as we go out to dinner. And you know, you get what they give you on the plate like I don’t have control over that.
And I’m good about like leaving some behind. Sometimes I don’t, sometimes I do. So, there’s this idea that you can’t trust your body to know what’s best for you, you because you’ve been conditioned to go by other rules, you know, you can only trust the conditioning that you’ve been exposed to, you know, and so, this is a, this is a big problem, you know, this is something that we have to undo this whole clean plate club, you got to be a member of the clean plate club.
No, you don’t. And a lot of this is just families, you know, bless my parents, you know, they were trying to try their best, they did their best, they had a bunch of kids, you know, I was always the problem child too.
And, you know, I have four siblings, and they would, I was always, always the one in trouble. I know, hard to imagine. But I was the one that would get what I thought was getting picked on all the time, but I was just, I was rebellious, you know.
But I have this conditioning, this family conditioning of overeating, really. And to this day, it still lingers here and there, sometimes it creeps it’s ugly head every now and then. But just understand that, you know, you got to start listening to your body. And when you’re feeling full, or even before you feel full, like when you feel like satiated, it’s time to stop, okay. So that’s number two, using your eyes instead of your body to know when it’s time to stop.
Number three, you believe that more is better. So if a little food is good for you, then more is great for you, right? This is the same issue that alcoholics and drug addicts have. So they think that, you know, if one drink makes you feel good, or if one hit or pill or whatever makes you feel good, then two or three drinks or 10 is going to be better, or 10 hits or pills or whatever is gonna make you feel better.
And so we think that since we’re eating a little bit of french fries, or a little bit of pizza is good for us, or it feels good, then eating the entire pizza is great. You know, we don’t want to, we don’t want to find it. And we don’t want this good feeling to end, we’re getting this dopamine response, we’re getting all these, you know, chemicals released, that feel really good.
And we don’t want that. And we want it to feel even better. So we think that eating more food, going back for more and more and more, is going to feel better and better and better. And again, this is conditioning. It’s not really genetics, we are not genetically predisposed to overeat, we’re not genetically predisposed to eat until we’re uncomfortable.
This is something that you have learned. Because you think if I stop eating halfway through this pizza, then this good feeling is going to end, it’s going to go away. And honestly, the only thing that happens is you start to feel really terrible. And then you feel really awful. And you and you do sort of hate yourself, you know.
And it’s one of those things where the behavior is so ingrained in us and again, these are just things that we’ve been conditioned to over the years we’ve trained ourselves to do these things. You’ve got to be able to unlearn this, we have to be able to learn better behaviors and start practicing eating to satiety, not to uncomfortableness, okay.
So we believe that more is better. And more is not always better, more is just more, and a lot of times more is worse. But it feels like more is better. Again, this is our brain sort of tricking us, okay.
Number four is this and I know that we have all thought this before, that I’ve already blown it for today so I might as well just keep going, right? So I ate the cupcake. You know, my kids wanted, you know, we take cupcakes to school. So I like made cupcakes, and I was just gonna get into the garage, but I had one.
And then I was like, you know what I’ve already blown it for today. So I’m just gonna go ahead and eat 10 more cupcakes and the entire pizza and all the ice cream in the house, right. And because I’ve already blown it for today, or, you know, I’ve already had like one piece of pizza, I might as well eat the entire pizza.
This is why so many diets fail because people don’t have any strategies in place to be able to deal with these occasional setbacks or fails or whatever you want to call them. And I believe that we have to build some of these exceptions into our plan.
So if you have a healthy eating food plan, there should be some exceptions in there every now and then it’s like, yeah, you can have a couple pieces of pizza, you can have the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. But you got to do these things in a very intentional and purposeful way. You got to do them mindfully.
You don’t want to do them because you’re reacting to how you’re feeling in the moment. You want to plan them ahead of time. One of the strategies that I work with all my clients on is planning, like plan ahead and then stick to the plan and plan ahead and stick with the plan. Don’t make decisions in the moment because we tend to not make good decisions in the moment.
Another rule that I think everybody needs to follow is, you never have two bad meals in a row or two cheat meals in a row. You can blow it with one meal, you can eat a cupcake, fine, okay, you blew it with that meal, you failed, great. Next meal, you’re back on track, that’s it.
Another way of looking at this is divide your day into four quarters, you might lose a quarter, but never lose the day. So if you blow it in quarter number three, and you had you know, some cupcakes or you had a piece of pizza, whatever, great, don’t blow the next quarter. Right, get back on track with the next meal. And that’s it. If you just kind of adhere to that right there.
This one can take care of itself pretty easily. But you have to be disciplined about that. And you can’t get into this attitude of like, well, I’ve blown it for today. I might as well just, you know, keep going. Or here’s another one I’ve heard people say is like I’ve already blown it for today, so I’m just gonna, like, make the next week a total eating binge fest, like, oh, I’ve gone one day, so I might as well go and blow the whole week.
Like don’t do that, but a lot of people do that. A lot of people do that. Right? Oh, you know, I was going great with my nutrition plan until work got really stressful. And then I had this one meal that was no good. And then that ruined everything. And now I’m back to eating garbage every single day. Like really, one meal can do that to you. It really can, it can set you back.
And then you think, you know, well look at me, I’m a failure, I can’t do this. So I might as well just go back to doing what I used to do. Just a piece of crap. And you know, you’re not, you’re not, you just made a bad decision, or, you know, you had a slip up whatever could get back on track with the next meal.
And again, I like to build in some of these, whatever you call it, cheat meals, you know, I like to call it the release valve. Like, we have this pent up craving sometimes for stuff and you know, talk about pizza, like just because that’s my thing. I love pizza.
And every now and then I gotta eat some pizza. Because that craving can get a little bit out of control sometimes. And every now and then I’m like, I’m just gonna go eat a couple of pieces of pizza. And then I’m fine. You know, I’ve had pizza twice this year. I know it’s crazy. And I just had some recently and it was so good. And I was like, This is so good. I’m glad I don’t do this all the time anymore. But it was so good to do it every now and then.
Okay, so don’t get into this attitude of a balloon offer today might as well just keep going or bonus for today. So might as well just blow the whole week, don’t do that. Get back on track with the next meal. Okay, that was number four.
Number five is this marketing and social pressures. So here’s the reality. The food companies do not care about your health, they don’t care about your well being, they want to make money. And the way they do that is they get you to eat more food, that is their goal.
They care about their bottom line. That’s it, it’s a business, and they’re making billions of dollars. And so they make this hyper palatable food that you keep going back for more and, and they know what they’re doing.
They spend billions of dollars on research and marketing to make sure that you crave the junk food, right, and then you keep eating it that you keep going back for more and more and more, even though, you know, it’s not good for you. They know it’s not good for you. They don’t care.
Okay, so if you think the food companies are putting stuff out there that is good for you, you’re wrong. They don’t care. It’s not good for you, they know what they’re doing. And they market this stuff to you. And they make you think that you have to eat this stuff.
Are you like some kind of weirdo? And our friends do this too. Our friends sort of like treat us like we’re weird if we’re eating, you know, good, healthy food, like we’re the weird ones. What? Really?
So there’s people in our lives, usually it’s the people that are closest to us who mean well, but they treat us like we’re in middle school. You know, they’re like, Oh, it’s okay, honey, just have one piece of pizza. It’s not going to kill you. You deserve it. You’ve been good all week. Have some fun. Live a little, let your hair down. Don’t be such a Debbie Downer.
Have you had anybody in your life that’s like this? Some people call them food pushers. And a lot of times they’re, they’re well meaning. They mean well, they’re trying to be positive and just say like, hey, have a little bit of fun. You deserve it. It’s okay.
You know, but what they’re doing is they’re putting pressure on you to do something you don’t want to do. And you don’t want to eat the junk food and they’re pressuring you into doing it and so a lot of times you do. You slipped back into it, you go back for more because they want you to, because that makes them feel good.
If you’re doing what they’re doing, and then they don’t feel so bad about themselves, because they’re like, oh, as long as you’re doing it with me, you know. But for those of us who have difficulty controlling how much we eat, saying no to certain foods, this is me totally.
You know, people in our lives that are like this are going to keep us going back for more. Doesn’t matter how much discipline we have, or how much willpower we’re using, we will keep going back for more because we’re feeling pressured by the people who are closest to us.
And again, they mean well, but we have to ignore that. And we have to stand up for ourselves in those situations. And listen, willpower, like discipline is great, willpower is a finite resource, though willpower diminishes as the day goes on, like you only have so much willpower, think of it as like a fuel tank.
And by the end of the day, that fuel tank is pretty low, you don’t have much willpower in the evening, you have a lot more in the morning, right. And then by the evening, it’s gone, right? It’s because it’s like, you’re tired, you just want to like chill out or whatever, like, your willpower is gone in the evenings.
And that’s when a lot of people, you know, go out with friends. And then that’s when the social pressures happen, and they want you to drink and then once you start drinking, you’re, you’re making even poor choices around food. And a lot of people blow it at night, like they do great all day long. And then they blow it at night because of this lack of willpower because the willpower kind of diminishes as the day goes on.
So I’m not saying you gotta avoid your friends, but just understand that, you know, you got food companies who are marketing food to us and putting pressure on us to kind of eat this food, we got friends and family who are kind of pressuring us to eat this food. It’s hard.
This is a hard one right to navigate around all this stuff. But I guess you just got to be okay, being the weirdo at the table, the one person who’s not partaking in the alcohol, the one person who’s not partaking in the junk food, and you got to be okay with that. It doesn’t feel good, it feels uncomfortable. But sometimes we got to just get used to being uncomfortable in those situations, it’ll get easier after a while.
Okay, so those are the five reasons why we typically keep going back for more, and then just understand that there are some things we can do about this. Like, I know, this feels daunting, it probably feels like oh my gosh, Patrick, like this sounds terrible. Like how am I supposed to overcome all this stuff, there’s all this pressure, there’s all these things, you know, working against me here.
The first step though, is just understanding that you have this self awareness about all of this. A lot of times is self awareness and understanding what’s happening within you and to you from the outside world.
Just having that self awareness is enough to keep you from going back for more for like slipping into those old patterns. Right. Another thing is, like I mentioned earlier, is having a plan, you gotta have a plan, make a plan, what’s your food situation? What are you eating tomorrow? What times are you eating? What are you eating, for lunch, dinner, whatever, make a plan, make it ahead of time and stick to the plan. Right? That’s it. Most people don’t do that. They just wing it every day.
If you want to change your habits around food, winging it, it’s probably what you’ve done your whole life. So don’t do that. You got to have a plan, and you got to stick to the plan.
And it’s like training yourself to practice good habits like new behaviors and behaviors, winging it is not how you do it, though. Because you’re never going to be able to like lose the weight, keep it off change eating patterns, if you’re winging it every day.
So make a plan, stick to the plan, make a plan, stick to the plan, right? Once I started doing this, I started, like seeing results consistently. Because the only way you’re gonna see consistent results is if you do something consistently, you got to stick to your plan consistently. And then you’ll get consistent results. And eventually you’ll get your goals.
Most people they just wing it every day, they get some results. And then they slide backwards. And then they get some of these backwards, they say why should I even bother? This is demotivating. Right?
Consistent results will keep you in the game. They’ll keep you motivated, keep you going forward. And eventually you’ll reach your goals, if you can stick with it long enough. There’s a big mindset shift though, right?
Because you’re you got to switch from being reactionary, like reactive to the world around you to being proactive and actively making a plan and sticking to it. That’s a very different way to do this, to go through life. Most people don’t do it, that’s why they fail.
So we got to switch from allowing the world around you to dictate your actions and behaviors to using your own mind, your own principles, your own goals, your own beliefs to guide your decisions and your actions and your behaviors.
Okay, so we don’t want to be driven by what’s going on out there but what’s going on inside by our own body, our own thoughts, beliefs, our own emotions, all of that, okay? So it takes time. It’s not something that’s gonna, you know, you’re gonna be, you’re gonna make a decision and you’re gonna say, Oh, I just want to change how I feel about food. And it’s going to happen overnight.
No, it takes some time. Alright, it’s, it feels daunting, but I promise you, there is hope you can do this. You got to give it some time, you got to embrace the discomfort of change, because that’s going to be ever present.
But if you can stick with it long enough, you will get the results that you want, I promise you and again, as always, if you’re looking for some help with any of this, we can talk about coaching, this is what I do. I help people navigate this stuff every single day. And we have fun doing it too by the way.
Just head over to runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me. Click on that link. You can fill out a short little application, get on a call. We’ll talk about coaching and how it might help you. And if it seems like a good fit for you, great. If not, that’s cool, too. Okay, cool. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean. And I’ll talk to you soon.
I think we all know that eating too much sugar is not good for you. Excess sugar consumption has been linked to all sorts of metabolic dysfunction like high blood pressure, excess weight gain, …
Continue Reading about 187. Why Moderating Sugar is so Difficult →
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 187 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, why moderating sugar is so difficult. So I think we all know that eating too much sugar is not good for you.
Excess sugar consumption has been linked to all sorts of metabolic dysfunctions like high blood pressure, excess weight gain, insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes, just to name a few. So the solution is pretty simple. Just don’t eat so much sugar, moderate your sugar intake. Easy, right?
Why does it sound so easy, but is it so hard in practice? Why is moderating sugar so difficult? Today I’m going to take a deep dive into why this is, why moderating sugar is so difficult, and offer up some practical tips to help you take control of those sugar cravings.
But first, why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off? How many times have you tried and failed? Contrary to what you might think and what most people think there isn’t anything wrong with you, you’re not a failure. There are a few reasons why most people fail at losing weight. Number one, probably you’re not willing to get uncomfortable.
Most people don’t want to experience any type of discomfort, especially when we’re talking about food. The truth is, if you want to lose weight, you have to do things differently. This means embracing a little bit of discomfort, okay, change is uncomfortable.
If you don’t accept that the journey will be uncomfortable and you are setting yourself up for failure. Okay, so you have to understand that you got to get uncomfortable.
Number two, you’re kind of blaming everyone and everybody else for your lack of success. If you go off track, you don’t stick to your plan. You blame someone or something, you know, the boss, the school, whatever it is, you’re destined to fail.
People who fail tend to have a lot of excuses. They have reasons, they have stories, they blame other people for why things don’t work for them, okay? The only one responsible for your actions, though, is you, okay? So don’t blame anybody else. Take responsibility for your successes, and failures, and act appropriately.
Number three, number three, you just give up way too easily. Successful people, they just don’t give up. They keep going no matter what. Even if it’s hard, even if it takes a while. Even if it seems like it’s not working. If you want to succeed at losing weight and keeping it often you have to stop giving up right? You just have to keep going.
Okay, so these are the three things that you need to stop doing. If you want to be successful at weight loss, you know, be willing to get uncomfortable, stop blaming other people, take responsibility, and then don’t give up.
Okay, by the way, if you want help with all of this, I’m here for you, you can always join the Running Lean Coaching Project. That is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more.
And if you want a little help, just getting started with all this stuff, I created a cool training program that you can watch for free. It’s like an hour-long training program. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to find that and get started. Cool.
Okay, so today we’re talking about sugar. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I talk a lot about sugar, a lot about the issues around sugar. And one thing that I’ve stressed is that I think for most people, you know, there’s not one diet that’s going to work for everybody, right?
But I think for most people that reducing and moderating your sugar intake is going to go a long way in helping you to become a healthier human being. It’ll help to, you know, help you to get fat adapted, it’ll help you to increase your endurance, it’ll help you to be burning more fat in general, which gives you more energy throughout the day.
It helps with cravings in general like there’s lots of reasons why we want to moderate our sugar intake. And so we all know this, we all know that we shouldn’t be eating as much sugar. But moderating it is so difficult, right? It’s so hard for so many people to eat some sugar or they stop for a while, then they go back to binging out on it again or whatever.
Why is this? Why is it so hard to moderate sugar when moderating other foods is easy? Like it’s not hard to moderate broccoli intake, right? It’s not hard to moderate chicken intake, or steak or eggs or, you know, brussel sprouts? Why is sugar different? What makes it different?
So I want to answer that question today. And I will, but we have to understand that excess sugar leads to all kinds of issues from a metabolic standpoint, higher blood pressure, inflammation, weight gain, diabetes leads to fatty liver disease.
An increased risk for heart attack and stroke like these are serious things. This isn’t like, oh, you know, it, you just shouldn’t eat sugar because it’s, you know, might give you cavities or something. No, these are like some serious issues we’re talking about here.
Okay, so we know eating too much sugar is not good for us. We all know that. It’s hard to moderate, it’s hard to give up. It’s hard to control. So why is this, first of all, and then what can we do about it?
So these are the questions I’m going to answer here today. The first thing I want to mention here is kind of go over, you know, I talk to runners, you’re probably a runner, if you’re listening to this podcast, I want to talk about fat adapted running and what that means.
So when you’re a fat adapted runner, this means that you have just improved your body’s natural ability to burn fat, that is our natural state as human beings to store some of the energy that we get from food as fat and then to be able to burn that energy later on. Okay?
So improved fat burning means that you will improve your running endurance, because fat is a great source of fuel for endurance activities for running and cycling, and swimming, and rowing and all kinds of things, it means that you’ll have improved endurance, improved recovery, running will become easier for you.
But in order to get fat adapted, you have to really lower the amount of sugar that you’re eating, right. Sometimes I tell people to take a break for 30 days, or, you know, just really dramatically reduce your daily intake. And this requires a little bit of a change in lifestyle, right?
You can’t go, you know, eating all the sugar every other day, if you want to stay fat adapted, like you have to lower your sugar intake and kind of keep it low for a while. It’s a little bit different for each person.
I can’t tell you exactly how much you need to lower it and how many days you need to stay there. And when you’re going to raise it, what you need to bring it up to, because it’s a little bit different for each person. But just understand, it doesn’t mean you never eat sugar again, it just means you’ve got to eat less than you’re probably used to.
Okay, so maintaining a lifestyle, a lower sugar lifestyle is what we’re talking about here. If you want to improve your running and you want to stay fat adapted, you’ve got to maintain a sort of a lower sugar lifestyle.
So doing this is challenging, because of all the reasons I’m going to talk about here today. But sugar is so powerful, it is a powerful food substance that makes it very difficult to maintain a lifestyle free from sugar or low in sugar. Okay.
So one of the things that I talk about with people and they want out of my coaching is they want to get fat adapted, and they want to stay that way. They love how they feel when they’re fat adapted, they love how it improves their running, they can run faster, they can run longer, they have this all day energy, they’re sleeping better, their mood is better, like there’s so many good things with being fat adapted that they want to maintain that and they find it difficult because sugar is a powerful thing.
Okay, so and then the other part of this is weight loss. So the other part is if you want to reach your weight loss goals, you’ve got to lower your sugar intake because again, we’re talking about burning fat here, right?
You know, as our natural state as humans, we are good fat burners, we want to, we kind of prefer glucose or sugar as a fuel, but it’s like a paper, it burns very hot, but very quickly, we want to tap into that fat which is more like burning logs.
Fat burns for much, much longer. It doesn’t burn quite as hot so to speak, but it burns much longer. Okay. So we want to tap into that stored body fat as a source of fuel for running but also that’s how you lose weight. You’ve got to burn the fat, right? And again, this requires you to moderate your sugar intake.
So if you want to lose weight, you want to become a fat adapted runner, we’ve got to moderate our sugar intake and just about every doctor and dietitian out there will agree that yeah, this is the case. If you want to lose weight, then you need to moderate sugar intake.
So we have an interesting thing happening here. Burning fat will help you to become metabolically healthier to help you to lose weight, you’ll improve your blood work, you’ll have less inflammation, lower blood pressure, all these things, it also helps improve your running performance running becomes easier, you can go longer, push harder, recover faster, all those things. But it just requires one thing, just moderate sugar intake. Okay, simple.
This is so simple right? Now, there are other things that contribute to becoming healthy and to becoming your healthiest self, you know, you want to stay strong, you got to do resistance training, you got to manage stress, you got to make sure you’re getting quality sleep every night, we got to you know, address mental and emotional health.
But one big lever that we can pull is going to be moderating your sugar intake. Okay, if you want to get your body moving in the right direction, then moderating sugar intake is going to be the biggest, the biggest lever that you can pull to get that started. Okay, simple, right? Simple, but not easy.
So almost every person that I work with tells me that they have a hard time moderating sugar or they have in the past. They’re on point with a lot of other areas of their health and fitness, you know, they’re running is on point they’re doing resistance training, or, and they’re sticking with their training program for their, you know, maybe they’re training for a marathon.
They do the cross training they’re supposed to, and they never miss their workouts like they’re on point with all these areas. But when it comes to sugar, they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s my weakness. That is my weakness. And if this sounds like you just know that it’s super common, you’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with you.
In fact, it means you’re pretty normal, but if you want to become metabolically healthier, if you want to lose weight, if you want to improve your running, then we’re gonna have to get this whole sugar thing figured out. Okay?
So why is it so hard to moderate sugar? First, you have to understand that there are many factors involved with why we want sugar, why we crave it. There are a lot of different drivers. And I’m going to talk about those drivers here in just a moment.
There are some that are physiological drivers that work on our biology, there are some mental and emotional drivers. And then there’s external drivers. Those are factors that are outside of ourselves that make moderating our sugar intake very difficult.
So I want you to think about each of these drivers as like a gas pedal, like pretend like you are a car and each one of these is like an accelerator. And each one of these increases your craving for sugar. Alright, so here’s what I’m talking about.
The first one is this, the first driver is taste. And the taste of sugar is a powerful driver. We have receptors in our mouth, around our mouth, on our lips, or tongue or soft palate that all scents the sweet taste of sugar.
When we taste something sweet, it sends signals to our brain that we are about to get something sweet. And it increases dopamine, dopamine, and it feels good. And immediately, our craving for sugar is increased.
So this first driver, this first accelerator happens right away. As soon as we taste something that is sweet, our sugar cravings get increased. And we want more sugar right now. And that causes us to want to eat more sugar.
It also causes us to want to eat more food in general. So every time we have this receptor that sends dopamine to our brain about sugar, and it’s saying like, oh, this is a good thing. We want more of this. It also increases our wanting and craving for more food in general. All right. So the first driver is going to be the taste of sugary foods in our mouth.
The second gas pedal that gets pushed here is an increase in our blood sugar and this happens in our gut. So when you eat sugary food this causes your blood sugar to spike and it causes an increase in your blood sugar, which is normal. This increase in blood sugar also sends signals to your brain to release dopamine. And again, your sugar cravings go up and your food cravings go up.
And they’ve done these studies where they’ve fed rats sugary foods. But they’ve removed their taste receptors, so they can’t taste the sweetness of the foods. So they don’t have that sweet taste of the food in their mouth. Just the sugar is just being ingested.
And these rats will eat more sugar because of that, because they’re eating sugar, they’re eating, they want more sugar, and they eat more food in general. All right. This is also the main reason why food companies try to sneak sugar into everything. Even if you can’t taste it. They’re still sneaking sugar into foods.
Because if what you eat causes a higher spike in your blood sugar, you’re going to crave more of that food. And you’re going to want to eat more of that food in particular and more food in general.
And the food companies know this because if you’re eating more of their food, they’re making more money. They don’t care about your health. They care about the bottom line. Okay. So some of the crazy places where they hide food and you wouldn’t really know this. Some of them may taste a little bit sweet like low fat yogurt.
We all know that if you look at yogurt, it’ll say like, oh, low fat yogurt is healthy and good for you. Look at the label, it’s like all sugar. Okay, so be careful of that one, but other ones are a little more sneaky, like pasta sauce. Almost all pasta sauce has added sugar. Look at the label. Other sauces. Almost all condiments have sugar in them. So just be careful.
But this one is weird, like gravy. Why does gravy have sugar in it? Again as to make you crave more of that food. canned soup has a lot of sugar in it. Salad dressings, nut butters, which should be what they should be just nuts. Like you’d grind up some almonds and you make almond butter. But no, they add sugar to that to make it more delicious.
Crackers have a ton of sugar and bread gets added sugar, beef jerky. I love beef jerky, and I go out of my way to find one. I think the brand is Tillamook. And they have a no sugar beef jerky. So, and it tastes delicious, by the way, but you’ve got to be careful of this.
So there’s this other accelerator that’s forcing us to crave more sugar. And it’s happening in our gut and we don’t even necessarily taste the sugar, but it is happening in our gut. And so just understand that those food companies are out there. They’re pushing that accelerator.
Okay, so now we have a car with two accelerators. It’s hard to put the brakes on when you got two accelerators going. Okay, what if you have a third accelerator? All right, well, the third accelerator, the third like gas pedal that’s being pressed here happens in your brain.
And understand that glucose is one of your brain’s preferred fuel sources. The other one is ketones, which are a byproduct of fat burning. Okay, so ketones and glucose, your brain needs about half and half of these in order to function properly.
And so, you know, if you’re somebody that doesn’t eat sugar at all, you’re going to get all the glucose you need because your brain gets the glucose it needs from your liver, your liver will produce glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis. And it provides your brain with all the sugar that it needs to function properly.
Ketones get provided when you’re in a fasting state. So anytime you haven’t been eating for about eight hours, you’re burning some fat and you’re producing some ketones and you’re getting all the ketones that you need, we’re all producing ketones to some degree, as long as you’re burning some fat, right.
And this is a natural state for humans to be in, in this sort of fasted state where you’re producing some ketones, right so your brain needs both of these fuels. And so that is another driver that is causing your brain to crave more sugar because when you eat sugar, your brain sees this as oh, this is one of my preferred fuel sources.
And will increase your craving for more sugar and your brain doesn’t really know that too much sugar is bad for you. It just says, oh sugar, we want more of this. And so it turns on this process of craving. So just understand that sugar is one of the preferred fuels for your brain and just having that as a fact is it is a little bit of an accelerator of the craving for sugar.
Okay, so now we have three accelerators right, we have taste, we have an increase in blood sugar, and then we have this preferred fuel source. All three of these things drive our sugar cravings up, they all cause us to eat more sugar and eat more food. In general, people who eat more sugar will naturally want to eat more sugar, and they are prone to eat more food as well.
So if you’re trying to lose weight, and you’re eating sugar, then an increased appetite. And an increased appetite for sugar is going to make losing weight very challenging. So just understand this, right? So we have this car or human person here with three accelerators all going at the same time.
Really increasing our sugar cravings, making us want more and more sugar more and more food in general. So putting on the brakes, and slowing this car down is challenging, right. So these are the three physiological drivers. Okay, there’s a couple other ones I want to mention here, that make it pretty difficult to moderate sugar intake.
So the fourth accelerator, I’m going to call this, I’m going to lump the mental and emotional factors into this fourth accelerator here. So the first thing about the addictive qualities of sugar, this is like the mental cravings that we have for sugar.
So sugar increases dopamine, which makes us feel good. It also causes us to want to eat more sugar, which increases our dopamine even further, eventually, our dopamine baseline gets increased, meaning that you need more and more dopamine just to feel normal again.
So what’s going to get you to feel normal again? Well, eating more sugar, of course, and then this vicious cycle just continues, and it keeps pushing your dopamine levels up. So all the while you’re gaining weight, you’re feeling terrible, because you’re not getting the same effect from the sugar because you’ve increased your baseline, right.
So this is the same cycle that people go through with alcohol and drug addiction. And studies continue to show that sugar is just as addictive as some drugs like cocaine. So you have to understand that this is a powerful mental driver. There is a physiological process going on underneath the covers here, but understand that this is a very powerful mental driver that causes us to want to feel better.
Okay, and it’s the addictive quality of sugar. So just understand, we got to fight against this, these are all things that are kind of working against us here, okay. And don’t worry, I’m going to talk about some things we can do. And just know that there are some solutions here. Okay.
The other one is the emotional side of this. So this is where you use sugar as an emotional management tool or like a coping mechanism, right. And most people do this, most people have used food in some form or another as emotional, an emotional management tool.
Basically, you’ve just trained yourself for decades, that whenever you feel unwanted emotions, that you eat something like you have some chocolate and you’ll feel better. So just unlearning this is a big challenge in itself, just unlearning how to not do this, like not use sugar to manage your emotions can be challenging in itself.
But you really have to learn how to just deal with your emotions. So you know, the process looks like this, you have a difficult emotion, you eat sugar, and you feel a little better immediately. The problem with this though, is it doesn’t last.
There’s a rebound effect, where you actually feel worse, after that Sugar Rush wears off. And you haven’t addressed the emotional stuff that’s actually causing you to feel bad. So you eat more sugar to try to feel good again. And then again, we’re in this vicious cycle of like, not really dealing with our emotions, and we’re, you know, messing up our dopamine baseline and all these things.
So the answer is you’ve got to stop using sugar to manage your emotions. So when you do this, when people stop using sugar as an emotional management tool, then they’ve got to like deal with the emotions, they gotta like, feel bad. That means you’ve got to allow the emotion to be there without doing anything to dull it, or make it go away.
And this process is not comfortable. And it is not fun. But it is very, very powerful. And one of the most powerful things that you can do for yourself. So I want to encourage you to stop managing your emotions with sugar and start dealing with those feelings. Just feel the feelings, right, feel the feelings, let it be uncomfortable. Eventually they go away.
You know, nobody has felt a strong emotion forever. So it will go away. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes, sometimes it’s an hour, 24 hours, sometimes it takes a few days. But, you know, typically, there’s no emotion that’s going to last forever.
Think about the worst emotions you felt in your life. You know, years and years ago, that, you know, you’ve gotten over. And you haven’t even thought about that for a long time. Okay, so got to stop using sugar as an emotional management tool. So that’s the fourth accelerator that we have causing us to want more sugar and craving more sugar.
And the fifth one, I’m going to call these external forces. So what are these external forces, these are things that are outside of ourselves. One of them is the marketing that food companies do. And I kind of mentioned a little bit of this earlier when they sneak sugar into food, right.
So their whole goal, the food company’s goal is to sell more food. So they just want you to eat more food, so they can sell more food and make more money. That’s it. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know how all these processes work that I just talked about here.
They know all the physiological, mental and emotional drivers causing us to crave food. And they take advantage of all of them. They exploit all of these factors, so that you will eat as much of their junk food as possible.
So your job is to recognize this, know that it is happening, it’s not going to stop on its own. But you have to take control, you have to make better choices. Pretty much just stay away from packaged food, stay away from food with a marketing message behind it, pretty much I mean, read labels, you got to get really good at reading labels, right.
But if most of the food that you eat doesn’t have a label on it, you’re just eating a whole food, like real food that still looks like food, it’s not ground up, it’s not emulsified, it’s not ultra processed, it’s just like a strawberry, a egg, a piece of meat.
Like if you’re just eating eggs, and meat and fish and dairy and fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds and all this real food, then you don’t have to worry about any of this. And eating this way doesn’t really ever get boring in my opinion. It’s always fun and delicious, and will improve your health immediately.
So you don’t need all the marketing, you know, they’re gonna tell you that this food is gonna be, it’s gonna change your life, it’s so amazing. But just stay away from all that stuff. Stay away from all that. And you will grow to love eating simple and quote unquote boring foods. It’ll become your new normal.
And then the last part of this, like external forces, would be social pressure. This is like friends and family who, you know, they mean well, but they’ll say things like, oh, well, you know, I just want you to have a good time or, you know, you deserve to live a little, come on. It’s just, it’s okay. It’s just one donut, don’t worry about it.
You know, you deserve it, you’ve been good all week. You know, they want to make you a part of their crappy eating party. You know, they want to make you feel guilty for not eating the dessert that they made.
You know, they tell tell you stuff like you know what sugar is not the problem. You just have to cut your calories. All foods are okay, in moderation. Well, we know that’s not true. Everything I’ve talked about today tells us that, you know, eat not eating sugar in excess is very difficult. Right?
So there’s this social pressure, this peer pressure that will always be there, always gonna be a thing. It’s out of your control, like, you know what people think or say or do around you like you have no control over that. It’s up to you, though, how you respond to it. Okay.
The only thing you could control is your own thoughts, feelings and actions. You can’t control what other people think do or say. So you can’t control them. But you do have control over what you make all that mean about you or not, and how you respond to that.
So I always just smile at people and say like, you know what? You might be right. And when they tell me something like it’s okay, you should have a little or you know, sugar’s okay, you should just live it up.
Just say like, you know what? You might be right. And it just kind of shuts the conversation down right there. You know, it’s not aggressive. I’m telling the truth. I’m like, hey, you know what, you might be right. But at the same time, I’m kind of saying like, also you might be wrong. Okay. Little subtlety there.
But I like this phrase because it immediately diffuses the sugar pushers. Okay. So now we have five accelerators all going at the same time. Right we have taste we have an increase in blood sugar. We have our brain’s preferred fuel source, we’ve got an addictive quality of sugar, we’ve got using sugar as an emotional management tool. We have marketing messages, we have social pressure.
All this can make moderating sugar extremely difficult, right? Do you understand now why putting the brakes on sugar is so hard, you’ve got five accelerators all going at the same time. Okay? But just understanding all of this should help you.
Understanding all of this should help you to start making better choices around food for yourself. And I’m not saying that sugar is bad, or that you should stop eating sugar altogether. You know, listen, life is for living, you should enjoy some foods every now and then. I enjoy a little dark chocolate here and there.
What did I eat recently, I had a piece of cake recently. Which was not really all that good. I’m not a big fan of cake, to be honest with you. Cheesecake on the other hand, love, love, love me some cheesecake. But you have to understand that the cards are stacked against us when it comes to moderating sugar intake.
Sugar is powerful. It’s a powerful substance. Is it a drug man, that’s just let’s just say it’s like a drug. Right? It has the same effect on our bodies and our brains, right? So be armed with this information so you can make better choices around food in your life and around sugar, especially a few suggestions.
Try to avoid the hyper palatable foods. So these are the foods that are overly amazing, right stick to eating whole foods. Stay away from packaged foods. If you’re going to eat food with a package, read the label carefully. Watch out for hidden sugars. Sugar comes in many, many names. I think there’s like 96 different names that they use for sugar in packaging. And they do this to confuse us. They do it so they can hide the sugar.
So understand those 96 names for sugar, and be on the lookout for them. Start learning how to deal with your emotions. Without using sugar to numb yourself to your emotions. Just feel your feelings, right. Learn how to say no to the social pressures around sugar, the peer pressure that you get from others.
And maybe one thing that you can do that tends to help people just kind of reset their brain and their body which is to just take a break from eating sugar, maybe 30 days. 30 days away from sugar can reset your dopamine levels. It can help you to get rid of the cravings that you have for sugar. It can do wonders for you physically, get you burning fat again, and helps with mental clarity. It’ll help with your emotions because now you’ve learned how to start dealing with your emotions.
So maybe a break is an order of always if you want help with any of this stuff, reach out I got you okay. That’s all I got for you today here. I hope you got something out of this episode. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
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 …
Continue Reading about 68. Our Complicated Relationship With Food →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 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.
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The only things you have control over in this world are your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. No matter how hard you try, you cannot control what other people think, how they feel, or what they …
Continue Reading about 48. Think, Feel, and Act With Purpose →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 48 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. How are you doing today? I am doing fantastic. Today I want to talk about how to think, feel and act with purpose. So we’re still talking about our Running Lean manifesto, the principles that we choose to live our life by here in the Running Lean community.
And here’s something interesting, the only things you have control over in this world are your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. No matter how hard you try, you cannot control what other people think, you cannot control how they feel, and you cannot control what they do. No matter how hard you try.
The problem is that most people don’t understand how all this works. Most people just feel terrible all the time. And they blame it on other people. They blame it on the outside circumstances, they blame it on everything and everyone except for it themselves.
But here’s the thing, if you want anything different in your life, anything different than what you already have, you have to look at what is actually creating those results in your life. If you’re getting good results or bad results in your life, whatever it is you’re getting, it’s always been created by your own thoughts, feelings and actions.
For example, losing weight and keeping it off. It requires that you learn how to think, feel, and act with purpose. So don’t worry, I’m gonna explain how all of this works today here on the podcast, so that you can start applying this to your own life so you can start getting the results that you really want.
But first, come check us out on Facebook, we have this amazing community of runners called the Running Lean community. It is a supportive group, energetic group and encouraging group of runners. It goes hand in hand with the podcast, we got this big challenge that we just started on Thanksgiving Day.
And it’s called running through the holidays, it’s not too late for you to get in on the action. Just come and join us. What we’re doing is we’re running at least a mile a day, every day from Thanksgiving Day, through New Year’s Day. Running is an amazing stress reliever. And who doesn’t want a stress reliever this time of the year? We could all use a little reduction in stress.
So come check us out the Running Lean community on Facebook, join us for the running through the holidays challenge is going to be fun, we are all doing it together. We’re challenging ourselves to show up every day and run at least a mile from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day. It’ll be fun, come check it out.
Okay, like I said, we are working our way through the Running Lean manifesto. And today I want to talk about, think, feel and act with purpose. So remember the Running Lean manifesto, this is a set of guiding principles that we can live our life by. And if you adopt these principles into your life, if you use these principles as your north star, then you can have an amazing life.
That’s it. It’s that simple. Just do what I say. You can have an amazing life. It really is that simple. It’s not easy. It’s simple. But so today we’re talking about how to think, feel and act with purpose because most of us don’t understand that we can do this and that this is an option for us.
I think this is absolutely life changing. This one principle alone has changed my life more than anything else I have done in my life like this has changed so much for me. And I’m gonna get into why and how this works and everything in just a minute.
But I just want you to know that of all the principles I’ve been talking about here. If you just adopt this one principle, I guarantee you that you will start getting different, more positive results in your life, like your life will continue to get infinitely better if you adopt this one principle and if you practice it and if you get good at it, okay. And the principle is to think, feel and act with purpose. If you get good at doing that, you’re unstoppable, you become super powerful.
So here’s how this works. Here, I’m gonna break this down a little bit for you here. Most people live their life, as if life is just happening to them. Like they have no control, like they are living at the effect of other people and other circumstances. They have no control over their thoughts. It feels their thoughts feel automatic, they have no control over their emotions, their feelings feel automatic.
And a lot of times they feel like they don’t even have control over what they do. So a lot of people will say, I don’t even know I just started eating all the Oreos, it’s like, no, you know, you chose to do that, like you actually have control over that. But they feel like they have no self control.
So for most people, their thoughts, feelings and actions feel out of control, like they are not in control of those things. Most people feel like they can’t get what they want. And so they blame everything but themselves. They blame other people, or circumstances, they have reasons, they have stories, they have excuses for why things just don’t go their way, or why they can’t stick to their diet plan or why they can’t stick to their running schedule.
Most people just think if they could control all these things outside of themselves, if people would just do what I think they should do, if work wasn’t so stressful all the time. You know, if everything around me would just like fall into place, then I could feel good about myself, then I could get the results that I want.
And most people live their whole lives this way, trying to manipulate control, change everything but themselves. And it’s frustrating, because it doesn’t work. The only thing this does is it causes you to feel terrible, all the time. If you try to spend your whole life trying to controlling the uncontrollable, the things that you absolutely cannot control.
If you spend your whole life trying to manipulate and control those things, you are just going to spend your whole life feeling miserable. Right, the only things you can control are your own thoughts, feelings and actions. That’s it, you cannot control anything else, period. End of story.
When you accept this, when you accept this universal truth it is incredibly freeing because it changes everything. It changes how you see things, it changes how you think about things, it changes how you feel about things, changes what you do, and it absolutely will change the results that you get in your life.
It changes how you experience other people, and how you experience everything that happens in the world around you. When you learn how to take control of your own thoughts, feelings and actions, anything becomes possible for you, there’s nothing that you can’t do. There’s nothing that you aren’t willing to experience.
So I’ve talked about this before, but I want to break this down a little bit for you. So that we have a good understanding of the foundation of how this all works. So we have these things that happen in our life. We call these things circumstances, circumstances, things that happen in our life are always, always neutral.
Nothing can happen in your life, and have any kind of meaning to you until you assign meaning to it. Nothing happens in the world that affects you unless you first have a thought about it. Circumstances: the things that are happening outside of you, you know, stuff your boss says at work, stuff your spouse says to you, what the kids are doing.
None of that stuff means anything until you have a thought about it until you assign meaning to it. Your circumstances are always neutral. They don’t mean anything until you tell yourself a story about what this thing that’s happening, what that means to you, okay? This is very important to understand.
Your circumstances are always 100% of the time neutral until you have a thought about it. Okay, now, once you have a thought about something, then that thing has meaning for you. You know, if your spouse speaks to you, and says some words to you that cause you to feel, you know, upset or whatever. And then you’re assigning meaning to what those words mean to you, okay?
But you know, the circumstances that this person is just saying words, okay? But once you have a thought, then this thing has meaning to you. Your thoughts are just sentences that you’re saying in your mind about something.
That’s it, we have like 60,000 thoughts a day. So basically, you’re saying like 60,000 sentences to yourself, in your mind over and over again. So your thoughts about your circumstances, you’re gonna have all kinds of thoughts about what’s going on in your life. We do we think about the past, we think about the future, we think about what’s happening right now.
We are cars, our minds are constantly racing, we constantly have all these thoughts. And they are always your thoughts. Your thoughts are based on your own experiences, your own beliefs, your past experiences, your values, your model of the world, we all see the world differently based on our beliefs, past experiences, our own values, all that stuff.
We all create our own version of reality, if you will. So your thoughts about a circumstance might be different than somebody else’s. Which is the truth? Is it yours or theirs? I love this example of two people standing at the ocean, you know, the waves are crashing, and they’re both standing on the beach, and they’re looking over the ocean.
And one person looks at the ocean, and it fills them with fear. Because this person had a near drowning accident, when they were a child, they almost drowned in the ocean. And so the ocean is a dangerous place to them, the ocean brings a feeling of dread and fear.
The person standing next to this person surfs every day and loves the ocean, it’s there. It’s the most magical place for them, it’s where they feel the most alive. So there’s these two examples of two different people experiencing the exact same thing: the ocean is neutral.
But for one, it has a completely different meaning. The ocean is a dangerous, terrible place and should be avoided at all costs. And for the other person experiencing the exact same ocean. It is beautiful, magical, and fills them with delight, and should be utilized every single day and shouldn’t be experienced every single day.
So this is how we each have our own model of the world, we each have our own version of reality. So your thoughts about a circumstance will be different than others. So which is true, yours or theirs? Well, both, both are true for them. And neither one is true. There isn’t one universal truth.
So if you believe it, then it’s true for you. So if you really believe something, if you really believe the ocean is dangerous, then that is going to be your truth. That is what’s true for you. If this other person believes with their whole heart that the ocean is amazing and enjoys it, then that’s what they’re going to believe. And that’s what’s true for them. Okay.
So this is just our thoughts. We have circumstances that happen in our life, and they don’t mean anything really until we assign meaning to them. Okay? Now, once we have thoughts about our circumstances, we will typically get an emotion based on those thoughts.
So your thoughts cause your feelings, your thoughts cause you to experience an emotion, always, you cannot experience an emotion without a thought first, every emotion you feel is first created by a thought in your mind. So you think a thought and then you feel something, you think a thought in your mind, and then you feel it in your body.
That’s where we experience our emotions, we feel them in our body. So you don’t feel something without a thought about it. You might experience something you have a quick thought about and then you have this emotion, it happens very quickly. You think it’s like automatic, you think it’s the circumstance outside of you that’s causing this emotional response. But it’s really a thought in your head.
It’s always a thought in your head that’s causing your emotional response. It’s never what that person is saying or doing or anything else like that. It’s always a thought about it. This is really critical to understand because you want to catch yourself when you have an emotion.
When you start to feel like a negative emotion. Like let’s say you’re feeling stress. quickly ask yourself, why am I feeling this? What is the thought that I’m having that’s causing me to feel this way? And just start to create some awareness around that. I’ll talk more about that in just a minute about what we can do to start to change some of these thoughts and feelings that we have, okay?
So circumstances in our life are always neutral. They don’t mean anything until we assign meaning to them. And we do that by a thought we have a thought about something. And those thoughts cause us to feel an emotion. Now our feelings, our emotions drive our actions, we always take actions based on our emotional state.
You know, if we feel motivated, we’ll probably do this thing. If we feel frustrated, we’re probably gonna do something different. We’re gonna do this thing over here. You know, if you find yourself staying in the kitchen, binge eating Oreos, and you can’t figure out how it happened.
Know that it’s because you had some thoughts and feelings. And those thoughts and feelings are causing you to take the action of binging on Oreos, okay? It wasn’t what happened at work. It wasn’t what your spouse said to you that caused you to eat Oreos, it’s because you had thoughts and feelings about what your spouse said, or you had thoughts and things about what happened at work.
Okay, the action that you take standing there eating Oreos, might feel totally out of your control. Like it’s just happening, unconsciously. But the truth is, it’s always under your control, you just haven’t learned how to take back the control, you just haven’t learned to recognize what’s actually happening.
And this is so crucial to all this thought work is to have awareness of what’s happening, okay? Because it’s not your circumstances causing you to feel this way. It’s not, it’s not the stress at work. It’s not what’s happening at work that’s causing you to binge eat. It’s your thoughts and feelings about work.
So when you take action, you get results, every time you get some kind of result in your life, it’s because of some actions that you’re taking, okay. And if you’re taking actions based on positive emotions, you know, you’re taking actions that are probably in alignment with your goals, like sticking to your food plan, you’re sticking to your running schedule. So no matter what happens, like you’re probably going to crush those goals, because you’re, you’re sticking to those things no matter what.
But if you constantly take action from a place of negative emotion, you know, if you’re always feeling frustrated and stressed out, you’re probably going to take different actions or no action, you know, you might just go sit on the couch watching Netflix instead of run, you might just say screw it and eat all the Oreos, instead of sticking to your food plan.
Those actions you’re taking, the things you’re doing, the behaviors you’re engaging in, you’re doing because of how you feel you’re doing it based on your emotional state, which is caused by your thoughts, right?
So a lot of times, we blame our results on our circumstances. I can’t lose weight, because I have this stressful job. You know, I can’t stick to my plan, because my spouse doesn’t support me. Those things are not true. You know, your spouse might say some things or do some things, but you have control over your thoughts about those things you have control over how you feel about those things.
And then what you do, the actions that you take or don’t take, okay? Circumstances are always neutral. Until we have a thought about it, our thoughts cause our feelings. Our feelings drive our actions. And it’s from taking actions that we get results or don’t get results. Okay, so that’s how this all works.
So any kind of result that you want in your life is basically created with a thought first, you have to have a thought about it. First, whether it’s a positive result or a negative result, it’s coming from your thoughts. So here’s an example of how this all works.
I want to I know, I’m kind of like talking about these concepts. And this may be foreign to you, you may have never heard of any of this stuff before. And I want to give you an example of what this looks like. So here’s a statement that I hear all the time, like literally every day I hear this from someone.
Work is stressful. And so I can’t stick to my food plan. Work is stressful. Well, in reality work does not cause you to feel stress. Okay, it’s your thoughts about work to cause you to feel stress. Stress is an emotion, right? That’s a feeling. It’s always caused by a thought.
So what is the circumstance? What happened at work, to cause you to feel stress or you know, to cause you to choose to feel stress? Oh, well, my boss only gave me two weeks to finish this big project. Okay, so that’s the circumstance, right? The boss gave me two weeks to finish a big project.
And, okay, well, what are your thoughts about that? Well, my thoughts are that she doesn’t support me, she doesn’t care about me, she should do things differently. These are all just thoughts. Right? About the circumstance “project is due in two weeks”.
We can all agree that that is true, but doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just those thoughts that cause you to feel stress, she doesn’t care about me, she doesn’t support me, she should do things differently. Right? That’s what’s causing you to feel stressed because you have thoughts about it.
And so what do you do when you feel stressed? You get home, and you eat a bunch of Oreos, because you just don’t feel like doing this work. Because you’re all stressed out, right? Now, here’s another way of looking at this, you might have somebody else on your team that says, oh, we only have to work two weeks to get this work done. Great. I work best on a short timeline, let’s do this.
So they might feel excited. Those thoughts like “I work best on a short timeline”, that would make them feel excited and motivated, to get the work to get cracking on this project. So that would fire them up, they would start taking action right away, they start checking off things off their task list, you know, they get motivated, and they just jump right in and start doing these things.
Same exact circumstance, you have two weeks to get this project done. Two different people with different thoughts, different feelings, different actions, different results. Okay. And I hear this so, so often, you know, work is really stressful. So I can’t stick to my food plan, you know, I have all this stress at work.
So when I get home, I just don’t feel like eating anything healthy. So instead, I just open up the pantry and start eating all the Oreos. So in your mind, stress at work is causing this thing you’re eating Oreos, like that’s what’s causing it. But in reality, you are causing the stress you’re feeling based on your own thoughts about work.
And because you’re feeling stressed out, you’re choosing an action, not in alignment with your goals, you’re choosing this action of binge eating Oreos. Based on that negative emotion, that negative emotion that you created with your thoughts.
You always take action based on how you feel. And if you always feel stressed out, you’re probably gonna do a lot of binge eating, you probably never lose weight. Those are the results you’re gonna get. If you’re always stressed out, it’s probably going to be very hard for you to lose weight, right, because you can be doing a lot of emotional eating.
But when you learn to take control of your thoughts and feelings and actions, when you can feel excited, and you can feel motivated, you’ll start to do things differently. You’ll want to stick to your plan, you’ll come home and eat a salad and a piece of salmon instead of the Oreos. And you’ll start to get the results that you want.
You know, you’ll keep losing weight. This whole concept, though, of thinking, feeling and acting with purpose, it’s not the norm. I get it like this is not something we’re taught. Can you imagine, though, if we taught this to our children, like how amazing would that be?
If I had learned this, I only learned this in the last couple of years. But if I had learned this 20, 30, 40 years ago, how much different my life would be. Because since I’ve learned this, my life has changed dramatically for the better.
But we go through our whole lives thinking that we can’t control our thoughts and feelings like all this stuff is just happening to us, right? You blame the results that you get on your external circumstances, whatever good results, bad results.
And we’re always living at the effect of our surroundings. We blame others, we have all kinds of excuses why things don’t work for us. We have these stories. And when you do this, you’re just giving away all your power. You become powerless. I want you to take back your power.
And you do this by taking control of your own thoughts, feelings and actions. Stop trying to manipulate and control other people and circumstances outside of your control. That does not work. I have tried this. Believe me it does not work.
I was always blaming other people for how I felt. I was always trying to control what other people were doing or saying or thinking so that like I could feel better about myself. You know, if my wife would say, if my wife would only say these things in this way, then I’d feel better. I’d like her more, I’d feel more confident or more secure in this relationship, you know, she’d only do things this way, then I’d feel more loving to her.
But since she’s not, then you know, I’m gonna hold back, my love. I was always trying to control her, manipulate her and change what she was doing. And you know what that got me? I felt miserable all the time, didn’t change, and she never changed, she’s not going to change, you can’t change other people.
I wish we could, that would be amazing, but we can’t. But when I finally accepted this, this universal truth, that I could not change anything else, that I could control my own thoughts, feelings and action, though, when I accepted this, I was free, I started to see everything in my life differently.
It was like seeing the matrix. Like for the first time in my life, I could, I could think, thoughts that would cause me to feel positive emotions. And I would take these positive actions based on that, and I would start getting these positive results, it was crazy.
You know, like, sticking to my eating plan got way easier. You know, I couldn’t lose weight. Until I got the mindset piece right. I finally started to lose weight when I understood that my emotional eating wasn’t caused by what other people were doing. Or my stress outside of me, that I was creating all of this with my own thoughts and feelings.
But I’ve started to feel more at peace, I still do, I still feel so much more at peace now, because I understand what’s happening in my mind. And I practice this every day, I’m not perfect at it. It’s a daily practice, I’m always aware that my thoughts create my feelings. And my feelings drive my actions.
I’m always, always always aware of that. Because here’s the thing, your thoughts create the reality that you’re living in everything that you have right now in your life, or everything that you don’t have, as a result of a thought it was first a thought, like, if you think I want to run a marathon, yeah, I can do that.
I want to do that. I’m going to run a marathon, that’s going to make you feel motivated, you’re going to train consistently, and then like, bam, you’re gonna cross the finish line. Result achieved, and you did it because you kept thinking, I can do it, I want to do that. I’m going to do that.
You know, your current weight. Whatever you weigh right now, is the direct result of your thinking. Well, if you keep thinking thoughts, like ‘I can’t lose weight, it never works for me, I’m always going to be this weight, I can’t do it. It’s too hard. It’s easier for other people, I always gain the weight back.’
If you keep thinking these thoughts over and over and over again, this is going to cause you to create an emotional state for yourself. You’re just going to feel terrible, frustrated, sad, dejected, you’re going to feel like a failure. You’re going to feel like you’re not good enough. And when you feel that way, what do you do?
You got it, you come home, and you eat a whole bag of Oreos, because that’s what feels good. And that’s, you know, why bother? And then when you do that, when you eat the Oreos, instead of eating what you know you should be eating, What results do you get, you get the exact results, you kept focusing on those thoughts.
You kept thinking over and over again, that’s what you get, it is hard. It doesn’t work for you. You can’t lose the weight, you always gain the weight back. You can’t do it, it doesn’t work. So what I want you to do, is I want you to just start being aware of your thoughts.
Anytime you experience an emotion anytime you experience a negative emotion, so you start to feel stressed out or bored or frustrated, lonely, sad, ashamed, you know, angry. Whatever emotion you’re experiencing, that should be an alarm that goes off and and you want to look at your thoughts.
What is the thought that’s causing me to feel this emotion? Okay, that’s step one. Be aware of your thoughts, what thoughts are you habitually thinking? And then notice that those thoughts are causing these emotions in you, okay? When you feel that way, when you feel that emotion, what do you want to do? What do you do or what do you not do? What actions are you taking or not taking?
Because instead of reacting to the world around you, I want you to respond thoughtfully with intention with purpose. Awareness is the key though. You have to begin to think, with purpose, with intention that will help you to feel with purpose and intention. And then you will act with purpose and intention.
And when you’re acting with purpose and intention, that’s when you start to get the results that you want in your life, you can become super powerful. You can get anything you want, honestly. So whether you know it or not, you are always creating the results that you’re getting in your life. Right now.
You’re always creating results with your thoughts, feelings and actions. They may not be the results that you want, but you’re creating them. Negative thoughts, feelings and actions will produce negative results. Positive thoughts, feelings and actions will produce positive results.
So decide what you want. And then create it on purpose. Begin to choose your thoughts with intention, begin to create your feelings, and begin to take action with purpose, think, feel and act with purpose. It’s a daily practice, but you can do it.
You got this, my friends. All right, join us in the Facebook group for the running through the holidays challenge we’re going to be running every single day, at least a mile. From Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day. We’re gonna run our way through the holidays and we’re going to feel good, we’re going to slide into 2021 Feeling damn good about ourselves. As always, lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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Next week is Thanksgiving and that marks the beginning of the holiday season here in the U.S. The holidays are a time to gather with loved ones, give thanks for all that we have, and of course, eat …
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 47 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about how to handle the holidays. Next week is Thanksgiving. And that marks the beginning of the official holiday season here in the US.
And the holidays are a time to gather with loved ones and give thanks for all that we have. And of course eat and drink ourselves into oblivion. Right? Okay, maybe that’s just me. So today, I want to offer some practical tips to help you handle the holidays. So you don’t roll into 2021 hating yourself and looking like Frosty the Snowman.
But first, if you are enjoying this podcast, please come check out our Facebook community. The Running Lean community on Facebook is a positive energetic, fun group of like minded runners who share goals and get through challenges together. I’ve got a big challenge that starts on Thanksgiving Day.
It’s called running through the holidays, we’re going to be running our way from Thanksgiving Day all the way through New Year’s Day, there’s going to be a lot of encouragement, a lot of support for each other. Listen, this can be a very stressful time of the year for a lot of people. And running is an amazing way to help relieve stress.
So we want to run our way through the holidays. So we can roll into 2021 Like a boss. Okay. So come check out the Facebook group, join us for the running through the holidays challenge, I’m going to be talking all about it, explaining how it works, what the quote unquote rules are, and all that stuff on Sunday. So come check us out love to have you in the group.
Okay, let’s talk about how we are going to handle the holidays. So most people, this is what happens when most people get to this time of the year. And they just don’t have any kind of plan for getting through the holidays in one piece, so to speak, okay. So this was always me, I would always roll into this time of the year and be like, it was kind of the off season.
So I might do a fall marathon. And so that would be like late October, early November, something like that. And then unrolling into this time of the year wouldn’t be running as much. And you think about how much time there is between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. It’s like 37 days. And those 37 days, it’s like hey, I’m going to go ahead and just do whatever the heck I feel like.
I’m going to eat whatever I want, drink whatever I want, whatever. And just party my face off and eat my face off for 37 straight days. So, you know there’d be holiday gatherings, a holiday family time, you know, shopping gift buying all this stuff, right? And I would just tell myself, hey, this is just, it’s the holidays. So I’m just gonna eat whatever I want. I deserve all this, I earned it. I’ve worked hard to share you know doing all this running. It’s the offseason, I’m just gonna let my hair down so to speak, and just eat whatever I feel like and we all do this.
Okay, this is a very common thing. A lot of people do this. No plan. Just feel like they can just do whatever they want. And then they roll into the new year and can’t understand why they gained five or 10 pounds.
And I did this like all the time and I couldn’t figure out why I keep doing this? Why do I always gateway this time of the year? And I just used this excuse. I used the holidays as an excuse to just stuff myself like a Thanksgiving turkey. You know, I got into this kind of mode, this end of the year where I was just like f it, I got into f it mode, okay?
It’s the holidays f it, it’s Thanksgiving Day f it, it’s the day after Thanksgiving f it, I deserve all this, f it. It’s, you know, two weeks before Christmas, like, I just keep saying f it, I was in f it mode. And you know what that’s gonna get you, when you’re, when you’re in f it mode, constantly, your whole attitude just kind of sucks.
And you’re just going to go off the rails. You know, if you’re trying to stick to some kind of food plan, you’re trying not to blow up like a Thanksgiving turkey, during the holidays, and you’re in f it mode all the time. That is a terrible combination, you won’t stick to your plan.
So that was me, I would do this every year. And then come January would be like, okay, now I’m going to start getting serious about this. But then I’m like, starting from a negative, you know, I’m starting from this place of like, well, now I gotta, I gotta lose the 10 pounds I gained here in the last couple of months.
And I also, you know, you know, maybe another 20 pounds over as I’m up 30 pounds now. So it just sets you up for disaster, it sets you up for failure, you know. And I want to tell you something, this is all normal. And it’s just your brain doing what it does. This is your, it’s your thinking, it’s the way you’re thinking and the way you’re feeling.
And you can change all of it. I’m going to offer some tips for how to get through the holidays here. But I just want you to understand this is very, very important to understand that your brain is always trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And when we get to this time of the year, we get very stressed out. And we don’t want to feel stressed out.
So we want to avoid that that kind of pain that we’re experiencing the pain of stress, the pain of having to you know, having family over or going to someone’s house, you know, and visiting with family or preparing all these meals or buying all these gifts, or whatever we have to do is time of the year.
It can be very stressful and cause a lot of stress and anxiety. And that’s perceived pain. And we want to avoid pain. That’s our kind of default, we want to avoid pain. We want to seek pleasure. And we go to things like food to do that. Okay, so this is just normal. This is the way your brain is kind of wired, okay, but you don’t have to just operate in default mode, though.
You don’t have to just, you know, succumb to these desires to eat all the crap and overeat and just binge out on sugar for 37 straight days. You don’t have to do that. Okay? I know. But you’re saying well, but it’s the holidays. So can’t we just live a little? You can. You can, you get to decide what you want to do.
But don’t go into this expecting that you’re going to like maintain your weight or lose five pounds with that kind of an attitude. Because if your expectations are, oh, I want to lose five pounds between now and the end of the year. But you eat like a maniac for 37 straight days, that’s not going to work. That’s not reality.
Okay, so just understand that your brain is there trying to protect you. And it’s trying to say, hey, we want to avoid this pain when avoiding stress eating makes us feel better. So let’s just do that. Let’s just eat all the things and just feel good now. But I want to drop a little bit of truth on you here.
Because when we talk about the holidays, and we talk about you know, we use the holidays as an excuse to overeat and to over consume and to binge out over drink all these things. What we’re actually talking about, how many holidays are there? There’s like, three holidays, right? There’s Thanksgiving Day, there’s Christmas, and there’s New Year’s Day.
Now you could actually argue that Christmas Eve might be a holiday or New Year’s Eve or something like that. So maybe four. Okay, and there might be a couple of parties in there. So maybe five, maybe six, we’re talking like five or six days out of 37 days. But what we’re saying is it’s the holidays, so I’m just going to eat and drink my way into oblivion and what?
No, we’re just talking about a handful of days here actually, and a handful of days that you can manage if you get your mind right. Okay. Your brain is always looking for an excuse to get what it wants. Your brain is always looking for an excuse to eat the sugar until you just give in. You missed out on sugar.
Sugar is like so addictive, you know, and your brain is gonna go, you know what, it’s the holidays, eat all the sugar, you’re gonna feel so good look at that plate of cookies over there, just eat all of them, you know? Good, that’s gonna feel good.
So just notice your brain is doing this, okay? And here’s the thing, I guarantee you that your brain is not thinking about eating a bunch of turkey, or green beans, your brain doesn’t go to this place of craving, you know, normal food. What I say is like normal food, okay?
You get fixated on pie. You get fixated on cookies, on sweet potato pie, on mashed potatoes, all the carbs, all the the alcohol, the sweet stuff, the sugar, that is what you’re thinking about. And I guarantee that that’s the kind of stuff that you will binge out on. If you don’t understand what’s happening. All those foods are super delicious. Yes, but they also make us feel good.
They release these chemicals in our body that makes us feel good. The more concentrated the carbohydrate is, the more good it feels, you know, and we love this. Even thinking about a pile of Christmas cookies right now. Just think about that. Really imagine them, smell them. Imagine what it would taste like, I guarantee you right now, you’re starting to get fixated on these cookies and your mouth is starting to water and you’re starting to crave these cookies like you started once you start thinking about them. It’s like I’ve got to have cookies now. I guarantee you that you’re doing that and I have to apologize for doing this to you.
But this is what our brains do, we start thinking about how amazing this is going to taste. And for me, it’s always like pecan pie with whipped cream. Oh my god, I’m starting to like salivate just thinking about pecan pie. It’s like, so decadent and so rich.
And when that sugar hits you, because that is just like pure sugar, right? Oh my god, it feels so good. And then so that’s just thinking about it, and we start to like, have these crazy cravings for it. But once you actually start eating it, you cannot stop. And that’s the other part of it.
So there’s this like mental fixation, there’s mental craving that we get. And then there’s this physical craving that we get once we start eating it, we cannot stop, we will binge out on pie and cake and pecan pie and apple pie and all this stuff.
Whereas you won’t do the same thing with like turkey, right? You’re not gonna like I just can’t wait to binge out on, I’m gonna eat the whole turkey myself. No, man, you can’t do that. You just can’t do it. Your body has these natural whatever you call it, the sensors, like there’s these sensors in your body that say stop eating, you’re full.
We don’t have those same sensors for carbohydrates, though. So once we start eating them, we cannot stop, that feels so good. And we don’t have these things that are telling our brain to stop eating them. Okay, so just understand that this is all what your brain is telling you but it’s not necessarily the truth.
Your brain might be telling you, you have to eat a whole pecan pie yourself. But that’s really not the truth. You don’t have to do that. And like I was saying, like you probably don’t get fixated on just eating something like turkey and green beans. You just don’t do that. Right?
But you can eat a lot of food a lot of like non carb type food and get pretty full but then you’ll still eat tons of pie. But if I were to tell you like when you’re full hey, eat a bunch more turkey. You’d be like no way I can’t. There’s no possible way I could eat any more turkey but I guarantee you, you can eat half a pie. At least I can.
I’m hoping you can relate to some of this because if this is just me, then I’m in trouble. No, I know we can all relate to this stuff. Here’s the other thing I have to make sure you understand and that I want to make sure I’m communicating this well. I am not saying you cannot enjoy Thanksgiving dinner. I am not saying you should not eat the pie. Like my friend Katie says, she says, eat the damn pie. And I love that. Because if that’s what you want to do, then you should do that.
If you’re eating your grandma’s famous pumpkin pie with whipped cream on it is going to bring you joy, and you want that to be a part of your Thanksgiving, then absolutely do that. But I just want you to do it in a way that’s intentional, I want you to do it in a way that you’ve, you’ve planned it, and that you feel good about your decision for eating that. And that you have your own back.
I don’t want you to say, you know what, I’m not eating any dessert, I’m not going to do it, I’m just, I’m off of sugar, I don’t want to do it, it’s gonna like really ruin everything for me, and then do it. And then just give in in the moment and do it because then you’re just going to feel like crap, and you’re gonna beat yourself up, you’re gonna feel guilty, and you and you’re just gonna, like hate yourself, you do not want to go through the holidays, hating yourself.
You don’t want to spend Thanksgiving dinner, thinking that you’re missing out on something good, and you can’t have anything that’s good. And you’re deprived and you can’t have certain things and woe is me, everybody else is enjoying themselves. And I can’t enjoy myself because that attitude sucks. And that’s just going to keep you feeling miserable. And that’s going to make you take terrible actions.
And you’re probably just going to give in, oh, you know what, screw it, I deserve this. So what I’m saying here is whatever you decide whether it’s, you know, I’m just not eating sugar, you could always bring your own like, sugar free dessert or something. That’s what I do. And I love it, love of it. And sometimes I just eat the sugar laden stuff too. And I love that.
But whatever you decide, do it with intention, go into it with a plan, and a purpose. And then stick to your plan. So we’re going to talk about that in just a minute. So I want you guys to enjoy the holidays. And I want you to do it in a way that is intentional, that feels good to you.
That’s honest, that’s authentic. And you’re not doing it in a way where you’re just beating yourself up for 37 straight days. Because that’s terrible. That’s just a terrible way to go through the holidays. Okay.
So here are some tips that I have for you for handling the holidays. So you don’t look like or feel like a stuffed turkey by the first of the year. So the first one is this, the first thing I want you to do is set your intention for the holidays.
How do you want to show up on January one? What is your vision for yourself? On January one, how do you want to feel about yourself? How do you want to look? Do you want to be the same as you are right now? Do you want to feel the same about yourself as you do right now? Maybe you want to get five pounds leaner? Or maybe you’re somebody that’s like you know, I’m okay gaining a few pounds.
Decide what you want to do now, set that intention for yourself now. Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to maintain weight? Or do you want to gain weight between now and the first of the year? Because the choice is yours. But decide now what you’re going to do and be honest with yourself.
Okay, so let’s say you want to lose weight, let’s say that’s your intention, I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to just continue sticking to my plan. And I’m going to try to keep losing weight. It might be, you know, a pound or two a week. So you know, I might lose, you know, five to 10 pounds.
And if that is your goal, and you’re all in on that goal, then awesome. Like, hats off to you like, awesome job. Just stick to it. Just do what you’ve been doing. Stick to your plan. So if you want to lose weight during the holidays, you can do that. It’s up to you. It just means that you’re going to have to get your mind right around some of these situations that you’re going to find yourself in.
You may not go all out on the deserts at Thanksgiving and Christmas and all this stuff. You may not be participating in the Christmas cookie bake-a-thon, if that’s something that would be challenging for you. Or you can do it and just know that you’re going to have these cravings and how to deal with them. And I talk to my clients all the time about how to deal with these kinds of cravings, and how to get through stuff like that.
Because, listen, we can’t always control our circumstances, but sometimes you can. So if you want to lose weight, you’re just gonna have to, like, stick to your plan, you’re gonna have to have the right mindset around it. And, and you can do that, but just go all in on that plan, okay?
What if you want to maintain weight during the holidays? So that might mean that you’re just gonna like, stay where you are. And that might mean you can have a few glasses of wine here and there, it might mean that you can have some exceptions to your plan, you can eat some pie here and there, you can eat the cookies here and there.
But it doesn’t mean going off the rails, it doesn’t mean like, really binging out on stuff, you know, you’re just going to continue kind of doing what you’ve been doing. But maybe you’re adding in a little bit more of the of the treats and the sugar and stuff like that. Maybe an extra helping of mashed potatoes with gravy, I love mashed potatoes, so good, isn’t it? Oh my gosh, like lots of butter in there and gravy.
And then let’s say you want to gain weight during the holidays. Now, you might think, who would want to do that? Well, if you’re the kind of person that’s like, you know what I want to really go all out and enjoy myself. I don’t mind if I gain five pounds during the holidays, if that’s what you want to do, again, go all in on that decision.
That might mean you drink more.It might mean you’re eating more and you’re participating in the cookie bake-a-thon. It means you’re like eating double desserts, you know, whatever it is you want to do. Go all in on that decision. Okay? Have your own back no matter what you decide, because there’s no right answer here.
It’s whatever you want to do for you, okay, but what happens is, most people say, I’m just going to like, I’m going to, I’m going to be really good this year, I’m not going to go off the rails, I’m going to stick to my plan, I’m going to keep losing weight, and then they they gain weight, and they can’t figure out why.
And they just didn’t go all in on their decision to lose, okay, so whatever you want to do lose, maintain gain, totally fine. Just be good with that decision. Have your own back and go all in on that. Okay, so that’s my first tip. Set your intention, decide what you want to do ahead of time, who do you want to show up as on January 1.
The second tip I have for you on how to handle the holidays is plan ahead and stick to your plan. This is like the most important thing you can do if you want to change anything in your life, but it’s so important when it comes to eating and losing weight. Or even you know, if you’re the kind of person who is doing something like maybe training for a half marathon or a marathon.
So what happens when you want to train for a marathon? You put together a training plan, you write it all down, you put it on your calendar, and then you do what when that day comes, you run those eight miles or those 16 miles or whatever it says on your calendar, right? That’s what it means to plan ahead, and then stick to your plan.
But when it comes to things like oh, I want to lose 40 pounds. And what that’s going to require is you changing what you eat, maybe when you eat. And instead of writing that down, and then working the plan and sticking to it. You’re just kind of like, oh, I’ll just kind of figure it out as I go. And it doesn’t work. And you’re like, oh, this, this diet doesn’t work or this eating plan doesn’t work?
No, it’s just that you just didn’t plan ahead and you didn’t stick to it. That’s all. It’s that simple. I know it’s simple. It’s not easy, but it’s that simple. So include in your plan, make sure you’re including in your plan, the stuff that you want to eat.
So let’s say you’re planning ahead for the holidays, right? And so you might work out a plan for a week at a time. You might write down in your journal or on a calendar, something like that. When you have holiday gatherings, parties, whatever it is. You have a written plan of what you’re going to do, when you’re going to eat, how much you’re going to eat on those occasions.
So you’re planning ahead, you’re using that prefrontal cortex of your brain that planning, cognitive part of your brain that’s responsible for thinking ahead and planning ahead. You want to use that part of your brain because you don’t want to use the primitive part of your brain into the make decisions in the moment because you typically make bad decisions in the moment.
So we plan ahead, we write down what we’re going to eat at least 24 hours in advance. So I know what I’m going to do tomorrow.
Right, this is a great, great tip, especially for things like Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, whatever it is, the day before Thanksgiving, make sure you know what you’re going to do for that day. And if your plan is to eat some pie, and eat the mashed potatoes, and you know, whatever, write it down, it’s totally fine.
Whatever you want to put on your plan is up to you. If you want to include a glass of wine, put that in there. Okay, just like with your running, plan it out ahead of time, and then stick to your plan. This is how you like, create good habits, this is how you build trust with yourself. This is how you build self confidence. If you plan ahead and you stick to your plan, you’re gonna feel so much better about yourself when you do it this way, as opposed to planning ahead and then just saying f it.
Because that’s the, you’re just gonna feel terrible about yourself, you let yourself down, you’re gonna feel guilty, you’re gonna beat yourself up, we don’t want to do that we want to feel good about ourselves, about ourselves and about our decisions. So have your own back, write, write down what you’re going to do, and then stick to that plan.
When it comes to food, remember, you know, it’s very compelling these foods, you know, especially he’s looking at that pile of Christmas cookies, or the table with the five different pies that you can eat after dinner, like it can be very compelling, and feel very urgent and feel like, you know, you get these intense cravings for that stuff in the moment.
But if you’ve planned ahead and said, I’m going to eat a small piece of pecan pie, and a small piece of pumpkin pie, and I’m going to be good with that, then do that. Stick to that and you’re gonna feel so much better about yourself. Okay. So that’s my second tip is to plan ahead, stick to your plan. And include the good stuff, include the stuff that you want to eat, the stuff that you love, if that’s what you want to do.
Tip number three is don’t show up at these holiday dinners, or meals, like starving and dehydrated. Because I’m going to tell you, if you show up feeling super hungry, hangry and super dehydrated, what you’re going to do is you’re going to as soon as you get there, you’re just going to be shoving food in your face and drinking whatever’s available to you.
Okay, so the suggestion is, for any kind of holiday event, to make sure you eat beforehand, like eat your regular breakfast or lunch, whatever you would normally do, do that. Make sure you’re getting good fats and protein, because that stuff kind of keeps you feeling full for a while.
And then when you show up at this event, you’re not going to feel like you got to eat your face off, you’re not going to feel like super dehydrated, drink plenty of water too, this is so important. Most people don’t drink enough water during holidays and stuff like that and family gatherings.
And what you end up doing is drinking a lot more alcohol and then when you’re drinking a lot of alcohol, you sort of lower your willpower and you start making bad decisions and that’s when f it mode gets activated and right.
So if you’re super thirsty, you tend to drink more alcohol. So if that’s something you want to avoid, my suggestion is to drink more water to make sure you’re just staying hydrated, okay? And whether or not you want to drink alcohol is totally fine. It’s up to you know, I don’t have any strong opinions either way.
Just know that as you drink more and you feel more drunk, you know you feel more relaxed, a little more loosey goosey. You get a little more loosey goosey with your eating plan and you tend to kind of get into that mode where you’re just like screw it, I deserve this, this is awesome. I’m enjoying myself. I’m just gonna eat whatever it’s fine.
So you’ve tended to make terrible decisions when you drink too much. So just make sure that you’re not coming to these events feeling super super hungry. Eat your normal breakfast or lunch and then when you do show up, you won’t be just, you know voraciously, digging into the piles of nuts and chips and all this other stuff, okay, so don’t show up super hungry or dehydrated.
Number four, and this one is so important. These are all important, but this one is one that we really have a hard time doing on a daily basis. But even more so during the holidays, especially Thanksgiving, and that is to don’t eat to discomfort. This was a big aha moment for me when I started losing weight.
Finally, for the last time, I learned that I am an overeater. I tend to eat a lot of food. And I always justify it because I’m a runner, hey, I run a lot, so I need to eat a lot more. But I would eat until I was uncomfortable, basically at every meal.
And at the holidays, it was way worse. I can remember Thanksgivings where I literally would stuf myself so much that I felt so miserable. I couldn’t even function after dinner. I just had to like go sit on the couch and just veg. And I felt terrible. I felt sick to my stomach. Is that how you want to go through the holidays? I say no.
There’s this comedian. And I don’t know who said this. But basically, he’s an overweight guy. And he’s like, “Yeah, I tend to overeat a lot. He’s like, the meal isn’t over when I’m full, the meal’s over when I hate myself.” And I think about this all the time, because that was true for me.
I would eat until I hated myself, I felt so bad about eating so much food. And I just don’t do that anymore. I’ve learned how to eat to a place where I’m comfortably full. And I use this tool with my clients called the hunger scale.
And it’s basically a scale of 0 to 10. How hungry are you? How full are you? And when you get to like a plus two plus three, on that fullness meter, then you just stop eating. So you’re kind of pleasantly full but not uncomfortable. Because as soon as you get uncomfortable, you’ve eaten too much.
Our bodies are not designed to eat that much food when you get uncomfortable. That’s because we have these sensors in our stomachs that sense. They’re like stretchers. Stretch sensors, they determine how much food we’re putting in our stomach. And when they get to a certain point, they say stop eating.
And I would not stop at that point, I would start to feel that uncomfortable. And I would just keep going and keep going and keep going. And that’s what made me hate myself, as it made me miserable. Okay, so I’m not talking about like, counting calories, or you know, tracking everything in an app or you don’t have to get that detailed with this kind of stuff.
You don’t have to get super diligent about counting everything that you eat or weighing your food or anything like that, because that can be very, very stressful for a lot of people. But I do suggest really getting in tune with how your body feels, how much food does your body actually need?
When do you start to feel full, and then don’t eat beyond that feeling. Because when you do, you’re eating too much. And if your goal is to maintain or lose weight during the holidays, but you keep overeating at every meal. You’re not going to recycle I’m just going to tell you right now.
And like I said, when I first started talking about this subject of not eating to discomfort, that was the game changer for me when I was able to start losing weight that I stopped eating to the point of making myself feel terrible. I stopped eating too are uncomfortable. I stopped eating to where I hated myself.
Okay, now I’m eating enough to where I feel satisfied. But I don’t feel uncomfortable. This is a game changer. I guarantee you. Okay, so do not eat till you feel miserable. That’s not healthy. It’s just not good for you.
And then my fifth tip is just to remember what the holidays are all about, and that they’re not all about the food. For me, the holidays are about giving thanks for everything good in my life, obviously especially Thanksgiving, right? But it’s a chance for me reflect on this past year, and all the things that I’m grateful for.
You know, the people in my life, the abundance that I have in my life, I’m so grateful for everything, for being able to sit here and do these podcasts and share this with you guys, for the Facebook group for my coaching clients, for my membership group, all these people that are changing their lives for the better because they’re changing their mindset.
They’re changing their diet, they’re changing their relationship with food, they’re changing their relationship with their bodies, and with running and all this stuff. And I get to do this with people, I get to help people. I’m so grateful for all this stuff. And these holidays are a time to celebrate our accomplishments over there.
It’s time to celebrate with family and with friends, it’s time to make connections, it’s time to be together and enjoy that feeling of kinship and togetherness. It’s time to share love, and laughter and have fun together and play games and make lasting memories together. 20 years from now, you’re not going to remember how many helpings of mashed potatoes you ate.
Unless you eat like 12 helpings and you’ll probably remember, but you’re always going to remember that time you spent with your family. Like I remember, honestly, like I remember so many Thanksgivings with my family sitting around the table when all of us were together.
And seeing my dad’s face and seeing him smile. And just looking around the table. And he was so grateful to have this amazing family. With these amazing kids. Especially me, I was really probably the most amazing of all. I’m just kidding.
But he just was like, would look around us in like, raise his glass and be like, I love all you, I’m so thankful for all of you. This is so amazing. You know, let’s all give thanks. And I just remember that connection in that family togetherness that we shared. And it was so amazing.
That’s what I remember, I don’t remember, you know how many pieces of pie I ate, or you know, my mom always made these amazing, this amazing Thanksgiving dinner and all the traditional stuff. And it was always great. But I remember laughing with my family.
I remember sitting around the table, and me and my brothers, we get going and my sister we just start laughing like crazy. That’s the kind of stuff that I remember. And my mom shaking her head and just going like you guys are terrible. Oh my gosh. We’d always kind of take things a little too far.
But that’s the stuff I remember. And it was so fun. Remember what the holidays are all about. Don’t focus so much on what you’re eating, or what you’re not eating, or what you get to eat or what you don’t get to eat because you get to decide all of that. Okay? So set your intentions.
Here’s, here’s our list of tips to get you through the holidays here. Set your intention, do you want to lose, maintain or gain weight it just go all in on that decision. Okay. Number two, plan ahead and stick to your plan. Just know what you’re going to do at least 24 hours in advance and stick to it. That’s the important part: sticking to it. Number three, don’t show up starving, don’t show up dehydrated. Eat a regular meal beforehand, make sure you’re drinking plenty of water. Number four, don’t eat so much that you’re miserable, you’re uncomfortable. And then number five, remember what the holidays are all about. Connection, togetherness. Make memories.
It doesn’t have to be all about the food. It can be a little bit about the food, but it doesn’t have to be the main focus. Okay. Those are my tips to help you get through the holidays. Come on over to the Running Lean community on Facebook because we’re going to do this amazing running challenge. We’re going to be running every day from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day.
And then I’m going to do some weekly coaching in the group to help you stay on track. We’re going to be talking about some goal setting for the new year. weight loss goals, setting running goals, all kinds of stuff. Cool. I cannot wait to see you guys there in the group.
And if I don’t talk to you beforehand, have an amazing Thanksgiving with your family and friends. And as always, lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
I think we can all agree that sugar is not good for us. And yet, there seems to be sugar hidden in just about everything we eat! And I’m not talking about the sugary cereals or the soft drinks - we …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 27 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about sugar. In fact, there’s sugar in everything. And I think we can all agree that sugar is not good for us, right? And yet, there seems to be sugar hidden in just about everything we eat.
And I’m not talking about the sugary cereals and the soft drinks, because we all know about that stuff. We all know there’s sugar added to all that right. The real problem, I think, is all the sugar hidden and foods that normally we wouldn’t think would have added sugar. From crackers to coffee drinks, pasta sauce to peanut butter, salad dressing, and salsa, you can find sugar virtually everywhere you look.
So why is this? Why do they have to add sugar to everything? And why is this such a big problem? In this episode, I’ll be answering all of those questions, and offer a few tips on how to avoid all that added sugar in your life. So this whole month we’re going to be talking about sugar is like sugar month, okay, or maybe we should call no sugar month.
But over the next few episodes, I’m going to be talking about the addictive nature of sugar, how to make the switch from sugar to fat as fuel for running, which is amazing, by the way, how you can possibly have a life without sugar like, oh, we’re gonna answer that question. A lot of people are like, how can I live my life without all the sugar?
So we just started the July, no sugar challenge over in the Facebook group. So the Facebook group is the Running Lean community on Facebook. And if you haven’t already checked it out, go to Facebook, just search for Running Lean community. And click the button that says join, ask to join, or whatever. It says join the group.
And then you can join us for the no sugar challenge if this is something that you’re interested in. So for the whole month of July, we’re kind of doing some extensive training on the topic around sugar, how to give up sugar, how to eat less of it. I’m answering questions like what am I supposed to eat now that I’m not eating blank, questions about fruit, about grains, and about alcohol. So we’re answering all those questions.
The best part is the community aspect of it. So when you do something like this, like when you take on a challenge, like stopping eating sugar, it is challenging, but it’s more fun and more supportive, and a lot easier to do with an encouraging group of people to do it with you. So when we’re all doing it together, we all support each other, it’s a lot easier.
In fact, here’s a comment from Tammy in the group. She said, “It feels great to have support and doing this with a group that makes me feel like this time I can make cutting sugar happen, which has felt like an impossible feat in the past. I’m thankful to have connected with Patrick and his group, we’ve got this.” Absolutely, Tammy.
And by the way, she’s a little bundle of positive energy. And I love that. But there’s lots of amazing people, just like Tammy in the group. So come check it out. So if you’re ready to get off the sugar wagon, and actually by the end of this episode you might be. Please join us in the Facebook group.
Remember, just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community. And it’s not too late, you haven’t missed anything we’ve just started. It’s the beginning of the month. So jump in, you can jump in any time seriously and join us and you’ll get a lot of great information. Okay. So we’ll see you over there in the Facebook group.
Okay, so today’s topic is all around how there’s sugar in everything. And I want to just kind of lay out why this is a problem. So what’s the problem with sugar? Like why are we so concerned about sugar? So here’s a few things that you might know already but I’m just going to go over kind of some of the issues around sugar.
Okay, so the way sugar works in our body is that sugar raises our blood, our blood sugar, okay, so anytime you eat sugar that gets turned into glucose on our body which raises As our blood sugar, and then insulin gets produced to bring the blood sugar down, anytime insulin goes up in our body, we start storing fat. So when insulin is consistently high, in our body, when our insulin levels are always really high, we are always storing fat, we can’t burn fat. Okay?
That is, that’s the biggest problem right there. In order to burn fat, or I’m sorry, in order to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And you can’t do that when insulin is high. So basically, if you want to lose weight, you got to stop eating sugar. It’s very hard to lose weight when you’re eating sugar in all its forms and I’m talking about, you know, sugar, fruit added sugar.
You know, a lot of fruits that are really high in sugar, and a lot of grains that turn into sugar and starchy vegetables, like white potatoes, or rice, those kinds of things will get turned into glucose and spike your blood sugar quite a bit. And so when that happens, you’re going to produce a lot of insulin. And you’re going to be in that fat storage mode.
And it’s really hard to get out of that, while you keep eating those kinds of foods. And here’s the thing. Obesity is up in this country over 30% in the last 30 or 40 years, like since the early 80s. And a lot of that has to do with how much sugar we’re consuming. Type Two Diabetes is up. High blood pressure, obesity, excess body fat around the waist, heart disease, stroke, even cancer.
In fact, according to the World Health Organization, as much as a 40% of cancer is diet related. 40% of cancer is related to diet. So, all of these things are kind of tied back to consuming sugar. Okay, so other side effects of eating sugar, other negative consequences of eating sugar. So when you consume sugar, your appetite actually increases.
You know, it releases these chemicals into your body, it produces certain hormones that block certain hormones, but it increases your appetite and you feel hungry all the time. And you never really quite feel full. Your body doesn’t really process sugar calories the same way it does, you know fat calories for instance, or protein.
So you feel full or you never feel full, you feel hungry all the time. And you end up craving more sugar. So you have this like sugar rush where you feel some energy but then you kind of crash from that you’ve all experienced this. I’m sure a lot of people do this in the afternoon, they’ll have lunch maybe you know some kappa Frappuccino, whatever they call it at Starbucks, you know, with all the, you know, sugar and the whipped cream and the caramel sauce and everything.
I mean, it’s amazing in the caffeine and it gives you this amazing rush but then you’re going to like crash hard after that you need a nap. I used to do that. So I’d be like, oh my I need to take a nap now. So and what happens is when you crash like that, the only thing it’s gonna bring you back up is what? Yeah, eat more sugar, because then you’ll have more energy again, right?
So anyway, you get these sugar cravings, these very powerful, uncontrollable cravings for more sugar. There’s mood swings that happen, you know that you can get very irritable from eating a lot of sugar. There’s lethargy, you know, you just feel a lack of motivation. And people say they feel more of a lack of motivation to exercise when they’re eating a lot of sugar.
And which actually kind of compounds the whole issue, right? So there’s all these negative side effects and all these negative consequences of eating sugar. And these should alone like what I just mentioned, should be enough for you to just say like, okay, maybe I should probably just stop eating sugar altogether, pretty much right?
But as a runner here, here’s a couple things I want to mention that really directly have to do with us as runners. So in general, runners carry around too much body fat. And the reason for this is that runners, most runners, are pretty much addicted to carbs and sugar. So, I mean, we rely on this for fuel. I’ve done it for years, you know, I just carved up all the time. Tons and tons of carbs, tons and tons of sugar.
The issue though is that that puts you into fat storage mode. And you’ll actually gain weight as a runner. And you think running is going to be the cure all for that and like counterbalance it, but it really doesn’t work. Because when you run a lot, you increase your appetite. When you run a lot and you increase your appetite, you tend to overcompensate by eating way more calories than you would had you had not been running all the time. So that actually kind of works against you.
And because we’re so addicted to carbs, we know we’re relying on this for fuel, especially if we’re doing any kind of long distance running, right? And when we do that, we have to have the carbs and we have to have the sugar all the time. And we can’t do a five mile run without a couple of energy gels, we can’t do a 15 mile run without a whole bunch of you know, energy gels and sports drinks and all this stuff, right.
And this causes a lot of GI issues for people I know a lot of people have a really hard time ingesting all these carbs, but they kind of forced themselves to do it, which causes a lot of GI distress call causes a lot of difficulty running actually, it’s kind of counterproductive for you actually, you tend to hit the wall faster, when you’re doing all these carbs, you kind of get burned out faster.
And so you can only burn so much sugar, so you only have so much sugar in your system that you can use for fuel at a time for a couple of hours, maybe at most, and then you have to keep resupplying that sugar. And when you do this, you’re constantly filling your belly with something that your body has to digest and something that you have to process.
And so all the blood and all the energy that you would want to be in your muscles and your legs, is being used to digest all this sugar, basically. So the alternative, though, is that you can use fat for fuel, all that body fat we have carrying around with us, you can run for days and days on your own body fat, okay, you don’t need to kind of replenish it the way you do sugar. You can run easier and farther when you become fat-adapted.
And so you can use your own body fat as fuel. And you know, one of the things that’s kind of cool about this is when you can get to the point where you become fat adapted and you are accessing your own body fat for fuel. Fat is a better fuel source than sugar. It’s not as easily accessible.
And that’s why you’ve got to get all the sugar out of your system first in order for your body to start using the fat because it’s not used to using fat as fuel. Especially if you’re carrying around a little extra weight. If you’re 20, 30, 50 pounds overweight, your body is definitely not used to burning fat.
And so in order to access that fat, we got to get all the sugar out of our system first. But granted, yeah, a gram of sugar can produce four calories of energy. Whereas a gram of fat can produce nine calories of energy. Now what’s awesome about that is that you’re gonna get basically twice as much fuel from fat than you would from sugar.
And you have hundreds of thousands of calories of fat just hanging around on your body. Even if you’re a pretty lean runner, you have so much fuel on board that you really don’t need to even like bring fuel with you on long runs I’ve done.
I did a 50K a couple of years ago, I did a couple of 50Ks, where I just brought some almond butter as fuel, so just some fat little protein and was doing some electrolyte drinks. So you definitely want to keep your salt and your electrolytes in. But you don’t need all this sugar and stuff. And I gotta tell you, those were a couple of the best really long runs I’ve ever done. I just felt amazing the whole time. Tons of energy.
I mean, it’s still hard, you know, running 30 miles is still hard, but it was way easier than the ones I did when I was sucking down all the energy gels and stuff like that. Okay. So those are some reasons why as runners, we might want to consider just getting rid of the sugar and becoming fat adapted.
Okay, so just think about that as I’m going through some of the stuff we’re talking about here and sugar, you know, and I get it the hard part is when we say like stop eating sugar in his runners. We’re like, nope, not doing that. It’s too hard. It’s too hard to give up. I love it. I love my sugar, and I get it 100%. I was a huge sugar addict completely addicted to sugar, grew up on carbs. And I’ve, I’ve changed my habits. And you can do it too.
But we’ve like been conditioned to love sugar, we’ve been conditioned to crave sugar. And that conditioning, it all kind of started back in the late 70s, early 80s, with the whole low fat diet craze, you know, they decided that fat was bad. And we needed to start eating a low fat diet, which is weird because we had survived as a human beings for a couple thousand years, just fine eating lots of saturated fat and animal products and butter, you know, and meat, and, you know, lard and then all of a sudden they’re like, nope, this does not good for us.
And it’s like, huh, nobody really questioned it. And the science they had to back it up was marginal. There was very, it was, it wasn’t really good science. Alright, we know that now we know that the science was not good. We believed it. I mean, we’re doing the best we could with what we had available to us. But now we know that science was not very good.
And we know better now. So anyway, they were like stop eating fat. You know, start making foods lower and fat. And everybody’s like, cool. Well, we’ll get on board with the no fat thing. We’ll make everything low fat or no fat or nonfat. But what do we use instead? Because when we take all the fat out, the food doesn’t taste good anymore.
And the USDA was like sugar, just put sugar into sugars, fine, sugar’s not a problem, just start using that. And so the food industry was like, Cool, man, we can put sugar in everything. And so they started putting food in all kinds of herbs, starting putting sugar in all kinds of food to make it taste better. You remove the fat, the food tastes terrible. So they just started putting sugar in everything.
So they would start putting sugar in things like pasta sauce, and yogurt, and crackers, and granola and like healthy cereals, oatmeal and salsa and potato chips and processed meats and cheeses, juice, salad dressings, non dairy, milk, bread, all these things they started adding sugar to they never had put sugar in bread.
You know, prior to this vitamin water, hey, lots of sugar in their iced tea, beef jerky, sports drinks, energy bars, protein powder, even vitamins themselves are loaded with sugar. And these are all products that we normally wouldn’t assume would have any kind of added sugar. You know, we know about cookies, we know about ice cream, we know about the sugary cereals. But when it comes to like bread or crackers or yogurt, we think we’re eating something healthy.
And we’re not, a lot of times we’re not. And they hide the sugar because they know, you know, over the last 10-20 years, things have started to shift a little bit. Food labeling laws have changed. They have to list added sugar. And they have to list the ingredients. And then if you notice something they put the ingredients in the order of like how much of a certain substances in things. So if you look at a thing of salad dressing, let’s say let’s say it’s like olive oil based or something like that, which they really don’t make much olive oil based salad dressing, which is a crime, I’d pay for that. But they don’t. They use these cheap seed oils that are just toxic for us. Anyway, different topic. That’s a topic for another day.
But the labels have to list the ingredients and kind of the order. So if you had a salad dressing those olive oil based the first ingredient basically should be olive oil, right? And then they go from, you know, the most prominent to the least prominent. Well, sugar is very prominent in a lot of foods, but they don’t want you to know that.
So what they do is they call sugar, a bunch of different names and they listed in there six or seven times. So it kind of confuses us as to how much sugar is actually in a product. So instead of listing just sugar one time at the very beginning, and we would all look at that and go oh my gosh, there’s a lot of sugar in this thing.
They’ll use names like agave nectar, or maltodextrin or fruit juice. Hey, it’s got fruit juice in it sounds healthy, right? It’s just another name for sugar, or dextrose or barley malt. Barley malt, that sounds delicious. That sounds like what is that oatmeal? No, it’s just sugar.
All of these things sound innocent. They don’t they don’t sound anything like they would be sugar but they are. They’re just sugar. There’s actually something like 98 different names for sugar that they include in food labels. So you gotta be you got to know what you’re looking for. Have, you got to be an informed consumer? Okay.
Here’s the crazy thing though, if you went into the grocery store, and you removed all the products that contained added sugar, you’d be left with only around 20% of the products in the grocery store. 20%. So 80% of every food product, everything that you could possibly buy at the grocery store contains added sugar.
And most of it is highly processed, and most of it is hidden. You know, what you’re left with is things like meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, cheese, eggs, some full fat dairy products, like there’s, you know, there’s quite a bit left, but 20% of the store is what you’re left with. That’s crazy.
So here’s a here’s a good example. Like, let’s say you’re, you’re trying to eat healthy, right, and so you sit down, you have a breakfast, you’re like, I’m just gonna have a nice healthy breakfast, I’m gonna have a glass of apple juice and some granola and some fat free yogurt because this is healthy, right?
Well, in that little simple little breakfast that I just mentioned, there’s more than 20 teaspoons of sugar. Now, if I said to you, here, I just put 20 teaspoons of sugar in this glass, just drink this down just like, eat the sugar, you’d be like, no way. No way am I gonna eat that much sugar. But when we sit down with some apple juice and some low fat for yogurt, that’s exactly what we’re doing. If you want to good, if you want a really eye opening look into this, there’s a movie that I would recommend you watch. It’s called That Sugar Film. And you can watch it free on YouTube. Or if you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it there too. But he lays out just how much sugar is hidden in foods at the grocery store. And it is very, very eye opening. You’ll get some good visuals on exactly what I’m talking about here.
Here’s another issue. You know, I talked about the kind of addictive nature of sugar or how we’ve been conditioned to crave sugar. And one of the reasons is that scientists like food scientists over the last few decades have worked really hard to produce the food that creates the biggest desire and the biggest, like, feel good sensations within us that produces the best, like dopamine hit.
So when you eat some sugar, you get a little hit of dopamine, you get a little serotonin release, you know it feels good, right, you get all these chemicals going through your body, much like somebody gets when they do drugs, or drinks alcohol, it’s very similar kind of thing and effects the same area of the brain. So food scientists have created this thing they called the bliss point.
And they work really, really hard to combine the right kinds of ingredients to make our food hyper palatable, and to produce this incredibly unnatural high within us. So they’ve been doing this for decades. And we have consumers who are, you know, now conditioned to want that rush.
We kind of crave it and we kind of need it there’s a psychological addiction and there’s a physical addiction I’m gonna get into more of the addictive nature of of sugar in a in a upcoming episode here, but I just want you to understand that they’re doing this they know that this is a highly addictive substance and they’re kind of doing this on purpose. So it’s a little insidious, if you ask me, it’s a problem.
I was reading a book recently, and there was a quote in this book from a guy named Howard Moscowitz. And he’s an expert on consumer behavior and studies. The way the food industry creates these highly, hyper palatable foods and stuff like that and, and of the, of the science of creating foods. He said that, as he’s said, “If you can find that optimal point in a set of ingredients, you may be well on your way to converting that array of chemicals and physical substrates into a successful product.” Wow, an array of chemicals and physical substrates.
This is the way that the food industry looks at creating these hyper palatable foods for us. Yay. You know, they’ll just look at it as like how can we make this as addictive as possible? This pile of garbage we have here, how can we, like combine these ingredients in such a way that make people crave it like a drug. And they’re very successful at doing this. The food industry is very successful at this.
Okay, so here’s something I really want you to understand. And this is an important point, we actually really don’t need sugar to survive. We, as humans have lived without sugar without eating, you know, pasta sauce with added sugar and yogurt with that, and sugar. And even with a lot of fruit, you know, because the fruit we have today, here’s just so you understand, like, the fruit we have today is so different from the fruit that was available to us a couple thousand years ago, even a couple of hundred years ago, you know.
We’ve genetically modified our fruits, and made them super sweet, like a banana today is not what it was a couple hundred years ago. Apples, watermelon, all these things have been, you know, the sweetness factor has increased a thousand times over the years, you know, so the fruit we’re eating, that we are eating for centuries for millennia, was very different and did not contain the kind of sugar it does today.
But we’ve lived for you know, thousands of years without all this sugar, okay? Our bodies actually produces our own sugar, we produce all the sugar we need in our liver through a process called gluconeogenesis. And this is a process where our liver produces glucose, because we need some glucose to survive, but we don’t need to get it from externally. Okay.
There are some cultures out there that still today they don’t eat sugar at all. They don’t eat carbohydrates at all. They don’t even eat vegetables. You know, there’s like the Maasai tribe in Kenya, who, you know, subsist on mostly high, high fat, raw dairy, like milk and blood, animal blood. And they don’t eat vegetables or carbohydrates.
There’s the Inuit Eskimos that eat nothing but fish and you know, seal meat and blubber. So they survive on protein and fat mostly. And they don’t see vegetables. They don’t eat bread, they don’t eat pasta. You know, they don’t drink frappuccinos from Starbucks or whatever. And they’re fine. They’ve lived for thousands of years like this.
And here’s a couple of facts that I thought kind of blew my mind. So just a few 100 years ago, let’s go back to like, the 1700s. So not even like caveman days, just 1700s you know, Americans were consuming something like four pounds of sugar per year. And that’s naturally occurring sugar and fruits and grains and added sugar as well. Four pounds a year. It’s not bad, right?
Today, though. We as Americans consume over 150 pounds of sugar per year. This is mind blowing. That’s like three pounds of sugar a week. Again, this is total sugar. This includes naturally occurring sugar and fruits and grains and starches and things like that. But a lot of this is added sugar as well.
There’s some we consume something like 66 pounds of added sugar a year, which is a pound and a quarter a week of added sugar. But that is a lot, a lot of sugar. Okay. And here’s something else we have to understand that sugar is sugar, your body kind of treats sugar, all the same, they all raise insulin. They all put you into fat storage mode.
So if you’re if you’re eating grains, if you’re eating starchy vegetables, like you know, white potatoes, if you’re eating sugary fruits like bananas and apples, you know, your body is just like, Oh, they’re sugar and they kind of treat kind of treats that the same way. And I tell people like you know, if you have to choose between eating a chocolate chip cookie, and an apple, I would say, you know, obviously choose the apple, you know, you’re gonna get some good fiber.
There’s a little bit of you know, there’s about a 15-16 grams of sugar in there. And you know, it’ll, it’ll spike your blood sugar a little bit. You’ll get a little bit of an insulin rush and if you’re eating apples all day long, that would be a problem but every now and then, eat an apple. It’s totally fine.
You know, and if you’re one of those people that likes to have oatmeal with bananas, like I used this used to be my favorite morning thing. I used to eat oatmeal and bananas all the time, I loved a huge bowl of oatmeal. I even put some granola on there because granola is all healthy, right? This is all very healthy right? This was causing me a lot of issues, though, like I was just gaining weight, I could not lose the weight, I just couldn’t understand why either. Because sugar is kind of sugar.
And so just know that if you want to do the oatmeal, and bananas, if you want to keep eating all the fruit, it will kind of slow down your weight loss progress. More than likely, it’s gonna put you in a fat storage mode. And you might start gaining weight. And so it’s just something to be careful of, you know, you know, once you get to where you want to be when you get to your goal weight, you can always add in more fruits and some grains and things like that.
But at the beginning, like if you’re trying to get off sugar, just get off sugar, just stop eating it altogether. Okay, so how do you do that? Like, what is the answer here. And this is where I got a really easy tip for you. Are you ready? Here it is.
Eat real food. That’s it. I’m just like, so passionate about eating real food and kind of going back to eating the way our kind of recent ancestors ate. So this is eating just a lot of whole food, with saturated fats with good fatty meats and fish and fresh vegetables, and very little sugar and very little refined grains and not much fruit.
You know, so this is like my main focus of my programs. And the main focus of the work that I do with my clients is teaching them how to just go back to eating real food. One way you can do that is the simple first step is just kind of eliminate the packaged and processed food from your life.
You know, it actually makes your life much easier when you just get rid of all this packaged and processed food, you know, you got to get into a routine and you may have to prep a little bit ahead of time. But once you do this, life becomes easier for you actually.
So just stop buying food in packages. Okay, now I get it, there’s going to be some exceptions to that rule. And I have exceptions to that. I love my riced cauliflower. Because I use this as a substitute for rice, I make pizza crust out of it. It comes in a bag, it’s pre riced, all it contains is one ingredient: cauliflower. But it’s just simple. Like I don’t want to my half my day shredding cauliflower into rice, you know what I mean? But, so there’s, there’s obviously exceptions, you know, I want life to be easy for me for you to, but pretty much stay away from packaged food.
You know, if you do buy packaged food, though, read the labels carefully. Know what you’re looking at, you know, look for the hidden sugar, I’m actually posting a picture that I found that lists all these like 98 different terms for sugars, that would be something helpful for you to check out.
And I’ll put that in the show notes for this episode. So you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/27. Or I’ll post it in the Facebook groups, just join the Facebook group, the Running Lean community. So watch out for all that hidden sugar. So read your labels carefully. And then just shop the perimeter of the grocery store. You know, avoid those aisles with all the packaged foods in them, right just you know shop in the produce section.
Eat tons of edge, you know, shop in the meat and fish department, you know shop in the dairy section, get some real butter, like just go back to eating the way that our grandparents and their grandparents ate. And I guarantee you’re going to start to see a lot of significant changes in your weight in your mood, in your energy levels. And we just got to get off all these refined pseudo foods with all the added sugar in them, okay.
So I’m going to be continuing this conversation in the Facebook group over the Running Lean community on Facebook. Remember, we’re doing the July no sugar challenge we just got started. It’s not too late. Come join us grab a few friends to do it with you. It’s more fun with friends. And let’s do this. Let’s just, let’s stop eating sugar.
And let’s start using our own body fat for fuel. We can survive for days and days and days on our own body fat. And we’ll lose a bunch of weight and we’ll become those lean running machines that we want to want to be right. Awesome. All right, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of my friends and keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
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