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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Overeating

27. There’s Sugar in EVERYTHING!

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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 …

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Podcast Transcript

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.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

25. Why Diets Don’t Work

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There are more diets out there in the world right now (and more conflicting information about those diets) than I even care to think about. There also seems to be a common recurring theme about all of …

Continue Reading about 25. Why Diets Don’t Work →

Podcast Transcript

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 25 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. Today, I want to talk about why diets don’t work. Honestly, there are more diets out there in the world right now, and probably more conflicting information about all those diets than I can even think about.

But there’s one theme that I keep seeing, and it keeps repeating and keeps coming up over and over again. And that is that diets don’t work. Why is this? Why don’t diets work? Every one of them claims that they are the answer to your weight loss problems. And basically, every one of them fails to produce lasting results.

So today, I’m going to do a little bit of a deep dive into what I think are the five biggest reasons why diets don’t work. And I’m going to give you a few options for what you should focus on instead.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a Facebook group that I created and it goes hand in hand with this podcast. We take a deeper dive into these topics, you can ask questions, you can get answers. It’s totally free. If you listen to this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. Just go to Facebook and search for the Running Lean community. Pretty simple. Right?

Awesome. So why don’t diets work? What is going on here? So I’ve got five things I want to talk about today. And the first is this. The first thing that I think is why diets don’t work. Number one diets, they only address one thing, what you should or shouldn’t eat. So I have tried many, many different diets.

I did the vegetarian thing for a while and then I eventually moved to pescetarian. And then plant-based or vegan. I did keto paleo Adkins, I did something called TR E or time restricted eating, which is kind of a form of intermittent fasting. And then I did like a raw food diet, and actually started a raw food diet when I was training for a marathon, like just a couple of weeks before a marathon.

I was like, I’m gonna try this raw food diet. And it was terrible. I had really terrible results from doing that. And then there’s a lot of diets out there that I haven’t tried. There’s things like Jenny Craig, which is super popular. Weight Watchers is another super popular one.

And then, you know, like the Mediterranean diet, the South Beach Diet zone, which I had to look up what that even was. And I’m still not exactly sure what that entails. But the common thread among virtually every one of these diets is that they just focus on one thing, what you should or shouldn’t eat. So eat this. And not that, which is fine, I get it. It is important. It is one of the components of, you know, creating a healthy eating lifestyle, but it’s only one part of it. It’s not everything. It’s not the whole picture.

And I think when these diets focus on just telling you what you should and shouldn’t eat, we’re, you know, they’re really missing the ball, they’re really missing the point. Because if it was that easy, if it was as easy as just like telling people what they should and shouldn’t eat, then there would be no problem with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, all that stuff that we got going on here in this country.

Also, most of these diets are just kind of handing out bad advice. So they fall along the same lines as the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is a diet that is high in carbohydrates, and low in fat. And we know without a doubt, now, we know that this approach does not work. I mean, we started doing this back in the late 70s, early 80s.

And the country the US as a whole has been compliant you know we’ve reduced the amount of fat we eat, we’ve increased the amount of carbs we eat. And we as a nation keep getting, you know, fatter, and all these issues of heart disease, diabetes and obesity just keep increasing. So we know for a fact that this type of diet really doesn’t work. Okay?

But this is what a lot of these diets are putting out there. The Mediterranean diet, the Zone Diet Weight Watchers, Jenny, Greg, South Beach, a lot of these are just telling you to eat more grains, eat more carbs and limit the amount of fat that you take in, okay? It doesn’t work. And here’s something that is interesting.

Runners on the whole are really very carb dependent. Runners on the whole carry around too much body fat in general. And the reason for this is simple, that runners are addicted to carbs. So runners eat way more carbs, then even the average American.

Think about it like you got to fuel up for all those long runs, you know, so the day before, let’s do some carbo loading, you know, fettuccine alfredo, like Michael Scott training for the 5k or, you know, the the pre run meal of, you know, carbs or pancakes or whatever you like to do, and the gels, all the gels, and this constant sucking down of sports drinks, and energy bars.

And then there’s the post workout fuel and carbo loading that we do as well. I mean, I’ve done this gladly, too, because it’s just an excuse to eat as much, you know, as many pancakes and syrup is that one, you know, so I get it. But runners on the whole, eat way too much sugar and way too many carbs, which creates a chronic state in our bodies of fat storage mode. You know, because our insulin goes high insulin is a fat storage hormone.

And so we’re constantly storing fat. You know, when we run, especially when we’re training for long distance events, we can burn off some of that fat, but typically no, typically, we’re not losing weight during training like that. In fact, if you’re a long distance runner, and you’ve ever like, scaled back your running, like scaled back the intensity of your workouts, or maybe the mileage you’re doing per week or per month, you will start gaining weight pretty quickly.

I hear this all the time from runners. Oh, yeah, you know, I injured my foot. And so I had to take a couple weeks off and I gained like five pounds. It’s crazy, right? Because you are not, your body’s in this state of chronic fat storage mode. You’re not in fat burning mode, the only way you can lose weight is to burn fat. That’s that we all know that. Okay, but anyway, I went off on a little bit of a tangent there about runners and being addicted to carbs. But it’s important, I think it’s important for us to understand that.

So diets, they, you know, they only tell you what to eat, and they’re not addressing the stuff that’s going on, underneath all of that, which is the mental and emotional obsession that we have with food, you know, we’ve become a culture that has become addicted to food, we crave it like a drug, specially certain types of foods and it depends on you know, on the person. But there are a bunch of different foods out there.

Pizza is one that we crave, like a drug, you know, fast food like burgers and french fries, we crave like a drug. I used to crave Ben and Jerry’s ice cream like a drug. And the food scientists know this. They are taking advantage of this mental obsession that we have with food. So every time we eat something, we get a little bit of a hit of dopamine in our brain, you know, which makes us feel good.

It’s the same kind of response you get when you drink alcohol, or do drugs like cocaine, for instance, you get a little hit of dopamine and it feels good. And you’re like, ooh, that was good. I want more of that. But when you eat certain types of food foods that are high in sugar, especially like McDonald’s, french fries, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and french fries, just by the way, you know, it’s the fat content, but it’s also the starch that turns in no sugar.

So those kinds of things really give you a big hit of dopamine. And so your brain is like, whoa, we need more of that right now. It’s crazy. They’ve kind of created this culture of food addicts, you know? Which I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

I don’t I don’t I don’t I well, I do know I don’t think that’s good. It’s crazy, though. Like they even you’re gonna start to notice this now. driving around town, you’re gonna see giant billboards with pictures of food, they call this food porn, because it like, creates that same sort of release of dopamine in our brain, when we see a picture of like a close up picture of a juicy hamburger and french fries on a billboard, we get that same response in our body.

Like, if you were like looking at a picture of, of a naked person, you know, I mean, like, there’s a physiological response to that. Notice it. Next time, you’re driving around, and you see a billboard with like, you know, close up of some kind of food, pizza, you know, steaming or that close up of a burger or whatever. Notice what’s going on in your body, chances are, you’ll notice one thing especially which is like your mouth will start to water like Pavlov’s dog here, you know?

So notice that the next time you’re driving around, you see a billboard like that, what do you start to think about? What feelings do you have in your body? Are you like, salivating? Do you all of a sudden want that burger or whatever.

But we see these images all over the place, we see them posted on Instagram, and Facebook, and we see him on billboards, and we see him, you know, in magazines, and in commercials and all this stuff. And so we’re constantly bombarded. Our brains are bombarded with thoughts about this food, it’s creating a mental obsession for us.

Not only is the food being created and designed in a way, and they call this the bliss point, which is what the scientists create, with the right amount of sugar, fat, and salt, or whatever they use to create a food that makes us crave it the most. It creates the biggest dopamine hit in our brains, which makes us feel the best. I call it the bliss point, because it creates a sense of bliss in our body when we eat it.

They know this, they’re doing all of this on purpose, okay. So, in order to break out of this, you got to start breaking the pattern, and you got to work on your thoughts about food, you have to change the way you think about food. And we do this with my clients, we work on that mental obsession, and we work on the cravings. And one thing we do is like, anytime you have a craving, we just allow it to be there and don’t react to it.

So anytime you can not give into a craving, like let’s say you have some ice cream in your freezer, and you’re like, man, that ice cream would be really good right now. But if you don’t give into that craving, you can start training your brain to allow those cravings to be there without reacting to them without doing anything about them. It’s a process though, and it takes a while.

And you have to be okay with like feeling kind of uncomfortable for a little while. And that’s what a lot of people have a hard time with. Okay, we’re also a society that does a lot of emotional eating. Right, instead of feeling our feelings, we eat food, just like I was explaining, you know, you get uncomfortable when you have this craving for something, you just want to eat it, it’s the same thing when we have a negative emotion.

So when we have a negative emotion, like hurt, or anger, or stress or overwhelm, or you know, we’re lonely, or something like that, what we want to do is we want that feeling to go away right away, we want it to go away, like right now. And one way that we do that is with substances.

So we’ll grab alcohol, you drink some alcohol, and it’ll immediately make you feel good. So instead of feeling lonely, let’s say you drink some alcohol, and you’re going to your blood brain is going to be flooded with dopamine and adrenaline and it’s going to just feel amazing. And you kind of forget about the fact that you’re lonely, okay?

Because your body is flooded with these other feelings. So alcohol does that. Food does that the same exact way shopping for a lot of people. It gives them that same kind of sense of that feeling of like flooding your brain and body with dopamine. And there’s a variety of other things that people get into drugs and you know, sex and gambling and other things like that.

And here’s the thing, all of these things that are outside of us when we reach for something that’s outside of us to make us feel better inside it not only does it not work, so it doesn’t we’re not dealing with the emotion that we’re feeling. You know, if you’re feeling hurt or lonely. Eating is going to feel good, just because you know you’re getting that little hit of dopamine, but it’s not dealing with the fact that you’re feeling hurt or lonely, that emotion is still there.

So when the buzz of your food or alcohol or whatever it is wears off, you still have the negative emotion. In fact, you feel worse because now you’ve created, you’ve done something very negative, something with negative consequences, like you gain weight, or you have a hangover or whatever. And now you feel bad about doing that.

And so it’s kind of like, you even feel worse. So these things we think are helping or making us feel better actually make us feel worse. You know, we call this buffering when we’re using something external as a buffer between our ourselves and our feelings, you know, we want to dampen the emotions, so we put a buffer between the emotion and ourselves, the emotion doesn’t go away, you just, it just sort of numbs it a little bit, okay. And you feel something else instead.

So when you eat, you might feel full, which gives your brain you know, big hit of dopamine, it feels great. And you sort of forget about those other emotions for a little bit. But it doesn’t work for the long term, because you’re not dealing with the emotions. Okay, so if any of this is resonating with you, I just want you to know that you are perfectly normal. This happens to all of us, welcome to the human race.

So number one, diets only address one thing: they address what to eat or what not to eat, they don’t address any of this other stuff. They don’t address the mental obsession that we have with food, this unnatural craving that we have for food, they don’t address the emotional eating that we do. And most diets are kind of handing out bad advice about what to eat and what not to eat. Okay. All right. So that was number one. Diets are only talking about what to eat, what not to eat.

Number two, diets are very restrictive. Have you ever been on a diet and just wanted to punch somebody in the face? I know that I had, this is my experience. Like, I remember doing this calorie counting thing a couple years ago, because I was gaining weight I was running and I was gaining weight. And so I’m like, okay, I gotta start tracking all my calories, because that’s how you lose weight, right? You gotta like, eat fewer calories than you burn.

So I was like, you know, running extra miles every week and tracking every single mile I ran, every mile I walked, every step I took, every time I like, did, you know, weightlifting, I was tracking all these calories that I was burning. And I then had to put in how many calories I was was consuming. So I had to like, put in this app that I had this tracker app, I had to put in exactly how many calories I was consuming each day, which meant that every time I ate a bite of anything, I had to input it into this app, right?

Which at first was okay, it’s like, you know, cereal, you know, find the cereal in the database. And you know, they had a pretty good database of food in there, find the cereal. How much did I use? Probably a lot more than they say, as a serving whatever. Blueberries, I could find that. And that was fine. Like if I could just put in things like that.

But sometimes I would, I would make my own recipe or you know, make a casserole or something, right. And then you got to put every one of those items into this app to create the recipe then divided out by how many portions sizes, like the whole, the whole thing was so stressful for me.

And honestly, I got so stressed out about doing this, that it just made me like, you know, it kept me up at night, like, every time I ate something I had to like, do all this inputting into this app and do all this math and everything. And besides that, besides it being super stressful. I was hungry all the time because I was restricting calories. Okay. I was like hangry. I was hangry right, hungry and angry. Hangry and, and I wasn’t losing weight either. Right. So awesome. I’m angry, hungry, and then I couldn’t lose weight. So that’s amazing, right?

But why is this what is going on here? I had to figure out what’s happening here. So most diets are based on this concept of restrict and restriction. So typically, diets restrict fat or calories or both. So low fat or low calorie diets are probably the biggest culprits here. And they create an environment in our bodies of over hunger and over desire, they kind of do the opposite of what you would think they would do.

So what happens in your body is when you restrict calories, your body starts sending signals to your brain that you’re not getting enough food. And so you produce more ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, your appetite actually increases, because you’re restricting calories. So your body is always trying to maintain homeostasis, it wants to get back to neutral.

And so it says, like, Hey, we’re not getting enough food here, you need to feed us and so your, your body’s doing what’s supposed to, it’s increasing your appetite. But since you’re restricting calories, you’re not eating as much, you’re gonna have this like really massive disconnect from your brain, your body, your body is saying, like, feed me now.

But your brain is like, oh, no, we have to stick to 1000 calories a day, no more. And you’re gonna just feel miserable and hungry all the time. This is my experience, there’s a lot of what a lot of people experience with restrictive diets. It creates a, it just feels terrible, it creates a lot of inner turmoil.

You know, when you restrict food, especially foods that are high in fat say, you also create a sense of deprivation. So, you know, you start saying to yourself, like, I can’t eat this, I can’t eat that. Or maybe you go out to dinner with friends, and everybody’s eating, you know, wings, and pizza and french fries. And you’re like, I’ll just have a side salad, because you know, I’ve kind of had most of my calories for the day. And boy, that feels terrible, right? You get FOMO fear of missing out.

It’s like, there’s all this food here around you, and I can’t eat it, it just feels terrible. Okay, so number two diets don’t work because they are restrictive. And this restricting of calories, especially calories from fat leads to uncontrollable cravings. And almost inevitably will lead to non compliance, people will no longer comply with this kind of diet, because they just can’t do it, they can’t deal with those cravings, usually at least a binging and then just quitting the diet altogether.

And then what happens is, a lot of times people will go back on that kind of a diet, and then they will lose some weight, and then they will feel terrible, and then you can’t do it. And then they gain a bunch of weight back. And then they do that again. And that’s what we call like a yo-yo diet, where people are constantly restricting what they’re eating and like trying to white knuckle it, and then you know, quitting, because it’s so hard. And then, you know, getting a bunch of weight back and then doing it again. And that cycle just continues. It’s really not good for you, by the way.

So number three is that diets are complicated. You know, I was talking about that calorie tracking app, and I had to input everything I was eating. This was extremely complicated. You know, when you got to like, count every calorie in every macro, you know, how much protein, how much fat, how many carbs of everything you’re eating, oh my god, I was crazy.

When I did the keto diet for a while there and had some good results from that. But keto in general, to get your body into ketosis means you have to eat very, very few carbs. I think it’s like less than 50 a day or something like that. And it is very hard to do that for most people, especially since I was plant based at the time.

And so it was like, you know, you had to get most of your calories in the day from fat and you know, as eating a plant based diet, it’s kind of challenging unless you’re like chugging olive oil all day, you know, which I did not do that. But you know, I was eating a lot avocados. Anyway. So when I was doing the Keto thing, I had to track all these macros and actually created this Excel spreadsheet for calculating all this stuff.

How much protein was, you know, the protein, fat, carb ratio had to get it all straightened out every day. I had to keep track of every single morsel that I ate. And honestly, eating was no longer enjoyable for me. Eating wasn’t fun for me. It was a chore; it was like a math assignment. You know, diets they really think they’re making things simple for us but they really are very complicated.

You know, Weight Watchers has their points just eat so many points. Well, you got to like keep track of all your points. You can only buy food that has certain points. Jenny Craig, you’ve got to buy all their food you have to like only buy the food that they tell you to buy other diets have you supplement with all these shake mixes? And pills and probiotics and prebiotics and cleanse kits.

And, you know, all these things, and it just seems so overly complicated. Some diets have you, you gotta weigh all your food. So, you know, what do you have to bring a scale to the restaurant? So you can like weigh your food? I don’t know. They’re just very complicated. You know, and they’re trying to tell you, it’s simple. They’re trying to sell you on an idea that, Oh, it’s just simple. Just count on your points, or whatever.

But it really isn’t, you know, it isn’t simple. The reality is that diets are very complicated. And what happens is they create a lot of stress for us. You know, my experience has been, when I’ve had to, like input everything into an app, or you don’t track everything on an Excel spreadsheet, I got really stressed out about food.

And when I get stressed out, what do I do? Probably the same thing you do, I just want to eat to feel better. You know, and that’s not the goal of these diets. But far too often, it’s the outcome. You know, the diets are trying to be simple, but they are very complicated. And they and they create a lot of stress, and then you end up just binging. Okay, so that was number three. Diets are complicated.

Number four, diets are based on this one size fits all concept. Every diet out there is like we are the best one for everyone. Like everyone should be on this diet, everyone should be on the Zone diet, or the South Beach diet, or everyone should be plant based.

Like they can’t all be right, right? If everybody’s saying they’re the one, and there’s, you know, 60 diets out there, or 100, or however many, they can’t all be right. But I totally get this, I really, really do. So for around 10 years, I was plant based 100%. And I swore that this was the only way to go. And this is best for everyone I preached about being plant-based.

And I was you know, my thoughts, my understanding was that if everyone would just switch to eating plants, they would all be super healthy. And, and I really firmly believe this for a long time. The truth is, though, that we are all different. We are all different people, we all have different dietary needs, we all have different metabolic needs.

We all have, you know, our genes are slightly different. I don’t know a ton about genes. But I will say this, I’ve started really getting into this new science of ancestral eating. And this is where, you know, you want to focus on eating what your particular ancestors have evolved to eat over the last, you know, couple 1000 years.

You know, if your ancestors were Inuit Eskimos living in the Canadian Arctic, you’re gonna be, you know, very genetically different and thrive on a very different diet than if your ancestors like mine, you know, we’re from Ireland and Scotland, you know, or if your ancestors come from the plains of Africa, or from East Asia. So in all of these different parts of the world, people have been thriving for 1000s of years on different types of diets, different types of foods, some of them super high in fat, and super high in animal fat, and very few vegetables.

And some are kind of the opposite. Lots of rice, and lots of seafood and lots of vegetables and things like that. So really the truth of the matter is there isn’t one diet that’s best for everyone. But that’s not true. There is one, there is one diet, it’s that’s best for everyone. And that’s the one that works for you.

You know, like South Beach diet might work for you. But it might be terrible for somebody else. So what I teach, and what I would suggest that you start thinking about is choosing food that works for you, you know, choosing an eating protocol and I use this word protocol with my clients because it’s not a diet, it’s a it’s kind of a way of of eating that you can sustain over time.

So we choose a protocol that works for each person individually, and we figure it out together. So if you want to lose weight, eating a vegan diet or plant based totally fine, we can figure out a way to do that. If you want to do it as a carnivore or doing paleo or primal or, you know, whatever, fine vegetarian, fine, whatever pescatarian. We will make it work, you can lose weight on all kinds of different diets, okay? There’s not one size that fits for everyone. There’s not one diet that’s best for everyone out there.

Okay, there’s so many different factors involved here, you got to figure out what works best for you. Now, I will say one thing here. And this is my, my caveat, which is, any diet that’s high in sugar and carbohydrates will not work. Any diet that’s high in sugar, and refined carbohydrates especially, will keep you in a state of elevated insulin will keep you in this chronic state of fat storage mode in your body and you’re constantly going to gain weight, you’re going to you know, massively increase your chances for obesity, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, sugar and carbs.

Bad, okay, you absolutely cannot lose weight, while eating a diet that’s high in sugar and carbs. I don’t care what anybody says or what you believe, that’s just the facts. This is just science where our bodies work, okay. So you got to get your insulin down. That’s the only thing I would say about this. So there, there it is. Well, there isn’t one particular diet that works for everyone, we do know that there’s one thing that does not work for everyone, and that’s lots of sugar and carbs.

So choose foods that work for you, if you want to eat, you know, whatever, if you want to eat, you know, a plant based diet, do it. And you know, we can work on that we can, we can make it work for you. But just don’t assume that every one of these diets is going to work for everyone, because they don’t, you know, diets don’t work because they assume that what’s good for one is good for all there really is no one size fits all, when it comes to what food you should be eating.

So choose wisely, my friends. And then number five, and this is probably the most important factor in why diets don’t work. And that is the main concept of a diet, the whole idea of a diet is that it’s temporary, it’s a temporary thing. You know, when we think of a diet we think of as something we do for a short period of time, you know, I need to go on a diet to lose weight.

So most people think they can go on a diet for a few months, get to their goal weight, you know, lose the 20 or 30 or 50 pounds, and then go back to the way they were eating before. You know, eating the same stuff that got them to gain all that weight in the first place. Which makes no sense at all right? This is going back to that whole yo-yo dieting thing. You eat all this crappy food, you gain a bunch of weight, then you’re like, I need to go on a diet.

So you pick one of these diets. It works for a little bit, until it doesn’t, you gain all the weight back. And then you do it again. And this is really bad for you and really bad for your health. And you know, it sets you up for a lifetime of struggle and weight loss failure. And it sets you up for all kinds of things for stress.

For this over desire for food, you’re constantly thinking about and stressing out about food. And, you know, it’s because of all the other things I’ve mentioned here, you know that all the complications, all the restrictions of diets, the deprivation, we feel the cravings we experience is why people just can’t wait to just go back to what they were eating before. Because, frankly, diets kind of suck.

The whole idea that a diet is something that’s temporary, and we got to get rid of that idea. Instead of a diet I teach my clients like I said, how to create a protocol, a way of eating that you can do for the rest of your life. It doesn’t do you any good just to be able to do this temporarily. Just doesn’t work.

Whatever you choose to do, whatever kinds of food you choose to eat, when we talk about what foods you want to eat, and how often you want to eat, and your mindset around food and how you process your emotions. When we talk about taking this holistic approach to nutrition and health and feeling vibrant and thriving in our bodies. It’s not a diet, it’s a way of life.

You’ve got to create a whole new way of thinking about food. You got to change the way you feel about food. You need to change the way you feel about yourself. What I do with my clients is I help them to create a whole new relationship with food And with themselves. You know, if you’re struggling with a diet, yes, stop doing that. You need to create an eating plan that works for you protocol.

And once you get that dialed in, and you get the mindset, right, and you get your emotional state, right, you’ll be able to lose the weight, you’ll, it’s kind of magical, actually, the way it works is you kind of the fat starts coming off. And when you stick to it, it’s something you can do forever, you lose the weight, the fat starts coming off.

And it’s something you just you want to keep doing because it feels so good. And then one of the things that I really want to say here, because I think it’s important is that eating should be a joyous thing. We’ve, our whole culture is like, you know, we celebrate with food a lot of times and I don’t want you to stop doing that.

And so I encourage my clients when they’re creating their protocol to include things like birthdays and holidays like account for those kinds of days. And, and enjoy. You know, the wedding cake when you go to your best friend’s wedding. You know, if it’s your birthday, no one wants to eat a birthday salad, you know, so eat the birthday cake, it’s fine, just go back to what you were doing the next day. It’s not an excuse to just like, say, screw it and go back to eating all the sugar and carbs all the time. But every now and then, you know, eat the birthday cake, you know, and plan ahead for things like this.

But for the most part, what we do is we create a plan that involves eating the kinds of food that properly fuels your body, and keeps your body thriving and working optimally. You know, the food you eat should help your body to thrive. And it should be something that you can do forever.

So you have to change the mindset of like this diet as a temporary thing. And get into the mindset of how you fuel your body today. And how you fuel your body tomorrow is how you’re going to fuel your body a month from now or a year from now or for the rest of your life. So the biggest reason why diets don’t work is that it’s a temporary concept.

Instead, eat real food, food that encourages your body to thrive and live this vibrant, healthy, long life, something that you can do forever. Cool. Cool. We are going to be continuing this conversation in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So I’d love for you to join the group.

We’re talking about diets and what different kinds of diets people have tried and why they haven’t worked. I would love to hear about your personal experience with some kind of diet. Maybe something I mentioned, maybe something I didn’t mention. I know there’s a lot more diets out there. I’ve tried a lot of them. And obviously not all of them.

But why? What have you tried? And why didn’t work for you? That’s kind of what we’re talking about in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Just search for Running Lean community on facebook and join in the conversation. Well, that’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you as always and keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

22. Colin McGilvray on What It Takes to Hit a Big Weight Loss Goal

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I recently sat down to have a candid conversation with one of my favorite clients - my son Colin! Colin has struggled with his weight his whole life. He's always been the "big kid", and that hasn't …

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Podcast Transcript

Patrick McGilvray
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 22 of the running mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, Master Life Coach and weight loss coach for runners. And hey, if you’ve been dorking around with your weight your whole life, you need to stop doing that. You need to take action, you need to do something about it, your time has finally come.

I’ve got a weight loss masterclass that starts next Monday, June 1, it’s an intimate interactive six week class, where you will discover the real causes of your weight gain, you will learn how to recalibrate your hormones so that you stop overeating.

You will learn how to eliminate the uncontrollable cravings, urges and desires that you have around food, you will learn how to master a healthy mindset of eating, you will learn how to break the emotional eating habits. And you’ll be able to create the exact future that you’ve always wanted for yourself.

Here’s the thing, if you want to get in, you just need to enroll now, because enrollment closes Sunday the 31st at midnight, I only take about 10 people through the class at a time so that each person gets my personal attention, and the personal coaching that they need to succeed.

Just go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and get signed up. Let’s get you to your goal weight. You know one of the most appealing aspects of this class is the personal attention that you get. I run all the classes live on Zoom, where you get to ask questions as we go. You get personal coaching time with me. And I personally teach you exactly how to get your goal weight and walk you through it every step of the way.

And doing it as a group is amazing. Everybody loves that aspect of this, I know you’re ready to do something. So let’s do it. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. And let’s go. Okay, recently, I had this amazing conversation with one of my best clients, my new favorite client, who just also happens to be my son, Colin.

So a little backstory, Colin has kind of struggled with his weight for most of his life. He’s always been “the big kid”. And I know it’s not always easy to be looked at that way, especially when you’re in like middle school in high school. So we talked about all that we talked about, like what it was like to go through middle school in high school as the bigger kid.

And then we talked about why he finally reached out to me for help with his weight. Now as his dad, I always knew that I could help him but I never like forced my ideas onto him. I was wanting to call him to decide for himself what he wanted to do. And when he was ready for help. If you want it from me, that’s fine. If not, that’s fine, too. But he finally did come to me a few months ago. And we started working together.

And I started doing the coaching with him exactly the same as I do with any other client. Almost exactly like he maybe got a little bit more of my time and attention. But he’s my son, so whatever. But this is a really fun interview, I just wanted to share, I wanted him to share his experiences that he’s had through this process, because he’s had some amazing results so far.

So we talk about the challenges he’s encountered throughout the journey so far, how he’s been able to get through those challenges. We talk about what it’s like to lose a significant amount of weight. Because this will challenge anyone, it was challenging for him. But he knew he could do it.

And he knew he could get through those tough moments. And he did, and he talks about that. And then he talks about how he’s come out the other side. And he’s just got these amazing results. He looks better, he feels better. He’s more confident. And honestly, as a parent, this is all we want for our kids.

You know, we just want them to feel good about themselves. And he does. It’s so awesome to see this. I’m really proud of myself too, for being able to be a part of this journey of his. I know you will be inspired by Colin’s story. And it’s a story that’s still in the making. Like he’s made amazing progress toward his goal.

He wants to lose 100 pounds. He’s not there yet. But he’s getting there. He’s super motivated and inspired to get there and I have no doubt he’s going to do it. He has no doubt he’s going to do it. Why? Because he has the right attitude about it. And this is the difference between people who succeed at something like this than people who don’t, you know, getting to some huge goal, whatever that goal is, is all about developing the right mindset. It’s all your mindset. Mindset is everything.

And he has the absolute right mindset to do this. And this is why I’m so passionate about helping people get the same kinds of results. Because when you’re armed with that, right mindset, there’s nothing you can do. You’re like unstoppable. You can totally train your brain to do whatever you want. Lose 100 pounds, no problem, bring it on. Okay, let’s do this. I want you to hear this interview with my son, Colin. He’s like my new favorite client.

By the way, I think you’re gonna really get a lot out of this. So here’s my interview with Colin McGilvray.

Okay, so today, I’ve got something very special for you guys. I’m actually having a conversation with one of my best weight loss clients. who just happens to be my son, Colin McGilvray. Colin, how are you?

Colin McGilvray
Great. Thank you.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Thanks for coming on here. And having a conversation with me today. I just wanted to share your experience with people. I wanted people to hear your personal experience with kind of the work that we’ve been doing together, because you’ve had some pretty amazing results so far.

So we’re going to talk a little bit about your journey in the past. What’s it been like six, eight weeks now? Roughly?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, roughly.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, roughly, over the last two months, basically, of, of working on the mindset, the emotional piece, and then obviously, the physical piece of losing weight. So tell me like, just I know where you were, but like, for everybody else’s sake, like, let’s just share, like where you were when we started working together?

Colin McGilvray
Sure. So when we started working together, I was about 300 pounds. And I weighed in once we first started doing this, at 295. Really lethargic, basically no exercise. Very little energy. Really not in a good spot.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so how, how was that for you? Like, you’re the reason you wanted me to help you is because of why like, why did you reach out to me for help?

Colin McGilvray
I reached out because I wanted to change. I wanted it to be different. Other people in my life kind of hinted that I needed to change. There’s a lot of people I know in my life who were as big as I was and had serious health problems. And so I know that if I kept going on that route, I was gonna have some serious problems.

Patrick McGilvray
And how has it been for you? Because you’ve always been like a bigger kid, you know what I mean? Like you were born a bigger kid, you know what I mean? And so and that’s fine. But you know, how was it growing up for you? Like as a, you know, middle schooler and a teenager in high school? Or was that challenging for you being like the bigger kid?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, so I played sports when I was growing up. And I always knew I was the biggest kid. And I was a little slower than everybody else. I ran cross country, kind of, towards the slower side there as well. So I always knew I was bigger. It’s not something that was like hidden. I always realized it.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So how did that make you feel, though?

Colin McGilvray
It didn’t make me feel really good at all, like, on the wrestling team I was probably one of the one of the biggest kids there. And, you know, I knew it. And I was really self conscious about it.

Patrick McGilvray
So when you like came to me and was like, Dad, I think I need some help with this. Like, what was your thought about that? Like, what was your thought of what you wanted to do? Like, what did you want from this?

Colin McGilvray
I want, ultimately a better body. I don’t want to worry about having health problems. I want to look better. I want to, I want to feel better, I want to have more energy, I want to sleep better. I want to be able to go out and exercise and be able to climb a few flights of stairs and not be out of breath.

Patrick McGilvray
Was that kind of challenging for you exercising and stuff like that?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, for sure. You know, you get in a routine where maybe you go to the gym for two weeks and it kind of falls off.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And I would imagine that being overweight being, you know, roughly 100 pounds overweight right? Is probably challenging trying to get out there and exercise. And so you don’t feel like doing it because it’s so hard, which just kind of perpetuates the body image issues that you’re having. And the fact that you know, you just don’t feel good about yourself. Right?

Colin McGilvray
Definitely.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. All right, so we started working together. And how old are you now? Colin?

Colin McGilvray
I’m 21.

Patrick McGilvray
You’re so young, literally, and baby still. But Colin’s 21 and, you know, he’s gotten, you know, he’s, he got up to 300 pounds. And that’s, that was kind of a wake up call for him. Like he told me like, when I saw that number on the scale, like, what did that mean to you? When you saw that? Like, what did that feel like?

Colin McGilvray
Oh, I mean, the first time I was 300 pounds was like in high school, like, probably my junior year, and I fluctuated between like, 300-35, I’d go on a diet, get down to like the 270s. And then it would all come right back. So I mean, recently wasn’t the first time I’d seen that I’d gotten so used to seeing 300 pounds. And I would purposely not weigh myself, because I knew it was going to be well over 300 pounds.

Patrick McGilvray
Wow. And so like you were ready to finally do something about that. Right?

Colin McGilvray
Absolutely.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, that’s cool. So you and I kind of got on this plan, I started coaching you, we started talking about, you know, what you’re going to eat, what you’re not going to eat. And then we worked on some other things, like your mindset and stuff like that, and we’ll talk about that. And then, uh, but you know, walk me through what it was like, at the very beginning, like, how was the beginning of this program? Like when you and I started doing this, and I really, the biggest thing was like, I was like, you got to stop eating sugar and flour. Like, we got to get rid of the refined carbohydrates and the sugar. And so we eliminated that first, like, what was that like?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, honestly, when we first started it within the first few days, I was like, wow, what did I get myself into? This is difficult. It started out pretty, pretty rough, because I would drink a lot of Mountain Dew every day. Yeah, like 52 ounces of Mountain Dew, which is a lot. And so tons of fast food, fried chicken, fried anything, McDonald’s. And so it was almost daily. So is a big, huge lifestyle adjustment. For sure.

Patrick McGilvray
How did you feel though, when you stopped eating sugar?

Colin McGilvray
I felt really good. I noticed that probably two days.

Patrick McGilvray
Well, first, though, at first, how would you feel first?

Colin McGilvray
Okay. So, you know, this first few days without eating sugar, it was a little rough. Because you know, you really have that sugar craving, your body really wants it, you really want that mountain dew or that candy. But like I said, probably a few days afterwards. It’s just, I just didn’t have those cravings anymore.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so it only took a few days. That’s cool. Yeah, so when you eliminate sugar, like you will kind of go through a withdrawal phase. And, and it’s short, you know, if you do it the right way. And you get rid of the refined carbs and the sugar, just like 100% like eliminate it, it will kind of be terrible, you will feel terrible for a couple of days, which I think you experienced.

And you and I talked about that. But then it goes away and then it gets better. So after that, like after you got over that initial thing, we just started getting you on an eating protocol, which just means like, a way of eating that serves you like it’s a way of eating food that fuels your body.

You know, so when we talk about a protocol, it’s not a diet, it’s not like you have to eat these certain five things or whatever. You get to choose what you want to eat. But it’s a high fat, low carb diet, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just, we just get rid of the refined sugar and carbs.

And when we do that, it gives your body a chance to, you know, rebalance the hormones. We’ve got to bring those insulin levels down, which you did, you know, when the insulin levels come down, then your hormones get balanced out so you don’t feel as hungry. When you do eat, you feel more full.

And when you’re eating a lot of processed food and sugar those things are all out of whack. So you’re like always hungry all the time. You know. So tell me about your experience with the eating protocol in general. Like, how’s that been going for you? And yeah, how’s it going today for you?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, the eating protocol’s great. I think it really helps that some of my favorite foods are high in fat. Like I really enjoy eating steak, and I can eat that a lot. And it’s nice to be able to find something in your protocol that you do enjoy eating. So it’s been really good so far. Like I said, at the very beginning, kind of settling into it took a little bit of adjustment for sure.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, cool. Um, so you are eating food that you enjoy?

Colin McGilvray
100%.

Patrick McGilvray
Do you feel hungry all the time?

Colin McGilvray
I do not feel hungry all the time.

Patrick McGilvray
So that’s, that’s good. That’s one of the benefits of eating a higher fat diet. So if you’re eating good, good fats, then it will fill you up, and you shouldn’t be as hungry. So then, one of the things I wanted to talk about, which is, you know, one of my areas of expertise, and one of the things that you and I have talked extensively about, which is kind of the mindset piece, because there, there have been times that have come up where you’ve been challenged by some of the things. So give me an example of a challenge for you during this whole mental weight loss process.

Colin McGilvray
So we have a party at work, and there’s a bunch of food that’s not in the protocol. Tons of sugar, flour, fried food, just big tables of candy and Cheetos. Doritos. So, you know, I just, I had the right mindset about it, like we’ve, like we’ve talked about before.

Patrick McGilvray
Well was that mindset like? So what is it that gets you to not have to like, feel like you’re deprived or something?

Colin McGilvray
Sure. So that mindset really becomes thinking about myself at my ideal weight. And thinking about what I’m going to look like, how I’m going to feel, the exercise I’m able to do, and knowing that, you know, if I eat that bag of Cheetos, that’s not helping me get there. So why would I really want to be eating something that’s ultimately going to hurt me?

Patrick McGilvray
Right? So what is your ideal weight? What do you want to get down to?

Colin McGilvray
I want to get down to 180 pounds.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, cool. I think you can do that. For sure. So tell me more about that ideal version of yourself that like future Colin like, what does that look like for you?

Colin McGilvray
I’d like to be you know, around 180 pounds, whatever my healthy weight is going to be, I want to have, you know, I want to be in shape, you know, I want to have some muscle muscle definition, I want to be able to have a lot of endurance, do a lot of running.

Patrick McGilvray
And what will that do for you? Like, let’s say you get to 185 pounds, 180 pounds, you’ve built some muscle you can like go out and run five miles at a time or whatever it is you want to do? Like, what does that mean for you?

Colin McGilvray
For me, all the issues we talked about earlier, like heart disease, being extremely overweight, and the possibility of diabetes. I won’t have those worries anymore. And just kind of proves to myself that, you know, I could do anything I really set my mind to. And it would give me a lot of empowerment for other other aspects of my life.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s awesome. So having that vision of yourself, is that what kind of helps you get through some of these challenging situations? Like that situation described at work, like does it help to like know that you know, who you want to be in your future is more important than like this bag of Doritos?

Colin McGilvray
It does. It really, it really helps because I think about, you know what I’m gonna look like. And I don’t really have that craving anymore, because I’m just kind of over it. I don’t need that. It’s at my ideal weight. I’m not going to be eating that. And it’s not going to help me get there. So why would I really want to hurt myself?

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So looking through this whole process of like, you know, losing weight, so how many pounds would be lost so far? Let’s go. Let’s talk about that.

Colin McGilvray
So right now. I’m at 257. So over 37 pounds so far.

Patrick McGilvray
Dang. That’s awesome.

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, it feels really good.

Patrick McGilvray
That is awesome. Because you’d lost a few pounds before you and I started like doing this together. But really the weight just has been dropping off like crazy over the last five or six weeks for sure. Which is awesome. But what’s been like the hardest part of all of this for you?

Colin McGilvray
The hardest part is seeing a lot of other people eating the food I used to eat. So you know people coming in with fast food, or pizza, or junk food at work sitting next to me eating it. That was really hard at first. And that’s the hardest part.

Patrick McGilvray
Has that gotten better?

Colin McGilvray
It’s gotten a lot better, just with the you know, the mindset that we’ve talked about and and thinking about, you know, 180lb Colin and how that’s not going to help get me there. And I don’t need to eat that food.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, when you think about that future version of yourself, do you have like some feelings associated with that some like emotions that that kind of come up when you think about that?

Colin McGilvray
I do. Yeah, I really want to get to that point. And I think I’m willing to put in whatever amount of work it takes to get there.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, because it’s not easy sometimes. Right? I mean, there can be challenges, you know, you get fast food shoved in your face at work. There’s cupcakes and Doritos, and all this stuff. And yeah. You’re doing great, though. Really proud of you. Colin has been an ideal client, you know, like you really have like, you’ve been doing everything that I’ve told you to do. You know, and honestly, some of this has been hard, right?

Colin McGilvray
It’s been really hard. Not gonna lie. Yeah, there are times where it is very difficult.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, but you get through it.

Colin McGilvray
Definitely. And there’s also times where it feels amazing to know that like, you know, wow, I’ve lost 37 pounds, I look visibly different. I’ve had to buy new clothes. Like, I’m doing this, it feels really good.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I tell my clients this all the time, like, it’s not easy. Like, there will be challenges, you will be challenged mentally, you will be challenged physically, you will be challenged emotionally. But I help you get through all that stuff. That’s the beautiful thing about having a coach there to help you get through stuff like this.

Because honestly, if like, losing 100 pounds was easy, everybody would just do it, it wouldn’t be a problem there wouldn’t need, we wouldn’t need any help at all, it would just be like, just eat this and you’re fine, you know, but we’ve been conditioned and trained our whole lives to eat food that just creates this, this unnatural craving inside of us.

And it creates this emotional connection to food. You know, so many of us use food as an escape from our lives as an escape from reality, because it feels good, feels good to eat the fried chicken, and eat the Snickers and eat the Doritos, you know, and so why should we deal with our emotions and our thoughts and whatever, when we can just eat instead?

You know, and one of the things that you and I have talked about is like, how to stop eating, because you don’t want to feel a certain feeling. You know, so you’ve learned how to kind of process some of those emotions and stuff.

And as a 20 year old, 21 year old, I think that’s pretty, pretty awesome, that you’ve been able to do that you know that you have learned how to manage your mind. Right? And how to process emotions, so you don’t have to eat over them.

Colin McGilvray
Definitely.

Patrick McGilvray
And you’ve also learned that you can have a fulfilling life without having to just eat food or like food doesn’t equal a good life. Right?

Colin McGilvray
Exactly. And the world doesn’t revolve around what I’m going to eat next.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so you were talking about going on vacation soon. And whenever you go on vacation, you have a lot of memories about like food with that. Yeah. So what are you going to do now? So you’re going on vacation soon? What are you going to do differently?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, so a lot of it is, you know, we go on vacation in the same spot, there’s all these restaurants we always go to, and really not a whole lot of what they have is, you know, on protocol. And it’s a lot of just realizing that the vacation is going to be just as fun if you don’t eat that food.

What I put into my body does not determine whether or not I have a good vacation. It’s people I’m with, the experiences I have, you know, making memories. It has nothing to do with the food. And you know, if you’re, if you’re motivated enough, if you really care enough, you’ll figure out a way to make that work and not make excuses. Like, I’m going to go off protocol, just because I’m in a situation where it’s harder to stay on protocol.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so that you may be challenged on that vacation, but there’s no reason for you to change what you’re doing right. Here’s the thing, when we use food, food as an escape or as food as a way to feel good. We lose the beautiful moments that we have with our family and with our loved ones with our friends, you know, because we’re not really fully present to be with them. We’re not fully present for the experience.

You know, I used to have the same feeling about when I was drinking, you know, I used to drink. And, and I thought there’s no way I can have fun out with people without drinking. Like if alcohol isn’t involved, why bother? You know.

And, and I’ve learned that my life is so much better without alcohol. And my life is so much better in the same way without those foods that I used to eat as an escape because I thought that to eat the certain food or drink, the certain thing meant I was having fun. But it didn’t at all, it meant that I thought I was having fun.

It felt good for a moment. But then I had the terrible hangover, and I was gaining weight. And I felt bad about myself. And I was lethargic, like, there were all these negative side effects, these negative consequences of using food and using alcohol as an escape from my life as a buffer from my real life, you know.

And so for you, one of the things we’ve talked about, and you’ve sort of embraced is like, I’m going to go on vacation, I’m going to spend time with my family, and my friends, and we’re going to hang out and talk and I’m going to be there for the experience of being with them. And you always find something to eat at these restaurants, you know, I mean, a big piece of fish, eat a steak, whatever you want to do.

Like, there’s lots of good options, you know, you can definitely find the food that works for you. Or you can just, you know, eat what feels good and feels authentic for you, you know, and maintain that integrity that you have with yourself, because you’ve built up over these last couple of months, Colin, you’ve built up a lot of integrity with yourself, you know, like you’re not cheating on your protocol, you’re not eating what you’re not supposed to.

And when you do that, and you continue to reward yourself, you reward your brain by not eating and giving in to those urges and cravings that you used to have for like Mountain Dew or fried chicken or whatever. When you continually do that you build up this trust in yourself and this confidence in yourself. And it’s I can see it in you like you’ve changed, you know, which has been awesome to see, you know. So that’s cool.

Like, obviously, Colin is, you know, my son. And so I’ve been working with him a lot like he and I have had a lot of long conversations about this stuff. And he’s made a lot of progress in a short amount of time. But honestly, anybody I work with can see the same kinds of results, it just depends on how much work they want to put into it.

You know, Colin just happens to be really committed to this, you know what I mean? He has this vision for himself that he has created that is like, it’s really powerful. And he thinks about that, you know, like when he’s challenged with the food at work, like he’s like, that person that I want to be in the future is much more important to me than this bag of Doritos right here. Like, that’s cool. That’s really cool, Colin. So what has been like the most surprising thing out of all of this work that we’ve done together, like, what surprised you the most so far?

Colin McGilvray
What surprised me the most is how the coaching that we’ve talked about and we’ve done, the coaching model, essentially, changing your your thoughts that you have about things, has helped me in so much more than just weight loss, relationships with other people, with my family, with co-workers, or just situations that pop up in my life. I mean, it’s helped me everywhere.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, like you’ve had some experiences, you work in customer support. And you’ve you know, I’ve had some, like angry customers, you know, I’m sure they call and like, you know, want to yell at you, you know, and just take out their frustration. And you’ve learned how to separate, like, the circumstance of this angry customer from what it means to you, like, it doesn’t mean anything about you, you know, and you don’t have to take that personally and you don’t have to react to that, you know, you can respond in a very mature and very in a way that’s like, very resourceful in a way that’s that’s very helpful for them and for you, you know.

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, just realizing, you know, what they’re saying doesn’t mean anything about me. It’s just a fact. And what they’re saying is what they’re saying. I’m gonna choose to think the thoughts that I want to think about it.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, they’re just words. Oh, this person said some words. You know, you can choose what that means to you. You can choose that means like, you don’t know what you’re doing. Or, you know, you know, they’re mad at you or something like that. But you can also choose that it doesn’t mean anything doesn’t mean anything about you. So that’s cool. All right. Any other thoughts about this process so far?

Colin McGilvray
Yes. So I’ve tried several, like weight loss programs before. And none of them prepare you for how hard this is going to be mentally. None of them tell you that, you know, you’re going to be around people who are eating this fast food that you are not going to eat. And it’s never prepared you for that. It’s never really gone into the coaching side of it. And I think that’s what’s really different about this. And this is why I’ve been able to get this far with it.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things that I definitely bring to the table with my clients. And I tell them this all the time, it’s like, you know what, it will be hard, it will be challenging, you know, changing your diet, like changing what you’re eating, and stop using food as an escape from your life stop using food to feel better, is going to be challenging.

But I got you through that, like, that’s my forte is like, you know, working on the mindset piece with people and helping them process the emotional piece so that they can get through this. And diets just don’t do that. They’re like, here’s what you eat, or don’t eat, and good luck, you’re on your own, you know, they don’t talk to you about, okay, what happens when it gets really hard? Like, what am I supposed to do?

Or I’m having this situation, what do I do about this? Or I have this thing coming up at work or this vacation. Like, how do I get through that? And that’s one of the beautiful things about having a coach working with you is like, you get answers to all of your questions. You get to help working through your particular situation, you get somebody there, walking you through every step of the way of this process, through the hard stuff. Has it gotten easier, like are things easier now?

Colin McGilvray
Sure, like I was gonna say earlier a ton about it being really hard. And you know, it isn’t the beginning of getting off a sugar craving and you kind of build a you obtain a skill set that you have to help you with all these different, all these different situations. So you’ve essentially given me that skill set to get through all of this, and it gets a lot easier as you go. There’s still hard moments and things come up for sure. But you get through it, and it just gets easier and easier.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and like I said, at the beginning, this has only been we’ve only been working together for like eight weeks, you know, honestly, the first five or six weeks are probably the hardest part, like just like you got to get through that initial, you got to get off the sugar and get off, get off the sugar withdrawals, because that’s definitely a mental and a physical issue that we gotta get over.

So we did that pretty quickly. But then we learn the mental piece. And that takes a few weeks to like, kind of work through that stuff. But once you get through those, like the first six weeks, then you’re pretty well situated, right? Like, you know, the last couple of weeks, we haven’t talked too much. And you’ve been doing really well. And you keep losing weight, and you’re sticking to your protocol, which is awesome.

Like you’re doing such a great job. I wish everybody was like, honestly, because people they’re like, oh, I want to change, I want to lose weight. And then I’m like, cool, here’s what we’re gonna do. And they’re like, whoa, I don’t want to do anything different. You know, like, I don’t want to like be uncomfortable at all. And like, you gotta get uncomfortable, right? Like, has that?

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, I definitely had a fear of being uncomfortable. Yeah, sure. But like you’ve said before, I must embrace the suck.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s a phrase we use in Ultra running a lot or in triathlon is like, embrace the suck, because it will suck at times. But just know that so. So it’s been uncomfortable. You got through it, and now you’re reaping the rewards of that right?

Colin McGilvray
Absolutely.

Patrick McGilvray
Do you feel better?

Colin McGilvray
I feel so much better.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And do you still have that like strong vision of future Colin? And is that still the thing that’s kind of like your north star that keeps you pointed forward?

Colin McGilvray
I do. Definitely. And, you know, I started out with that vision, and it’s only gotten stronger as we’ve done this. As I get closer, and that number between 2- or 300 and 180 becomes smaller and smaller. That vision only becomes stronger.

Patrick McGilvray
When’s the last time we were in the 250s?

Colin McGilvray
I don’t remember it was probably junior high. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s crazy.

Colin McGilvray
It is.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s awesome. Well, here’s what I want for you. I mean, I love you because you’re my son and I want obviously all the best things in the world for you. But I want you to feel good about yourself. And I think it’s tough growing up as a kid, that’s the bigger kid in the class, you know, I mean, you’re tall too, you’re like six, three, right?

Colin McGilvray
6’2.

Patrick McGilvray
So like 6’2, okay, so you’re like tall, and then the big kid. Like, I think that’s tough. And there’s a lot of stuff that goes on, you know, around that, you know, there may be teasing, there may be bullying, there may be, you know, just some like, passive aggressive stuff, talking behind your back or whatever.

So, I mean, I know that that can be challenging. And, and I know that, you know, what I want for you is that I want you to feel good about yourself and feel confident, I want you to feel like you can do anything, because you can, I have so much faith in you. And I have so much confidence in you.

And I’m seeing you building up that self confidence in yourself. And it’s amazing to watch. And the more you do this, the more you stick with what you’re doing, the more that builds, the more that self confidence builds, the more that relationship with yourself, gets stronger, and gets better and more powerful.

You know, you’re learning very quickly, too, by the way, but you’re learning how to like, be a more powerful person and to like, step into that person that you really want to be. Because we all have that within us. We all have that ability within us to be who we want to be. And you’re starting to see that. And it’s awesome.

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, I definitely look at challenges a lot different already. Now.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So you probably see challenges as more of like, an opportunity for you to grow.

Colin McGilvray
Exactly. And I started to feel, you know, a lot of things I thought I could never do, are suddenly possible.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Anything is possible.

Colin McGilvray
It is.

Patrick McGilvray
Well, you’re doing great. We’re going to check in with you later in a couple of months and see how things are going. My prediction is that you should get your goal weight here in a few months, you know, if you’re kind of on this steady decline, so average weight loss in a program like this is anywhere between like one to seven pounds a week, you know, I mean, you’ve been in about in the middle about five pounds a week, I guess.

Colin McGilvray
Yeah, something like that. And it fluctuates, too, you know, some weeks you lose a little less than others. Some days you get on the scale, and you notice a couple pound difference.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And sometimes it goes up and you’re like, what the heck is going on here? But then we’ve learned and one of the things I talk about is like not to be afraid of the scale. It’s just data. You know, I mean, it’s just like a number. It’s a number. This, you know, it’s a number that means how much your bones and your skin weigh and the water inside your body, you know.

Colin McGilvray
Exactly and ultimately still have that downward trend. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And that’s what we’re always looking for. We want it to keep going down for sure. So while you’re doing great, I’m really proud of you. And we’re going to check back in like I said, and a couple of months and see how you’re progressing. But you’re one of my favorite clients. You’ve been like one of the best coaching clients I’ve had. So keep up the good work Colin, and we’ll be checking in with you soon. Okay?

Colin McGilvray
Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, I love that kid so much. He is so awesome. I’m so happy for him too, as a parent. I’m like, so proud of him and so happy for him. And I’m proud of his progress. And I’m proud of the fact that he’s continuing to make progress and continuing on this journey.

And I want to keep you guys posted. So you know, we’ll definitely share more of his journey with you as we progress along here. I think a couple more interviews with Colin would be awesome. And then just a quick reminder here. The next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, only about 10 people can get in this class.

So if you want to get in, you have to enroll now, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and get signed up, get your body ready for the summer, become that lean running machine that you know you can be innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and enroll. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it so much. And as always, I have lots and lots of love for each and every one of you, my friends, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

20. How to Become a Lean Running Machine Part 2

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This is the second episode of an eye-opening podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying every …

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Podcast Transcript

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 20 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, Master Life Coach and weight loss coach. And today, I’ve got part two of my three part series on how to become a lean running machine.

This series is something that I’m very passionate about. This is something that is very near and dear to my heart, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort and energy trying to figure out how to lose weight as a runner, because I was really struggling with that. I put on about 25 or 30 pounds and was able to finally figure out how to lose the weight.

And it didn’t involve running a million miles, or restricting calories or anything like that. And so I’m sharing all this stuff with you here, okay. I’ve gotten back to my goal weight, you know, what I weigh now today, the same that I did when I was like in this heavy training for Ironman back in 2013. So it’s been like seven years, since I’ve been at this weight, I’ve just put on weight ever since then. But I finally got back there.

And it only took me a couple of months really to get there. So I’m going to share a bunch of that stuff with you here. My goal here, I just want to help you. I know there’s a lot of runners out there that kind of struggle with their weight. And it’s not something that we talk about, we don’t feel comfortable talking about that a lot.

It’s almost like a taboo thing to talk about in the running community. But I know there’s a lot of people that struggle with this. So I want to be an example of what’s possible. And I want to help you. So I hope you find some value from these episodes that I’m sharing here. I’m just sharing what I know. And I hope it brings you some kind of help. And I hope it gives you something that you can do, some action that you can take that you can put into place and that you can get some results from that.

Okay. So here’s something I wanted to share with you guys. I just got this awesome text from one of my weight loss clients. And he said that he’s lost 13 pounds so far. He has more energy than ever feels better than he has in a long time. And here’s a guy who’s a runner, who also has struggled with his weight for years. And he joined my program. And he’s now well on his way to his goal weight. And oh my gosh, it’s so amazing.

I love, love, love getting texts like this from clients, it makes me feel so good. This is why I do what I do. You know, I want to help people transform their lives, I want to help people change the way they think about their bodies and the way they think about themselves. I want people to love themselves more. I’ve learned how to do that. And I want to share that with as many people as possible.

But I know what it’s like to try to just run and run and run and not be able to lose the weight. And to go to the gym six days a week and restrict what I’m eating and feel terrible all the time and still not lose weight. Like I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. So this particular client has gotten some amazing results.

He’s well on his way and he keeps texting me all the time. Like, you know, I’m down another two pounds, I’m down another three pounds. And I just love it. I just give him big hearts and smiles and everything every time he texts that to me. So I learned what to eat, I learned how to manage my mind. I learned when to eat, learned how to stop using food as an escape from my life, I learned how to deal with all the cravings and hunger.

And I will teach you all of this stuff. And I have an upcoming masterclass that starts on Monday, June 1, and I will teach you how to do every single one of these things. I only take about 10 people through these classes. Okay. It’s an intimate class. And once it’s filled, I just closed the doors and we gotta wait till the next time.

So another couple of months before I do that again. But if you want to save your spot for this class, just go to innerfiretribe.com/overeating, and enroll now. I know for a fact that this is the solution to your weight loss struggles. I know for a fact that this is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program you will ever experience.

I walk you through everything step by step. I’m there for you. It’s a six week program. When you’re trying to lose weight and you’re changing a bunch of stuff. Those first six weeks are the hardest. But I got you through that. Okay. I will walk you through that and help you get through the challenging stuff so that you can have this success that you’re looking for listen, you deserve this, you are worth it. Go to Inner Fire, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. It’s easy to say and sign up today.

Okay, so today, like I said, this is part two of the three part series on how to become a lean running machine. And if you haven’t listened to the first episode yet, go back and do that. Now listen to part one. That was episode number 19. And to find any of these podcasts, you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/and, then the number 19. And, and that’ll take you right to that episode. So listen to that first, because it kind of lays the foundation for what I’m going to be talking about here. Talks about why losing weight is so hard. In fact, I’m going to recap that here.

So here’s what I talked about in that episode. Running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. It just doesn’t. Calories in calories out does not work. And eat more, run less, or I’m sorry, run more, eat less just does not work, which people just have been telling us for decades.

We just need to move our bodies more, move more and eat less and you’ll be fine. It does not work. And I explain why. But some of the reasons why are your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite when you exercise more, so you get hungrier, and you’re eating more, you end up eating more calories, than you can burn.

Also, progress is very, very slow when you take this approach, and it’s minimal at best. And then running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. Okay, you got hormonal hormonal imbalances going on, you’ve got mental cravings, you got emotional eating, and it just doesn’t address those things. Okay.

And then the calories in calories out, you know, everybody thinks this is the only way to lose weight and adjust does not work and never has is a myth, your body, the body will naturally work against this process to keep you from like dying to keep you from starving to death. So when you reduce calories, your body lowers its metabolism in response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism.

And you cannot run fast, run as many miles or reduce the amount of food you’re taking in order to burn off those calories. Right. So there’s some other things and some other reasons why that doesn’t work either. But basically, metabolism lowers when you limit the amount of calories you take in. And so it can only go so low, before your body starts to like to get into starvation mode. Okay.

So the first secret to understand the first thing you really have to understand is that running more and eating less just doesn’t work. Okay, and so I break that all down. And I talked about that in episode number 19, episode number one of this series, but the podcast episode number 19. Okay, cool.

So today, I am going to ask your permission to get a little sciency because I want to talk about hormones. And so I’m going to be talking about the three main hormones that are involved with weight gain, and why it’s really hard to lose weight and what we can do about that, okay.

But for a lot of us, we’ve thought that there must be something wrong with us because we keep gaining weight, even though we’re watching. We eat a good diet, and we don’t, we might be vegetarian or vegan, or paleo or something like that. And we exercise regularly. But we keep gaining weight, and we can’t seem to lose it.

And, and so we come to these conclusions like It must be me, I’m doing something wrong, I don’t have enough willpower. I’m not strong enough. This is just the way I am. I don’t have the self control other people have. Nothing ever works for me. Basically, there’s just something wrong with me. But here’s the truth, there is nothing wrong with you, my friend, at all.

It’s not your fault. And this is the thing I want you to understand here. And this is kind of the second secret I want to talk about to permanent weight loss is that it is not your fault. Your hormones, more than anything else are causing you to gain weight, your hormones are what are keeping you from losing weight. Okay.

If you want to lose weight, you have to be able to burn fat, you’ve got to become a fat burning machine right? And more than anything else your hormones are responsible for whether your body is in fat storage mode, or fat burning mode. And so if you want to get into fat burning mode, you’ve got to like make sure your hormones are regulated properly. Okay. So the three hormones we’re going to talk about today are going to be insulin, ghrelin, and leptin. And these all have to do with your body’s ability to become a fat burner or a fat store. We want to be fat burners, we don’t want to be fat storers. We’ve done enough of that so far in our lives. Okay?

So let’s talk about insulin first. Okay, this is the most important hormone when it comes to weight loss, insulin’s job, its main job is to lower your blood sugar. So anytime you eat any kind of food, and especially foods that are high in sugar, your body secretes, releases insulin to help keep that blood sugar low and keep things in balance, okay?

But here’s the thing. When insulin is high in your system, you are in fat storage mode. Because what insulin is doing is saying like, hey, we need to take this energy and put it somewhere, we need to store it. This sugar, let’s say, and so what we do is insulin stores it as fat for use later on, okay?

So when insulin is high, you’re in fat storage mode. The opposite is also true. When insulin is low in your system, you’re in fat burning mode, and you can start consuming your own body fat, which sounds disgusting, but you can start using your own body fat for fuel, okay? Until you get rid of the sugar that you’re burning in your system, you really can’t access that fat very well.

Okay, so we want to get rid of that, get out of that sugar burning mode, we want to get out of that fat storage mode, and we want to get into the fat burning mode, okay? And the way we do this is to lower our insulin, okay? When you have too much insulin in your system, you just cannot lose weight. Okay? Very, very important to understand. When you have too much insulin, you’re in fat storage mode, and you cannot lose weight.

So there’s two types of insulin disorders, basically, there’s type one and type two diabetes, okay? Type one diabetics, their bodies do not produce enough insulin. So it is very, very hard for them to actually put on any weight, because their insulin levels are so low. And so it’s kind of sad.

But back in the earlier 20th century, type one diabetics used to starve to death because they couldn’t get enough. Their bodies were not getting enough. They were not storing their fat, their bodies were basically just burning off everything that they took in, okay, so their insulin was way too low, until they figured out how to you know, inject insulin. And that was a life saving thing, which is awesome. But they didn’t have a way of storing fat. And so they were way too thin, and they ended up starving to death. It’s horrible, right?

Then there’s type two diabetes, and this is a disease of, of diet, basically. Okay, and type two diabetics produce way too much insulin. And type two diabetics are always in fat storage mode, so they can’t lose weight. And the treatment for type two diabetics, there’s a couple of different things, but one of the treatments, which is crazy, and I really don’t understand this, but the treatment for a lot of type two diabetics is to increase their insulin, so they give them more insulin, which produces the same fat storage mode.

And it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, which is the big problem anyway. And it just compounds the cycle, it creates a problem called insulin resistance. Too much insulin means your body is resistant to insulin’s effects, it just stops working. It’s like when you take too many antibiotics, you know, the bacteria becomes resistant to it, right? This is same thing here.

So what we want is we want our bodies to be sensitive to insulin, okay, so we want to lower the insulin so we can access our fat for fuel. And so this is the first thing that you just really have to understand. I know I’m talking about a lot of like, sciency stuff here. Okay? But what I want you to understand with this is that insulin’s job is to lower your blood sugar.

And when your insulin is high in your system, you’re in fat storage mode. When it’s low, you’re in fat burning mode, okay? So if you’re trying to lose weight, we want to get the insulin levels down.

Okay, the second hormone I want to talk about is ghrelin, and that’s the hunger hormone. So whenever you get hungry, there’s this hormone that gets released called ghrelin, and that kind of tells you that you’re hungry. It increases your appetite so that you’ll eat some food. And this works great. You know, we should be hungry at different times.

Like there’s every now and then we should be hungry, we should feel hungry. We should have an appetite and we want to eat some food. This way we don’t die. And all these hormones. They’ve been working this way for millennia. We’ve evolved for these hormones to work beautifully, okay?

Here’s the problem. When insulin is high in your system, ghrelin gets blocked, it does not turn off. And so it’s constantly producing these signals that are saying I’m hungry, I’m hungry, my it increases your appetite. And it’s saying feed me feed me. And you constantly feel like you need to eat more food, even though you don’t.

So high insulin levels blocks ghrelin, and so you feel hungry all the time and you end up just overeating. That’s a real problem, okay? So high insulin is kind of insidious, okay? It has one more insidious effect here, and that is how it affects the hormone leptin.

And leptin is the safety hormone. So leptin’s job is to tell your brain when you’re full, and so it sends signals that says, hey, I’m no longer hungry, stop eating, and you’ve probably experienced leptin. Everybody does, you know, but think about the last time you had like, Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re like, stuffed, and you’re like, I cannot eat another thing, you got a lot of leptin going on here, okay.

But here again, when insulin is high, leptin gets blocked, same way, and it cannot do its job. So you never really feel full. You end up overeating at every meal, you eat too much food. So high insulin levels block leptin, you constantly feel like you can still eat more food. It’s like after that Thanksgiving dinner when you’re stuffed in somebody’s like, hey, would you like another piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream? And you’re like, yes, of course I would.

That is a hormonal imbalance that’s going on there. Okay, because, you know, it’s really not good for you to do that. It’s not good for you to stuff yourself to the point of feeling miserable and terrible and sick to your stomach, okay? But because the hormones are all jacked up here, we do that to ourselves.

So high levels of insulin, cause this chain reaction with these other hormones that puts your body into the state of relentless over eating and relentless fat storage mode. So the big villain of this whole story here is insulin, okay? So too much insulin is the root cause of insidious weight gain. It’s the root cause of obesity. It’s the root cause of type two diabetes, okay? Too much insulin is bad.

So what causes insulin levels to get so high? So anytime we eat food, that food that we eat, no matter what it is, becomes, to some extent, sugar in our bloodstream, glucose. And so your body produces insulin to lower that glucose level to kind of balance things out to lower your blood sugar.

So anytime you eat any food, there’s an insulin effect. So insulin gets produced, okay, so whenever you eat, insulin goes up a little bit, okay? Which is totally normal. One of the problems though, is that when we eat all day long, our insulin is always elevated and never goes down. And so we kind of put our bodies into this consistent fat storage mode, like all day, every day, we never give our bodies the chance to regulate and for that, blood sugars actually come down, and the insulin levels go down and everything starts working the way it’s supposed to.

So eating any food causes insulin to go up, but eating all the time causes insulin to be always high. Okay? The other thing that causes insulin to be really high is certain types of foods. So sugar, and processed foods, especially highly refined carbohydrates, make insulin go way up. These are super concentrated foods, they have a huge glucose response in your body, which causes a huge insulin surge to try to bring your blood sugar down. This is a big problem.

When you’re constantly eating refined carbs and sugar, you are in way higher levels of glucose and way higher levels of insulin. Okay, and then the whole system is jacked up. So eating all the time, and eating processed foods with a lot of sugar will put your body in a state I have constantly elevated insulin, which puts your body in this state of constantly in this fat storage mode. Okay?

Which can lead to insulin resistance, which can lead to obesity, but it definitely causes weight gain, for sure. Okay. So the big question is, I know what you’re thinking, and I have an answer for you. The big question is, I didn’t get your insulin levels down. How do you get your hormones back in balance? How do you, you know, get that insulin production down, get it into the normal ranges?

So you can become that lean, mean fat burning machine. How do you get your body back into the fat burning mode and lose weight, because that’s what we’re talking about here. There’s two things you can do, you can change what you eat, and you can change when you eat.

So first, you need to change what you eat, you need to eliminate the foods that cause those huge insulin spikes. So mainly, you’re not going to like to hear this. But here’s the truth, you need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. What? I know it sounds terrible. But everything you eat causes insulin to rise somewhat.

Sugar and highly refined carbs create this intense glucose response in your body. And they cause the highest insulin spike. If you were to just cut out eating sugar and refined carbs, you are going to decrease your insulin like crazy and you will start losing weight, I guarantee it. It’s hard to do, I can teach you how to do it. It’s hard to do on your own for sure. But if you can do that, then you are going to be well on your way to getting your hormones in balance and starting to lose weight.

One thing that I would encourage you to do is to just eat whole food, eat the kind of food that we’ve been eating for millennia. Okay? If it comes with a, if your food if you’re buying food that has a nutrition label on it, it’s probably not what you want to eat. You want to eat the stuff that’s on the outside of the store, you know, the produce, the meat, the fish, the dairy, like, stick with this stuff on the outside, okay.

Try to get away from the sugar and refined carbs, you know, and then check those labels because there are so many different types of sugar that is put into food, especially food that says like low fat or whatever, like stay away from low fat stuff all together. But when you see food and it says like, you know, healthy, whatever, low fat look at the label and see what kinds of sugar are in there.

So a lot of times there’s not added sugar, or there’s added sugar, but it’s hidden. So it’ll be called like agave nectar, or brown rice syrup or maltodextrin. Like they have all these different names for sugar. I think there’s something like 78 different names for sugar. And they try to confuse us. So they actually put sugar in the ingredients like six times.

But it’s all these crazy names. And so you think like, oh, like sugar is like only the 12th ingredient on here, you know, and oh, this must be good for me. But then they’ve hidden sugar and all these other ways. So anyway, stay away from food with labels. How about that idea? Okay.

Really, the best thing you can do is just eat whole foods. Just eat like fruits, vegetables, meat, fish protein, dairy, poultry, like all the good stuff, right? There’s so many options out there for you. But the sugar and the refined carbs are poisoning us. And it’s making us overweight, it’s keeping us from losing weight. Okay, so if you want to lose weight, drop the sugar, drop the highly refined carbs. Okay. So that’s number one, that’s changing what you eat.

Number two, is you need to change when you eat. So basically eating less often. So you know, insulin levels go up every time you eat any kind of food. So one of the simplest things you can do to get your insulin levels down, is to just not eat anything at all. And here’s the thing, like, I know what you’re thinking like, dude, I’m not going to starve myself. And I’m not talking about that. Okay?

But um, one of the things you can do to extend the time where you don’t have food in your system to give your insulin levels a chance to go down, is to stop eating snacks altogether. Okay, let’s just start there. So there was this time back in the 50’s. Like and prior to that where there was no such thing as snacks. There was no snacking going on. People would eat their three meals a day. And that was fine.

But back then starting in the 50s, the big food companies were like, hey, we got to make more money, we got to sell more food. How do we get people to eat more food? And so they came up with this whole category called snacks, okay? And they could, you know, they would tell people like you need a little pick me up in mid morning. So have a mid morning snack. And feeling love lethargic after lunch, you know, have an afternoon snack.

And then after dinner, you need a little snack, you need some dessert, you know, so we’re basically eating three snacks and three meals a day, we’re eating six times a day, here in the United States. I mean, a lot of other countries don’t do that. But at least here I know, for a fact, most people eat five or six times a day.

So your body is always in this state of elevated insulin levels, okay, you’re always in this state of storing fat, we never give our bodies a chance to lower that insulin and so that we can, you know, become fat burners. Okay, so we always have food in our system. So one of the biggest things you can do, and the easiest thing you can do is to just don’t eat something in between meals, like that’s number one.

And it’s so easy, it doesn’t cost any money to do this. You don’t have to like add anything, you don’t have to figure anything out, you don’t have to decide what you’re going to do, like just don’t do anything, just don’t eat anything. All right.

Another thing you can do is extend the amount of time between meals. And I get into this in my program. And I talk about intermittent fasting. And I’m not going to talk about that right now. But one thing you can do is extend the amount of time between your dinner and your breakfast the next day.

So if you want to give your body just a little bit more of a chance to get those insulin levels down and get into fat burning mode, eat your dinner a little bit earlier, you know, maybe an hour earlier than you normally do, and eat your breakfast like an hour later than you normally do. Okay, so extend that what we call the fasting window, you’re you’re fasting every day anyway, unless you eat while you’re sleeping, which I do know somebody that does that, which is crazy.

But if you’re eating dinner at let’s say, you know, seven o’clock, usually, and then you eat breakfast at seven o’clock. So that’s like a 12 hour window of fasting, you know, maybe just extend it, you know, eat at 6pm dinner and then eat breakfast at eight o’clock. And so now you’ve got like a 14 hour window there.

So you’ve given your body two extra hours, and you won’t even notice that really, you know, have your coffee in the morning, whatever you need to do, but just don’t eat, just push that back a little bit, you will find that you will. These two things combined, like getting rid of the sugar and flour and then extending periods where you’re not eating will actually have a huge effect on your body’s ability to get into fat burning mode and lose weight.

These two ideas are gold, they are absolutely gold. What the idea here is we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on board, we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on our bodies, which is our own fat and we have tons and tons of this on our bodies we do we have pounds of it that we can use it.

And a pound of fat has way more calories than a pound of you know, whatever. Fat has more calories than glucose, okay, so like fat is a better fuel source for us than sugar is anyway. So get rid of their sugar, you know and start accessing your fat, you’re gonna have tons of energy, you’re gonna feel amazing, and you will start losing weight. It’s awesome. And this and what you do here with these couple of simple things I’m talking about is you get your hormones back in balance. Regulating your hormones is critical. If you want to lose weight, and if you want to start becoming a lean, mean, fat burning machine. Okay, got to get those hormones regulated.

So I know I talked about a lot of stuff here, a lot of science. Let me just recap really quickly. Okay. One of the main reasons why you can’t lose weight, your hormones are out of whack. increased insulin levels puts your body into fat storage mode. Elevated insulin also causes ghrelin and leptin to stop working properly. So you’re always hungry, you never feel full and you constantly overeat, which makes it even worse.

You can put even more weight on your body okay, so increased insulin causes your body to become a fat store. When you decrease insulin, when you lower the insulin levels in your body, you become a fat burner. It means that ghrelin and leptin start functioning properly. So your hormones are all in balance, you aren’t hungry all the time, you aren’t hangry all the time.

And when you do eat, you feel full and you feel more satisfied for longer. How do we reduce insulin, we change what we eat, and we change when we eat. So we eliminate the two main causes of insulin spikes, which is sugar and refined carbs, eat whole foods, and then we eat less often, we just eliminate the snacks, and maybe extend our fasting nightly fasting period by an hour or two.

So the second part of this three part series, the second secret to permanent weight loss is basically your hormones are causing you to gain weight. And it’s not your fault, it’s totally changeable, you can fix this easily. And I teach you exactly how to do all of this in my weight loss master class.

If you really want to become a lean running machine, you have to get your body out of the fat storage mode and into the fat burning mode. Reducing insulin is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to solve the physical aspect of permanent weight loss. So in the next episode, in part three of this series, I’m going to be covering the mental and emotional aspects of permanent weight loss.

So most diet programs, they tell you what to eat here, eat this food, do this and good luck, you should be fine. Just eat this stuff right here. They don’t tell you what to do when you have all these crazy cravings. When you have withdrawal from when you stop eating sugar, let’s say when you have these uncontrollable urges around food, when you have this unhealthy relationship with food, they don’t tell you what to do with all that.

They don’t tell you what to do when you start feeling your feelings, you just want to eat over it and you just say eff it and you eat all the food anyway, this is why most diets don’t work. This is why a lot of the approaches that most nutrition coaches take just doesn’t work either. Because they basically just tell you what to eat, they give you a nutrition plan to follow.

And my approach is very different. The way I work with my clients, it’s vastly more effective. It’s basically 100% effective, because I provide solutions for all of the factors involved, that contribute to being overweight and I provide solutions for all the things that are the root causes of weight gain, not just the physical stuff line, what to eat, but the mental and emotional factors as well.

Okay, so we’re going to talk about that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that you will not want to miss it. And then one more quick little reminder. The next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I only take a few people through the program at a time, each person gets a lot of my personal attention and they get personal coaching time with me. It’s actually like the probably the most affordable way of working with me as your weight loss coach. But you have to get signed up now because it will fill up innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to get signed up. Remember, if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

You know, if you want different results in your life, you have to take different actions. I know it feels uncomfortable, I know that it will be challenging for you. That’s why I created this six week program to basically walk you through all of the tough stuff step by step and help you to get to the other side where you become the person that you want to be.

Where you start to feel good about yourself again, where you start to love yourself again, where you feel good about your body and you feel you feel good about your mind. I want this for you. I’ve experienced this, I’ve learned how to do it. I’ve learned the formula.

So I’ve put together this system and this program that works wonders. I want you to be a part of this. So please join me. innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, sign up today. That’s all I got for you here. Can’t wait to see you on the next episode. And as always, I have lots and lots of love for each and every one of you. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

19. How to Become a Lean Running Machine Part 1

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This is the first episode of an eye-opening new podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying …

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Podcast Transcript

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 19 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and a Master Life Coach and weight loss coach for runners. And today, I want to talk about how to become a lean running machine. And this is the first episode in a podcast series that I’m doing a three part series that I’m doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine.

This subject is near and dear to my heart because I’ve spent years and years trying to lose weight, I was very overweight for a while there. I lost some weight with running and exercise and diet, and then put a bunch of that weight back on. And then I’ve spent the last few years trying everything imaginable.

And nothing was working at all, until I finally figured out the secrets to losing weight and to becoming a lean runner to getting back to my natural weight and being able to stay there. And now I’m on this mission I want to help as many runners as possible to stop struggling and stop trying to run more to lose weight. I want to help you stop struggling and hit your goal weight too.

So over these next few episodes, these next three episodes, I’m sharing everything I know about becoming a lean running machine. That’s all right here on The Running Mind podcast. As a reminder, my next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I’m really, really excited about this. I’m really proud of this work that I’m doing and the people that have taken the class already have seen amazing results. Anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds lost in the first five or six weeks, up to 35 pounds loss in the first six weeks. It’s amazing.

You will learn how to control your cravings, manage your emotions, and stop the overeating for good because really the cause of being overweight is overeating. This is a one of a kind masterclass, it’s not a diet program. It’s not an exercise program. It’s a transformational coaching program and my job.

And what I do really well is to help you permanently change your relationship with food. Most diet plans, they just focus on the food, here’s what you do, do this. They don’t do anything to address all the mental and emotional factors, all the mental and emotional causes of overeating, overeating and weight gain.

So as a master life coach, this is my area of expertise and I got you covered here for sure. I will help you go from feeling exhausted out of control and hating how you look in the mirror to feeling full of energy in control. And loving how you look feeling confident about your new body and your new mind. You’re going to completely change how you think and feel about food and about yourself.

It’s a six week masterclass, and we teach this live so we do a zoom call with the group. And I only take like 10 to 15 people at a time. I want to keep it small so that everybody has a chance to get personal one-on-one coaching time with me.

Okay, but in the six week masterclass, you will learn how to control the hormones that cause you to gain weight, you’re going to learn how to stop the cravings of those foods that do not serve you. You’re going to learn how to only desire food that fuels your body, you’re gonna develop this whole new healthy relationship with food, you’ll stop struggling with the uncontrollable urges, we’ll recalibrate your hunger.

So you will feel satisfied for longer, you’re going to be able to use food as a way to thrive not as an escape from your life. And I will teach you how to manage your mind and your emotions, like a badass. And this work that we do. It’s not just about losing weight. It applies to every aspect of your life. The tools that you will learn here you can apply to your work, to your relationships, to your family, to your career, if you’re an entrepreneur, whatever it is.

So here’s what it looks like when you enroll in the master class. Week one we uncover the hidden causes of weight gain so you’re gonna learn all the reasons why you’re gaining weight and what you can do about it. You’re going to learn what foods you absolutely have to stop eating and the most important things you should be eating if you want to lose weight.

Week two we will go into how to recalibrate your hormones. Okay, next week we’re gonna be talking about hormones. But there’s these differences between like, what is physical hunger? What are withdrawals? What are cravings? What’s emotional hunger? You’re gonna learn how to deal with all that stuff, you’re gonna learn how to recalibrate your hormones for optimal weight loss. You’re gonna learn what a food protocol is and how to stick to it.

Week three, we talk about the mental cravings, the urges, desires, how to control your thoughts, how to manage your mind, this is such a key component to this program. And so different from what other people offer out there, honestly, you’re going to manage your mind to eliminate this over desire, this unnatural desire for food, you’re gonna learn how to believe in yourself, you’re going to learn how to believe in your ability to get back to your natural weight, and we will get you there, you’re going to learn how to process those urges and those cravings.

Okay, week four, we talk about making decisions ahead of time, the power of that I talked about that in the podcast, in a recent podcast episode, the power of making decisions ahead of time,
how to overcome obstacles that stand between you and your goal weight, using the power of visualization, and then we get into in week five, the emotional eating piece, you know, we’re we build up to this, okay.

And then in week five, we talk about how to stop using food as a way to escape your life, as a way to escape your emotions. What false pleasures are and how to create emotional well being instead of relying on these false pleasures to feel good. There’s food, it’s much like a drug, you know, we eat food, it makes us feel good, but we’re escaping our life.

When we do that we’re avoiding something, usually when we do that, okay, so I’m going to teach you how to create emotional comfort, without all these negative side effects that you get from like, from overeating, okay.

And then in week six, we’re going to talk about how to feel on purpose, like how to choose your emotions, it’s fascinating that you can choose your emotion, you can choose how you want to feel, did you know that? So we’ll talk about how to do that.

The power of making commitments, how to stop reliving your past, and start creating an amazing future for yourself. And then how to keep getting ongoing support, motivation, how to, you know, do your maintenance, your ongoing maintenance once you get to your goal weight.

So I talk about all of this stuff. It’s a comprehensive program that addresses the physical, mental and emotional aspects of gaining weight, and how to master those things. So that you can lose weight and get back to your natural weight and stay there, okay. You also get access to all the training material. So I record everything and put it on a private website. We have a private Facebook group where you guys can interact, we can ask questions, I post questions and answers in there. And you get one-on-one coaching with me.

So this is one of the biggest things that I offer. One of the most powerful things that I offer through this program is that you get one-on-one time with me throughout the course of the six weeks. And this is key because if there’s something you want to talk about, that’s, you know, maybe a little personal or you want help with a specific issue, you and I will have a chance to do that together. So you get me as your personal weight loss coach throughout this program.

Now, if you’re looking for some kind of a quick fix, this is probably not the right program for you. A lot of people want the magic pill that’s going to make them lose weight, or just tell me the one thing that I should eat. I gotta tell you, that stuff does not work. Okay. This is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program that you will ever experience.

I guarantee that the program itself is pretty simple. Okay, it’s a simple concept, but I will tell you this, it is not easy. Over the course of the six week masterclass, you will be challenged mentally, physically and emotionally. But I am there to help you navigate every single piece of that you will not be doing this on your own. I’m not going to just tell you what to eat, and send you on your way and say good luck with that. That’s the way most diet plans work.

Okay, that’s not what I’m going to do here. Also, if you’re the kind of person who likes to sort of half assed stuff, this is probably not for you either. This is a program of commitment, empowerment and action. I want people who are committed to reaching their weight loss goal. If that feels like you, then this is the perfect program for you.

Okay, I can’t do the work for you. Just like your personal trainer can’t do the push ups for you. I can’t do your weight loss work for you. I can’t be there standing next to you every time you know somebody shoves chocolate cake in your face, okay? But I can be there virtually for you to help you. Okay. But you have to show up and you have to have a commitment to do this work. And if that sounds like you, have you committed? If you’re ready to do this now, then this is the right program for you. Again, I only take about 10 to 15 people through this class at a time so that everybody gets the personal attention and coaching that they need to be successful.

So if you want in on this, please go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, that’s one word, and enroll now you can learn more about the program their enrollment is on a first come first served basis. So once the class is filled, I’m going to close the doors and you’ll have to wait until the next program starts in probably another eight weeks. But if you want to save your spot for this life changing masterclass, then please go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and enroll now. I want to see you in this class. You deserve this. You are worth it. Okay, so sign up today, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating.

Okay, so here’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Here’s some things that I hear from my weight loss clients a lot, especially my runners. See if any of this resonates with you. So I hear things like, I’m running more, and I’m eating less, and I’m still gaining weight, or I’m running every day, and I keep gaining weight. Or I’m training for a marathon, and I’m not losing any weight, I’m actually gaining weight.

What is happening here, why can’t I lose weight by running? If you have found yourself thinking these things, or trying to run more to try to lose weight, or if you’ve tried to just limit the amount of calories you’ve been eating to try to lose weight, and it hasn’t worked for you, this is not your fault.

The truth of the matter is that this is a broken model of weight loss, it does not work. Okay, we’re going to talk all about that today. I’ve been there, I know exactly how this feels. So just a little quick backstory about me. I was about 60 pounds overweight, I was very sick, unhealthy. I was eating too much, drinking too much, I had a lot of health issues. I got really sick.

So I started eating better and running. And I did lose a lot of weight, okay. And I started getting into ultra marathons and Ironman and stuff like that. And I lost a lot of weight. But I wasn’t able to keep it off. It was temporary. It took me a long time to lose that weight. And then it didn’t take me very long to gain it all back or to gain a lot of it back.

So I started running more and trying to eat less and really controlling my calories by using apps and all kinds of stuff to like count my calories and stuff like that. I tried all these different diets. And none of that stuff was really working. I kept gaining the weight.

And so I had this mission of like trying to figure this out. I’m a runner, I’m healthy. I’m pretty fit, you know, I work out all the time, how come I’m gaining weight? And I had to realize that it wasn’t about the running. And it wasn’t about the calories. It was about this abnormal desire that I had for food and over desire, an unnatural craving and over desire for food. And that unnatural over desire was causing me to overeat.

My body and my brain. We’re addicted to food we’re addicted to eating, and no amount of running is ever going to fix that problem. Okay, so in order to lose weight, I had to figure out what was causing this over desire for food. And I had to figure out how to fix that so that I could stop the overeating so that I could get back to my natural weight. Okay, so I tried all kinds of stuff that I tried diets willpower, starving myself running more, none of this stuff was working.

So I had to get to the to the actual cause. And I discovered something interesting. My overeating was just a symptom of deeper problems. And if I wanted to lose weight, I had to identify and solve those deeper problems. I had to solve the cause of the over desire, cause of the kind of food addiction, not just treat the symptom which was overeating.

So here’s what I learned. The reason we are overweight is not because we don’t run enough. The reason we are overweight is because we overeat, period. And the reason we overeat is because we have a physical, mental and emotional over desire for food. And when we solve these underlying issues, mental, physical and emotional issues, the overeating stops the way It comes off, we get to our natural weight, and we can stay there permanently.

Now, there are three things you need to understand if you want to stop the struggling, if you want to stop the overeating and if you want to lose the weight and keep it off permanently. And these three things go against a lot of what you may already know about weight loss are about diet and exercise. And these are three things that a lot of people are not talking about.

I’m going to talk about them here. These are the secrets to getting your body back to its natural weight. Okay. So the first thing I’m going to talk about, and the subject of today’s podcast is all about how running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. Okay, so this is secret number one. So we’re going to focus on this today.

So we’ve been told for decades that the formula for weight loss is this, right: eat less, exercise more. That’s all anybody has ever said. And so this has like been the normal advice we’ve all been given. But unfortunately, it’s not good advice. And it’s basically wrong. It just doesn’t work.

Okay, running more and eating less, does not work. If you want to lose weight, and keep it off permanently. So, just a little backstory back in the 1970s, early 70s. There was this guy named Jim Fixx, and he and he wrote this book called The Complete Book of Running. And so this guy is considered sort of the catalyst for the American Fitness revolution, okay, he really popularized the sport of running.

Since then, running has become like such a popular and such an accessible sport to people. I just did some research on this, there are more than 30,000 running events in the US every year. So that includes 5k’s marathons, half marathons, ultra marathons, all that stuff. Yet, as a nation, we are fatter than ever. We are exercising more than we ever have in a recorded human history. Yet since the 1970s, the obesity rates, especially here in the US have tripled. This is crazy.

Okay, what is happening here? Here’s why running or exercise doesn’t really work for weight loss. So there’s three parts to this: running doesn’t work for weight loss. And the first part is this, that we tend to overcompensate by eating more food. So when we exercise, we burn calories, right, we burn a bunch of calories. Well, when that happens, our body requires more calories.

So do you ever notice how hungry you are after a long run? I know that I used to eat like crazy after a long run. That’s because after your long run, your brain is sending signals to your body to increase your appetite. So this causes you to actually eat more food. So your body’s always like trying to regulate itself, right? It’s trying to get back to a neutral state.

That neutral state is called homeostasis. And what happens is when you burn a lot of calories, your body’s like we got to get all those calories back. Okay, so it sends signals using hormones to your brain, to increase your appetite to cause you to eat more food. And a lot of times we overcompensate.

So instead of just, you know, eating the exact same amount of calories that we burn or fewer, we eat more, which leads to weight gain instead of weight loss. That’s why a lot of people who train for marathons gain weight, because their appetite is increased and they overcompensate. And there’s kind of a mental thing there too, where people think, hey, I ran today, so I can eat whatever I want.

And they’re just shoving doughnuts and stuff in their mouth all the time. Right? And it’s fun, I get it. Like it’s like, hey, I’m a runner, I can eat whatever I want. And I see all these memes and all these posts in Facebook groups, from runners who are like, I run so I can eat anything I want. And it’s funny, but it doesn’t really work.

Okay, you can’t just consume donuts and expect to lose weight. I don’t care how much running you’re doing. That is not going to work for you. In fact, it is going to have some very detrimental effects for you. It’s just not about it’s not about that you just can’t eat anything you want just because you’re running. Okay.

So when you exercise, you’re burning a lot of fuel and your body’s like I need to get back to homeostasis as quickly as possible. So it does this by making you hungry so you eat more food. Running actually makes you hungrier, you overcompensate, you gain weight. And this cycle just continues.

And then when you’re not exercising those hunger signals because you’re eating certain types of food, and we’ll get into that later, but because you’re eating certain types of food, and because you’re constantly burning a lot of calories, you’re constantly in this like increased appetite mode. It’s a vicious cycle, okay? You just can’t outrun this process, you can’t outrun your appetite here. Okay. So that’s number one. The number one reason why running doesn’t really work for weight loss is because you tend to overcompensate and your body’s this is just a natural process that your body is doing here. Okay.

Number two, when you try to use exercise running as a way to lose weight, progress is slow and minimal at best. It takes a long time to lose weight just by exercising just by running a bunch of miles. And when you do, the effects are usually pretty minimal. So there’s a couple of studies that were done. One of them studied this large group of men and women for over a year. And they had them do an hour of strenuous exercise six days a week for more than a year. Okay.

After the study, after more than a year, the women had lost an average of only three pounds, and the men had lost an average of around four pounds. This is after a year of exercising six days a week. They’ve done a lot of studies like this that prove that exercise is not a great way to lose weight. Okay.

Another study that I think is really fascinating is that they took this group of sedentary people, people who normally do not exercise, and they had them trained for a marathon. Okay, so what is that, 17 weeks, 20 weeks? And then at the end of the training season, they checked in and the men had lost an average of around five pounds, which is not bad. The women had lost zero pounds. This is crazy.

This is a ton of running that you’re doing when you’re training for a marathon, right. But it just doesn’t work. All of these people were overcompensating by eating more food, okay. But one of the most compelling studies was the Women’s Health Study. So this is where they followed around 40,000 women for 10 years. 10 years!

And they were divided up into three different groups, high exercise, medium exercise, and low levels of exercise. And the high intensity group exercised for like an hour every day, okay. And after 10 years, they checked out the groups, and this high exercise group has lost no additional weight. In fact, there was no noticeable change in body composition. This is insane, right?

But you just got to look at the facts. You know, science has proven time and time again, that exercise is not a great way to lose weight, yet we are so Ultra focused on this one thing: just run more, and the weight will magically come off, but it doesn’t work. Okay. So that is reason number two why running does not really work for losing weight. Which it progresses slow and minimal.

And then reason number three, why running is not a great way to lose weight is because running doesn’t address the underlying causes of weight gain, the mental, physical and emotional causes. Okay, running is just treating a symptom. So you gain weight, and then you want to try to burn it off by running right?

All you’re doing is just putting a tiny bandaid on this huge wound, okay, it’s just not enough, it’s not going to work, okay, you just cannot run enough to get out of that cycle. And you’re not addressing the underlying issues. And that’s what the third thing here is, it doesn’t address the cause of overeating, the cause of your over desire for food.

Like I said before, overeating. That’s just a symptom. You’ve got to treat the cause of the overeating, which is an over desire, okay. And I feel like I need to say this here. So I don’t want you to stop running. Running is awesome. It’s very, very good for you. It helps to build strong bones and muscles. It improves your overall fitness, especially your cardiovascular fitness. It helps you sleep better. It helps reduce stress, it’s really good for your heart. It’s an amazing thing to do. So keep running for sure.

Just don’t rely on running as a way of losing weight. Okay, so I just want to make sure that I threw that in there, okay. But there are mental issues and emotional issues that are hidden kind of beneath the surface that cause us to overeat that cause us to crave food and have an unnatural craving for food and running just doesn’t address those things. Okay?

So the three things that why running is not a great way to lose weight is you overcompensate, progress is slow and minimal, and then it doesn’t address the underlying causes: the physical, mental, emotional causes of overeating.

Okay, so that’s why running is not a really great way to lose weight, and then why eating less doesn’t work for weight loss. This is fascinating stuff right here. So we all think that if we just burn more calories than we take in, we can lose weight, right? We’ve been taught this forever. And it’s not that simple. It really does not work the way you think it does.

Okay, so here’s what we think. We think that if we normally burn something like 2000 calories a day, if we restrict our daily calorie intake to 1500 calories a day, we’re going to lose weight, right? I know you’ve tried this, I’ve tried this for years, I actually had this app where I was logging every bit of food that I ate, every time I went to a restaurant, everything I bought in the store, everything I made at home, like I was logging every single item.

And you know, getting my macros right, and counting all the calories, and then making sure that I’m running to burn off more of these calories. And it was completely ineffective. And so frustrating. I can’t tell you how much time I wasted entering food data into this app. It was crazy, okay.

But here’s what happens, you restrict your caloric intake to you know, 1500 calories, okay. And what happens is your body then lowers its metabolism to conserve calories. Okay, your body, again, is trying to get back to homeostasis, it wants to get back to normal, okay. So if you’re used to eating 2000 calories per day, and you limit your intake to 1500, your body has this process where it will down regulate its metabolism, to only burn those 1500 calories and no more, your body has a very good system at regulating this.

What’s happening here is your body is trying to keep you from starving to death. If you were to continue to lower your caloric intake, you know, there’s this idea that if you continue to lower your caloric intake, you can just keep losing weight, and you can lose some weight, but your body will continue to downregulate.

Okay, so let’s say you lowered your caloric intake and you’re losing like two pounds a week, you know, if you went on this thing for, like, two years, would you lose 200 pounds? No, you would not. Your body will downregulate what it burns. And it’ll keep you at a certain level. Okay.

Because your body’s like, I do not want you to starve to death. Okay, your body is really good at this process, okay. They actually did this experiment back in the 40s, like 1944 or 45, right after World War Two or during, during the end of it. So it was called the Minnesota starvation experiment.

And it sounds terrible I’ll tell you, but they took a bunch of healthy young men, who averaged eating around 3000 calories a day. And they lowered their caloric intake to around 1500. And then they lowered it even more to like less than 1000. And there were all kinds of issues that they had.

They ended up being like super cold all the time. Their fingernails got really brittle, their hair was falling out. Like there were all these side effects, you know, because their body was trying to conserve calories it was trying to and so it was putting all its it lowered the metabolism so much that it wasn’t effective at keeping the body in, in a good state in a natural healthy state.

And so these people were slowly losing their minds. They were starting to, you know, hallucinate and think about food all the time, and anyways, horrible. But anyway, the expected weight loss for each of these guys was around 78 pounds. That’s what they expected would happen. They discovered though, that on average, they only lost about 37 pounds each.

And what they figured out is that their bodies were reducing their energy expenditure in direct response to the reduced caloric intake. So the body was lowering its metabolism to make up for the fact that they were getting fewer calories. So for those people who were doing like 1500 calories a day, at that time, their energy expenditure dropped to only around 1400 calories per day.

So the body actually creates this little buffer, this margin of safety. Again, it’s like trying to stay healthy, so you don’t starve to death. Okay? Once the experiment was over, though, and they went back to their normal caloric intake, the 3000 calories, or whatever it was, they started gaining weight until it was actually they were even heavier than they were before the experiment.

And I know that we have all experienced this kind of thing, you kind of starve yourself, you eat less for a while, and you kind of lose a few pounds, but then you start eating normally again, and, and you gain all this weight back. In fact, you’re heavier, right? It’s crazy. I’ve done this before. It’s a crazy cycle. It’s no fun at all. But the fewer calories you eat, the lower your metabolism goes, and the fewer calories you burn.

There was another study done most recently in like 2008. And they had these participants, you know, they lowered their caloric intake, and they initially lost like 10% of their body weight. And their total energy expenditure decreased as expected. But it didn’t last very long, their metabolism actually remained reduced. So their ability to burn calories remained reduced for the entire year of the study. So even after a year at this new lower body weight, their total energy expenditure was still reduced by an average of almost 500 calories per day.

When you lower your caloric intake, your metabolism decreases almost immediately. And then that decrease persists basically indefinitely. Otherwise, you’d keep losing weight until you die. And the application of this is like it’s, it’s obvious like, let’s say, prior to dieting, a woman eats and burns 2000 calories per day. And then following doctor’s orders, she adopts a calorie restricted portion controlled low fat diet and reduces her intake by 500 calories a day, quickly.

Her total expenditure also drops by 500 calories a day. So her metabolism lowers. She feels lousy, tired, cold, hungry, irritable, depressed, but she sticks with it thinking that things must eventually improve, she might lose some weight. But as the caloric expenditure decreases to match the lower calorie intake, the weight plateaus.

And a year later, things have not improved, the weight slowly comes back. Even though she’s eating the same number of calories, right? So she finally figures this is not working. She abandons this failed diet and resumes eating 2000 calories a day, but her metabolism has slowed. She’s only burning off like 1500 calories a day now. And all the weight comes rushing back.

And people will say, well, you just are lacking willpower, right? You need to just, you know, eat less, control yourself. Right? Does this sound familiar to anybody? This is my experience for sure. Okay. Everything I’m describing here has been well documented, okay. Remember, your body is always trying to balance things out, your body always wants to get back to homeostasis.

And when you limit the amount of fuel that you give your body, your body also limits how much fuel that will burn. So you don’t become calorie deficient and starve yourself to death. calories in, calories out is broken. It does not work. Your body naturally works against this process. Okay.

So let’s recap. Running more does not work for weight loss. Your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite and you end up actually eating more than you would normally. Progress is slow and minimal at best. And running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. It doesn’t address the hormonal imbalances that cause us to overeat the mental cravings, the emotional eating.And then eating less doesn’t work either, calories in calories out is a myth.

It doesn’t work. Your body naturally works against this. You reduce calories and your body lowers its metabolism and response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism basically forever. And you cannot lose weight this way. If you want to lose weight, you have to address the causes of weight gain. And just eating less and running more does not address the cause.

It’s just treating a symptom and doesn’t do very well. That’s why this approach to weight loss is so frustrating. It was so frustrating to me for so long and so frustrating to my clients for so long, because it doesn’t work. Okay, so next week on the podcast, I’m going to be talking about the role your hormones play in overeating and gaining weight. And this is a fascinating, fascinating topic. You will learn a lot I guarantee it.

But one of the biggest reasons why we gain weight is that our hormones are just completely out of whack. Okay, and I’m going to talk about how to get your hormones back in balance by simply changing what you eat. This is fascinating. It’s eye opening information, it will completely change what you know about food and how it affects your body.

Okay, quick reminder, my next weight class weight loss masterclass starts June 1, and I only take about 10 people through the class. So if you want in, you have to enroll now, go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and get signed up. Drop the Quarantine 15, get your body ready for the summer, become a lean running machine. Go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to enroll now. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

14. Sarah Buckley on the Myths of Strength Training for Runners

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Today, I am sharing a conversation I recently had with my friend Sarah Buckley. Sarah is a badass personal trainer, owner of Persist Fitness Training and creator of Run Strong Cincy - a strength …

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Podcast Transcript

Patrick McGilvray
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.

Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host, and I’m the life coach for runners. And I teach you how to stop struggling, how to stop struggling and start getting results in your running in your weight loss journey in your life. And it all starts with managing your mind. And that’s what I created this podcast for. That’s what I teach you here.

I want to teach you how to manage your mind so you can create the life that you love, the life that you really want whatever that looks like for you. Today, I’m sharing a conversation I recently had with my friend Sarah Buckley. Sarah is a badass personal trainer. She’s the owner of Persist Fitness training here in Cincinnati, and she’s the creator of a program called Run Strong Cincy.

And that’s a strength training program that’s designed specifically for runners. It’s awesome. Now, there are a lot of myths around strength training and running. And today here Sarah breaks it all down for us. And she explains why strength training might be kind of misunderstood in the running community. Especially in the long distance running community. It’s kind of an eye opening interview.

Sarah and I discuss how managing your mind is the key to every good thing you want in your life from building muscle to overcoming food addictions to running a marathon. It all begins with mindset. I’m actually very excited to share this interview with you. So I’m gonna stop talking now. Here’s my interview with Sarah Buckley.

Today I am talking to my friend Sarah Buckley, about strength training specifically for runners. And she’s going to share a bunch of awesome knowledge with us today. Sarah, how are you doing?

Sarah Buckley
I’m good. Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate you having me on today.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so tell us just a little bit about you know, who you are and what you do?

Sarah Buckley
Sure. So I am a strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer. I have been in the business going on nine years. And I own Persist Fitness. That’s my business. And I work with a lot of runners. I’ve been working with runners my entire career as a personal trainer, and I have a significant running history myself, which is why I feel very passionate about working with that population. You know, I have been running since I was little. I competed in college, did the marathon half marathon kind of stuff post grad. And when I moved to Cincinnati, I didn’t know anybody. And so of course, my running community was the first place that I plugged in. And as they say the rest is history.

Patrick McGilvray
So what is it about? Well, like why do runners come to see you? What do you see? Is there kind of some of the main issues that they come to see you?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, so I actually kind of accidentally developed this program, when I was training for, you know, half marathon marathon and triathlons and I started playing around with my own strength programming. Because I was having a resource issue. And that resource was time, I had to get my mileage in. And I love lifting weights. So I didn’t want to quit.

And I also understood how beneficial it would be for my health and my performance to continue lifting. So I started to really take a critical look at my programming and my exercise choice. So that every single movement and every single exercise that I was doing was giving me the absolute highest return for my health and performance as a runner.

And so that program started out as me working with myself and then bringing in the rest of my running community. I have probably trained over 100 runners easily in the past six years, and I have a really strong group that has stuck with me. And so yeah, we are focused on health and performance and optimizing those two, while also accounting for your running programs. So You know, you have your miles on X, Y and Z days, you are tapering for this specific race and the strength. Part of your training runs directly alongside that as a complementary, rather than a competitor story, kind of part of your training.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I think that’s good that you have that perspective as a seasoned runner yourself, to be able to coach people and train them to get get to their race goals, because a lot of trainers are not, you know, half marathoners or whatever, and they don’t understand what it is to go through that training period, how you peak at a certain point, how you taper and things like that. And so having that knowledge under your belt, I think gives you definitely a great advantage to help people.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, thanks. I agree. And then just also, I think the running mind is a little bit different than some other athletes. And so I think having, you know, been an avid runner, having been both a competitor and a recreational part of that community for a long time, I really feel you know, connected.

And I feel like I’m in a unique position to communicate kind of the benefits. And I really deeply understand their why. And I can find that, you know, what I have to offer is really strongly connected to their why, it’s just a matter of having that conversation.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, when you’re talking about the mind of a runner, you know, I always say that running is 20% physical and 100% mental. And then I follow that up with saying like, and we runners were very mental, you know, we definitely have a different sort of mindset when it comes to goals, fitness, endurance, all that kind of stuff. We’re a little little out there sometimes. And we like it. We like being out there. Not everybody gets us. So and that’s okay. Yeah, we’re okay with that.

Yeah, so I know that there are some kind of myths or misconceptions about strength training, because I’ve heard a lot of people say things like, you know, you can’t build muscle while you’re, you know, training or as a runner as a long distance runner, you know, you don’t really even need to go work out at the gym and things like that. Have you heard some of these myths?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, definitely. And these are conversations that I have with my runners frequently. There’s a lot of information out there. And I think sometimes the strength conversation and the running conversation are happening in silos. So neither is really considering the like applications of the other, even though when we’re working with a real live human athlete, as an individual, we can’t operate in silos, because all of these things holistically are forming this athlete.

So for instance, the example of you know, putting on muscle because I’m like, way more, and then I’m going to slow down. That is something that I try to dispel immediately when I’m having conversations with runners, if you’re a beginner, in the gym, if you’re a beginner for strength, it’s very likely that you are going to build some muscle, you are your body and might actually recomp, meaning you might shed some body fat, and kind of put that weight that scale weight back on with muscle.

However, as far as the weight that you’re carrying, muscle is so much more valuable for your health and performance than that other weight is. So if you had to choose between the two, I would want you to have the muscle. And also of course, there is a point of diminishing return.

However, from a scientific standpoint, your nutrition number one and that’s a very important kind of separate conversation would have to be very, very dialed in for you to put on, you know, the maximum amount of muscle especially as a training endurance athlete, because those are kind of competing energy systems. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying you have to really be dialed in on quite a few different things to move that needle forward.

And secondly, muscle even if you’re, you know, just for general health, it is healthy, it’s safe. It’s protecting your body so it’s protecting your joints, it’s making you more resilient. You know, your organs are underneath. If you have some muscles in the front, you know, even like a fender bender, having some muscle in your structure can actually protect you from the world.

So it’s not something that we need to worry about. I’ve never worked with a runner who I thought needed to shed some of this muscle, you’re carrying too much around, in seven years.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s definitely one of the things I hear a lot people talking about. Or that, you know, you can’t build muscle as a runner like it just you’re, you know, it can’t happen, it’s impossible to do. Like, what do you say to that?

Sarah Buckley
So it’s not impossible, I think we said there’s some things that would need to be dialed in. And that would be a kind of a nutrition conversation. Just, you know, protein is something that builds muscle. And so if an athlete is interested in putting muscle on, there’s gonna have to be some, you know, kind of broad nutritional guidelines that would need to be followed in order to put muscle on.

That being said, there’s scientific protocols that basically do what’s called hypertrophy and hypertrophy is the scientific name for putting on muscle. So as long as an individual is consistent and over a long enough timeframe, so say, three to six months, depending on that individual, individual variables like age, gender, those types of things. As long as they’re hitting that rep scheme, and that volume scheme, they’ll put muscle on, especially someone who’s training age, meaning how long they’ve been strength training is low.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, that’s awesome.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, we call those beginner gains, because you get super strong super fast, because everything is new. So your body is on the fly there. It’s adapting very quickly.

Patrick McGilvray
Hmm. And so how would this help a long distance runner?

Sarah Buckley
Great question. So when we look at the physical demands, kind of zooming way, way in on what’s required of the body to actually run? First of all, it’s very high impact. So most of us who are in the running role, understand that conservatively, every single step when you’re running is three times your body weight, plus overcoming momentum, plus overcoming gravity, and each leg is landing about 1000 times per mile.

So this is a quite a high impact sport, which is, which is okay, that’s fine. But from the strength side of things, we need to look at how we can stay safe when we’re constantly pounding, constantly pounding, and all sports are reliant on one major foundation, and that’s being able to maintain correct position for specific amounts of time.

So for endurance athletes, it’s being able to maintain proper and efficient running biomechanics for a very long time. So you have this high demand for muscular endurance. So strength training is absolutely necessary for an endurance athlete, because simply running does not put the appropriate external load on your body is necessary for a scientific adaptation to take place for you to actually get stronger within those positions.

And secondly, running also requires almost all of the different ways you could move your body, it requires single leg strength, it requires Single Leg level change, where you know, you have knee bending and hip flexion, those kinds of things, it requires both stiffness and mobility in your joints.

And it requires rotation, that’s basically all of the components of movement that the human body allows for. And it’s all happening in an extremely short window of time, over and over and over and over and over again. So if that’s not an opportunity for over usage to happen, I don’t know what is. So we have to train that body to be prepared to do all of these necessary biomechanical things to run efficiently.

And like I said, you might be, it might be an hour and a half, it might be five hours that you’re required to maintain these pretty high level positions of your body. And strength is the only way that you can get to that place.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, the way you’re describing this and the way you’re describing the mechanics of running, just makes it sound like it’s so hard on your body like how could you not want to be stronger? You know what I mean? Because it would just make you be able to absorb all that impact to be able to push through the the repetitive motion and get to, you know, you know, have a successful workout or a successful race because without the strength involved have, oh my gosh, I could see how this could be, I’m could see why a lot of people get injured.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t want to discourage people from entering into the running world, I think the running community is one of the best and strongest and most accepting and accessible fitness communities that is available. And I absolutely love it for that. But just like a runner, who goes from one mile to three miles and three miles to five miles, and so on, and so forth, until they’re running their marathon, you have to earn that mileage.

And I think something that people don’t consider is that they think, oh, running is just walking like, but faster. And it really isn’t that simple. It’s highly complicated. When you kind of look at it, you know, the way that I’m looking at it, I’m looking at it from a human body perspective. So I would love people to think about their strength in the same way that they think about their progression of mileage. Which is like, I’m not ready to run five miles, because I haven’t put the base work in.

Similarly, like, I might not be ready to run at all, because I have, I don’t have these kind of specific strength prerequisites, in order to maintain position, keep my joints healthy. You know, and especially for a starter performance aside, the main goal is going to be health and sustainability in the sport. And then we can talk about performance, once we have this pretty significant bass, similar to how a runner, you know, would approach their first say, half marathon or marathon, I don’t think as much work as necessary for maybe a 5k. But you know, the longer distances certainly.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, what are some of those like beginner type of injuries that you see people coming in with? Like, what is kind of the main thing where people are, are, maybe they don’t have the right mechanics, or they don’t have the right strength in the right areas, like what are you seeing?

Sarah Buckley
So I see a lot of kind of random knee and that it’s really nothing, there’s no diagnosis, but it hurts all the time. And it’s probably like arthritis, or bursitis, or tendinitis, these things that are caused from, you know, doing the same thing over and over again. And, you know, consistent loading on a joint the same way over and over again.

So I see a lot of joint stuff. So hip, knee, even like ankle or foot things, is probably the most common. And I have to say almost every kind of pain, I want to say injury, because a lot of it is more just kind of chronic aches and stuff like that is coming from upstream, it’s coming from the hip. And the hip joint is very special and specific to what runners need, it needs to be able to, you know, rotate in it’s ball and socket, but it also has to be strong through its entire range of motion.

Or else you have a very significant energy week, which is going to likely come out in the knee because the knee doesn’t really it doesn’t. Of course, it does something. But as far as when we’re talking about performance and health and running efficiency, the knee is kind of just like following up with what the hip is telling it to do. So the hip isn’t healthy and strong, the knee isn’t going to be able to kind of execute on that follow up, and so on don’t down the line.

Conversely, if you have a lack of foot strength and toe dexterity, it can move up the chain. And that’s when you kind of start to see ankle issues. And again, knee issues, shin splints, I get a lot of plantar fascia stuff. And I truly believe that just just even just gaining some general strength, not even specific to your sport, but just lower body strength, stiffness, and bracing and breathing capabilities in your core will take the load off of those areas.

Because truly, you know, our body is designed to absorb and distribute forces through our core. And when I say core, I kind of mean like, from your armpit to your armpit and down to your hip towards your other hip and then on your back as well. So your torso is your core. That’s where forces come from in your body and that’s where we can absorb them. So the more stiff and strong we are in our center area, the less our joints have to absorb. So just some general training in the beginning can certainly start to reduce, you know, pain and discomfort in our limbs.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And I know that there’s a lot of different exercises that people can do and different strength training circuits and things like that they can do to build up all of those areas and strengthen the hips and strengthen the glutes. and strengthen the hamstrings and calves and all this stuff.

And you know, you get the whole thing abs, whatever. What is like one exercise that somebody could do just like at home since especially we’re all locked down at home right now anyway, like what would be like the one thing you would say that people could do that would give them kind of an overall good strength exercise or whatever?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, great question. So for all of my runners, regardless of whether we’re in the gym, or if we’re quarantined at home, I prioritize strengthening our posterior chain, which is your back and your vectors, which are the muscles that surround your spine, and they’re responsible for protecting and keeping your spine stable, your low back, your booty, your glutes and your hamstrings, because those are a runners engine, and those are a runner’s brakes.

So those are likely areas where I see energy leaks. So any movement that is a hinge. So one example would be a deadlift, where you have a soft bending of your knees, and you’re pushing your hips back and your belly button down and kind of reaching towards mid Shin, you’ll feel your hips load up, because you’ll start to feel a stretch in your hamstring.

When we’re at home, something that works great if you have a little bit of equipment, you can just stand on a band. And you can hold the band on the outside of your legs and do your hands movement from there. But also, I actually just made gallon weights by using old gallon cartons that I just taped and one of them is filled with sand and basically dirt and it’s a little heavier and more dense. And then the other one I filled like three quarters of the way with water. And it’s a little bit unstable because the water sloshes around, and I secured it with duct tape. It’s kind of whatever. But it’s working for me right now. Awful items. But I think nailing a hinge pattern, being able to lengthen your hamstrings under load is the absolute first priority for any runner, I don’t care if you have been running for two days or 20 years, you have to be able to load your hamstring in a lengthened state.

Patrick McGilvray
And doing that you said to do these bent over hinges or the deadlifts?

Sarah Buckley
Especially, you know, if you were to Google ‘deadlift’, you’re gonna see somebody probably doing it with a barbell, but the movement is the same. And it’s you’re acting as your hips, if your body is a door, your hips are your hinge, and your upper body is the door and your legs are staying in the same place. So they’re the doorframe so your upper body is opening and closing your hips will be pushing backwards as your belly button going down, and you have a soft bend in your knee, that’s the biggest thing I see is that people bend their knees all the way and they do more of a squat, rather than being a very so think about your the knee bend that you’re looking for is the same knee bend that you would have on your landing. When you’re running. It’s not very deep. It’s a tiny degree.

Patrick McGilvray
Gotcha. Like would this be like a Romanian deadlift?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Romanian, or RDL or deadlift, do like the same thing, but different ranges of motion. So yeah, exactly. Patrick.

Patrick McGilvray
Cool. That’s good. I’ve done a few of those.

Sarah Buckley
Good. Yeah. Good for everybody.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, they suck. No, that’s actually a really, it’s a really good strength training any I’ve found, and from what I understand any type of squatting, like that is going to help a lot for runners just because you’re, you’re strengthening that whole posterior chain also, you know, you’re hitting the glutes, and you’re hitting the hamstrings and the calves and the hip flexors and all that stuff. So that’s all good.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, and I really like compound movement, meaning it’s one movement that checks a lot of boxes. Yes. Efficiently from like a weight loss standpoint, I really like it because it’s not ice. Like it’s not a bicep curl. Your bicep is like three inches of your whole body versus your RDL, your deadlift, which is literally recruiting all of your muscle fibers for your entire body. It’s quite a bit more of a workout. So from a resources standpoint, I really liked the compound lifts. Not that we don’t hit isolated stuff we absolutely do. But again, if we had to choose one, and we’re prioritizing, it’s gonna be the compound lifts.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I think maybe a good rule of thumb for people when they do start going back to the gym, is to avoid the machines because those are very isolating and to do more stuff, just on the floor, you know, on the using the rig or whatever they got there, right.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah. And, you know, I don’t use a lot on machines, I don’t train within one specific kind of like program, I’m more of a hybrid. So I would consider myself working within a system where multiple tools can be brought in depending on the needs of an individual. So I will never say no to machines.

However, like you had said, they’re very isolating. So it’s unlikely that you’re going to get the benefits from a compound movement. And also, it puts you in a prescribed range of motion that may not be what you’re ready for, or be structurally what you have the capacity for. So I know a lot of people, particularly with shoulders that have big time trouble with machines.

So I would recommend having a coach look at your movement. Dumbbells are king for stability. I love using dumbbells. And I would recommend that over any machine any day, for any individual, except for maybe somebody who’s either doing like powerlifting or weightlifting, specifically, but even those folks are going to use the dumbbells for their accessories.

Patrick McGilvray
And I think what you just touched on something that’s so important, which is having somebody like watch you, that knows what they’re doing. And that can help you. I’ve seen some people the gym, the way they’re lifting weights is just terrible. And you’re just like, oh my god, you’re so doing it wrong, you’re going to hurt yourself. And we don’t want that. So having somebody to watch over you to help you to create the movement that works best for your body type for your shape for what your goals are. I think that’s so important.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think that kind of hits on another, like myth as well, which is where I hear a lot of my runners saying two things, one of the things that they say is that they want to get in shape before they come to work out. And then secondly, you know, because I think of, and I again, love the running community.

A lot of the reason that people are plugged into running groups, or become runners is because it is so social, and it is so supportive, and it is so inclusive, and I think you can find some of those same markers in group fitness type classes.

And when we’re talking about getting assessed and using your resources wisely, and getting kind of in shape, that would not be the route that I recommend for runners based on what kind of energy system they’re trying to train based on progressions that I would be recommending for them, because you haven’t been assessed on your individual needs. So we don’t know where you stand.

We don’t know what your strengths are, we don’t know where there’s opportunity to grow. And we certainly, you know, the emphasis is on the individual to say when they’re ready for the next thing. And all of those decisions can be made by a coach who’s working with somebody because the variables are, you know, they vary.

So it could be someone who’s coming off of an injury or could simply be someone who’s having a hard week at work and their stress is really high. And there’s really no value in continuing to stress that system. All the way to okay, you have a race in two weeks, so I’m tapering you in the gym. So that’s something that those kinds of circuit, specifically kind of timed circuit based classes, I don’t necessarily recommend those for my runners because it is very depleting to their recovery tank. And it is not adding value to their long term goals, because of the lack of assessment because of the lack of correct progressions and variations for themselves.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it’s really not a one size fits all, you know what I mean? It’s just like, it’s so individual. So individual.

Sarah Buckley
Communities are wonderful, like I said, for the workout, but when we’re talking about training, just like your training for your race. There’s a difference between going to a workout class and going to train for you, for yourself, for your goals, for your why.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s a very good point. Yeah, you touched on something else earlier that I want to kind of mention, which is you you said like doing these compound exercises are better for your kind of for your, like weight loss goals. And one of the things that I firmly believe, and I think it’s kind of one of those myths about running in general is like if I just run I’ll lose weight, you know, and when it comes down to it, running is not a very effective way to lose weight.

I think exercising in general is not a very effective way by itself to lose weight. The problem, a couple problems with it are number one, people tend to work out or run and then they overcompensate with what they eat. And so they’re just they’re negating any kind of gains they may have made at the gym or out on the road.

So another problem is that the main reason we are overweight, especially here in the United States is that we overeat. And the over eating has to do with, you know, social cultural things. It has to do with psychological reasons, hormonal reasons, but it’s mostly like there’s physical, mental and emotional causes that are sort of hidden, and that have kind of programmed us to be overeaters, you know, and no amount of running is going to fix that.

And so, you know, I tell people, like you have to address the underlying issues, if you want to lose weight and get to your, you know, natural weight, not everybody needs to like fit some perfect airbrushed model version of whatever people think reality is, but like, what is your natural weight, where should you be, if you’re not there, then we need to address those issues.

So you know, but I do, but here’s the thing, here’s where I’m getting to it, this long, roundabout way of saying it, is like running is a part of that, it is a part of staying healthy and staying fit. Running makes you feel good, you get that release of dopamine and endorphins and adrenaline and like it just it’s, it’s a good, it makes you feel good. It’s good for your mental health, it’s good for your physical health, it’s good to get outside and get some vitamin D, get some sunshine, how does strength training play into someone’s overall, you know, kind of weight loss goals for the people that are interested in losing weight?

Sarah Buckley
Sure, so just to kind of touch on what you just kind of left off with, with the running. The reason that, you know, I became a strength coach, and I push lifting the weights so hard and believe in it so deeply, you know, my, my tagline for my business is empowerment through movement is because I truly believe that pursue personal emotional mental growth far surpasses the physical gains that you will have in the gym.

And it’s a way to do something and to have success on something that you’ve never done before. And you feel amazing, you feel like a badass, you are able, you’re you feel very capable. And so there’s all these other, like high value, things, high value words that you’re getting from your lifting experience, that I think are going to again, we can’t work in a silo.

So from a holistic standpoint, that checks many boxes when I start to think about mental and emotional health. And I think, at least for me, I provide a safe, accessible place for people to come do those things. Because I understand like, it can seem intimidating. When you just go out on the road, you’re by yourself. Maybe people in cars see you but you know, you’re very separated from them.

Versus in the gym, you might be face to face with someone who you feel like it’s watching you. And so I think that, that that’s why I’m here to be on that journey with you. And that’s kind of the soft science things, and anecdotally why I believe in doing it that way. But the hard science absolutely supports that as well. So yeah, running in and of itself, weightlifting in and of itself, these are tools towards weight loss, whether you have just strictly an aesthetic goal or a weight loss goal that’s tied to help. Both are great.

So doing the high, you know, compound movements that’s recruiting a lot of muscle. You know, it’s just, it just makes more sense, wouldn’t you rather burn this amount of calories doing a compound lift and this amount of calories, doing 50 bicep curls, and only targeting one part of your body and the rest of your body now is not getting what it needs.

So and also it’s a great way to put on muscle and build muscle is to do those compound movements because you are using every muscle in your body. And so we know that having more muscle is helpful to weight loss. Even though you know muscle weighs more, I say it’s helpful to fat loss, because that scale number could potentially go up but your percent body fat is going to go down.

So that’s something that I was mentioning earlier. And so it’s the quality of the number that we see on the scale. And you’ll look different and you know your body is going to change. But the weight that you are carrying is working for you; it is adding value to your life every single day.

Versus on the other side. Maybe there’s risks that are involved with the weight that you are carrying. And so I think that you again, all those conversations need to be happening. That’s why I said this kind of nutrition is very important. But it’s kind of separate because we need to, you know, be talking about emotionally, why is this happening? It’s not just about eat this, don’t eat that, like, why are we eating what we’re eating? What, what history do we have with food? How do we address behaviors at a behavioral level? And those are probably just manifesting themselves in overeating, binging restricting those kinds of those kinds of behaviors.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and you know, I call that buffering. And that’s where you’re putting a buffer between your, your emotions and your and your mind, you know what I mean, you’re trying to stuffed those things down, so you don’t have to experience them, maybe it’s a negative emotion, some kind of feeling you don’t want to feel and so you just eat the whole bag of potato chips, or the whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s, or you sit in front of the TV and watch Netflix all day long.

And it’s a way of numbing yourself and feeling good, because you kind of it replaces that kind of dopamine hit that you would get from doing something like working out or running, you know, so it makes you feel good for a moment. But then when you’re done with that, but with that buffering experience, whatever it is, we finish the pint of ice cream, you’re gonna come down crashing from that, and you’re still left with feeling the emotions, and now you’re beating yourself up because you were you ate something you knew that was bad for you.

And it’s actually making you gain weight instead of losing weight. So, yeah, it’s, it’s just such a, there’s a, there’s a lot of factors involved here, there’s no like, you know, there’s no magic bullet. And here’s the thing, people want a magic bullet, they just want to be like, you know, I’m just going to eat these five things and work out three times a week and run three times, and I’ll be fine. Like, and a lot of times, that doesn’t work.

And they need to understand there’s so much more going on under the surface that they have to like, be willing to uncover and look at, it’s like these dark corners of our minds, and our emotions that we don’t want to look at. But once you start bringing those things up, you know, it, it’s not, it doesn’t feel good at first. But once you start to realize you can like feel your emotions and not have to eat over them or, you know, just, you know, sit around because of them. Like you can be such a more well rounded and healthy person mentally and physically.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, I’ve shared this with you before, but I have a long history of every eating disorder, disordered eating, those kinds of things, different behaviors. And I, myself, I worked on it, you know, big time in a kind of concentrated area, and then every single day, similar to other kinds of behaviors, you know. Whatever your age, I’m in recovery is how I would describe myself, like, you know, so there’s things to work on every single day. But you’re right, it’s so nuanced.

And, you know, for me, it has just been, you know, running, you know, I have a history as a runner, and now I’m more of a lifter, but those two things complemented, my, you know, emotional, well being journey. Because they’re unlike everything else, they’re very constant. You know, one mile is one mile, always. And it’s always, like, accessible to you, you know, even if it’s slower, or even if it feels crappy, you know, it’s still one mile.

That’s similar to how things are in the gym, you know, five pounds is always five pounds. And so, you know, and it’s always just a, you know, something else with running. I mean, I think some people are at the level where yeah, they are trying to beat somebody. And that happens in the lifting world as well. But you know, it’s a way for you to just kind of be with yourself. And also both things are really hard.

And I think it’s important for us to put ourselves in positions that feel really uncomfortable, even if it’s extreme physical discomfort, because that is going to train us to be unable to adapt to emotional discomfort and just be in our feelings, you know, mental discomfort feels like out of control. So, I really think that there’s so much carryover to physical training when we are dealing with like you said, those dark corners.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s such a good analogy to the you know, getting uncomfortable getting outside your comfort zone because that’s the only time you can actually learn that’s the only time you grow that’s the only time you expand your consciousness that you expand, you know that you grow who you are, and become you know, a different person when we stay in our comfort zone.

We just stay stuck in the here and now and that’s it and we can never grow and be you know, we have these dreams of like, here’s who I want to be I haven’t you know this person I want to be but I’m not willing to be uncomfortable at all to get there. Guess what? You’re never going to get there. And so it takes getting uncomfortable out on the road when you’re running, it takes pushing yourself farther and, and faster and running up that hill 27 times.

It takes going to the gym, and embracing how bad it’s going to suck for those first few weeks at start doing that, but the results on the other side of that are just so good and so amazing and, and it works with our feelings to let but like when we’re pushing down our emotions and not wanting to feel them because it’s uncomfortable.

We just stay stuck there, you know, in that emotional childhood, so to speak, you know, in order to grow and become an emotional adult, we have to be able to sit with our feelings, experienced them, process them, manage them, and that will allow us to grow when we get really good at managing our, our emotions, man, we can do anything, there’s really nothing we can do if we’re not if we’re willing to feel our emotions.

And I think we get so stuck in trying to stuff all that down. And we have all these excuses why we can’t do things like, you know, go work out at the gym or, or you know, run a half marathon or whatever, we have all kinds of excuses. You know, a lot of it just has to do with us not wanting to get uncomfortable with our emotions. It’s crazy, but this is really awesome. This has been a really cool conversation, Sarah just so cool.

So where can people like find out more about you? Or like, what can they do? I know we’re kind of in a situation now where it’s can’t go to the gym, but what can people do right now to connect with you?

Sarah Buckley
Great. Yeah, so even though gyms are closed, I’m still running. My run has been strong since the strength program over zoom. And I’ve had people who are good with it. And you know, the doors are open here. I’m welcome to have additional participants. We have a couple different times a day a couple different times a week to kind of accommodate everybody’s schedules right now. So you can find information about that at persistfitnesstraining.com You can also email me sarah@persistfitnesstraining.com. And, yeah, I’ll reach out to you ASAP.

Patrick McGilvray
And this is for anybody whether they live around the Cincinnati area or not, because you’re doing it on Zoom right now. Right?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, and actually, even when we go back to the gym, the way that my running program works is that it’s extremely flexible. So people can come in and be in the gym with me or they can train remotely. So there’s an opportunity for them to have programming delivered to them. And but we are still coaching, um, you know, we’re still communicating about their needs. And so, you know, kind of depending on where you are physically, geographically where you are in your fitness journey, those things will all be accounted for.

Patrick McGilvray
So you can do some kind of personal coaching and assessments over zoom with people, right?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think it’s everything, of course, now it’s a little bit different with the assessments. So typically, I would have someone come in and run for me and do all of these things. But I’ve been able to do like, what’s something that’s very important for me is to look at as joint health, we talked about the hips stuff.

So that is something that I could get a pretty good handle on over zoom, just by directing people to move a certain way. I mean, I’ve been looking at, you know, human bodies move for seven years, and my hobby is exercising. So I, you know, I’m training with a bunch of people. So I’m looking at people move for like, many, many hours a week. So over Zoom, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn close to what we would be able to do if we were in person together. This is the situation we’re in.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s cool. I’m glad you’re still offering this service to people because I think it’s really important. I think it’s important for runners to get stronger and to realize that it’ll only serve them in a positive way to, you know, get stronger and build that strength and muscle fitness. Yeah.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And similar to your running group, we have our community too. So you know, you get to see your people. Oh, and I forgot to mention that anyone who’s interested in joining, especially now when we’re doing during quarantine, I will be gifting you equipment that you will need because I understand people don’t necessarily have access to everything and I want to accommodate for that.

Patrick McGilvray
No way. What, you’re gonna like send them stuff like in the mail?

Sarah Buckley
I’ll send them something if they’re not in Cincinnati. If they’re in Cincinnati, I’ll come and drop it off on your porch.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s awesome. Yeah. You’re so awesome, Sarah. Hey, this has been really awesome. We’re gonna get you on another time and we’ll continue the conversation because there’s a lot of things I want to talk to you about here that come up here. Yeah. So we’ll do that another time. But in the meantime, you guys go check out. Persistfitnesstraining.com, sign up for one of Sarah’s remote classes. You can do it no matter where you are in quarantine right now. So awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, thank you for having me on Patrick. I loved our talk.

Patrick McGilvray
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