Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
When it comes to changing your diet in order to lose weight or just be healthier, most people feel like whatever they do is too restrictive. They feel like you should be able to eat anything you …
Continue Reading about 238. Should You Restrict Certain Foods? →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, sports nutritionist, Master life coach and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you, properly fuel your body and your mind so you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is running lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 238, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, should you restrict certain foods when it comes to changing your diet in order to lose weight or maybe just feel healthier? Most people feel like whatever they do is too restrictive. So they feel like you should be able to eat anything you want, as long as you don’t overdo it. And most people also feel that restricting any amount of food is really not sustainable long term.
So what’s the answer here? Should you restrict certain foods or not? That’s the big question I’m going to answer today in this episode of the running lean podcast. But first, if you want to get leaner, if you want to get stronger, if you want to run faster longer, you need to change some things. Doing the same things is not going to get you different results. Nothing changes if nothing changes, I think we all understand this, right? But the real secret here is doing these new things, making these changes and making them doing them consistently.
If you decide you want to get stronger, you can’t just go to the gym once a month. If you want to get faster, you can’t do speed training one time. You need to adopt new behaviors, and you need to do them consistently. And this is where coaching comes into play, because with coaching, it really helps you to stay on track. It helps you to have somebody there that’s kind of guiding you, yes, that’s giving you the information that you need, that’s telling you what to do, that’s guiding you forward, that’s walking you through things step by step, but also to make sure that you’re staying on track. This was my problem.
I could never make much progress because I couldn’t stay on track for very long. But once I got a coach, everything changed for me. I had somebody that was holding me accountable, calling me out when I started slipping back into old behaviors, and somebody that’s really never, ever letting me quit, that was an awesome part of having a coach. So if you’re ready to start doing some things differently, if you’re ready to start doing some different things consistently, and you want to make sure that you never, ever quit, let’s get you there. Just go to my website, runningleancoach.com, click on work with me, and I will show you how to stay on track, how to be consistent, and how to become the most badass version of yourself yet.
Cool. Yeah, let’s do this. Okay. So what are we talking about today? Should you restrict certain foods? So the reason that I want to talk about this today is because this is kind of a big hot topic in the field of nutrition management, weight management, diets, diet culture, whatever. And there are basically two camps out there with two main ideas.
So there’s one camp who says you need to stick to a certain diet. And it’s usually whatever one they adhere to, and a lot of times it has to do with a book that they wrote that they want to sell you, okay? But basically it’s like you need to stick to a certain diet, Mediterranean, keto, vegan, carnivore. It doesn’t really matter what it is. There’s just some diet. This is the way to do it. This is it. This is the healthiest way to go. And you have to stick to this. And then that’s their whole thing. Like you cannot deviate from this diet. You have to do this.
Then there’s the other camp who says you should never restrict any foods. You should be able to eat all the foods that you want. Don’t ever deny yourself the foods that you love. Just make sure you do all these foods in moderation, right? And I’m going to get into both of these approaches.
I’m going to tell you kind of what I think is good and bad about each one, and I’m also, today, I’m also going to share my approach, which is a little bit different, but this is the approach that I live my life by, and the one that I recommend to all of my coaching clients as well. But while you’re listening to this episode, I want you to be thinking about yourself and thinking about your own life, and think about how these different approaches that I’m going to be talking about, how do they sit with you? How do you feel about them? How do they make you feel and then think about which of these approaches might be something that you could do long term.
Okay, again, when we talk about making changes like this, it can’t be something you do temporarily. Be something you do every now and then. It has to be something that you can commit to for life. So what can you commit to for life? So just be thinking about those things like, what, what are these different approaches mean to you? How do they make you feel? How do they sit with you? And which feels like it’s sustainable for you? Okay? So just be thinking about that.
Okay. So, first approach I want to talk about is that you have to stick to this certain diet no matter what. And so that’s like the people who are like, all carnivore, you know, like, all you have to do is just eat meat and eggs, and that’s it. Just don’t eat anything else. Or vegan, like, you just have to never eat any animal products. You just stick with plant based stuff. And that’s the way to go, or vegetarian, or the Mediterranean diet, or the south peach diet, or the, I don’t know, the all cabbage diet, whatever it is.
What I like about these approaches is that a lot of times there is some good data, some good studies that they’ve done, some science based studies that support some of the data here. Now what’s interesting is that a lot of the science based studies will contradict each other.
So people will say, Oh, you know, all these people lost a ton of weight and got much healthier and are at lower risk of all these diseases when they went to a totally plant based diet, so no animal products whatsoever. Then there’ll be all these other studies that say, oh, all these other people, they lost weight, they feel better, they’re much healthier. All their markers have improved. They’re at lower risk of all these illnesses, and they went to the all meat diet. That’s like, which of these is right, you know, are they both right? Are they both wrong? I don’t know, but, but a lot of times we can look at data and science and say that, you know, for the most part, for most people anyway, that some of these approaches have some good data behind them.
So I like that. One thing I really like about adhering to some sort of a diet is that you have very clear guidelines to follow. You know, it makes it very simple for you, because you don’t have to make all these decisions yourself. You can just say, like, look at a list online, or something that says, here’s the foods you can eat and here’s the foods you need to avoid. You know, if you want to do paleo, just stay away from sugar and grains and dairy or whatever it is, you know, and you’d be like, Okay, that’s easy to follow, you know, if you do go online, another thing I like about adhering to a diet is that there are, there are tons of information about each of these diets available online.
So you can get into groups where you can chat with other people about this stuff. You can look up all kinds of different articles, listen to podcasts. So there’s tons of information out there about all these different diets, and there’s lots of success stories about all these diets. A lot of people do really well when they eat, you know, this diet or that one? And you know what? Some people just like being told what to do, and they like not having to make decisions. And they just want somebody to tell them, just do this, and that’ll work for you, and they feel good, and that works for them. Okay? So that’s kind of what I like about the sticking to a certain diet approach.
Okay, what I don’t like is that these diets are all pretty restrictive, or at least most of them are pretty restrictive. For example, we look at, you know, vegan, and I was vegan for 10 years, so I’m not slamming veganism, I’m just saying that it’s kind of extreme, because you’re avoiding all animal products, including things like honey. So no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no honey, you know, and that can be tough for some people because it is very restrictive, and some people don’t like this. Some people just don’t want to live their life that way. Some people like it. They like the restrictive quality, and they do really well with that. But some people do not like that restrictive quality.
Another reason why I don’t like completely restricting certain foods is that it can lead to, in some people, it can lead to disordered eating. And this is one thing you’ll see out there when you start looking up different diets and their effectiveness and stuff like that, you’ll see that this one topic keeps coming up over and over again, and it’s that any type of restricted eating can lead to eating disorders or disordered eating. And I just have to say that that is not true for everyone.
Okay, so I don’t want you to think that if you are following some kind of diet, like paleo or something like that, that you’re doing some sort of disordered eating. You’re not but some people that are more susceptible to that kind of thing, or have had eating disorders in the past, or things like that, you got to be careful with how you’re restricting food. So that’s just something that I don’t really like the restrictive nature of. Some of these approaches, especially when they’re like, you can never eat sugar again in your life.
You know, is that really? Is that really, you know, is that really going to happen? Are you really going to adhere to that? Like, I don’t know, also, each one of these diets, like I was saying, there’s studies that’ll show, like, oh, this, this will help cure cancer, and this one, you know, I don’t know, I’m making that up, but they give you all these claims, right? But not one of these diets works for everyone, right? They’re all different, like, not everybody responds the same way to eating certain foods, right? So you just have to accept this as part of the deal here. And so if there’s a certain diet that you’re, you know, following, and it’s not working for you, try a different one. Maybe that’ll work better for you.
But all these food influencers out there, or people that are selling their books or whatever it is, they’re claiming that their diet, this one way of doing things, is superior to all the other ways of doing things. And of course, the other person that’s on the other end of that is saying the exact same thing. So who’s right? Like, I don’t know, different people respond differently to different diets. We just have to accept that this is part of it. Okay?
So these, these diet approaches, you know, there are some things I like about it. You know, they’re pretty clear, pretty simple to follow a lot of times. There’s some good science behind it, a lot of information out there, but at the same time, they can be very restrictive, and a lot of people do not respond well to that. Okay.
The second approach is this approach that a lot of dietitians out there, almost every dietician, especially if they are A and D certified dietitians. So that means that they’ve been certified through the American the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. So A and D, they recommend this approach, which is, you should never restrict any foods, right? All foods in moderation. That is their mantra. All foods in moderation. And you have to understand that dietitians, they are funded by the big food industry, even brands like PepsiCo and Mars, right Pepsi and then Mars, who makes all the candy bars and stuff like that their advice is biased, in my opinion. You know, just because they have, they are, they’re funded by big food industry, and they have a certain agenda that they’re taught to pass on. And one of them is this, all foods in moderation.
And I think this approach does have its benefits, like for most people, they do consider this approach sustainable, right? Because it’s not restrictive at all, like you can eat anything you want, just be, you know, moderate your food intake. You know, be mindful about what you’re eating. People who don’t restrict foods, they’re less likely to develop like disordered eating, right?
And again, this is not to say that everyone who restricts Foods has some sort of eating disorder, right, but for some people that are more prone to it, you know, just allowing whatever foods. You know it’s fine. You don’t have to think about what you’re doing here. You can just eat whatever you like. Doesn’t matter. You’re not following any guidelines at all. You just get to eat whatever you want.
What I don’t like about this approach is that, again, it doesn’t work for everyone for a lot of reasons, like all foods in moderation. Let’s talk about that for a minute. This idea is great in theory, but for a lot of people, and I’m one of these people, certain foods I have a really hard time moderating, especially when we start talking about hyper palatable foods.
So these are foods that are designed to make you feel really good. They taste amazing. They light up your pleasure centers like crazy, and they make you crave more of those foods. They’re very addictive in nature. They’re very hard to moderate. So hyper palatable foods, and usually these are foods that are loaded with sugar, that are a lot of times Ultra processed foods. These foods hijack your hunger signals. They make you more hungry for more of those types of foods. They make you crave more of those types of foods, very, very difficult to moderate, hyper palatable foods. So to say all foods in moderation, it’s a great theory, but it doesn’t work for a lot of people, and for some people, they eat these foods, and it leads to binging behavior, which is also a disordered type of eating, right?
So the idea behind all foods in moderation is good, the execution of it is typically pretty, pretty poor, because they’re not teaching people how to moderate their food intake. They’re not teaching people how to change their thinking. Most of us have very well developed thought patterns, thought feeling, action patterns around food. And in order to moderate our food intake, you have to learn how to change these patterns. And no one is teaching you how to do this. They’re just saying moderation. Just moderate your food. Eat in moderation. Eat whatever you want, but eat it in moderation.
So I’ve got a big problem with that part of it. And if moderating food was that simple, we wouldn’t have this obesity epidemic in this country. So I think all that advice of like all foods in moderation doesn’t work for everybody, and I think it is one of those things where it’s a little bit irresponsible because we’re not helping people deal with the thoughts and feelings they have around food, or how to deal with their own own emotions and things like that.
You know, another thing that I don’t really like about this approach is that there are some foods that affect people profoundly, you know, like sugar, for example. For some people, sugar can really dramatically affect people and put them into this place where they’re pre diabetic or diabetic, you know, high blood sugar can be a real problem. And I think saying, like, oh, even though you’re diabetic, you can still eat a bunch of sugar. I don’t think that’s responsible either.
Okay, so I have a few problems with this approach. Okay, so I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about my approach. So we’ve talked about restricting foods, you know, forever, like, here’s the diet you’re going to stick to be a vegan, or whatever it is, forever, or just eat whatever you want. Here’s my approach. I think this is something that we can all sort of relate to, which is, you need to figure out what works best for you. You know, I’ve talked about this before, right? I do suggest at the beginning of the process here, especially if you’re somebody who is trying to change your relationship with food, you’re trying to lose weight, I do suggest that we practice some food restriction for a period of time, let’s say 30 days or so, to get your body off of the sugar and the and the highly processed foods.
We got to give your body some time, your body and your brain, some time to detox and to get out of this addictive tendencies, you know, around food, you got to get you starting to get used to eating real food, not just food that hijacks your hunger signals that makes you super hungry all the time. We need to get your body burning fat, so there’s a period, yeah, of a little bit of restriction at the beginning. So we kind of lower the carbohydrate intake. You know, with this may be 30 or 60 days, depending on where you are with things or what your goals are.
But what’s different here is that this restriction is temporary, like, we’re trying to reset your body back to normal, and then we can reintroduce some of these foods later, we can even, like, you know, I also suggest taking a break from alcohol too, because it’s it’s also very addictive and has a tendency to keep you from burning fat and makes it hard to lose weight if you’re trying to lose weight. So maybe we take a break from alcohol as well, but after some period of time, we can even reintroduce alcohol back into the mix, right? If that’s something that you want for yourself, right?
So where, where I’m different though, from these other approaches is that I want you to learn how to be more mindful about the foods that you eat. So it’s not about total restriction forever, and it’s not about, you know, all foods in moderation either, it’s, you know, it’s not about eating whatever you want whenever you want, either, okay, but it’s about learning how to manage your mind around food.
So for most of us, we’ve, like, taught ourselves all these lessons around food for the last 30, 40, 50 years. Like we can use food as a great emotional management tool, you know, if I’m stressed, if I’m tired, if I’m bored, we use food and it works for us, you know. Or we use food as a reward, like I did something good this week. I had a really hard day at work. I turn in that presentation, or had a really long run, and I’m going to reward myself with a bunch of junk food. Or, you know, I can’t have fun unless I’m eating X, Y and Z, like, I’m going to go out with my friends, and I have to order the burger with the glazed donuts, because that’s the thing they have at this restaurant, the glazed donuts, or the buns for the burger, whatever it is, right?
I just heard about a burger here locally that has glazed donuts as buns. So hilarious. But we have these well conceived and well established lessons that we’ve taught ourselves around food. We use it as an emotional management tools reward or, you know, we have to eat junk food in order to have fun.
But we need to take a different approach. We want to be mindful about what we’re eating. And being mindful about what we’re eating is something where it sounds, you know, it sounds easy. It’s not easy, right? Especially if you’re eating highly palatable foods that are loaded with sugar, like these foods make you crave more of those foods. It really requires a shift in your thinking.
So this is where we have to really dig into the mindset, and we have to change our thinking. And this is something that neither one of these other approaches are really talking about. You know, if you want to, if you want to moderate your food intake, especially the hyper palatable foods, you got to learn how to deal with your emotions if you want to stop the, like, emotional eating. You know, if you want to stop eating as a reward, you got to learn other ways of rewarding yourself that don’t involve eating a bunch of junk food, right?
So what I’m talking about here is a more sensible approach. We need to learn how to take back control of our eating. We never want to feel like we’re on autopilot, like we’re out of control. We want to be intentional about and mindful about the foods that we eat, foods they affect us profoundly. You know, they can fuel our athletic endeavors. Food can provide sustenance and all the nutrition that we need, but food can be harmful to us. Can’t forget that not all foods are awesome, you know? And there’s issues out there, especially when we’re talking about these highly palatable foods, hyper palatable foods, highly processed foods.
The problem with these foods is that it’s all about the marketing. They’re just trying to sell more of this food. So they market this stuff to make it seem like it’s amazing. A lot of these foods are void of actual nutrients. So they’re actually not good for you. They’re bad for you. They’re loaded with artificial ingredients, artificial flavorings, artificial sweeteners. A lot of these foods have been proven to cause long term health issues. They’re designed to make you crave more and more of the foods, so that you become addicted to them, so that you buy more because the food companies don’t care about your health. They don’t care if you’re healthy and happy and feeling good. They don’t care if you’re overweight. They just want to make more money. They want to sell you more food.
High profits drive cheap ingredients, poor quality, addiction and repeat customers, not health. We are the sickest society to ever live in the history of the world, right here, right now, in 2024 and all the stuff we’re doing is clearly not working. I recently came across this fascinating study in the journal Lancet, and it says that the number one killer of human beings on Earth right now is no longer heart disease or cancer, but the foods that we are eating mainly because the foods that we’re eating are causing all of these other killer diseases, you know.
So what we eat, it really does matter, but we have to find a balance, like you have to do what feels right for you. You don’t have to listen to anyone else. You need to kind of trust your own instincts. And what I’m trying to tell you to do here is get off the highly palatable foods, eat mostly whole foods, real food, food that still looks like food, food that our ancestors would recognize as food. And then you got to learn how to manage your mind.
You have to adopt a mindset that is intentional and mindful about the foods that you eat. And yes, you do have to do this for life. This is not a short term thing. This requires a shift in your identity, to someone who eats healthy like 90% of the time, and someone who can indulge a little bit here and there, but this is the approach that I take.
This is what I see as the most sustainable. This is the approach that I work on with all of my clients. I want to get them into this place where they eat real food most of the time. We can occasionally have that little indulgence here there, eat the pizza, eat the ice cream, fine, whatever. But then we’re back on track again. But that is what’s sustainable. What’s not sustainable is the all or nothing approach.
You know, all foods all the time and are super restrictive all the time. So what I do, like 90% of the time I’m eating whole foods. I’m eating meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, dairy, nuts, seeds, that’s it. There’s no sugar, there’s no junk food, there’s no fried food, like, 90% of the time I’m eating super clean food. 10% of the time, 10% by the way, works out to, like, maybe a meal per week, or something like that. I might eat some pizza or some ice cream or some bread, but I probably don’t do all those things at once, you know, like, I try to pick one thing that I’ll do.
You know, if I go out, going to go, you know, play some trivia or something, one night, I might have some pizza. And that’s the one time I do that for the week. And I really limit the amount of grains that I eat, the amount of sugar that I eat, I really do. And then occasionally, I will do a 30 day stint or so where I take a reset, where I might avoid all sugar, all grains for 30 days. I just won’t do any of that stuff. I won’t eat any pizza, no ice cream, nothing like that. And this is if I’m feeling like I’m gaining some fat weight, or feeling a little puffy, or just not feeling as good as I know that I can feel, then I’ll just take a reset.
So I’ve developed a way of eating, for me, that works beautifully. It’s not all or nothing. It’s not super restrictive, but it’s not eat all the foods all the time, either. And you know what? It changes sometimes, and this is important too, like sometimes I do that stint where I’ll cut out all dairy, or cut out all sugar, or all grains or whatever. And I think one of the big mistakes that most people make when they set out to change their diet, their lifestyle, they want to lose weight, whatever it is that they think that they have to do the same thing forever. You know, all I committed to, you know, being a vegan, so I got to do this forever.
You got to figure out what works for you, and then you have to allow yourself to change things up if it stops working for you, or if you want to work differently. You know that’s what sustainability really looks like. Find something that works for you, stick with it pretty much. And then if you need to change something, change something. You got to do what works for you, right? Don’t hold on to some methodology forever, no matter what. I did this when I was plant based, I was plant based for like, 10 years, and I was doing great for a while, but then I really started feeling like crap. I was gaining a lot of weight, and I kind of felt stuck because I wouldn’t change anything, because I was like, this is who I am. This is what I do. I’m this vegan guy, you know, and you know what? That’s dumb, like, I know that now that I could change at any time, but I wasn’t willing to let go of this ideology around the foods I was eating, because it had become such a part of my identity. I had to let go of that if I wanted to feel better and get healthier and lose weight and all that other stuff, right?
So what sustainability looks like is finding something that feels good for you, that you feel in integrity with. And you know what? Some people like sticking to that plant based diet, or to the, you know, all meat diet or or doing all foods in moderation, whatever. And if that works for you, beautiful, do that. That feels good for you, and that is a long term solution for you. Do that. The real answer here is that there isn’t an answer that is the same for everybody. You got to sort of figure this out.
That’s why I do coaching, and I don’t write a book and say, here’s how you’re gonna you know, here’s the foods you’re gonna eat, because it doesn’t work that way. We all have different ways of approaching this stuff, and it’s fine. It’s completely fine that we do. The important thing is, is that what you’re doing feels good for you. It’s healthy for you, it works for you, and it is sustainable for you.
Cool, okay, you guys got this, I know you do. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
I’ve taught a lot of nutrition and mindset concepts over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast, and some of these topics are worth a revisit. Either because I’ve discovered new …
Continue Reading about 123. Back to Basics: Eating Real Food →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 123 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, Back to Basics Eating Real Food. I’ve talked a lot about nutrition and mindset over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast. And some of these topics are worth a revisit, either because I’ve discovered new information about the topic and I want to share that with you.
Or because it’s just so important, it’s worth another look. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to be sprinkling in some of these back to basics episodes to share new and improved info, and then revisit some of the key concepts for weight loss and sports nutrition for runners. And today’s topic, eating real food falls into both categories.
So I’ve learned a lot since first talking about eating real food. And it’s also one of the most important things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So it absolutely deserves another look. And eating real food is a simple concept. But it looks a little different for everyone.
If you’re a runner, and you’re interested in making a change in your eating habits so that you can lose weight while also supporting your running goals, then I want to invite you to join the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program that includes group coaching one-on-one coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability that you need to learn what to do to learn how to do it, and to help you stay on track.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, you will fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me. And we’ll talk about your goals and see if coaching is a good fit for you. I would love to help you learn how to eat real food, lose the weight without all the frustration and learn how to build good habits that last for life.
If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started down. All right back to basics, eating real food.
So I’m just gonna jump in and talk about why I teach this concept. And the really the first reason why I talk about eating real food is that there’s something really wrong with the standard American diet. Alright. So for millions of years as humans, we did really well, you know, eating real food was just something we did naturally.
But then pretty recently, we screwed it all up, all right? The standard American diet is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it was created back in the late 70s. It was like 1977, I believe, I think they published it in like 1980. But they basically told us that we should all be eating a very high carbohydrate diet, like upwards of 65% of your calories should be coming from carbohydrates. And low fat, like fat is bad. They just decided this right?
And immediately upon implementing these guidelines, the health of this country began to decline. So why did they make this change? Well, there was this guy named Ancel Keys. And he was a researcher and a doctor. And back in the 50s, he proposed this idea. It was called The Diet Heart Hypothesis. And it was an idea that eating fat would cause people to die of heart attacks. So he did all these studies. And he did. He published a study called The Seven Countries Study.
And the interesting thing about this study is actually there were 22 countries involved, but he just cherry picked the seven that kind of fit with his idea of what he wanted the results to be and he only published the seven countries that that kind of supported his claims. Anyway, none of the stuff that he proposed in this study have actually been proven.
In fact, a lot of it has been disproven over the years. A lot of the stuff that he proposed in this Diet Heart Hypothesis has been disproven yet. We changed our dietary guidelines back in 1977/1980 and we’ve changed everything, this has affected everything. It still does today, the guidelines that they produce and they haven’t changed much over the last 50 years or whatever.
But these guidelines have a profound effect on all areas of our lives. So all school lunch programs are being generated based on those guidelines. Right now, 19% of school aged kids are obese. This is a problem. All military rations, all mess hall food and military is dictated by the guidelines. 7% of our troops are obese.
All the special nutrition programs for women, infants and children like WIC are being determined by the guidelines. 15% of toddlers and WIC are obese toddlers, all hospital food is dictated by the guidelines. Food Programs for the elderly are being dictated by the guidelines. Life expectancy in the elderly is going down.
There’s more Alzheimer’s disease, more diabetes, more cancer. These things are rampant among the elderly. And they’re all diet and lifestyle caused diseases. Agricultural production is dictated by those guidelines. It’s simplified, it’s incentivizing farmers to produce more and more cheap carbohydrates like soybeans, wheat and corn.
Those are like the main things that we produce here in this country. And then of course, the food industry uses the guidelines too, so they produce more garbage food that’s loaded with things like vegetable oil, right? And high fructose corn syrup and all this junk. So all these things I just mentioned, they all are using those guidelines to produce, you know, the foods that we eat, and the guidelines are just wrong. They don’t work.
Since implementing the guidelines in ‘80, 88% of Americans are today considered metabolically unhealthy meaning they’re overweight, they’re obese, their insulin resistant they have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and on and on, only 12% of us are considered healthy. This is wrong. This does not work.
“For the first time in history, we had a government telling us what to eat.” This is a quote from Ben Bikman. He’s a PhD, a Utah professor and a leading metabolic scientist and he says, “For the first time, we have a government telling us what to eat, encouraging us to eat far more refined carbohydrates, and much less healthy fats and proteins and our weight, and our health has only suffered for it.”
The results on the nation’s health and weight have been dire since the government first set dietary guidelines in 1977. The food industry has completely shifted the types of foods they produce to our overall detriment. According to the CDC, the weight of the average adult American today is nearly 30 pounds more than that of the average adult American in 1977.
This is a problem. What are we doing? There’s all sorts of issues and diseases related to eating this particular diet too, by the way. Obesity rates have more than tripled in the US because we’re following the guidelines. We have a diabetes epidemic. 14 different types of cancer have been related to diet, including breast cancer, colorectal cancer.
Alzheimer’s disease is diet related. They call it type three diabetes, PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, is diet related. All of these issues are mostly caused by you know too much insulin in the bud. And that’s called hyperinsulinemia. And how do you get too much insulin in the blood? Eat a lot of carbohydrates and eat a lot of sugar. Right?
So the diet is wrong. It’s making us sicker, it’s making us fatter, and we need to get off of that. Do anything else do anything else, then what the dietary guidelines are telling you to do? Okay. And I don’t think I’ve talked about this, but they did a study a while back, and this was called The Pure Study.
And they did this over a 10 year period. And they did it from 2003 to 2013. And they followed over 135,000 people in 18 different countries. And they basically, you know, divided these people up based on their macronutrient intake and basically there were people who are eating high carbohydrate and lower fat, and then low carbohydrate, high fat.
And the conclusion basically is this: I’ll just read the conclusion to you. High carbohydrate intake was associated with a higher risk of total mortality body death. Whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.
Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings. So that’s the conclusion from this study. The interesting part about that, I mean, the whole thing is fascinating to me, because basically they just disprove that Diet Heart Hypothesis right there, they’re saying fat has nothing to do with it.
In fact, the people with the high fat diet had lower risk of dying from all these diseases. And the saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke, meaning that the people who ate more saturated fat had less stroke than the other people. So that was really fascinating, right? That kind of blows all that out of the water, right?
Okay, so how does this affect you, as a runner? Aren’t runners just immune to all this stuff? Can’t runners just eat whatever we want? No, we cannot. Runners are humans too, in case you haven’t noticed, and lots of runners experience a lot of these health issues, weight gain, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes, right?
There’s this phenomenon called TOFI. And this is someone who is thin on the outside, fat on the inside. And this is especially true with runners who look pretty lean on the outside. But on the inside, they might have a lot of visceral fat. And they might have developed something like type two diabetes, and no amount of running more is going to fix this right.
This is a diet related problem, a diet related disease. And one of the famous examples of this is Professor Tim Noakes, who wrote the book, The Lore of Running, and this guy is a total badass, right? He’s a researcher, he’s run over 70 marathons, but he ended up getting Type Two Diabetes. As a runner, he looked fine on the outside, but his doctor was like, you need to switch your diet.
It opened his eyes, he switched to a low carbohydrate diet. And now he coaches world class athletes on this low carb approach and this fat-adapted approach to running. And in his book, The Law of Running, he has a chapter on nutrition in there, which he advocates for the traditional high carbohydrate approach that, you know, you’ve probably heard of that most runners have heard of, right.
But he famously like, tore that chapter out of the book, because he just could no longer support that he’s like, I was wrong. I wrote this stuff about eating all the carbs. And it’s completely wrong. It’s bad for you, it’s killing us, we’ve got to stop doing it. Okay. So this whole low carb approach to running to sports nutrition, it’s no longer some weird fringe thing.
This is becoming more and more common. So the NASM, the National Association of Sports Nutrition, this is where I got my sports nutrition license. They used to teach the traditional high carb approach to nutrition for endurance activities running and such.
Several years ago, they made a big decision in that they couldn’t do that anymore, they’re going to move away from that high carb approach, and move to a more of a low carb fat adapted approach to sports nutrition. This is a bold move for this organization. But they could not in good conscience keep telling people, especially athletes to eat this crap diet, this diet that is literally killing us.
So they said we can’t do it, no more. And the funny thing is, is that this decision was not well received by everybody. Like there’s people who, you know, we’re following that traditional all carb approach to sports nutrition, and they wanted to get trained in this and wanted to get licensed in this approach. And they were not happy about this, but they just decided that this was what they had to do.
They couldn’t, you know, in good conscience, they couldn’t keep telling people to eat this garbage food anymore. Okay. And this is probably the biggest reason why I signed up with NASN is because they promote the low carb approach to sports nutrition, they understand the importance of being fat-adapted and how it’s not just good for for us as humans and to become the healthiest people that we can be.
But also, it’s great for endurance sports. And then there’s doctors like Stephen Finney and Jeff Bullock, who wrote the book on low carb sports nutrition called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. And then there’s all these companies out there right now that are making nutrition products for low carb running like Mirror Energy, s fuels, you have Elemental Labs, and there are more companies coming on board all the time, they’re springing up all over the place.
Why? Because there’s a need. There are a lot of athletes like me and you who want to perform at our best without eating all the garbage. All those like nutrition food like substances like Clif Bars, I used to eat a lot of Clif bars back in the day when I was like doing the high carbohydrate thing. And I would eat a couple Clif Bars every day and I was like, well, this is healthy, you know?
And look at the ingredients, Clif Bars, these things are not good for you. In fact, I was on their website and I was like what is in a Clif Bar. And so I’m going to read you some of these ingredients: organic rolled oats, so that’s all carbs, organic brown rice syrup, sugar, soy rice crisps, which are made from soy protein isolate rice flour and barley, barley malt extract, which is a form of sugar. Organic roasted soybeans, organic tapioca syrup, that’s sugar, organic cane syrup, that’s sugar. Unsweetened chocolate, chicory fiber, soy flour, high oleic, sunflower oil, natural flavor, sea salt, cinnamon, there’s not a whole lot of nutrition in here.
Okay, this is a bunch of carbs. This one bar is 43 grams of carbohydrates, including 17 grams of sugar with 16 grams of added sugars. And only 10 grams of protein. So this is just a candy bar essentially, is what it is okay. And on their website, it says there’s like a FAQ section like frequently asked questions that says are Clif Bars good for you? And here’s their answer, “Clif Bar is the ultimate energy bar trusted for nearly 30 years by athletes and sports nutrition experts to get you started and help you keep going during long outings on the bike trail or slopes.” Notice how they don’t actually answer that question.
Because their lawyers probably were like, you can’t say that they’re not good for you. Right? So they kind of skirt that answer. But anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that instead of eating this, like processed garbage food, we need to be eating real food. And I’m gonna get into that in just a second. Okay, I’m gonna tell you what that means.
But we’ve evolved as humans to like, eat real food. We’ve thrived on eating real food for millions of years. And I just want to say that we’ve changed things recently, pretty recently, right? I mean, we’ve evolved as hunter gatherers, our diet was mostly animal based for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, we’re also omnivores, we can eat a lot of different foods. It doesn’t mean we should.
But for the most part, we were eating a diet of meat, tubers, fruit, not like the fruit we have today, honey, but there wasn’t broccoli. Broccoli didn’t come around until the 1700s. There wasn’t tomatoes, tomatoes didn’t come around until 700 ad. Even bread is a relatively recent thing, like refining grains that happened about 1000 years BC, so maybe about 10,000 years ago, right?
But in the grand scheme of things, two and a half million years of human evolution 10,000 years is not that much time. And prior to that, you know, we just didn’t need that stuff. You know, and if you look at the mummies of ancient Egyptians, they, you know, we can study the actual bodies, you know, because they’re, they’ve been preserved for the last few thousand years.
They have rotten teeth and distended bellies, and they’ve determined that this is from eating refined grains, a lot of refined grains, rotten teeth, distended bellies. Prior to that though, Paleolithic man, they found all these, you know, they didn’t find the bodies, but they found the skeletons and the skulls and they all have like perfect teeth.
So no refined grains, no tooth decay, you start eating this stuff, and it starts to be bad for you, right? The bottom line is that the refined grains are a problem, right? Alright, so what I mean when I say like, let’s eat real food. Let’s go back to eating real food. Real food is food that still looks like and it’s food that our ancestors would recognize.
So a Clif Bar does not fit into this description. Okay. So eating real food means you’re sticking with unrefined unprocessed food. Food that still looks like it’s supposed to look, if it’s a piece of salmon, it’s a piece of salmon. If it’s a sweet potato, it’s a sweet potato. If it’s broccoli, it’s broccoli. Not food that’s been ground up into powders or liquids, not food that’s been extracted from whole foods, but the actual food, okay.
I think it’s a good idea to stay away from most foods that come in packages. Most packaged food is basically processed food, okay, and I’m not anti packaged food, but most of it is highly processed. You just have to be careful, read the labels, right? Most processed food, most packaged food contains like the three worst things you can eat. I call this the Vile Triumvirate. Right?
It’s sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. If you stay away from packaged food, you’re not going to get any of that stuff. I promise you. Stick with whole foods, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit, natural fats, like olive oil, butter, some dairy like whole milk, Greek yogurt. Stay away from highly refined, highly processed food made with a million unpronounceable and unnatural ingredients. All right.
And then when I start talking about this, people get this idea in their head, and they’re like, isn’t this just like keto or low carb, high fat or paleo? And the short answer is like, no, it’s really none of those things. It’s similar. Paleo is pretty close. But even that isn’t quite right. Because here’s the thing. This is going to look different for each individual. And last week’s episode, I talked about this in depth, that’s episode 122.
Like we’re all different, we all have different goals. We all have different lifestyles, different food preferences, genetics, our metabolism, our culture, all that has to play a part in what you choose, as the diet that works best for you. Right? There’s not a one size fits all plan that’s going to work for everybody.
There just isn’t, there’s no such thing. And to be clear on this, this isn’t about eliminating a food group. This isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates, right? Or never eating a carb again, or anything like that. This is about shifting your body back to the way it’s supposed to function. The way that your body has been functioning beautifully, as humans for thousands or millions of years, right?
I think it’s ignorant to think that introducing all this processed food in the last like 60 to 100 years or so is not going to negatively impact our health it is it has, it’s a problem. So the best thing and simplest thing you can do for yourself right now is just eat real food, food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize.
So what if you do this what happens when you start eating real food? Well, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to. You know, the way that humans have been functioning for millions of years, hormones become balanced and regulated. You’re no longer hungry all the time. You’re getting all the nutrients your body actually needs. Things like insulin drop, like you stopped storing so much energy as fat, right?
You keep eating sugar, a lot of that sugar energy can’t be used right away. So your body stores it as fat. If you’re not eating that stuff, you’re not storing all this fat, you’re actually burning fat, your fat begins to be released from your fat cells and you begin to burn fat and you begin to lose weight.
You start sleeping better, you wake up feeling more rested. You have this steady supply of energy from burning fat, so you don’t have these afternoon crashes where you need that Starbucks Triple Shot, Caramel Macchiato with extra whip, just to get you through your workday. Right. So when you start eating real food, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to.
So what about running? How does this affect your running? Or why would runners choose to eat this way? Well, one of the biggest benefits of eating this way is that you become really efficient at burning fat. And fat is an amazing fuel source for long distance running. And when you become fat adapted, this is a pretty amazing experience. Like if you’re into running and I know you are, then I suggest you try this. I can’t explain it.
Like you have to go and you know, try this for yourself and see how you feel. Now there are some misconceptions about what it means to be fat-adapted. So I want to explain this a little bit more. Being fat-adapted means you are training your body to burn fat very efficiently. And we all have a virtually unlimited supply of energy on our bodies at all times in the form of stored body fat.
Okay, now, I want to go back to our prehistoric man for a second because in doing a little bit of research for this episode, I came across this fascinating study in this article. And I just want to talk about what it means to be fat-adapted and how we have evolved to kind of, this is like our normal state of being okay.
So we are born runners, we are really good at running long distances. We’ve adapted to become these amazing long distance runners, right? Modern humans, and their immediate ancestors, like Homo erectus, have several adaptations that make humans instead of being some ferocious, furry fleet creature, the animals, the animal world’s best, we are the world’s best distance runners. Right?
Early humans, scavengers, ended up becoming persistence hunters. So we develop these long springy tendons in our legs and our feet that function like large elastics like rubber bands, right? They store energy, and then with each running stride, release it and this actually reduces the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There’s also other adaptations to keep our bodies stable as we run.
So we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, we have these large butts and these large buttock muscles that hold our bodies upright. And we have this elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady. All of this stuff is designed to help us run very efficiently, right? Even the human waste, which is thinner and more flexible than that of our primate relatives, allows us to twist our upper bodies as we run to counterbalance the slightly off center. It forces exerted as we stride with each leg.
Okay, so once humans start running, it only takes a little bit more energy for us to run faster. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a ton of energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances, right?
Those adaptations make humans and our ancestors better runners, it’s our ability to run in the heat that may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game. So humans have several adaptations that help us dump the amount of heat that we generate when we’re running. These adaptations include being hairless, virtually, some of us more than others, our ability to sweat, the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, it allows us to take bigger breaths, and helps us to dump heat.
And we can run in conditions that no other animal can run in. So other animals, they get to get rid of excess heat, they pant, they have to pant and they can’t pant when they’re running, so they have to stop and rest and pant to dump the heat. That means to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans, they just kept that animal running. So altogether, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day, when most animals are resting right.
So we practice persistence hunting. We would chase a game animal during the heat of the day, make it run faster than it can maintain, we would track it, flush it if it tried to rest and repeat the process, just keeping the thing going until the animal would literally overheat and collapse. And so the animal would develop hyperthermia, which is like heatstroke in humans after about 6 or 10 miles of this.
And so, by the end of all this, even humans with their crude, early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. And adding credence to this theory is the fact that some Aboriginal humans still practice persistent hunting today. And it remains an effective hunting technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of nutrient dense fuel in the form of meat.
Okay, so all that is just to say that running long distances is part of our DNA. And running long distances means that we needed a steady fuel source available at all times, especially when we were not eating we would be fasting we would be, you know, running an animal for days until we, you know, caught up with it and whatever. That’s where our stored body fat comes into play.
We’re naturally born fat burners. And when you get off the sugar, and you get off the refined grains and the packaged garbage food, you can turn your body back into a long distance running badass fat burning machine. And right now, most people, like the average runner probably has around 100,000 calories of stored energy in the form of stored body fat, enough to run for days and days without stopping.
On the contrary though, your body can only hold about 2000 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glucose. So if this was our preferred fuel source, we would need a lot, lot more of that to be able to track animals for days, right. So the idea of getting fat-adapted should be really stated like getting back to being fat-adapted like we were meant to be.
The other misconception about being fat-adapted is that you make this switch from burning all carbs, you know in sugar, and then burning all fat. And this is never the case, you’re always burning both your body produces glucose, all the glucose that your body needs your body actually creates at your liver creates glucose for your brain and for your muscles to function properly.
And as long as your activity level is kept low enough, like during most long distance running, you will continue to produce enough glucose glucose for your working muscles while also utilizing fat as your main source of fuel. But as your exercise intensity gets higher and higher as you start burning more glucose and less fat, and you will probably need to add some sort of fuel in the form of carbohydrate to maintain the more intense effort, okay, and you got to practice this in your training.
And then you can dial in exactly how much carbohydrate you need, at what level of intensity. So you can keep that inner fire burning hot, right? So you can keep delivering a steady supply of fat and glucose to working muscles and kick some serious butt out there. Okay, so when you get good at this when you practice both, using both fuel sources efficiently, this is known as being metabolically flexible or metabolic flexibility.
So you train your body to use both types of fuel very effectively. Again, this isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates. This is about switching your body to going back to being an efficient fat burner, okay? The only thing with this is that if you go too high in the carbs, you kind of shut down the fat burning process. So you have to be careful with how you do this. And you have to experiment with it.
Okay, and everybody’s a little bit different. And so you have to practice with this in your training. This is not something you’re going to just do on race day, for sure. Okay. So eating real food, I want to recap real quick, what I just talked about, the standard American diet is wrong, needs to be changed.
Runners are not immune to the effects of this terrible diet. So just stop doing it. Running does not mean you can eat whatever you want, okay. Humans have evolved by eating real food. We’ve become amazing creatures, the most advanced creatures in the universe as far as we know. And we did it by eating real food. So we need to get back to that.
Humans have also evolved to be badass runners and badass fat-burning machines. We need to get back to that too. And the easiest way to get back to that to get back to our badass purpose is to eat real food. Eat food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize. Cool, this is fun. I love talking about this. I could talk about this all day. Hope you guys have an awesome day. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
There’s a lot of chatter out there in the world about which diet is best. You see this play out on social media where proponents of one diet will bash another diet, and then proponents of THAT diet …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 94 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, which diet is best? So there’s a lot of chatter out there in the world about which diet is best. You’ll see this play out on social media, especially where proponents of one diet will bash another diet and then proponents of that diet or bash the other one and then on and on it goes.
And with all of this conflicting information out there, it can be very difficult to make an informed decision about which diet is best for you. How do you know which is right for you? What happens if you’re wrong? So in this episode of the podcast, I’ve decided to make things a little bit easier for you.
I’m going to explain, first of all, why there’s so much conflict around which diet is best and offer up some actionable tips on how to make the right choices to help you reach your particular health and fitness goals. Cool. Awesome.
But first, if you like this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook. This is a group that I created that goes hand in hand with podcast. We do some coaching and training over there in the group. It’s a positive, encouraging, motivational, inspirational group of people that share goals like wanting to lose weight, wanting to become a fat adapted runner, wanting to run without bonking just running to run faster, or maybe just want to run more.
Whatever goals that you have around weight loss and running around health and fitness. We’re here to support you. So come and check us out. It’s a fun group and I do some weekly coaching and training in the group and people get a lot out of it. At least that’s what they tell me. Just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, and you’ll find it over there. Cool.
And then here’s another five star review of the Running Lean podcast and this one is from Lance and Lance says:
“Running Lean is easy to understand. And it works. This podcast does a great job explaining complex subjects by using everyday terms. The podcast uses updated studies in science nutrition debunking a lot of methods. The vast information out there is the vast information is out there for all of us, but Patrick takes all the information and gives us the Cliff Notes and it works for me. Love that. I read nutrition food labels an entirely different way. Now I eat entirely differently and it works for me. My hunger pangs are gone over the past two months, I feel full I’m losing weight without some crazy calorie counting. And I get my nutritional needs met. Keep up the great work you are my nutritionist for exercising. Best, Lance.”
Thank you, Lance. That is awesome. I love this. I am your nutritionist, Lance. I love that that’s so fun. And if you feel like it, if you want to leave a review, that would be awesome. You can just go to iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts and leave a review. Leave some feedback. I love getting messages like that. It just lets me know that the message is resonating with you guys. And that you’re you’re getting something out of this. So cool, awesome.
And then people ask how they can work with me. And there’s really two ways. So I have the Running Lean coaching group. And this is a group that meets once a week we do a group zoom call. And we talk about what’s going on we talk about how was your your weight loss goals going? How is your running goals going? How is your health and fitness goals guide? Like how are things going for you?
And it’s a place where you get support encouragement and you get to ask questions and get questions answered. I do some coaching and teaching in the group. I bring in special guests to do some coaching and teaching in the group. I have an entire online library of training materials that you have access to.
I have a private podcast that you would have access to with all the replays of all the trainings, you never have to miss anything you can take this stuff on the run with you. And it’s just really a great way to help you reach your goals and get some support doing it. So that’s number one.
Number two is you could hire me as your coach I’m a coach, this is what I do. This is my jam. working one on one with a coach is probably the best way for you to get your to get to your goals. And I’m not saying that like oh yeah, I’m the only one that can do this for you.
Now there are lots of coaches out there. But if you ever want to really like supercharge your your goals and really get there faster and easier and more efficiently than hiring a coach is a great way to do it doesn’t have to be me, it can be somebody else. There’s lots of great coaches out there.
So if you’re interested in working with me, you can just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply, and you can apply for coaching. And if you’re interested in joining the group, the monthly coaching group, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. So those are two ways of working with me.
And you know, I’m always here for you, my my goal in life, like, my purpose, my mission in life is to help as many runners as possible to get healthy, to, to get fitter, to become stronger, to become just better overall human beings. And it takes a little bit of work to get there, you know, so I teach some stuff on the podcast, but really to take a deep dive and, and really almost guarantee that this is going to work for you, then you can do some some coaching. Cool.
Awesome. All right, let’s get into this topic of which diet is best. So I want to say this before I start, because I’m going to use the word diet today a lot. And I usually don’t use that word, because I don’t like the connotations that brings up because when we think about a diet, we think about something that is temporary, or something that is, you know, just for the purpose of losing weight.
Like saying I’m on a diet to lose weight, and then it also implies that somehow you’re going to go off the diet. So that’s not how I’m using the word diet today. What I’m using the word diet today is just to refer to your food plan, your protocol, your nutrition program, the types of foods that you eat, whatever you want to call it, okay? It’s like the way you eat.
Okay, so, you know, we can, here’s some examples of diets like vegetarian, pescatarian, ovo, lacto, vegetarian, vegan plant based carnivore, low carb, high fat, Paleo, keto, high carb, the standard American diet, the Mediterranean diet, like there’s all these different types of diets out there. Okay.
So that’s kind of what I’m referring to in the course of this episode today, okay? So when I talk about diet, and what sparked me wanting to talk about this today, I’m a little fired up about this subject, because I see so much information out there, where people are, you know, they’ll talk about their, their particular diet, the one that they believe is the best.
And they sort of like put it out there as if all the other ones are terrible. And this is the only way to do it. And I’m right, and you’re wrong. And I’m just kind of like over that, you know what I mean?
Because clearly, there’s lots of people that that do things like, vegetarian or vegan that, like don’t eat meat. And then there’s people that do things like carnivore that eat only meat, and both groups of people seem to be pretty healthy. You know, I mean, like, I think there’s a lot of evidence that would show that, like, you can be very healthy on either side of that equation. Right.
And for us to argue with each other about this, I think is it’s an exercise in futility. Because, as I’ll get into in a minute here, the science will tell us that this one is, is the better diet, and then the science will also tell us. No, this one over here is the better diet and they conflict each other and it’s like, why is this? Why is this happening?
And I got a message recently from someone who said, you know, hey, I’m kind of confused about all this because every, you know, nutritionist that I follow or dietician or coach tells me that as a runner, I need carbs, like, that’s the only way I can fuel my running, and I have to have carbs or I can’t, you know, run a marathon or whatever.
And you’re over here telling me that low carb is, is something that’s possible, and it’s a better way to go. And so which is right, is that everybody else? Or is it you? How can the science support both of these views? And I’m going to get into that in just a second. Like why the science is so conflicting on these matters.
But I just want to say that sometimes we get into what’s what’s called a bias. So we have this, this bias as to what our beliefs are. So we tend to believe something like, like, I tend to believe that a low carb diet is a good way to go. I’m not saying it’s better or best. I’m just saying that this is a good way to go. And so I read a lot of information, and I follow a lot of people, doctors and elite athletes, who talk about the low carb diet as a way of enhancing your performance of losing weight of becoming the healthiest person you can possibly be of reversing chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes and heart disease and things like that.
And so I’m following all these people in the world. And I’m very connected to a lot of people in the low carb sort of community. And so for me, I see this everywhere I see evidence of this low carb being effective, I see it everywhere.
Now, if you’re the kind of person who believes that, you know, the traditional sort of high carb approach to running is the way to go, you’re probably going to be following people that talk about that. And that’s why you might say to yourself, like, well, everybody that I see and hear and talk to, says that you have to have carbs, well, you’re just not following the right people, or you’re just only following this small group of people over here, okay.
So just know that we all have this sort of perception bias, like when it comes to our own beliefs, you know, so we believe something. And so we tend to gravitate towards people towards resources towards podcast or its books, towards literature toward studies and all that stuff that supports our viewpoints.
And I’m telling you that I do the same thing, I totally do this, I follow tons of podcasts and read tons of books on, on how the low carb approach to endurance sports is a great way to go. And, and I feel really, you know, convicted in my beliefs, I feel very strongly about my particular beliefs. Okay.
I also have to say that what I believe is not necessarily true for everyone. And this is kind of the point I’m trying to make here today is that there are a lot of people out there that say, like, there’s only one way to do it, and this is the way to do it. You know, plant based, you can’t eat meat, because it’s killing you. It’s killing the plants, killing everybody.
And then there are other people, they’re like, listen, we’ve been eating meat for 2.5 million years, I think we’re gonna be okay, you know, why all of a sudden, do we need to stop eating it? You know what I mean? So, and both people have valid points, and both people can make the claim that you know, that they get good health results from eating this way.
And so we’re going to get into why there’s conflicting information and all that stuff here. So let’s talk about this a little bit here. So science, I love science. I am a fan of science, I’m a logical thinking sort of like science person, I want to see the facts. I don’t take much on just face value, you know, I’m not much of a man of faith, I’m more of a man of science, okay.
And when we get into studies, and we get into scientific studies, especially around food, the science can be conflicting, and the science can contradict one another. So the studies can kind of contradict each other. The problem with the way they do science in the in around food. Is that is that the science is not perfect when it comes to food. Okay.
So there are different types of studies. And there’s two main types of studies that I’m talking about here and they they have good and bad points. There is a study called a randomized controlled trial, RCT. And then there are what are called observational studies. And I want to explain what these two things are. And I’m going to just take a dive into this just for a minute here. If you will allow me, will you allow it? Thank you, because I want you to understand the difference between these two types of studies.
So randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, are the most straightforward of studies, to design and to interpret, they’re often considered to be the gold standard of clinical and epidemiological studies. This is because if they are conducted properly, it is often possible to be fairly sure that the results are correct, at least for the type of people who took part in the study.
In a randomized control trial, two or more groups of people are compared. So there’s an experimental group who receives maybe a new treatment or a different type of food or something like that. And then there’s a control group who receive the current standard treatment or the current standard food, whatever it is.
Information from the control group allows the reacher researchers to see whether the new treatments are more or less effective than the current standard. It is important that in a randomized controlled trial, the two groups have people that are as similar as possible except for the treatment they receive except for the diet they’re getting.
For example, this is very important because it means that the researchers can be sure that there aren’t any outside influences that are skewing the results. And they call it randomized because the decision about which treatment each participant gets is random, it’s based on chance, rather than decided by the participant or by a doctor or something like that. Okay.
So, randomized controlled trial, the gold standard, you’re basically taking two identical groups of people, and you’re controlling all of the factors, you’re controlling everything except for one variable, like the food that they’re eating, okay?
Then there are things called observational studies. So in fields like epidemiology, social sciences, psychology, statistics, and observational study will draw inferences from a sample to a population where the independent variable is not under the control of the researcher, because of maybe ethical concerns or logistical constraints.
So these are called observational studies, because the investigator observes individuals without mean manipulation or intervention, they’re just sort of observing what’s happening. Okay? This is in contrast to randomized controlled trials where investigators do do intervene and look at the effects of the intervention on an outcome.
Although randomized control trials are useful in determining causal relationships, between treatment and outcome, there are often instances where randomized control trials are not appropriate or ethical, right? So observational studies are needed. Observational studies are good for things like you know, long term effects of food on a population.
Like you can’t control every aspect of an entire population, you can’t make them all do the same thing, live in the same, you know, neighborhood, work, the same job, have the same level of stress, have the same type of relationship status, like all these things, you know, factor into your health and things like that, right? So it’s very difficult to do randomized control trials with food studies. So I’m just going to put that out there. Okay.
Randomized control trials are considered the gold standard, because their goal is to prove causation, what is causing the problem, if we remove all the variables, if these two groups of people are exactly the same in every single way, except this one thing, like one person’s eating high fat, one person’s eating low fat, does this food cause obesity? Does this food cause diabetes? Does this food cause heart disease? This is what we’re trying to get to.
But it’s very hard to do, because it’s hard to control everything in two groups of people, right? That’s why there are so many observational studies around food. Okay, so the best we can do. Sometimes a randomized control trials are possible with food. But the most studies around food are called observational studies. Observational studies cannot prove causation. That’s the thing you have to understand they can they can cause they can show correlation but not causation.
So correlation is where like, let’s say, everyone in this group who ate brussels sprouts had a 90% higher risk of lung cancer. So you’re inferring you’re making a correlation of lung cancer to brussel sprouts, okay? You’re inferring that the brussel sprouts caused the lung cancer, but you can’t prove that the brussel sprouts, you’re not proving causation. They didn’t cause the lung cancer. They didn’t factor in that maybe all those people smoked cigarettes. Okay. So that’s what the difference between an observational study and randomized control trial.
So the bottom line with me talking about all this stuff is just saying like the science is not always 100% perfect when it comes to food. And that’s why you can find studies that show that a high carb diet is the only way you can run long distances. And you can have other studies that show the completely opposite effect that a low carb diet is just as beneficial for endurance athletes.
And I’ve talked about some of these studies in the past, you know, like the faster study is a great one that showed groups of elite athletes, one group who did the traditional high carb diet, the other group did the was on a low carb, high fat diet for a period of time. And they had them go through all these, you know, rigorous exercises and things like that, and then they measured their blood glucose levels and their performance and their output and all this stuff.
And both groups were very, very similar. The high fat group, the low carb, high fat group was burning tons more fat than the other group. But besides that, like their performance was almost exactly the same. And so what that tells me is like, either way is is going to work. Like there’s not just one way, there’s not one way is better than the other necessarily, okay.
And I’m not saying that the science is bad, or it’s wrong or shouldn’t be trusted, but I’m saying is that science can be skewed a little bit based on some of these types of trials that they do. Also, this is very important. Sciences is often biased, you know, by who’s funding the study. Or science can be incomplete, you know, making so they’re making assumptions, you know, they’re jumping to conclusions sometimes.
But unfortunately, a lot of science is biased, because it’s bought and paid for by, like the big food industries with deep pockets. They pay for these studies to support the results that they want to get, like, they want to say, like, let’s show sugar is not the problem. So let’s pay for these studies that support this outcome. And you better show us the results that sugar is not the problem here.
Here’s an example in 2015, The New York Times revealed how Coca Cola was funding high profile scientists and organizations promoting a message that in the battle against weight gain, people should pay more attention to exercise, and less to what they eat and drink.
In the aftermath of that investigation, Coca Cola released data detailing its funding of several medical institutions and associations between 2010 and 2015. From the Academy of Family Physicians to the American Academy of Pediatrics, all told, Coca Cola says it gave $132.8 million towards scientific research and partnerships that supported the message of you need to exercise more and don’t worry so much about what you eat and drink, but they paid for those results. This is not uncommon. This is just one example. Google this, you’ll find all kinds of examples of the food industry, paying for studies that support whatever their particular views are.
So you can see how it can be sort of hard and a little frustrating to sift through all the science out there and come up with anything that is like perfectly irrefutable. Alright. So I just want to like wrap up this whole science piece by saying, like, there is a lot of great science out there, there’s no doubt about it.
But do your, like research, do due diligence, you know, look for yourself, who’s funding these studies? Are they epidemiological studies, like observational studies? Are they randomized, controlled trials? How big are the studies? Because oftentimes, the larger the study, the more sort of accurate the results will be.
So it’s a good idea for you to just kind of do a little bit of like research on your own and just kind of come up with, you know, like, if you see a study was, you know, funded by, you know, Nabisco or like Hershey’s, or something like that, I would be very wary of something like that. Okay.
There’s a lot of medical studies out there that are funded by these big food companies, too. There’s tons and tons and tons of them. They saturate the market with these studies. And they do it on purpose. They do it to make things complicated and confuse us. Honestly, they do.
Okay, so there was a little bit of rant I just went on about the science. If you’re still with me, then let’s talk about which diet is best. Okay, so according to the science, they all are, right, every single one of them will work for everybody. But here’s the fact – there is not one perfect diet that works for every human being on the planet, there just isn’t okay.
In order for you to find out what works for you, you’ve got to get into some trial and error. Okay. I talked about this idea of being an experiment of one we are all an experiment of one. We call this an n equals one or n of one. N means the number of people involved in the experiment. So if it’s an n of one that means there’s one person involved in the experiment, you, you get to try whatever you want. You get to experiment on yourself, so to speak, and see what works.
Now, here’s where most people sort of get this wrong. So let’s say you want to try something like you try, like, I just want to go plant based, I keep hearing everybody talking about plant based whatever. So like, you go read a book, or you watch some YouTube video and you’re off to the races, you start, you know, stop eating meat and you start eating more tofu or whatever, right?
And you’re doing this for a while, you might lose some weight, you might feel pretty good. But then it stops working. And you know what, it really doesn’t matter which diet you pick, like, most diets will come to a point where maybe it stops working for you, or you need to change something and you just don’t know what to do.
And so, but here’s the thing, most people at this point, they just quit, they give up. They say that diet doesn’t work. ‘Oh, I tried that. It doesn’t work for me.’ I had somebody tell me this the other day, they were feeling really good. They were, you know, kind of like doing the low carb thing. This is somebody that I’m working with. And she’s like, “Oh, man, I’m feeling so good. I’ve lost some weight. I’m just feeling it got a lot of energy. And somebody at work was like, oh, yeah, I tried that for a while. And it didn’t work after awhile. It just stopped working.”
And she was a little concerned. She’s like, well, what if this stops working for me? I was like, hey, you know what, that person, you don’t know what that person was doing? First of all, they could have been doing something completely different. They could have been like totally cheating.
Most people, when they say they tried it, and it didn’t work. Most people aren’t doing it 100%. Like most people are sort of cheating. Unless you have somebody holding you accountable. It’s very easy to just sort of like, half ass the diet, you know what I mean?
And we know we don’t half ass anything, we full ass everything we do, right? So most people just sort of don’t do the right way. So this person probably was trying to be helpful, I don’t know. But it’s kind of a jerky thing to say to somebody, in my opinion, it’s like, let this person figure it out for themselves. Like so it didn’t work for you, that’s your experience that has nothing to do with you.
It has nothing to do with whether this is going to work for another human being, you know what I mean? But that’s where most people get to they get to this place where they’re like, Oh, I tried that diet, it doesn’t work. So they just quit. And then they go on to the next one.
Oh, the Mediterranean diet. Let’s try that one, you know, and they just keep doing this, and they just keep getting the same results? Because I don’t know, maybe they’re not sticking to it. Maybe it’s just not the right diet for them. Maybe they aren’t doing it right. Or you know, they’re not doing it 100%.
Or, you know, maybe they just need to tweak it a little bit. And that’s where I do a lot of work with my clients. This is where we we tweak things, like we’re always kind of making minor changes to your nutrition plan and to the diet, because I don’t know what’s gonna work for you, and neither do you. Like, we don’t know exactly what’s going to work.
It would be amazing if there was just one simple, straightforward way and one diet that works for everybody. But it’s not it’s not straightforward. It’s not simple. It’s complicated. We’re all different human beings. We all have different complex systems at play here. We all have different genetics, different metabolisms, different goals, we have different tastes, different likes and dislikes.
We have different lifestyles, we come from different cultures, we have different families we have, some of us have allergies, we have different body types, and we have to fit factor all of these things in when we’re deciding which diet is going to work for you. And you have to sort of try different things and stick with it, you know, instead of just giving up, you have to like just make some minor changes, just like you would an experiment.
You make a minor change to one thing you try for a while. And then if that doesn’t work, you try something else. You don’t give up. You keep going. And if there was just one thing that worked for everybody, this would be so much easier. I gotta tell you, I could just write a book and give it to you guys and just be like, here, I’m done. This is exactly what you do. This will work for you perfectly.
But it’s not that easy. I’ve read a lot of books on diet and nutrition. And a lot of these books come with, like menus, they’ll say like, here’s what you do, here’s what you eat. And week one, week two, month, one, month, two, whatever. But like, what if you don’t like that food? What if that doesn’t work for you? Like, you can’t possibly write a book with pre written meal plans that will work perfectly for everyone. You just can’t do it.
When I write my book, which I’m thinking about doing here, and I’ve got, you know, sort of an outline going already, so I’m working on it and let’s just say the book is in progress at this point. I’m going to instead teach that you have to figure out what works for you, instead of just giving you like, here’s what you do. Because when you learn how to do it yourself, this is a much better way to go.
This is one of the main reasons why I don’t like just tell my clients what to eat, I make suggestions, I might tell them what to avoid, like, don’t eat sugar, that’s bad for you. That’s just a no, nobody should be eating sugar. I’ll say that, okay.
But I offer guidelines offer a blueprint, a framework, but not like done for you meal guide, right, you need to learn what works for you, you need to learn how to make your own decisions around your diet. And I’ve talked to several people recently tell me they’ve worked with like a dietitian in the past and this person gave them a menu each week.
So each week, they would like send them a menu of here’s what you’re going to eat each day. And you can’t deviate from this, this what you have to do. And then after months of working with this person, they had developed zero skills, they couldn’t make their own decisions, they didn’t know what to do, they had no idea what to eat, because somebody was just like figuring it out for them and just telling them what to do.
They weren’t telling them why they should do it, or what’s the theory behind it? Or, you know, why would you avoid this? Or why should you eat that instead, they were not empowering their people, you know what I mean? They weren’t in control of their, you know, these people weren’t in control of their own health, they were like relying on somebody else, to make all their decisions for them.
Okay, so my approach is different. What I do is I help you learn what works for you, I teach you how to make your own food choices, I teach you how to make good decisions, I teach you why we’re doing this stuff. And you’re gonna make some mistakes along the way. That’s good. That’s actually part of the process. That’s how you learn. That’s how you develop good skills.
That’s how you begin to intuitively learn what to eat that works for you, as an individual human being, and what doesn’t work for you. The best diet for you is the one that works for you. And it doesn’t have to be paleo or keto or vegan or carnivore or anything like that. It could be whatever the heck you want it to be.
Now, let’s address the big ole lean elephant in the room. So I have a bias towards a low carb approach. The low carb diet, I think works for the majority of people that I have worked with, I would say like probably 98 out of 100 people have gotten really good results with a low carb approach.
And we’re not talking about you know, necessarily like keto, or paleo or anything like that. I don’t like to put labels on it. But the reason I think the low carb approach works for a lot of people is because when I switch runners to a low carb diet, if their goals are to, you know, lose weight and to improve their health and fitness and improve their running, when they make this switch, they do lose weight, they feel better, they have more energy, not less.
Their hunger levels go way down, their cravings for junk food just go away. Their endurance improves, running becomes easier, they become bonk proof, they can run for longer distances without hitting the wall. Most of the time, they get faster and they recover faster from these hard workouts. They start sleeping better and waking up feeling more rested. They have way less inflammation, the bloating goes away their clothes fit better.
People tell them how amazing they look. They love how they look in the mirror, they feel better about themselves, they have more confidence. And if you’re experiencing all of these amazing positive benefits, why would you go back to like a standard high carb approach? I say do what works for you.
And if this this approach that I just described the low carb sort of approach to to overall health and fitness. If that works for you, do it. I don’t think it works for everybody. Or I don’t think everybody well, honestly, I don’t think everybody wants to do it first of all, but I think there are other ways to do it.
I know people that eat a very high carb diet, lots of sugar and pasta and bread and stuff like that. They seem to be in very good health. Okay, great that works for them. A lot of us we’re sort of carbohydrate intolerant, we can’t tolerate carbohydrates very well and so we get bloated, we get inflamed. We gain weight, it starts to affect us in a lot of negative ways, okay?
You know, when when you eat high carbs, you also increase your blood glucose levels, which means you have high insulin levels, which means you’re in fat storage mode, which means you end up like having less energy, you become more hungry, you gain weight.
Your intense cravings for junk food tend to go up, running gets harder, your recovery time becomes longer sleeping is more erratic, you feel more bloated, inflamed, your clothes keep getting tighter for some reason. And you don’t feel good about yourself. Like, that’s what happens with a lot of people who who eat a very high carb diet.
Okay, so that’s just my observations and sort of my bias, you know, so I do have this bias. But I think when it comes to my recommendations for runners, especially runners who want to lose weight, I tend to recommend a low carb approach. Now, it can be low carb and plant based, it can be low carb, and carnivore, or it can be low carb and somewhere in between.
And we’re really talking mainly about sugar being the number one offender here. And other concentrated forms of carbohydrates like flour, you know, white flour, that kind of thing, right? Will this approach work for everyone? Probably not. There’s no guarantee that this approach will work perfectly for you or everyone, but I think it’s a very good place to start.
And, you know, remember that low carb doesn’t mean like an all meat diet, like lots, lots of runners do amazingly well, eating low carb, who do like maybe some fish or they’re, they’re vegetarian or even vegan. I’m just a little biased, because I’ve just seen way too many runners do amazingly well with this approach. And as long as it’s working, I’m gonna keep recommending it.
Okay. Now, for me, personally, I’m always experimenting with my diet, with what I eat. I tried different things to see what works best for me for my buy for my running and stuff like that, right? I started out, I lost a lot of weight, doing sort of a kind of a paleo-ish diet, like no sugar, low carb, some fruits and lots of veggies.
And that works pretty well for me. And then I switched to a very low carb, maybe carnivore type of diet for the first part of this year. Basically, all animal products, no vegetables. And I did this during the training for my marathon I did in the spring of this year. And you can I did an episode all about that. And you can listen to that it’s Episode 71, zero carb marathon training.
And I had a really good experience doing that. But then I kind of went back to eating my more paleo-ish way, you know, eating more salads and veggies and stuff like that, then I switched back to carnivore again. Now I’m back on the salads, again, I mean, some berries here and there. And, generally, you know, more carbs than I’ve been doing for most of this year. And I’m just trying this approach.
This is more of like a paleo type of an approach, if I had to put a label on it for this particular marathon, so I got a marathon coming up here in about three weeks. And so I’m just trying this approach, because what I like to do I like to experiment and then be able to share this stuff with you guys be able to share with you like, how did it go? How was your training? How was that marathon? How did you feel? How’s your week been? Like, all those kinds of things.
Okay, so I’m gonna report in on that after the marathon at the end of this month. So this is all my approach. This is what works for me, you need to figure out what works for you. And how do you do that? Well, you just try something. For starters, I would say, try cutting out sugar and flour and processed food and vegetable oil, like those things are terrible for you, right? And just start eating real food, see how that goes for you.
Maybe try increasing your protein intake. A lot of runners don’t get enough protein. I think if you aim for something around 30% of your calories coming from protein, you’re off to a much better place. Okay? But whatever you do, it has to be sustainable for you.
Most diets operate with this idea of like, restriction or deprivation or, you know, temporary, it’s temporary. Most of these diets sort of make you feel terrible. So they’re not really sustainable. So whatever you choose for yourself has to be something that you can do going forward it has to become part of who you are, and what you do.
And the real secret here to making all this last and making it permanent is just don’t quit. This is not well, ‘I tried this one thing it didn’t work for me, so I’m done’ situation. This is a I’m going to stick with it no matter what situation. And then you’re going to make incremental changes along the way.
How are you feeling? Is this making you feel good or not so good? Is this you know, giving you more energy or less energy as you’re running, improving? Or is it sucking more? You like you just have to like figure it out as you go. Only you can make those decisions for yourself, okay?
The best diet is the one that makes you feel good. The best diet is the one that helps you to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. The best diet is one that supports your weight loss goals, your running goals, your overall health and fitness goals. The best diet is the one that feels easy for you and practically effortless.
Your diet can’t stress you out, it has to be something that’s just easy to do. The best diet is the one that’s sustainable for you because it’s something you have to be able to do from here on out. And there’s only one person that can decide what that is going to be for you and that is you. Cool.
And listen, if you’re looking for a little help with all of this, this is what I do. I can offer you the guidance, the support the encouragement, the accountability, may be a little tough love that you need to make this work for you. No matter what your goals no matter what your lifestyle no matter what your tastes. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and we’ll see if coaching is good fit for you. All right, you guys, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
The diet that most of us have been eating for the last 40 years or so is just wrong. It doesn’t work. Instead of getting leaner and healthier, we just keep getting fatter and …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner Ultra runner, Master life coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 40 of Running Lean, my name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners 40 episodes. Oh my gosh, this is so awesome. Today, I am talking about eating real food. So the gist of it is this: the diet that most of us have been eating for like the last 40 years or so is just wrong. It doesn’t work.
Instead of getting leaner and healthier, which is what it promised it would do for us, we have been getting fatter, and sicker. Something has to change. In this episode of the podcast, I’m talking about one of the most important principles that you should adopt, if you want to stop struggling with your weight and start living a healthier, happier life.
And that principle is this: eat real food. It’s that simple. I’m gonna explain exactly what I mean when I say eat real food, don’t worry, and why this is such a crucial principle for you to incorporate into your daily life starting right now, especially if you are a runner.
But first, if you liked this podcast, please come check us out on Facebook. We’ve got this growing, thriving community called the Running Lean community. It’s a bunch of energetic positive runners that like to talk about running. And it’s a place where I share more information.
So I share more trainings and interact with you, I help answer questions as much as I can. And we’re all like minded runners sharing goals. You know, we’re trying to lose weight, we’re trying to run better. And it’s a lot of fun. So come check us out.
Here’s a comment from one of our community members, Philip and Philip said, “Patrick, I appreciate you more than you know, you help so many people, including myself, I listened to you every run that I go on. I think I made it to Episode 32 just today.”
That’s a lot of episodes. If you did 32 in one day, but hey, more power to your brother. And he goes on he says, “I have a different mindset since one of your listeners mentioned your podcast and how it changed her life. At that very moment, I was looking for something and I found it when I saw her comment on Facebook. Ever since then I’ve been hooked. I’m in the beginning stages of my life change thanks to all the valuable information you give. Congratulations on your crazy 2020 success, wellness, especially after all your stressors.”
Phillip, thank you so, so much for sharing these comments, it really means a lot when I hear that my message is resonating with you guys. So Phillip, thank you for being a part of the community. Phillip is just one of the many positive, energetic, fun, warm hearted people that we have in the Running Lean community on Facebook.
So come check us out, we always, we also do monthly challenges, we just finished up the September intermittent fasting challenge, which is a lot of fun. A lot of people have been trying intermittent fasting for the first time and having great results. So we do stuff like that, and I got a big challenge coming up for you guys in a few weeks.
We’re not going to start it just yet. It’ll be later maybe next month, you know, maybe in November timeframe, but just know we got a lot of fun stuff going on over there. Also, just in case, you’re the kind of person that wants a little extra help with all this stuff with losing weight with becoming a fat-adapted runner.
With changing habits if you’re the kind of person that just wants someone to walk them through the whole process, step by step and you want somebody that can hold you accountable. If that sounds like something that you want, because listen, making changes like this is hard to do on your own. Wouldn’t it be great if you just had somebody that could kind of hold your hand and walk you through it step by step and help you every step of the way? Yeah, that’s me.
I can do that for you. I do one-on-one coaching with people to help them make these changes last, you know, I can help you figure out the exact nutrition plan that you need. That’s gonna work for you to get you to your goals. I will hold you accountable. I will keep you on track.
I will encourage you to do things that you don’t want to do so that you can be the person that you ultimately want to be And, most importantly, I will help you develop the mindset that you need to make these changes last. If you’re ready to stop screwing around with all this, if you’re ready to stop screwing around with your weight, if you’re ready to make some big changes and ready to start eating real food, then apply for a one on one coaching with me.
Just go to innerfiretribe.com/coaching. That’s one word. Do it now it will change your life, I promise you. Okay, let’s get into talking about eating real food. So several months ago, I gotta give you guys a little backstory, because I’m starting a little series of podcasts episodes that I want you guys to understand what I’m doing with this.
Okay, so here’s kind of the backstory, several months ago, I sat down, and I wrote out something that I’m calling the Running Lean Manifesto. No, this is not like the Unabomber, you know, list of crazy, you know, ideas or whatever. This is a simple list of things that I stand for, that we stand for, as a community. It’s a list of things that are important to me.
And I’ve been wanting to share this with you guys for a while. And the timing just hasn’t been right. And now I’m like, you know what, this is perfect. Let’s start doing this. You know, we’ve got a good opportunity right now, especially with the holidays coming up, that I want to start sharing these principles with you guys and get you on board with this set of principles, this set of guidelines.
So what is a manifesto in the way that I’m talking about it here? So a manifesto is this: it is a list of guiding principles. Okay? A manifesto is a set of values that you can use to live your life by a manifesto. Think of it as your North Star that guides you to where you want to go. Okay? Why? Why would we want to have a list of values? Why do we need a North Star? Why do we want guiding principles?
Here’s why. When you have this set of guiding principles, when you have a manifesto, this provides a simple blueprint that you can live by. For me, it helps keep me on track, it helps keep me moving toward my goals. It’s very easy for me to know exactly where I am with my health and fitness goals with my mindset goals with my, you know, emotional goals with my business goals, all that stuff, it’s very easy to know where I am.
If I have a set of principles that I can use as kind of checkmarks, right, I can just say like, am I living by this principle? Yes or no, it’s very simple. So it’s like, following this set of guiding principles, it helps to give my life purpose, it helps drive me forward, I believe that we should all have some sort of list of guiding principles.
So I’m sharing this with you guys here because this is our collective list of guiding principles. Okay, this is everything that I teach is based on these principles that I’m going to share with you. You are free to adopt these principles as your own and I promise you, if you do adopt these, your life will get better in so many ways. I promise you.
Okay, so let me list out what the Running Lean Manifesto is here. There’s just there’s like eight principles, this isn’t very long. Very short, actually. And so here’s what the eight principles are of the Running Lean Manifesto. Number one, eat real food. Number two, live vibrantly. Number three, thrive in your body. Number four, embrace discomfort. Number five, run because you love it. Number six, love yourself unconditionally. Number seven, think, feel and act with purpose. And number eight, be an example of what’s possible. Over the next several episodes of the podcast, I’m going to take a deep dive into each one of these principles, okay, but I wanted to kind of lay them all out for you.
And today I’m going to be talking about the first one which is to eat real food. So we’ll get into all of these over the next several episodes. Okay? But I’ve already been sharing with you bits and pieces of these principles because these principles as a guide.
Everything that I do from these podcasts or what I teach in my Facebook group, to how I coach my, my one-on-one clients to the programs that I offer, the courses that I’m creating, everything I do in my life is guided by these eight principles.
I’m sharing these with you, because I’m hoping that these will become your guiding principles to the Running Lean community is a vibrant and growing community of passionate runners. And we all share common goals. So this manifesto was really our collective Northstar. Alright, these are the principles that bind our tribe together. Right?
This is what’s going to help propel us forward together. This is a blueprint and we can all use to become the best version of ourselves together. Cool. Cool, awesome. So let’s get into the first principle, which is, in my opinion, the most important one, and that’s why I’m talking about it first. And the principle is this: eat real food. Why is this so important? Well, I believe that your health is the most important aspect of your life. Because without it, what do you have? You have nothing.
The problem though, and this is crazy. Most people, especially in the United States, but most people in the world are not healthy. There’s a stat that I came across recently, and this is crazy, but 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. That means they have some sort of illness related to their their diet, which would be they are overweight or obese.
They’re insulin resistant. They have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, all these things. 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. That means 12% of us are considered healthy. Wow. I know which 12%, which percentage I want to be in, I want to be in that 12%. Right.
So I work very hard on my health and my fitness. It’s very important to me. The problem though, and the reason why 88% of us are unhealthy is because this diet that we’ve adopted and we’ve been implementing, and we’ve been following since the late 70s, early 80s. It’s just wrong. It does not work.
So you know, the dietary guidelines came out in like 1980, and said, we need to be eating a lot more carbohydrates, a lot less fat. And so we’ve been doing that. We’ve been very compliant with that, we need to also cut our calories and we need to exercise more. We’ve been doing all these things, right.
And you know what? It’s not working. We’re fatter, and we’re sicker than we ever have been. Since 1980, the obesity rates in the United States have more than tripled. And that’s just because we’ve been following those guidelines. You know, we have an epidemic of diseases like diabetes, like cancer.
You know, there are 14, I think 14 types of cancer that have been related to diet. According to the World Health Organization. Those include the number two and three cancers, which is breast cancer and colorectal cancer. So there’s no doubt that diet plays a huge role in disease. Alzheimer’s has been called a type three diabetes, because it’s so clearly related to diet now and to a high carbohydrate diet.
Especially polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS, diet related, all of these issues are most mostly caused by this problem of hyperinsulinemia, which is just too much insulin in the blood. How do you get your insulin super high? Well eat a lot of carbohydrates, eat a lot of sugar. This is what’s going to drive up blood glucose levels is what’s going to drive up insulin levels.
And this is what’s going to create a state in your body where all these diseases just happen. And and so, you know, I’ve talked about this a lot, and we all kind of understand that this is a problem. This diet is just wrong. It doesn’t work, okay. It’s making us fat. It’s making us sick.
And the other thing we have to understand is that exercise is not going to fix the problem, you know, cutting calories and running more isn’t going to fix the problem. All right? No amount of exercise can fix this terrible diet. All right.
Couple of examples of this. And there’s many, many examples. I mean, just in our Facebook group alone, there are many, many people that share stories about how they have been running, you know, marathons for years and years and gaining weight, you know, they just cannot seem to lose weight.
But a couple of examples that kind of stand out, Professor Tim Noakes. So this is the guy who wrote the book, The Law Of Running, right, famous book on running, you know, became like the runner’s Bible, so to speak.
And this guy ran like 70 marathons, you know, coaches, people, all this stuff, he ends up getting type two diabetes, because he’s following this high carbohydrate diet that he was actually teaching people. And so getting type two diabetes, and being a long distance runner, he was like, there’s a serious problem going on what is happening here.
So he switched to a low carb diet. He now coaches like world class class athletes on the low carb approach, and they’re having amazing success. And he’s awesome. He actually was doing a book signing sometime after he switched to the low carb diet.
And he actually took that book, The Law Of Running, and he stood up, and he ripped out the chapter on nutrition from that book, and he says, I no longer can tell people to follow this high carb diet. It just, it’s terrible. It does not work. So that’s one example of someone who was following the advice of exercising more, and ended up with type two diabetes, which is just terrible.
Another example, I recently had this conversation with someone who is on this running streak. And this guy, he’s awesome. He’s a cool dude. He’s been running every day. On this running streak. He does an average of around three miles or so three, four miles a day, right? But he’s been doing this running streak since 2007, right?
This guy has been running three, four miles a day on average, for like, almost 5000 straight days. Okay. And in the process, he’s gained like over 50 pounds, right? And if you’re thinking, well, what you need to do is just run a little bit more. Honestly, I don’t I don’t think that is the answer. That is not the answer.
The exercising more thing just does not work. Okay. You can’t outrun a bad diet, we have to change the diet that we are eating. Okay, we have to stop all this high carbohydrate nonsense, it just does not work. So what’s the answer?
The answer is that we just need to eat real food. So what do we mean when we say eat real food? It’s not complicated. It’s this: eat whole food. Food that is as close to nature as possible food that our ancestors used to eat. That’s it. So when I say whole foods as close to nature as possible, what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is, like, no refined food or processed food, food that still looks like food. Okay, not food that’s been ground up into powders, or liquids or smashed into, you know, patties or, or bars or anything like that.
Like not, not things that have been extracted from whole food, and then injected over here, like just the whole food. Okay. So most packaged food that we get is processed food. It’s highly refined and highly processed. So if you kind of stay away from packaged food in general, you’re going to be solving most of the problems.
Now, I’m not anti-packaged food. I mean, I do buy food that comes in packages. That’s not what I mean. I’m not saying you have to eat, just you know, celery and, and turnips, like it’s this is not what I’m talking about at all. But you’ve just got to be careful because most of this packaged food is just highly processed, you can’t eat.
Most processed foods that you buy in the middle parts of the grocery store contain the three worst things you can eat which is sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. And I call this the Vile Triumvirate. So these things are in most packaged processed foods, sugar, refined grains, vegetable oil, terrible combination.
So instead what I’m suggesting is that we eat whole foods. Foods that are very close to nature foods that still look like foods, okay? For example, a whole food that are close to nature would be something like bacon and eggs, right?
Bacon, you know, it’s, you know, been, you know, trimmed, it’s got a little bit of curing or whatever, but a really simple thing bacon and eggs very, very simple, very close to nature, whole food, tons of nutritional value, amazing.
A processed food equivalent, not not equivalent at all, but a processed food would be Jimmy Dean’s bacon egg and cheese biscuit with over 60 ingredients. So I did a little research on some foods and I gotta tell you, it’s horrifying what they put in this food.
But here’s the, I’m not going to list all 60 ingredients, but I just want to tell you like the grilled egg patty is one of the sections of the ingredients on this package that I looked at. And here’s what the grilled egg Patty alone has in it. So in my mind, it should be one ingredient right? It should be egg. Okay, but here’s what the grilled egg patty has. It has: egg, nonfat milk, soybean oil, modified corn starch, salt, xanthan gum, natural and artificial butter flavor, which contains soybean oil, butter, lipolyzed butter, oil, natural and artificial flavors. And then also citric acid, soy lecithin as a release agent.
So in my opinion, this is not real food. This is not real food. What is all that stuff? Why are we putting soybean oil and modified corn starch and xanthan gum and lipolyzed butter oil into this thing, right? We don’t need to be eating all this garbage. Okay, so bacon and eggs, whole foods, close to nature.
Jimmy Dean’s bacon egg and cheese biscuit. Processed highly refined garbage. If you liked the Jimmy Dean’s bacon egg and cheese biscuit I apologize right now, but no, I don’t apologize. I stand my ground. Here’s another example.
Whole foods close to nature. Chicken. Right, that’s easy. Chicken. Here’s an example of a processed food, frozen chicken nuggets that are shaped like dinosaurs. Right? You know, I looked up these won’t bore you with all the ingredients. They’re all terrible. But there’s like over 20 ingredients in these things. Right? Not real food.
So what I’m trying to say here is this stick with whole food. Things like meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, veggies, natural fats, like olive oil, butter, avocados, and stay away from all the highly refined, highly processed foods made with a million unpronounceable and unnatural ingredients like that stuff is not real.
The you know, kind of a rule of thumb that I share with people is to shop the perimeter of the grocery store. That’s where you have the meat section, and the dairy section and the produce section. And very limited stuff in the middle. Now I buy some you know salad dressing, I buy some frozen broccoli, you know, there are a few things that I get that have a few ingredients in there.
I’m not saying never buy food with ingredients but just be really mindful of this. Okay, so when we talk about eating real food, whole foods, as close to nature as possible. This is what we’re talking about right food that has not been highly refined and not highly processed. Now, it’s a little more work to eat food this way.
Yeah, it can be, it takes a little bit more work to prepare something than it does to take something out of the freezer like a frozen dinner or whatever and throw it in the microwave. Yeah, it does take a little bit of extra effort to make something but you know, what, is it worth it?
Is it worth it for your health? In your overall well being? 100% yes 100%. I love eating this way. I never have to think to myself like I wonder what’s in this. I’m wondering if this is okay to eat like, I don’t have to do that anymore. I eat a ton of nutrient dense, vibrant healthy food, and I love it.
You know, I eat this big salad every night I call it my kitchen sink salad, because I just throw a bunch of different stuff in there that I have around. But it’s loaded with fresh colorful greens and veggies and, and then I eat a big piece of quality protein like wild caught sockeye salmon or a local grass fed steak. And it’s so satisfying to eat whole foods this way.
That’s like very close to natural. And I feel super healthy. Because I’m just focused on eating real food. And when you first start eating whole foods this way, it is a little bit more work. Yes. But over time, it gets easier, you’ll grow to love it. And you’ll never go back. I promise you, you’ll love it. So that’s kind of what I mean when I say whole food as close to nature as possible.
Now, food our ancestors used to eat. So what do I mean by this? Well, here’s the thing. Two and a half million years, Homo sapiens have been evolving. We’ve evolved for the last two and a half million years as hunter gatherers, right? The most significant period of our human development was during that Paleolithic era.
So two and a half million to something around 10,000 years ago. We evolved, we were doing really well as humans, you know, we became, you know, Homo sapiens, we became these thinking, these amazing people that we are basically now okay. And then a few 1000 years ago, we started shifting more to agriculture, we started processing, growing like cereal grains and processing them.
And we started relying more on farming than we did on hunting and gathering. But here’s the thing, 99.5% of our evolution, we’ve been eating this very low carbohydrate, almost zero carbohydrate, diet, high in fat, high in quality protein, and very low in carbohydrate. And then, for the last .5% of our existence, you know, we’ve been farming and processing our food.
If you think about the entirety of human existence as a football field, 99 and a half yards, you know, we’ve evolved and have been perfecting our health, and evolving and surviving and thriving as hunter gatherers. And then for that last half yard of the football field, just that tiny little slice, we’ve been farming and processing.
So our genetics haven’t changed much. It takes 15,000 years or so for genetics to change significantly, right? And so we are just genetically predisposed to eat this way, this way that we’ve been eating for the last two and a half million years, right, we just are. We’re not genetically disposed to eating the cereal grains and the carbohydrates, we’re just not, we’re not.
And especially the concentrated forms of carbohydrates like sugar, and all the fruit that’s super high in sugar, sugary drinks and desserts, all this stuff. We are not designed to eat that stuff. And if you think about what’s available in the grocery store, every meal is basically dessert.
You know, for breakfast, oh, eat some yogurt and some cereal and some granola, sugar, sugar, sugar, oh, for lunch, have this, you know, sandwich with you know, this white bread, sugar, you know, and for snack, have some pretzels and some of these nuts that are sweetened with you know, sugar, it’s just sugar, sugar, sugar, you know, for dinner, you know, eat all this pasta.
And you know everything just and then dessert. You know, here’s some brownies like whatever. You get the just like we’re just eating sugar at every meal. And it’s not working for us. The more we eat grains, the more we eat the processed foods, the more we eat carbohydrates, the sicker and fatter we become.
And this is not something that is just in the last 50 years or so that this has become a problem. This just started happening a couple of 1000 years ago. So this is really fascinating. They did this study where they looked at like 3000 preserved mummies from ancient Egypt. And they were looking at them and they can do these scans of them and they have their bodies. Which are pretty well intact so they can see a lot of what’s going on in their bodies. And at the time of when they were alive, you know, these people their diet was very rich with grains and bread and cereals and they weren’t eating a lot of fat other than olives, olive oil.
It’s kind of like the modern version of the Mediterranean diet, right? What now a lot of people think of as a very healthy diet, right? Low fat, very high carbohydrate. At the time, the banks of the Nile were fertile, and they would grow a lot of fruit and vegetables. And one of the primary staples that they ate the ancient Egyptians was this like coarse bread that they made from stone ground wheat, right.
So they started like, they were like processing and refining grains. And they weren’t eating much meat at the time, because animals at the time were more beasts of burden, and they were more valued for their work than for their food. So they weren’t eating the animal products. They were eating more of these grains and lots of vegetables, fruit, especially.
And, you know, today, if we were to say, well, this is a really good diet and a lot of nutritionists, and it kind of follows along with the dietary guidelines, you would think these people must have been super healthy, right? The Mediterranean diet. Yeah, man do it. The Egyptians should be super healthy.
But you know what, they were not healthy. They were very pretty they ever like in miserable health. Okay, so they were looking at these mummies they have like, they study like 3000 preserved mummies from the time. And a large percentage of them showed a nightmarish array of dental diseases.
So any dentist will tell you what causes dental diseases, what causes tooth decay, and dental problems is sugar, it’s eating sugar and grains, that causes the tooth problems. They studied them. And they could see that many of them had heart disease, they had high blood pressure, they had diabetes, they had obesity, all of the same disorders that we experienced today in this, you know, quote, unquote, civilized Western world.
Why in God’s name, would anyone recommend this diet today to everyone? These people, clearly, by just looking at them, you can see they’re in miserable health. All right.
In contrast, when you look at the skeletal remains of Paleolithic man, who consumed mostly a meat and fat based diet, very high in fat, very high in protein, very low in carbohydrate, you have to understand that, at the time, like two and a half million years is a long period of time, there was a couple of ice ages in there.
And people on the planet, were not all living in tropical zones, where they had access to fruit and vegetables everywhere. There was a lot of the earth, it was very, the fruit and vegetables were very scarce. Some of the veggies they would eat would be like, tubers that were grown underground, you know, yams, for example. The fruit that they ate was very, very low in sugar. It’s not like the stuff that we have today, and only available very seasonally. And only in certain parts of the world.
They didn’t you know, they couldn’t go to Whole Foods and just grab, you know, bananas and stuff like that. They couldn’t get their banana smoothie from Whole Foods, right? So their diet subsisted on, you know, mostly meat and fat, and some berries and some things that they could forage for. But anyway, they looked at the skeletal remains of Paleolithic man, and they show that they have very strong perfect teeth.
Now they don’t have access to the internal organs and all that other stuff that we could see in the mummies, but they can see that these people had amazing perfect teeth, which means that they were not consuming a lot of carbohydrates, because bad teeth are the hallmark of carbohydrate consumption.
So we can make a pretty good assumption that their health was very good. You know, here’s the thing when it comes to like carbohydrates, because people tend to think, well, we gotta have carbs, you gotta eat some carbs. And you know what, there’s no essential carbs.
Essential nutrients are those things that our body cannot manufacture on its own. They have to be obtained in the diet. There are two essential nutrients that we have to get in our diet. The one is essential fatty acids, and we get that by eating fat. And then we need essential amino acids, and we get that from eating protein, but there are no essential carbohydrates.
In other words, if you eat a zero protein diet, you will eventually die. If you eat a zero fat diet, you will eventually die. If you eat a zero carbohydrate diet, you’re probably going to do just fine and live a very happy, healthy life. You know, your body actually produces the glucose that you need, your liver will produce glucose in this process.
It’s called gluconeogenesis, which just means making new glucose. And your brain needs a certain amount of fuel in the form of glucose and your liver makes everything that you need, you don’t need to eat it. Okay. And then going back to this whole paleolithic diet thing, and people ask me, so what are you talking about here? Is this just the Paleo diet?
And I’m like, not really, I don’t like using labels like that, other than to say, what I’m suggesting is that we go back to eating real food. Yes, it’s low carb. And yes, it’s high fat. And it’s not necessarily Atkins, or paleo or keto or anything like that. Although it can be. It’s whatever works for you. I don’t care what you call it.
Honestly, what I’m focusing on and what I teach people is to eat real food. And the way that I eat is probably pretty close to paleo, because I think it’s the food, pretty close to what we’ve been eating and what our ancestors have been eating for millions of years. And I think it’s probably the best diet for us.
But even go back to our more recent ancestors. So when I talk about eat food our ancestors would have eaten I’m talking about even just a few generations ago, like our grandparents, for example, they didn’t eat all the processed junk we eat today, they didn’t have all the refined foods that we have today.
They ate meat and eggs and butter and full fat dairy and loads of fresh, seasonal vegetables. They didn’t eat a lot of fruit. And it wasn’t the kind of fruit that we have now. It wasn’t super available. It was very seasonal. They didn’t eat a ton of refined carbs, they didn’t eat a ton of sugar. They ate foods that were very close to nature, they ate foods their ancestors ate, right? So that’s what I’m suggesting here. It’s not a radical concept. It really isn’t. It’s just let’s just go back to eating the way we used to eat.
Here’s the thing. When you switch to eating real food, this is freaking awesome. I absolutely love eating this way. My clients love eating this way. It’s very satisfying. It is delicious. It is diverse. And people think, oh, well, it’s so restricting. I can’t eat this, and I can’t eat that. But I think it’s the opposite.
There’s tons of freedom in eating this way. There’s like never ending ideas for what you can eat. If you buy 10 packaged food items, you know, buy 10 packaged frozen food items, take them home, what do you get, you get like 10 meals. Right? That’s it. If you buy 10 whole food ingredients and bring them home, I guarantee you you can find 10s of 1000s of meal options that you could put together with the right set of ingredients.
Just go on any website and find something, I guarantee you’ll find 1000s and 1000s of ideas for those 10 ingredients. And you know, you don’t have to be like a carnivore to do this. You don’t have to eat meat. You know, eating real food doesn’t mean you have to eat animals. It really doesn’t.
You can do this as a vegetarian as a vegan as a pescatarian as a ovo lacto vegetarian or whatever. You can do this eating plant based you can do this as a carnivore. You can do it eating all plants or eating all meat or anything in between and most people fall somewhere in the middle. This is the first principle: eat real food.
This is the first principle of the Running Lean Manifesto for a reason. Because I believe that eating real food is probably the most important thing that you can do for yourself. What is more important than your health, nothing. You know, if you feed your body, a bunch of processed garbage, you become a fat, sick and unhealthy human, then everything else in your life becomes a constant struggle.
But if you’re feeding your body properly, when you eat real food, you become the healthiest human being that you can be. And everything else in your life begins to fall into place beautifully. You lose weight, you feel better, you have more energy, you’re happier running becomes easier. So my suggestion to you is to follow this principle starting now go out there and eat real food.
Alright, so I’ll be diving into All of the other principles I mentioned from the manifesto in upcoming episodes, I am so excited to share all this with you. And then I will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Join us and start applying these principles to your life. Challenge yourself. Begin, start today like start eating real food, get healthier, lose weight, become a better runner, become the best damn version of yourself yet.
All right, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
Here’s a fact: if you are trying to lose weight and you are hungry all the time, it is going to be a very difficult struggle. This is exactly why most people quit diets - they can’t deal with the …
Continue Reading about 37. How to Solve the Hunger Problem →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 37 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we are talking about how to solve the hunger problem. So here’s a fact: if you’re trying to lose weight, and you are hungry all the time, this is going to be very difficult for you, you are going to struggle. And this is exactly why most people quit diets, they just can’t deal with that constant, intense feeling of hunger.
So today I’m talking about this problem of hunger and how to solve it. So I’ll explain different types of hunger, how to tell if you’re actually hungry, which foods tend to increase your hunger and which tend to reduce it, and how all of this relates to your running. So that is all coming up momentarily.
And listen, if you’d like this podcast, I hope you do, then you got to come check us out on Facebook, check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It’s this positive, energetic, fun group of like minded runners like you who share common goals. We all want to lose weight, we want running to be easier. We want to live a healthier life.
Okay, I do weekly live trainings in the Facebook group on a host of different topics like running nutrition, weight loss. This month, we’re talking about intermittent fasting. So I’m doing a lot of in depth talks about that. Here’s a recent comment from one of our members of the Facebook group. Erica, she says, “Okay, so I’m sure you’re still on a Saturday run.” She sent this on a Saturday morning. “But I just have to say that the scale is finally moving in the right direction. And it has nothing to do with exercise because I’ve been sick, and I’ve cut back due to trying not to physically wear myself out again. So thinking about food as my main way to control my weight has been key. I tried too long to connect diet with exercise. And I wound up focusing more on exercise to make up for my bad eating. Not anymore. And I love listening to your podcasts while walking or running. They make the time fly. Thanks again, for all you continue to share. You’re impacting so many lives in a positive way.”
Oh my gosh, Erica, I’m getting all choked up. That was really sweet. And this is my goal. I just want to help people, I want to impact people in a positive way. So thank you so much for saying that, it does make me feel good. Sometimes I feel like I’m just all alone over here. I’m just talking into this microphone. When I get messages like that it does make me feel good, that lights me up.
And you are so right. Exercise is great for a lot of things. But it’s just not a really great way to lose weight. Right. It’s more about the food you eat. And I’m glad that message is resonating with you especially. It’s one of the big reasons why I do what I do. This is why I started this whole Running Lean community in the Running Lean podcast because running you just can’t outrun a bad diet. Right? We’ve heard that a lot.
And we have to focus on nutrition. If we want to get lean, lose weight, feel better, make running easier, get stronger, all that stuff. Okay. So in the Facebook group, we’ve got a big challenge going on this month, I told you it’s intermittent fasting month, over in the Running Lean community on Facebook.
And that does not mean we’re fasting for the entire month of September. No, we’re not doing that. So what we’re talking about is what intermittent fasting is, what it isn’t, and how to do it safely. And the amazing benefits that you can get, especially for long distance running. Right?
There’s so many amazing benefits and if you haven’t checked it out last week, I did a podcast all about the myths and benefits of intermittent fasting you should definitely check that one out. So just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community and join us. We’d love to have you in there.
Also, figuring out what to eat so you can become fat-adapted, losing weight, becoming that lean running machine. This can all be kind of challenging to do on your own. It typically takes these three things to create lasting change in your life. You need awareness, you need knowledge, and you need support.
And what I try to do with this podcast is I try to provide as much awareness and knowledge as I can. Right? But that personal, ongoing support is something you can only get from one on one, you know. So that’s why I offer one-on-one coaching. Listen, we’re all different. We all have different dietary needs, what works for one person may not work for you.
Working together, you and I, we figure out exactly how to put together a nutrition plan that works for you, that gets you the results that you want, that gets you to your goals. So if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life, if you’re ready to get off the sugar, and those crazy insatiable hunger.
If you’re ready to reap all the amazing benefits of intermittent fasting, if we’re ready to lose weight and feel good while doing it, and not be hungry all the time, then you have to apply for a one on one coaching with me, it’s very easy to do. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word, do it now I promise you, it’s worth it.
Alright, let’s talk about hunger. Yay. So how to solve the hunger problem? So first of all, what is hunger? What does this even mean? What are we talking about? So early humans, we were hunter-gatherers, right? We would go and hunt. And we would eat or we would forage for food.
And we would eat, we feasted. And we fasted. I talked a lot about this in the last episode, right? So we would go for long stretches of time, without food, and this was normal. Right? So we would maybe hunt for something, and kill it and then eat it. And then, you know, that would keep us feeling pretty satiated for a few days.
Think about this in the animal kingdom today, most mammals, especially predatory mammals, like think of the lion, right? They hunt, they kill, and then they eat. And they only eat like once or twice a week. Right? This is the way that we evolved as humans. This is the way most animals operate in the animal kingdom, that are predatory animals, omnivores.
And so it was very common for our ancestral human hunter-gatherers, to go for long periods of time without a substantial meal. Right. And this did not impair them mentally or physically. In fact, it had the opposite effect. From a report that I was just reading called meal frequency and timing and health and disease. It says that the ability to function at a high level, both physically and mentally, during extended periods without food may have been a fundamental importance in our evolutionary history.
So meaning that we were not impaired mentally and physically by not eating, in fact, it had some good health benefits to us. So hunger would come on a day or two after we ate, and would signal the animal or the human in this case to go out and hunt or forage to get more food. Right?
We weren’t getting hungry, we didn’t evolve to get hungry every couple of hours. We didn’t evolve eating six meals a day. We didn’t have snacks. Okay, we feasted. And then we fasted. And when we did that, our hunger came on very slowly. So we would feel this urge to go get more food, and then we would eat it, and we would feel satiated. And then we wouldn’t be hungry for a day or two.
When that hunger came on, it would send signals that we need to eat, we need nutrition. And then we would go out and get more food. So this is what hunger is. It’s our body signaling us that we need nutrition, we require it or we will die. Now, today we eat you know, if we feel just a slightest bit hungry, we got to eat something right. This is not the way we evolved to eat though. Okay, so we’ll get into more of that in a second.
Let’s talk about some different types of hunger. First, I want you to understand what we’re talking about when we talk about different types of hunger and what real hunger actually is. So first of all, we have a type of hunger called a craving, right? Have you ever had a craving for something?
So a craving is where you have a real need like you want a specific food, so it might be what do I have a craving for? Chips and guacamole. That does sound good right about now, or I have a craving for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. That’s a very specific kind of craving, you know, people are like, oh, I have a craving for pizza or french fries, you know, cravings feel urgent, they feel like you have to do something about it right now.
They come on very quickly, and easily pass very quickly, if you don’t do anything about it. This is not real hunger. This is just a craving. And a lot of this is mental. It’s psychological. Right? Another type of hunger is withdrawal, hunger. So this happens, when, for instance, you stop eating sugar, or refined carbohydrates. Obviously, sugar, we’ve talked about this in depth. It’s like other drugs, it’s like alcohol. And when you stop consuming drugs, or alcohol, or sugar, in this case, you may experience some withdrawal symptoms.
So in this case, the withdrawal symptoms are both physical, and mental, and it’s a sensation of ‘I need to eat something right away.’ So it might feel urgent, mentally, and physically, it comes on quickly, again, similar to a craving. But it’s not, it’s not real hunger, it’s because your body is coming off of sugar, carbohydrates.
The next type of hunger I want to talk about is called emotional hunger. And this is when you are bored, or you’re nervous, or you’re anxious, or you want something to do. And this is typically what we call emotional eating. So we’re eating to dull a sensation, to dull an unwanted emotion that we’re having. And emotions are just caused by our thoughts.
So this idea that we’re hungry, and that somehow going to make us feel better, is just a thought in our brain. That’s what emotional eating is. That’s what emotional hunger is, again, this comes on kind of quickly. And again, it just kind of passes away if you don’t do anything about it. This is not real hunger. None of these are real hunger, okay?
These are all just like our body, having addiction or coming off addiction, or not dealing with our emotions, or having a craving for something because we saw a billboard with giant french fries on him. Not real hunger.
So let’s talk about what real hunger is – physical hunger. This is when our body actually requires nutrition, we need food. Now, you’ll usually feel physical hunger only a couple times a day. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But for the most part, you should only feel real physical hunger once or twice a day. Real physical hunger, it comes on slowly. It comes on gently, kind of like a gentle wave in the ocean. Right?
It typically doesn’t just pass very quickly, but it never feels urgent or terrible. The way you know that you’re really hungry is if a meal sounds good. In other words, if you’re like, you know, a handful of nuts, it’d be good right about now, that’s not real hunger. That’s typically an emotional eating, or a craving, or man, I could really go for some french fries right now that’s, that’s not real hunger.
Real hunger is, man, I could go for a steak and a salad and you know, some broccoli. When a big meal sounds good, then you know you’re actually hungry. Okay, so we have some signals in our body. They’re hormones, and they help to regulate our hunger. So the hormones we’ve talked about, and I’ve talked about a lot on here are insulin, ghrelin and leptin.
So insulin is the hormone that gets secreted when our blood sugars go up. So anytime we eat anything, especially when we eat sugar or carbohydrates, our blood sugars go up quite a lot and we produce insulin. We also have a hormone called ghrelin and ghrelin is produced when our body is actually hungry.
And again, ghrelin should just be produced in very limited quantities, and very slowly to tell us we are hungry so it sends hunger signals to our brain, so we eat something and we don’t die. Then we have a hormone called leptin. Leptin tells us when we are full and and when we eat food, leptin kicks in and says, you know, you’ve had enough broccoli and steak, I think you’re good and then we stop eating.
Now when insulin is super high, by eating a high carbohydrate diet, it messes up the production of ghrelin and leptin, you over produce ghrelin, so you feel hungry all the time, and you under produce leptin, so you feel you don’t feel full. So when you’re eating a diet high in carbohydrates, sugar is a carbohydrates, just a very refined carbohydrate.
So high in carbs, high in sugar, then insulin is always elevated, your body is in this mode of holding on to fat, which is not good. You’re more hungry, and you don’t feel full when you do eat. So this is a terrible combination of hormone activity in your body. Okay, so when you’re eating a diet high in carbohydrates, you are going to feel terribly hungry all the time.
So a low fat, low calorie, high carbohydrate diet makes you feel hungry, this diet, eating this kind of food will increase your hunger when you’re eating a lot of bread and pasta, and a lot of fruit and drinking a lot of you know, sports drinks with a lot of sugar in it. You’re eating all these sports goos and things like that, when you’re running.
Insulin is going to be high all the time this suppresses leptin and interferes with ghrelin, you are going to be abnormally hungry all the time. Eating a high carb diet increases your appetite and makes you hungry.
This is why restaurants really push appetizers, especially a bunch of carby appetizers, like they’ll just stick a basket of bread in front of you and say, oh yeah, here just eat as much bread as you want while you’re waiting or while you’re deciding on what you’re going to eat. Because when you start eating bread, especially carbs, or appetizers, especially high carb appetizers, it actually makes you hungrier.
Restaurants know this, they know that if they can get people to eat some carbs before they order their food, they order more food, and they eat more of their main course. But you think we probably think that if we eat some appetizers, we won’t eat as much at our meal. But the opposite is actually the case, people order more food.
So eating these high carb appetizers, and just next time you go to restaurant, check out the appetizers and you’ll notice a theme. Everything’s got a ton of carbs in it, right? Especially when they just dropped that bread basket right there. Which don’t get me wrong, I used to love the bread basket. Now, I do not eat bread. Bread is really. There’s so many bad things. I’m gonna do a whole podcast episode on bread, because bread is like the worst thing you can be eating.
I know it’s delicious. I know it is. But really, it’s not good. You guys hate me sometimes. First, I take away fruit and I’m taking away bread and you’re just like, who is this guy? Alright, so the wrong diet, the wrong food will make you hungrier. So this is lots of sugar and lots of carbs, it makes you hungrier. Now, the right type of food, the right diet should reduce your hunger.
So when we switch over to a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, this is a diet that keeps insulin levels low, normal. It normalizes these hormones, right? Then ghrelin and leptin work the way they’re supposed to. So you’re only hungry when you’re really physically hungry, which is very, not as often as you would think. When you do eat, you feel more for you to eat to satiety, so you eat until you feel for.
And then because you’re eating good types of food with nutrient dense types of food with good fats. You won’t be hungry for a long time. The high fat part of the diet really helps with hunger because you feel full for way longer.
And this is basically what our human ancestors ate for millions of years. Think about it. They ate meat with a lot of fat. They went especially for the fattest parts of the animal. They ate some vegetables. Yes, very few though. There just wasn’t a lot of vegetables available. And they ate seasonally and low, whatever they could find.
They ate very little fruit and the fruit that they ate was not sweet at all, not like it is today. They weren’t eating refined sugars or carbs. And so they would eat and they would feel so full and satiated and then they wouldn’t need to eat for a couple of days, which is I think, really cool. And we can do the same kind of thing.
Now, I’m not suggesting you don’t eat meat for a couple of days at a time. But um, you know, you can go longer periods of time without food, which is an amazing place to get to. And think about, like, you know, predatory animals today like a lion, you know, they get very full, because they basically eat a low carb, high fat diet, right.
And they don’t need to eat again for days. And I know we’re not lions, I’m just trying to say that, like mammals eat this way, most of them. So here’s another thing I want to talk about. So the types of food you eat is very important. But even if you’re eating a low carb, high fat diet, there’s times where you might experience a little bit of hunger, okay?
We think that being hungry is somehow a problem. If we ever feel the least bit of hunger, we get that little signal, maybe a little belly grumbling or something like that. We’re like, oh, my God, I’m so hungry, I can’t concentrate, my blood sugars are going to be too low, I’m running low on energy, I’m gonna pass out. And like we got to do something about it right now. Right?
This is really not something we have to like, it’s not an emergency. Okay, being hungry is not really an issue. It’s not a problem. You know, real hunger is an important signal that we should eat. But it’s almost never an emergency, especially we’re talking about here in the Western world where we have access to food all the time, you’re not going to starve to death, you’re not going to die.
Okay, unless you haven’t eaten for days, and days and days, you won’t die from being a little bit hungry. In fact, I talk about this guy who holds the world record for fasting, his name is Angus Barbieri. And he is a Scottish dude who weighed like 467 pounds or something like that. And he fasted for 382 days.
So he lived off of his own body fat, he had to, you know, drink water, obviously, and take electrolytes and some vitamins. And he had doctor’s supervision through this. And he was drinking coffee and stuff like that. But basically, no food and he lived off his own body fat for over a year. And he was fine. He didn’t die.
He ended up weighing, like 180 pounds or something like that, when all was said and done. So anyway, the point is that you can live off your own body fat, and when you do feel a little bit of hunger, if you’re trying to lose weight.
And you’re starting to feel a little bit hungry, and it’s that gentle hunger, it’s actually kind of a good signal to you, like think about it as like, Oh yeah, I’m burning fat on my body and can actually use my own fat for fuel. So it’s not a it’s not a problem.
And, and being a little hungry every now and then. Maybe it’s just something you have to accept as just being okay. You know, I’m not talking about being like ravishing, ravishingly hungry or starving, like these are unhealthy states to be in. But I guarantee you, if you’re listening to this podcast, then you don’t have to worry about starving to death, I guarantee you that.
So if you find yourself if you are eating a low carb, high fat diet, and you do find yourself getting hungry between meals, here’s what I suggest you do. Nothing. Just don’t do anything about it. Just allow it to be there. Allow that feeling to kind of be there. It’s not a problem, really, it’s just a feeling.
And you’ll probably be eating in an hour or two anyway. So it’s not an emergency, you will be fine. You won’t die. Remember, Angus, he didn’t die. One of my clients started using that as a hashtag. I think it’s fabulous. He didn’t die. If it’s true hunger, it will come on slowly, like a gentle wave that won’t feel urgent.
And you can just like let it be there and it’ll kind of pass. Right? The main reason we feel hungry all the time. And it feels urgent because we’re eating food that makes us feel that way. When you change your diet, when you switch to a low carb high fat diet, the hunger problem is basically solved.
Alright, I’m going to talk about a concept that I think is pretty interesting. And this is a concept I call hunger matching. So hunger matching is basically you have this sort of biological function in your body that says every time around the time you normally eat, you’re going to be hungry.
So let’s say you normally eat three meals a day, 8am, 12 noon, and 7pm. Over time, your body’s going to expect to be fed at those three times. So ghrelin will kind of be produced at those times. And you will start to feel more hungry at eight, noon and 7pm. I know this was recently my friend was hanging out at my friend’s house and his dog started freaking out. And I’m like, what’s the dog freaking out about and he’s like, oh, it’s dinnertime, the dog knows what time dinner is, even though he doesn’t tell time that we know of.
But he has this like biological sensor that knows, hey, it’s time to eat. Okay, so the dog doesn’t freak out two hours before it’s time to eat, or an hour afterwards. But like, right at that time, it’s pretty fascinating. But we do the same thing. So we have this internal biological function that says it’s time for you to eat.
So if you’re eating six times a day, which some people recommend you do, which I think is ridiculous, and stupid, and I don’t think this is a good is the exact opposite of what you want to do, by the way. But if you eat six times a day, then you will be hungry six times a day, you’re basically always going to be hungry from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed.
Do you want to live your life that way? I say no. Over time, let’s say you switch to eating twice a day, which is what I kind of recommend for most people, you’re only going to feel hungry around those two times a day. And it might take a few weeks for you to get used to this new like feeding schedule.
But basically, hunger should only appear around those couple of times a day where you normally eat. So your hunger, the feeling of hunger kind of matches, when you typically eat. Think about the freedom that comes with only being hungry once or twice a day. And knowing that it’s real hunger, like this is so amazing.
Alright, let’s talk about running a little bit. So running actually makes you hungry. Did you know that you probably didn’t know that exercise increases your appetite. And again, this is an evolutionary thing that is good. It’s a good system to have in place. So you exercise, and your body says, hey, you’ve just expelled a bunch of energy, you know, you burned a lot of fat or calories, we need to replace that.
So hormones will kick in and your appetite will go up, the ghrelin gets increased. And so after you exercise, then hunger becomes increased. And this is what our hunter gatherer ancestors did, you know, they would go on this hunt, which would build up their appetite. And their hunger would increase as they were out there, hunting down this animal or chasing it down or whatever they did. And then they would eat and feel satiated, right?
So the exercise increases your hunger. Right. And if we didn’t get hungry, when we exercise, we would have just been extinct a long time ago, because our bodies wouldn’t have any way of knowing that, hey, we need to replace some of this fuel that we just used up here. Okay. But think about this, the whole calories in calories out thing.
It doesn’t work for this very reason right here because when you burn calories, when you go and run, your body sends signals that you have to replace those calories right away. Your body is always trying to get back to homeostasis to neutral to baseline. And so your body has these systems in place to replace those calories.
It will increase your appetite and most runners what happens is you go for a long run, you come back you eat a bunch of food, lots of carbs, usually. And you sort of overcompensate so runners tend to actually eat more when they run more.
This is why it’s so hard to lose weight while you’re running a lot. And a lot of people have trouble losing weight when they’re like training for a marathon, which is bananas, right? It’s like why am I gaining weight when I’m training for this marathon? It’s because your body is saying you need more food. And of course you’re listening to your body.
So you burn all these calories and your hunger goes up like crazy. You eat a ton of food. And let’s be honest, here’s what runners eat. They eat doughnuts, cereal, pancakes, drink a lot of beer. They’re taking in these goos and gels, energy bars, pizza pasta, all the carbs. Runners tend to be carb addicts, right? They just have this idea of like I can just eat whatever I want because I run.
This is actually a recipe for metabolic disaster though. You have to switch over to a low carb diet. And then when you run you are actually being fueled by your own body fat which is amazing, so many amazing benefits to that. And it doesn’t upregulate your hunger quite as much. But when you do eat after a long run, so I might come home from a long run, and I usually wait an hour or two after I run to eat anyway, because I’m not that hungry, and I come home and then I’ll eat a low carb meal, you know, bacon and eggs and avocado or something like that.
And it doesn’t pack on the fat that that fuel is going right back into my, into my body to be used properly. And I’m not just storing all this extra carbs as fat, right? So very important thing to understand. And I know people have issues, or concerns about doing these long distance runs, and not eating enough food, like you know, what happens if I’m hungry, you know, should I be eating for running? Don’t need the calories doing the fuel.
Here’s the thing, you really don’t, if you’re fat adapted, if you’re off the sugar and the carbs, you got plenty of fuel on board. Earlier this year, in May, there was an ultra runner named Mike McKnight. And he ran 100 miles without consuming any calories during the run.
So he was out there for like, almost 19 hours running. And he didn’t have any calories before, during. And if you asked him, you know, man wasn’t this hard? He was like not really, it was actually kind of enjoyable. So he’s the fat adapted athlete, he trains very low carb. And he incorporates intermittent fasting.
So he’s running on his own body fat, and he can do these amazing long distance events without any food, like he just doesn’t get hungry. Because your body is getting what it needs is getting the nutrients it needs from your own body fat. Now there’s an important thing I need to point out, you need to be fat adapted before you go and try to run 100 miles with no calories, right? Your own fat is an amazing source of fuel for long distance running, it’s amazing.
And this is why we want to become fat-adapted. So we can use our own body fat for fuel. So how to fuel these runs, like if you’re gonna go out and do five, six miles, I suggest don’t eat anything. You know, if you get to the point where you’re running, where you are fat adapted, and you’re running for two, three hours at a time or more.
And then you start to actually feel really hungry when you’re out there, then eat some food, you know, eat something and it’s totally fine. But just know that you shouldn’t be eating like for energy, you won’t need to eat for energy you want to eat because I’m getting a little hungry, you might need a little bit of fuel.
And in that case, you can do like a little bit of fat protein, which will give you the kind of energy that you actually want, you don’t need to do the goos and stuff like that. I’m already up to about two and a half hours of running with zero calories, no calories before, during or after running. And I’m just not hungry. And I’m doing fine.
You know, 16 miles was where I’m at right now. And I’m just trying to, you know, keep going, I want to see what I can do. I want to see how good I can get at running on my own fat. It’s pretty fascinating. And trust me, I’m pretty lean, but I still got plenty of body fat to use as fuel. And I eat fat. I eat a high fat diet.
And so I’m replacing that fat in my diet. And I can use that for fuels too, as well. So it’s awesome. So I’m just getting good at listening to my body. I’m only eating when I’m genuinely hungry. And I suggest you start listening to your body to Okay, so the bottom line for eating and running is like if you’re genuinely hungry, eat something.
But for the most part, if you’re fat adapted, you shouldn’t really need to eat much unless you’re doing some very long distance type stuff. All right, so just a quick recap here. How do we solve the hunger problem? Well, first of all, become fat adapted, stop eating the carbs. Start eating more fat. And when you do this, your hormones will begin to reset. You’ll know what real hunger feels like. You know, you’ll know the difference between a craving and withdrawal, that emotional hunger that stuff will all kind of fade away.
Eat only a couple times a day. You don’t eat six times a day, you don’t need snacks, and your hunger will begin to match the times that you eat. If you do get hungry between meals, it’s not an emergency. You don’t have to get in, get into that feeling. It’s just a feeling. Allow it to be there and it’s going to be okay.
When you do run, you don’t need to overcompensate by eating doughnuts and pizza and beer. You know, don’t load up on carbs after you run. You’ll be fine. And just practice not eating before, during and after running and see how it goes for you. Right do these things and hunger will never be a problem for you again, Mischief Managed.
Alright, we’re going to be talking more about solving this hunger problem over in the Facebook group, especially how to manage hunger when you begin your intermittent fasting journey. So being hungry when you first get off the sugar and carbs, that withdrawal type stuff, it can feel a little overwhelming for people.
So I’m going to be offering some tips on how to alleviate the hunger and getting through those first few weeks of intermittent fasting. And then over the course of the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking more about intermittent fasting. You know, what do we do about electrolytes?
How do we curb the cravings between meals? We’ll be talking about training in the fasted state more, and some of the other types of fasting, and just really what it takes to become fat adapted as a runner, because this is like one of the best things you can do for yourself. So join us over in the Running Lean community on Facebook, and see what it feels like to not eat all the time. See how much better running can be. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
In this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I break my silence about making the switch to eating meat again. Many of you know that I’ve been a big proponent of the plant-based diet for the last 10 …
Continue Reading about 32. Why I Changed My Mind About Eating Meat →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 32 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, and weight loss coach for runners. And if you’re just checking out the podcast for the first time, or recently, and you are hoping to find The Running Mind podcast, well guess what? I changed the name. That’s all, same content, just a different name. It’s called Running Lean. And eventually I’ll change the website. That’s a whole nother thing I got to do.
But welcome to Running Lean. That’s the name of the podcast now. Cool, cool. Awesome. How are you today? I’m good. I just got done with a five mile run. I ate some food, some eggs, some bacon, some avocado, a little Greek yogurt with a couple of strawberries. And I feel good. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about today.
The fact that I have recently changed my mind about eating meat. I’m breaking my silence, I’ve made the switch to eating meat again. So if you know me, if you’ve known me for some time for awhile, you may know that I’ve been a big proponent of eating a plant based diet for like the last 9 or 10 years.
So now hearing that I’m eating meat again, may come as a surprise to you, it may be shocking to you. So I wanted to just be completely forthright with all of this and record this episode to explain what led me to this decision why I made this switch and answer questions about you know why now and talk about the impact that it’s had on my overall health and my athletic performance.
And then I also want to talk about what this means for you, you know, whether as a listener of the podcast, or as a potential or current coaching client of mine. So I think this is going to be very interesting episode. It was very interesting for me to like, write some notes about this, and really just speak from the heart. But that’s what’s going on today. So that’s what you get to look forward to hear in a moment.
If you haven’t already, come and check us out on Facebook, we got this awesome community of people. It’s the Running Lean community. And it kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. It’s an energetic positive group of like minded runners who share common goals like losing weight, wanting to run easier and living a more vibrant life. You know, I do these weekly live trainings on a host of topics like running mindset, nutrition for runners, weight loss, and just a bunch of other stuff.
Here’s a recent comment from one of the members of the Running Lean community on Facebook, Josh and Josh says, “Thank you for doing such great work. You’re gifted with simplifying the complex and confusing jargon. We are bombarded with your experience and understanding of the runners mindset hits a home run by me.”
Oh my gosh, Josh. Thank you. That was really sweet. And it is something that I really work hard on. So I’m really glad that you made this, this observation. Because I work hard to learn everything I can. I soak it all up, I read the scientific papers, I read the books, I follow all the leading experts. I’m constantly learning, constantly consuming information about nutrition and diet and weight loss and mindset and what this all means for us as runners. And not just like the elite athletes, the Olympic gold medalists, like we’re weekend warriors, you know, we’re middle of the pack here.
So what does this mean for us? And it doesn’t mean we’re not capable of amazing things because we are. We are capable of some amazing, incredible things. And my job, my goal here is just to break all this information down. Let’s apply it for us. Let’s see what works. I want to help you accomplish those amazing things. So check us out. Just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community. Join us it’d be fun to have you there.
Also, I want to let you know that losing weight and becoming a fat-adapted runner, it’s kind of hard to do on your own. Part of that is why I have the Facebook group so you can get some some motivation and some support. I also want you to know that I offer one-on-one coaching.
Listen, we are all different, we all have different goals. We all have different needs. We all have different lifestyles, working one on one with me, you’ll learn exactly how to become a lean fat burning running machine in a way that works for you. You get the help and guidance, you need to work through obstacles, you get a personalized step by step action plan that will get you to your goals.
You get the accountability for your results, you get the motivation you need from me to keep you moving forward. And you get these tools and these skills that you’re going to learn that will help you improve every aspect of your life. Just imagine how much easier losing weight will be when you have someone right there with you. Someone like me showing you exactly what to do and holding you accountable.
Ditch the sugar and carbs, get fat-adapted, lose weight, feel better, have more energy, run easier, get leaner, get stronger, run faster, run longer than you ever thought possible. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/weight-loss-coaching. That’s a terrible URL. I’m sorry for that. I gotta fix that.
Weight Loss coaching with dashes in between, there’s basically what it is.
And then you can apply for one on one coaching with me, we’ll get on a call, we’ll talk about if this is a good fit for you. You can also, anytime I mention a link, you can just go to the show notes for that episode. And if you’re looking at it on your let’s say on your iPhone, in your podcast app, just click that Details button. And you’ll get all the notes and the links are right there. You can just click the link. You don’t have to remember all these slash dash and all this other stuff. Okay, just click the link in the show notes. And, and let’s get you to your goals. Cool. Awesome.
Okay, so just so you guys know, I’ve been thinking about recording this episode for some time. Now, I have not really been talking about this publicly that I’ve switched from being plant based to a more omnivorous type of diet, that I started eating meat again, I’ve been sort of hiding this. And it didn’t feel right to me, I felt like I was not being truthful.
I didn’t feel like I was being honest and open about what I was doing. And here’s why I was afraid, I was afraid of what people would think of me. If they found out that this plant based guy has now switched to you know, eating meat.
You know, I might lose some friends. I’ve got a lot of friends who are big proponents of like a vegetarian or a vegan or plant based diet. And these are great friends. And I love these people and I don’t want to lose their respect, or I don’t want to lose them as friends. And that’s what I’m afraid of.
But I can’t keep my silence any longer. I just feel like I have to talk about this so that I can be completely in alignment with who I am publicly and privately. I want to be transparent. And I want my message that I communicate to you guys to be in full alignment with my personal values and beliefs. Okay, and I was afraid to do that.
Now, I know that no matter what I do or say that some people will not like me. And that goes for all of us. Some people will, some people won’t. No matter what stand I take. Some people will not like what I’m about to say here today. And basically talking about, you know, how eating meat is not that bad, okay.
When I went to a plant based diet, and I started talking about that, and I’m gonna give you a little backstory here in a minute, but when when I went to that kind of a diet, I got people calling me stupid, people telling me I was going to be sick and diseased and ruin my life. Because I wasn’t eating animal based proteins.
Basically the same thing I’m finding is happening. Now that I’ve switched back to eating meat I get people they’re not really calling me stupid not yet. Probably after this episode comes out and I share it. But I’ve had some interesting comments from some people that have, you know, kind of found out that the cat kind of got laid out of the bag a little bit recently in a comment on Facebook that I made about what I eat.
And I mentioned bacon and eggs or something like that. And then I got a few comments from people about you know, I’m going to kill myself basically. So no matter what you do, you guys just so you know, there are going to be people that don’t like it or don’t agree with you, and that’s okay.
So I might, I might get some unfollows, I might have some unfriends. And that’s okay, it means that I’m just taking a stand and I’m standing up for what I believe in, it means that I actually have a stand to take, it means that I actually have strong values and beliefs, and I’m not afraid to share them.
It really doesn’t matter what people think of me, it really doesn’t. It has nothing to do with me at all. And honestly, what I eat has nothing to do with you either. Now, I say that and I get it that I’m out here, talking about nutrition and talking about athletic performance and sharing this information that I know that there’s a certain amount of bias there, I get that. I try to be as unbiased as possible in my message, just so you know, we’re gonna get into that too, today.
But here’s the thing, I don’t base my friendships, or the respect I have for other people based on what they eat. I really don’t. I have friends who post pictures of food that they eat on Facebook. And it’s a bunch of crap. Okay, fast food 180 ounce sodas, or whatever they are. And you know what? I click ‘love it’. I say, ‘I love you’. I think that you do you, you know what I mean?
I don’t judge people based on the fact that they’re eating, you know, McDonald’s and funnel cakes and drinking large sodas, I don’t really care. Now, I don’t really think that’s a really healthy way to live your life. But that’s not for me to decide, okay. And here’s the thing, I’m not sharing this information today to try to convince you that you should do what I do.
Or that one way is right. And another way is wrong. I’m not trying to change hearts or minds here. I’m sharing this information because I want to be in integrity with myself. And I want to be in integrity with you. And I want to be transparent and honest. And I want you to know the truth. Cool. Cool. That’s why I’m doing this here today.
So here’s a little bit of a backstory. I started running later in life back in like, ‘04, ‘03, ‘04. And from the very start, I was very focused on nutrition. I was reading everything I could and trying all kinds of things. To try to make running better. Like I wanted running to be easier. I started running marathons.
And I was like, I’ve got to figure out a way to make this as easy as possible, what can I do. And all the evidence at the time was really pointing towards this high carbohydrate, low fat diet, the same thing the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans suggested back in the 80s. And in the carbo loading, that, you know, early marathoners, we’re proponents of and things like that.
And then the low fat part of that, you know, so lean meat, you know, stick with like just chicken or turkey and maybe some fish, but stay away from red meat and bacon and eggs and all this other stuff. And so my diet progressively got more higher carbohydrate, I guess, and less fatty. So I just went like, if meat was bad, basically, then vegetarian was better.
And so after a few years, I went pretty much full vegetarian, I don’t know ‘06, or ‘07, something like that. And then went fully like plant-based at the end of 2011, somewhere around there sometime in 2011. And because I kept thinking, okay, if I just get rid of these fats, then that’s going to be the answer, right?
And so I just kept limiting the amount of fats and the animal products and all that stuff. So totally plant based, starting in 2011. I even got so into it. I like started this recipe blog called The Vegan Road, and it’s still out there and I got a bunch of recipes out there. Honestly, though, even as a plant based, they’re like, a lot of sugar high in carbs like I did. They’re probably not awesome recipes. I wouldn’t go, you don’t need to go check it out. There’s a lot of sites out there that have better recipes these days.
Okay, but anyway, at the time, it was a passion of mine. I was really passionate about plant based nutrition for runners. Okay. I saw this movie called Forks Over Knives and it just talked about the plant based diet and how it was so good for you. And then they kind of put out this call for people to share their stories, you know, and that they would publish them on their website or whatever.
And so I submitted a story, I got kind of a before and after picture, and they published it. And so I got a lot of attention from that, you know, a lot of attention, it was actually like, overwhelming in a way, you know, because here I am, I’m really into this topic and really into nutrition and stuff like that, but I wasn’t like a big expert.
So and then I figured, you know what, I should probably become an expert. And so I actually attended this program through Cornell University, which was a plant based nutrition certification program. And so I did this program, got certified and was kind of like sharing a lot of the information.
And that’s kind of when when I started sharing more of this information, that’s when people started telling me that I was stupid and telling me that this was dumb, and, you know, whatever. But it was something that I believed in, you know, at the time, and it was, it was working for me, you know, I was able to do a lot of long distance running and a lot of endurance events.
I mean, pretty much all the stuff I’ve done, for the most part has been on a plant based diet. You know, I ran like 14 plus marathons, dozens of ultra marathons, I did a 50 miler, a 100 miler, an Ironman, and it pretty much had good results, for the most part. Now, could they have been better based on what I know now, you know, if I had adopted more of a low carb, higher fat type of diet?
Even plant-based, but becoming fat-adapted, is kind of the key that a lot of endurance athletes are latching on to now. And the data that’s coming out, and the scientists coming up about the benefits of that are pretty incredible. So could those results have been better? Yeah, probably.
But at the same time, I was having some, you know, pretty decent results. And I was able to do a lot for somebody on a plant based diet back then. And the other thing is like, at the same time, there were plenty of people out there that have always gotten great results, eating an omnivorous diet, plenty of people.
So what’s the answer here? You know, is there an answer? Is there a right way to do this or a wrong way to do it? And then really quickly, I want to talk about the difference between a plant-based diet and vegan. So I always talk about following a plant-based diet. That’s the kind of diet that I focused on. Basically, you’re just eating nothing but plants, so no animal products whatsoever. So no dairy, no eggs, not even honey, because it comes from bees, they consider that an animal product.
But a plant-based diet is nutrition centric. You hear a lot of athletes talk about a plant-based diet. And so the focus is on the food that you’re eating, and your personal health and athletic performance, basically, okay. And then there’s vegan. Vegan is a little different, same type of diet, you eat nothing but plants, no animal products, no dairy eggs, no honey. Also no leather. So you wouldn’t like, buy a leather belt or leather shoes or anything like that, or any other thing that comes from animals.
Vegan is more animal rights centric. So when you say I’m vegan, that kind of means, you know, for most people that it’s a, it’s a lifestyle, it almost has more of like a religious feel about it. Vegans tend to be more vocal about animal rights and things like that, they tend to be a little more evangelical.
Typically, they want to try to convert people. And think that’s where the kind of religious aspect comes from, you know, they want to change hearts and minds. And I was just never like that. I was never super vocal, I wasn’t really telling people what to do, or telling them that what they’re doing is wrong or bad.
And a lot of people in the vegan community. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term militant vegans. I mean, I’m not trying to paint a bad picture of anybody or anything like that. But that’s a term out there that people use that are pretty hardcore. And that will kind of shame people for eating meat and things like that. So I was never into that. Okay, I just that’s not my jam at all.
Okay, I kind of stayed in my own lane. I did my own thing. And really just tried to be a good example, I guess more than anything else. So I lived in this world, this world of eating a plant based diet, specially for endurance athletes, like I developed a profound understanding of the plant-based diet, especially for runners.
And so here I was the plant-based runner guy. I was quietly advocating for what I thought was really the best diet for everyone. You know, if everyone would just go plant-based we’d all be much healthier, the world would be a better place. And this is kind of what I was taught in my certification program and what a lot of stuff I was reading and listening to kind of pointed to.
So things were humming along pretty well for me, until things began to go kind of terribly wrong for me. So in 2017, I did my 100 miler, the Hallucination 100 at the end of 2017. And after that, I had run like 2000 miles that year, over 2000 miles out here, I was just running all the time. And I decided I was going to kind of back off on my running. So I slowed down.
I kept running, I kept up with it, but just not as much. So maybe running twice a week, three times a week, doing more walking, some strength training, still that kind of thing. And then, over the course of the next three years, basically two to three years, I gained like 40 pounds, you know, I was down to like 160 or so. And I was pushing 200 again. And I was like what is going on here? I really had to figure something out. I mean, I know what’s happening. I knew what was happening with my body.
Now, I didn’t know at the time though, because I’m like, Hey, I’m eating, you know, plant-based diet. I should be fine. Everything should be fine. So I had to really take an honest look at what was happening to me. So at the beginning of this year, at the beginning of 2020 I really started looking at what I was eating.
So here’s what my diet kind of look like, you know, over the last three years, very hard, high carbohydrate, so lots of refined grains, lots of bread, cereals, granola, pancakes, maybe not a ton of gluten because my wife was a big proponent of gluten free so I didn’t do a lot of gluten, but I did enough.
And also, man, I was a cereal addict. I would eat this huge bowl of cereal and granola all mixed together, maybe three or four different kinds of cereal with blueberries or bananas with like maple syrup on it. Oh my gosh, I was a big proponent of maple syrup, too, loved it. So very high refined carbohydrates, lots of Clif Bars, lots of goos and gels while I was running, it was also a very low fat diet, because a lot of the stuff I was reading about was like any kind of fat as bad all fat is bad.
And so when I was eating fat, it was like vegetable oils, you know, the ones that say heart healthy, like canola oil, which I know are just like industrial seed oils, industrial oil in there. It’s just toxic. It’s poison, don’t eat that stuff. By the way, I was eating lots of processed foods.
So one of the things I was a big proponent of was the Beyond Meat brand of products. So they make these beyond burgers. They make these likes, quote unquote, like sausages. But it is like the definition of highly processed foods with a ton of canola oil and things like that. And then so, but they were very satiating to a point.
I liked that idea of eating, getting my protein in and things like that. But they were all plant based. It was all like a plant-based meat substitute kind of a thing. Very processed, though. And then of course, lots of sugar. I was eating tons of fruit because fruit is good for you. Right? I was eating tons of maple syrup.
You guys ever seen the movie Elf and he like carries around a little flask of maple syrup with him? That was like me, okay. Not really, but pretty close. I was eating lots of vegan ice cream. Because it’s vegan, right? It’s fine. I would pour maple syrup on my ice cream. Oh my God, that’s the greatest thing ever.
But here’s what was going on, I was like hungry all the time. I was eating all the time. I never felt full. And so I was like way over eating, way over eating the wrong kinds of foods, was never full, and I felt tired all the time. I was lethargic. Running was terrible. I was only running a couple days a week but it was terrible. My clothes were not fitting any longer. Everything was like super tight. I would put these shorts on that were like I couldn’t even button them up. I just had to throw them back in the drawer. I couldn’t even put them on anymore.
I’d put a shirt on like a button down shirt and it would be so tight. The buttons would be like the shirt would be stretching across the front. It was embarrassing. I didn’t even want to wear those kinds of clothes. You know, I was bloated, my body was inflamed. I had a lot of inflammation. I looked very puffy, very doughy.
Okay, if you can imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, that’s kind of where I was getting to, okay. And I like was like, Oh, my God, something has to change. So I did this analysis of looking, really taking a good, hard look at what I was really eating. And I had to figure something out. I didn’t really know what to do. But I knew what I didn’t want.
And what I was, all the things that I was doing, all the stuff I just laid out for you there, was definitely not working. And then, you know, I went to the doctor, and I had some blood work done at one point, I don’t know, a year ago or so. And it wasn’t good. You know, she told me I had to, you know, get some of these numbers lowered, or else I was going to be having some issues.
And anyway, so how did I get to the point where I was like, I made the decision that meat was the answer. Well, I thought back to a few years back. So back in 2016, I tried keto for a while because I had been running Ultras and started kind of following some people who were doing like more of a ketogenic type of diet.
So very low carb, high fat, and they were having these great results. And talking about becoming a fat-adapted runner. And I was like, that sounds really appealing to me. How do you do that? And so I started like, just took a deep dive into the low carb high fat diet. Now, I was doing it then as a plant-based person. And so there are differences when you do it that way.
For example, like you wouldn’t be eating meat, obviously, or butter and things like that. So you got to substitute with other good healthy types of fat, like coconut oil, it’s a great saturated fat avocados and avocado oil, olives, olive oil, that kind of stuff.
So there’s plenty of good options. You can do a Keto type of diet, as plant-based, or vegetarian. It’s not that hard. There’s so many good resources out there for stuff like that. So I tried this, I was like, I’m going to do the Keto thing. And so I started counting my carbs.
And I’ll tell you, I got fat-adapted, running got easier. I could run all day, I actually did a couple of 50K’s that summer, without any sugar, without any carbs. And I felt amazing. I felt like I could run all day. I go out for a 20 mile training run. And I just felt like amazing at mile two and amazing at mile 19. Like it was just great.
When I was like, wow, this is awesome. I need to just keep doing this. But here’s the thing. I didn’t keep doing that. I was like why didn’t I keep doing that? And I didn’t have it all figured out. So first of all, number one, I was still eating all the time, I was constantly eating, like, you know, from the morning time I got up in the morning till the time I went to bed just eating all day long.
I was also eating a ton of these artificially sweetened, like desserts. Like I made this like keto ice cream, kind of a thing with some kind of sweetener, like erythritol or something like that. And I was eating this stuff all the time. Well, I know now that the artificial sweeteners will kind of increase your cravings and increase your appetite. So you got to be careful with that. I didn’t know that at the time.
I was eating a ton of highly processed foods like the Beyond Meat and like vegan cheeses and things like that. Lots of vegetable oils. And while I was, you know, running had gotten easier. I wasn’t really losing weight. I wasn’t getting the results I had hoped for. And one of the biggest things is it got really stressful for me, I was counting all these carbs, I had to put everything into an app.
You know, you gotta keep everything below, like 50 grams of carb net carbs a day. And I was just like, this is like crazy. And I look to some people in the ultra running community, the elites like Scott Jurek, who just eats whatever he wants. I mean, he’s a plant-based guy, but he just needs tons of grains and cereals and things like that. Or at least that was my impression.
Maybe he doesn’t, I don’t know, you really don’t know what people eat unless you watch him. But he has like this cookbook and I was kind of following that. And I just gave up what I was doing. And I went back to the high carbohydrate, low fat diet and I wish I had just stuck with it and figured it out.
Because a year later I did my 100 miler, and it was really tough. There’s a lot of very challenging moments there. I was just loaded up with sugar and carbs and my stomach was a mess. I was a wreck for most of that, and I think it would have been a better experience had I stuck with the low carb, high fat type of diet, but I didn’t, I just went back to doing things the other way. And I started gaining weight.
And then, you know, eventually 40 pounds of weight came back over the last couple of years.
So in order to me for me to like go back to that like because this is what I was thinking about earlier this year when I decided I need to change something and I was thinking like, Oh, I got really, I got some good results, and I was doing the Keto thing, I need to revisit that.
So if I was gonna go back to that I had to figure out some of this stuff. I had to find some good sources of saturated fats and complete proteins, I had to get off the highly processed foods and get off the loaded, the toxic oils that are just loaded with toxins and stuff like that. So I had to get rid of that. So what do I do?
And I was doing a bunch of research and reading and watching documentaries and stuff like that. And I read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Ty Schultz. Oh my gosh, amazing, amazing book. I recommend you read that for sure. I watched ‘Fat’, a documentary, I read the case against sugar by Gary Taubes. I watched that sugar film, which is fun and disturbing. And I read, one of the biggest things that changed my whole beliefs here was reading the obesity code by Dr. Jason Fung.
He’s a nephrologist, a kidney doctor who treats people with type two diabetes and obesity and basically cures them with a low carbohydrate, high fat diet and intermittent fasting. And he has this clinic up in Toronto, and he treats thousands of people. And they have these amazing results.
And you know, I’ve listened to his podcast, and I’ve consumed a lot of what he’s done, a lot of the weight loss teaching and coaching that I do is based on Dr. Jason Fung’s methodologies, which he teaches in his book. So you know, I just started to paint this picture that things are not what I thought they were.
And I came to realize that really, the saturated fats, especially coming from animals are not the problem. You know, this is not why we have heart disease, obesity, type two diabetes, stroke, and a slew of other diseases. The reality of this is that it’s not the fat, it’s the sugar. And sugar is a carbohydrate. It is like the purest form of carbohydrate. So it’s the refined carbohydrates that are the problem.
You know, it’s not the bacon, it’s the bagels, it’s not the eggs, it’s the eclaires. And this was creating a very clear picture for me that, you know, carbohydrates, like sugar and flour, are the reason we gain weight. They are the reason we have tripled the obesity rates here in the US, since implementing the high carbohydrate, low fat diet in 1980. This is the sugars, the refined grains are why so many of us have type two diabetes and heart disease and a host of other what they call Western diseases.
Saturated fat and meat have never been proven to be harmful to our health. The science is very clear on this. And I’m not just making this up, I would encourage you to do your own research and really look into this stuff, you know. And then something interesting here, like when I was in my plant-based in the throes of my plant-based certification program, and really researching all that.
There was a lot of talk about how we’ve evolved to be vegetarians, basically, that, you know, we look at the way our jaws are in our stomachs and things like that. And they can just say like, oh, yeah, so we, you know, we didn’t evolve to eat meat. And I never really felt on board with that. The archaeological evidence just doesn’t point to that at all.
And so, you know, I started doing a deep dive into this and really looking at what the unbiased archaeological evidence shows. And here’s what it shows. The unbiased archaeological evidence shows that humans started eating meat around 2.6 million years ago. This is like just the beginning of the Paleolithic period, or the old stone age, right, which was a period that lasted two and a half million years ago to 10,000 years ago. So it’s a huge swath of time, right, and actually fits nicely with the Pleistocene era, which is the timeframe 2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago, when we had our last major ice age.
Okay, this was a major evolutionary change for us eating meat. So we began to hunt down and eat animals. We began eating the meat and the bone marrow and the fat and the organ meats and things like that. And this provided us with essential amino acids that we needed. It provided us with the macronutrients that we needed, that helped our brains to grow and our bodies to become larger in size and stronger.
So our brains got bigger, and we became bigger and stronger because we started eating meat, our relatives that were still in the trees, eating fruit and nuts and things like that did not evolve the way we did. So humans did not evolve solely as plant eaters, or solely as meat eaters, either. Also, the archaeological evidence points to us eating plants to like, there are some tubers and bulbs.
But you’ve got to understand this is like most of this period of evolution was during an ice age. So there wasn’t an abundance of fruit and vegetables and seeds available. They would hunt animals, they would hunt woolly mammoth and Mastodon, and smaller animals like antelope size creatures, whatever those were at the time.
And we learn this thing, which is really cool, called persistence hunting. So we as humans, we sweat very efficiently, right? I know I do, like I sweat like crazy out there. You know, and this is a cooling mechanism and keeps our body temperature low, which enables us to go out and run long distances, we can run literally for 12 hours or 24 hours straight. I mean, I did 100 miles, it took me 29 hours, I was pretty much running the whole time.
And we sweat and we can call our bodies that way. Most animals don’t do this, though. Especially like think about those herd animals, you know, antelope and things like that. They can’t keep running, or they’ll die of heat exhaustion, basically, you know, their bodies will overheat, they’ll die of exhaustion, they have to stop.
And so what we learned how to do is we learned how to chase down these animals over these long ranges, which is awesome, like, so we evolved to be long distance runners, which I just love that, I think that’s so cool. So our ability to control our body temperature made us better hunters, we could just chase these animals down and wear them out, basically.
And then we would just, you know, smash them on the head with a rock or whatever we did. I don’t know. I crack myself up sometimes just so you know. So that was one part of it. The other part of it is we have these big butts, right? We have these big glutes, the glutes are the biggest muscle in our body.
Why is that? Why are our butts so big? Isn’t that weird that we have these big butts? No, it’s that it’s perfect to balance this out when we’re running. So think about as you’re running, how your your butt actually kind of counterbalances the front of your body, you lean forward just a little bit. And then those big muscles propel your legs forward, allowing you to push off and then keep you balanced.
So like we are the perfect long distance hunting animal, you know, we’re perfect for that we evolved to, you know, chase animals down and eat that we didn’t develop these abilities to run long distances and out sweat other animals so we could hunt down, you know, sweet potatoes, we just didn’t, okay.
We wouldn’t be here where we are today without eating meat, like our brains never would have evolved. We never would have become bigger and stronger and then we survived like two and a half million years of an ice age by eating a diet rich in fish and meat. Because there just weren’t all the options available all over the planet now.
Evidence also shows archaeological evidence also shows there were times and areas on the planet where meat may have been scarce. And so, you know, people around the planet would eat tubers and nuts and yams and some fruit and even honey. And, and this is very important because there isn’t just one paleo diet, there isn’t one caveman diet.
You know, we evolved as humans to eat a lot of different foods. Because there wasn’t, there isn’t, just one ideal human diet. You know, we’ve evolved this unique ability to combine many different types of foods throughout the year seasonally, to create many different healthy diets. You know, there’s the Inuit up in the Canadian Arctic that eat nothing but fish and seals.
You know, there’s some people that live in the mountains of Afghanistan that eat nothing but animals because nothing grows up in these higher elevations, no crops or anything like that grow. And then there’s other peoples in India that have been vegetarian for thousands of years, and they do fine.
So, really, there isn’t like one ideal human diet. And I think that’s really important to know. And this is one of the messages I really want to make clear here. Is this archaeological evidence that I’m talking about in this evolutionary evidence? Am I oversimplifying things? Absolutely. Am I telling you the complete picture of our evolutionary history? Oh, my gosh, no, because I couldn’t do that in, you know, 45 minutes on a podcast. Maybe I’ll just do that one day, I’ll talk about it. Nothing but that.
But here’s the thing, what I’m trying to say is like, we have evolved to be meat eaters, we have evolved to be plant eaters, we’ve evolved to be omnivores, basically, okay. The only thing I will tell you, that we have not evolved to be is to follow that modern Western diet, which is high in refined carbohydrates and sugar, that is not something we have been evolved to eat.
In fact, that is what is making us sick. And that is what is making us fat. And that is what is making us dying earlier and earlier. So I’m a science nerd. I’m all about the evidence based science, you know, I study all these theories. I look up what the new scientific papers and I read them.
And honestly, when I was taking this plant based nutrition certification, I was kind of questioning a lot of the stuff they were putting out there. And they were just suggesting that, oh, humans didn’t really eat meat. You know, we’re natural vegetarians. Eating any meat at all will cause all kinds of health issues. And it’s just, it’s just not true. It’s not supported by actual science, okay.
But at the time, I wanted to believe at all, because it matched my worldview. And I wanted it to be the truth, I really did. But now I can just say that I can’t really stand behind that, because it was kind of flimsy science. So I finally had to let go of that. And I did.
So where am I today? So I made that decision that I was going to give it a try. I was going to try eating meat again. And then people asked me this question all the time, like, what was it like eating meat for that first time? What did you have?
First of all, I had bacon. And it was delicious. And there were no problems at all. I felt fine. I didn’t get violently ill. My body didn’t reject it. There’s no negative consequences. It makes me just really realize that we are omnivores, you know, our bodies digest meat perfectly fine. We can absorb tons of nutrients from meat, and other animal products. My body had no problem at all.
Yeah, and your body’s not going to forget what it’s like to eat meat after 10 years of not eating, it handles it just fine. And so I really have taken a deep dive into this topic of being an omnivore. Basically, eating meat, eating saturated fat, what does saturated fat do to us? How is it detrimental? Is this the problem?
And I’ve even looked into really finding some interesting information about the carnivore diet, which is basically no plant products at all. So you got the plant based people on one end, and then you got the carnivores who basically, they believe that all plants are toxic to our bodies at some degree. And so they don’t eat any plants at all.
And they believe that the bioavailability of the nutrients in meat is more beneficial for us and the nutrients we can actually absorb the nutrients better than we can from plants, because plants have all this fiber. And they have these natural defense mechanisms that stop us from absorbing the nutrients.
But meat does not have that and it’s easier to digest. And the animals eat the plants. And then the animals that we’re getting the nutrition from all that anyway, that’s kind of a very brief, high level, look at the carnivore diet. But anyway, my point is that it’s all very interesting. There’s lots of new science coming out all the time.
There’s experts in these fields that I listened to and read and I’m taking a more open viewpoint of all these things. I’m taking it all in. I want to know about it all, tell me everything. There’s world class athletes out there who are switching from a traditional high carbohydrate diet to more of like a carnivorous approach and they’re having these amazing results.
So today, I eat meat pretty much every day. I eat bacon, beef, chicken, pork, coldwater fish, and eggs. I eat eggs, full fat dairy cheese. And I’m very particular about what I eat. I really am very particular about the kinds of meat that I get and where I get it and what I buy. So for example, I only eat wild caught salmon, never farmed. The salmon in the wild eat other fish and stuff like that. Farmed salmon eat grains, salmon aren’t supposed to eat grains. Okay, salmon need a lot of krill, these little shrimp, like dudes that turn their skin orange. That’s why salmon are orange because they eat a lot of this particular little shrimp or whatever, that guy has an orange color.
The farm salmon, they color them, they add some kind of color to their food or something like that to turn their gray flesh orange. So anyway, don’t buy farm salmon. I only buy local organic, free range eggs from chickens who eat bugs and things like that, right? No grain fed animals. No factory farmed animals ever, no big agriculture.
So I try to buy everything local, like grass fed local beef, and pork and things like that. And chicken, no fish farms, no grain fed anything, no growth hormones, no antibiotics. So anyway, I pay a little bit extra for these things. But it’s very, very important to me, that I’m eating really clean meat. And that, you know, it’s humanely raised and things like that.
So basically, I’m just trying to eat real food the way that our ancestors ate, you know, maybe a few 100 years ago, maybe a few 1000 years ago, you know, they were eating just regular food. They weren’t, there was nothing processed, they didn’t have to count calories. You know, they weren’t adding up, you know, how many macros they ate, you know, they were just, it was intuitive, and they ate when they’re hungry.
They didn’t when they weren’t and that kind of stuff. So that’s what I’m trying to go back to. But I in particular about the kinds of foods I eat, especially meat. So what are my results so far? So I’ve been doing this for about six months now, the low carb high fat omnivorous diet. And here’s something pretty dramatic, I think pretty dramatic, benefits and changes that I’ve experienced.
So no more bloating or inflammation, like my body is no longer puffy. I am no longer the Pillsbury Doughboy. I’ve lost 40 pounds, and I am super lean. I am cut up like never before. Running is amazing. I’ve become fat-adapted. I can run five miles, 10 miles, and I feel great. I just have tons of energy. In fact, I just have tons of energy all the time, all day long.
I am not hungry all the time. I reaped the benefits of fasting, I do some fasting and some intermittent fasting. Sometimes I eat once a day or twice a day. And I’m not hungry in between. Sometimes I do a longer fast, maybe a 48 hour or something like that. The important part here though, is that I am not starving all the time, like I used to be when I was eating a high carbohydrate diet.
I don’t take any supplements, I don’t have to like suck down protein powders and take a multivitamin every day. So when I was plant based, I had to take a multivitamin. Like you have to take certain supplements, you know, and depending on who you ask, but here’s the list of supplements that you should take if you’re following a plant-based diet: calcium, iron, B12, vitamin D, omega threes, zinc, among others. And it’s interesting to me that our ancestors who ate an omnivorous diet, they didn’t take multivitamins, they didn’t have to take protein supplements. And this is just a little bit of a red flag.
For me a diet that requires you to supplement certain vitamins and minerals means that it’s maybe not a complete diet. Maybe it’s not the best diet, I don’t know. But I don’t think we evolved to eat a diet where we would have to supplement certain vitamins or else we’d be really deficient and maybe get sick or die.
So I just had my annual physical a month or two ago and the bloodwork was perfect. The doctor said she wished all of her patients were doing what I was doing, which was a huge compliment to me. I love that. I’m seeing gains at the gym, like from strength training after just a couple of months that I never saw in years of lifting weights on a plant based diet.
And now granted, these are all anecdotal my evidence like, you know, will your results differ, of course, everybody’s different. But I can tell you right now, I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m 53 years old, and I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m leaner now than I was back in 2013, when I was training over two hours a day for Ironman, I’m leaner and more fit, I’m stronger and more cut up than I was then.
I’ve never had like, this little body fat on me feels amazing. I do work out pretty regularly. But kind of the same that I always have the last few years, I run maybe three times a week. My long runs are like 10 or 12 miles. And then I run like maybe three miles one day, maybe five miles another day. So I don’t know, 18 miles a week, something like that.
I do a lot of walking, I walk, you know, a couple miles three times a week, let’s say I do a little bit of yoga, stretching, and I lift weights. So I’m not exercising two hours a day, by any stretch. I’m eating about the same number of calories that I was eating, when I was doing the plant based diet with lots of carbs and sugar and all that stuff, maybe, maybe more calories, actually.
So I’m somewhere between and I don’t track this stuff. But I have tracked it recently, a few days just to like, so I could share this stuff with you guys. And give you a ballpark of where I am. Because people ask me all the time, like how many carbs you eat, and I’m like, I don’t know. But anyway, so I’m probably at around 2000-2500 calories, probably getting net, maybe 50-60 grams of carbs a day, something like that, again, I don’t really track it. So I can’t tell you exact numbers, but it’s somewhere in that range 50 to 100 grams of carbs net a day, right?
So it’s pretty low. I eat when I’m hungry. And I don’t eat when I’m not hungry. That’s amazing right there. And that’s a very freeing thing. This whole thing I’m doing now this eating real food, it’s stress free. It’s very satisfying too. And I feel like I’m absolutely thriving in my body right now.
I feel like this is how my body is supposed to look and feel. You know, I feel like I’ve hit my natural weight. And now staying there is effortless. And I weigh myself every day. Just so I know. And I’ve been at like 157-158, somewhere in that range. And remember, I was close to 200. So I’m below 160. And I eat a lot of food. I’m never hungry, I’m not starving myself. And I can just maintain that way. It’s no problem. So that’s where I am. What does this mean for you?
That’s a good question. Here’s what I think it means for you. Number one, I am no longer stuck with this one sort of narrow minded point of view. This whole experience of going back to an omnivorous diet is making me a better coach, I’m a more well rounded coach. And it gives me authority to speak on a wider variety of topics, especially, you know, eating meat and animal products and the nutrition that you get from that, and how it, how its effects on weight loss and running and things like that.
Also, I don’t believe in this idea that there’s one right way to fuel your body, there’s not one right way to do this. And I was kind of into this myopic view of things before, whereas like plant based or everything else is stupid, you know, I don’t believe that anymore. I’m willing to take a deep dive into these different options and learn multiple ways of helping you get the results that you want.
So all in all, I think that just me making this shift in my own diet makes me a better all around authority, and a better all around coach. And, you know, in my coaching, I try to take on a very informed but unbiased approach. So my goal is to help you figure out what works best for you. And it’s not the same thing that works for me.
So whether you do plant-based diet, whether you do carnivore, whether you do something in between most people or somewhere in between, right, you can get great results. I do however take a solid stand against the whole high carbohydrate approach. I don’t think that’s necessary. We shouldn’t be eating all the sugar and the carbs, carbs cause all kinds of health issues they need to be avoided. So I am firmly attached to this principle. I will take a stand there for sure. That’s where I draw the line.
But you can run half marathons, you can run full marathons, you can do Ultra triathlons, you can be a long distance swimmer cyclist, rowing, bodybuilding, speed golfing, whatever you want to do whatever floats your endurance boat, you can do all of it on a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, whether you’re a vegan, plant based carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian, whatever.
So the bottom line is, I’m not going to tell you that you should or shouldn’t eat meat, I don’t want that to be the message you take away here. You know, my job as a good coach is to help you get the results that you want. That’s it, and do it in a way that works for you. So you can do this in a way that works for you.
And I’ll help you make those decisions and tweak things until you get the results that you’re looking for. I just want you to have all the information. So I’m going to continue to talk about these kinds of topics, you know, I want to like, get some people on here to share their expert opinions and experiences on running on a plant based diet or a carnivore diet or vegetarian diet or whatever it is.
So I’m actually actively looking for some people to talk to about those things. So if you have some people in mind you’d like me to check out, send me a message and give me some ideas, and we’ll try to get them on the show. That’d be really fun. I want you to make good decisions for yourselves. That’s all.
So I’m giving you all the information so you can decide what works for you. I’m open to new ideas, I’m willing to admit that. I don’t know everything I really don’t. I’m always learning and when, when the science and the evidence. Sort of like goes against what I believe in my heart. Let’s say I’m willing to take a really serious look at that, and change what I believe, based on what’s real, you know, what’s the truth? What’s the real evidence out there?
So I’m not, I don’t need to die on my sword while holding on to some ideology that may or may not be right for everyone. Okay. So that’s my story. That’s why I made the switch from a plant based diet to eating meat. I hope this was informative for you. I hope you got something out of this.
We will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community join in the conversation, it’s going to be fun. That’s all I got for you today, my friends. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
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