Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
I hear this almost every single day from runners all over the world: “I hate strength training.” I get it, I used to feel the same way many years ago. I thought running 30-40 miles a week was …
Continue Reading about 273. Why Runners Should Be Lifting Heavy Weights →
There are so many ads and promotions these days for different diets, it’s almost overwhelming. Everybody wants to sell you the magic pill - the easy, simple diet that will allow you to eat all the …
Continue Reading about 263. Why You Need to Ditch the Diet Mentality →
Everyone wants to know how to lose weight, how to get healthier, how to run faster, and how to get there as quickly as possible. We have become a society of instant gratification, from instantly …
Continue Reading about 255. The Shortcut to Health & Fitness Success →
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 255 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, She Shortcut to Health and Fitness Success. Everyone wants to know how to lose weight, how to get healthier, how to run faster and how to get there as quickly as possible. We’ve become a society of instant gratification from being able to instantly download any music or any movie that’s ever been made to having whatever we want delivered right to our door, oftentimes, the very same day. Nowadays, people have no patience for anything, especially when it comes to something like losing weight, which can take a long time for a lot of people, it’s not uncommon for it to take six months or more to lose 20 or 30 pounds.
This is all good and fine, but isn’t there anything we can do to get there faster? So in this episode of the podcast, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, the shortcut to health and fitness success, so that you can get to your goals maybe just a little bit faster.
But first, if you’re considering coaching, if this is something that you’ve been thinking about, if it’s something that you want for yourself, right now is the time to take action. For most of us, this is the off season. We’ve done our fall races. We’re starting to get into the holidays, and then we’re going to pick up our training again in January. So right now is the best time to get started, because if you want to lose some weight, if you want to change your diet, if you want to start, you know, working on getting stronger, or getting yourself ready to start your training in January, then you’re going to want a few weeks, a month or so, to get yourself ready for all of that. This is a very, very good time to change your diet, because you don’t want to start changing your diet in the middle of your training cycle, or, you know, right before your race. You can do that. And I work with a lot of people who do that very successfully. They, you know, they might be halfway through their marathon training, and they, we work on changing their diet, getting the fat adapted, getting off the sugar and stuff like that. And it can work fine for a lot of people. But honestly, if I had to tell you what’s the best time to start, it would be in the off season, and that would be right now, okay, this means that you’re going to make some changes to your diet. You’re going to get used to those changes. You’re going to start losing weight, you’re going to start feeling better come January, you’re going to be stronger, you’re going to feel lighter, and you’re going to be well on your way to getting fat, adapted and then feeling your best so that when you do start your training, you’re giving yourself every opportunity you you need in order to perform at your best.
Okay, so just understand that you know having a coach getting you through the holidays is also something to consider, because listen, the average American gains like eight pounds from Thanksgiving until January 1. Average, that means there’s a lot of people that gain a lot more than that. Okay, you don’t want to be one of those average people. Okay, so instead of, you know, showing up on January one, regretting all the decisions you made over the last six weeks or so, wouldn’t it be awesome to show up on January one feeling like you’ve been making progress all this time. So having a coach to help you get through the holidays is an amazing thing to have. You got somebody guiding you, supporting you, helping you along the way, keeping you on track so that you don’t become one of those quote, unquote, average Americans who gains about eight pounds during the holidays. Okay, so if you’re interested in coaching, like I said, Now is the perfect time to get started. Just go to my website. That’s your first step. Go to runningleancoaching.com. Click on work with me. You’ll fill out a little application, and you and I will get on a zoom call. I’ll tell you all about coaching, how it works. We’ll talk about your goals. We got to make sure that you know this is a good fit for you, and if it is awesome, we can get started right away. Okay, runningleancoaching.com. Click on work with me, and I will show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself, yet. Cool.
Okay, so today. I want to talk about the shortcut to your health and fitness success. And the reason I’m talking about this is because I was having a conversation with one of my running besties, so one of my running friends, and she mentioned that she would really, really love to be able to do one pull up. Okay, this is a goal that I’ve worked on with a lot of my clients. Actually, there’s a lot of, especially women out there who, they just want to be able to do, like a pull up or a straight leg push up, you know, like a normal push up. However you want to say that.
And it’s hard to do because it requires a lot of strength, and a lot of women just have never really had that kind of strength. Now there’s a lot of women that do have that kind of strength, which is amazing, but there’s some women that have not really developed that kind of strength, and to do a pull up requires a lot of upper body strength. So I started having this conversation with her, and she was like, This is my new goal. I really just want to be able to do one pull up. And I said, okay, I’ve worked with people on this before, so let’s talk about what you’re doing. And she’s doing a lot of the right things.
So one of the things I mentioned is probably the best thing you can be doing for this particular goal, to do a pull up, is work on lat pull downs. So that’s where you’re sitting at a machine where you’re sitting down, you kind of lock your knees in, and you grab a bar that’s straight above your head, and you pull that bar down to your chest. And the nice thing about this particular exercise is that you can adjust the weight so that you can actually pull it down. So you’re doing the exact same movement as a pull up, but you’re able to lower the weight so you’re not pulling your entire body weight. So let’s say you weigh 130 pounds. You know, you may only be able to pull down 60 pounds or something like that.
So if you’re just getting started with this, that is a really, really good place to start, because as you get stronger, you can begin to increase the weight that you’re pulling down. And you could go to 70 pounds, 80 pounds, 90 pounds, and that’s a really great progression in order to be able to pull up your own body weight. So the lat pull downs are a really great place to start.
Another thing you can do is, you can wrap a resistance band around the pull up bar, and then you step into that resistance band so that when you pull yourself up, it is taking some of that weight off of you. So you’re actually it’s going to pull you up, and the stronger the resistance band, the more weight that it’s actually pulling up. And I did this quite a bit when I was trying to learn how to do pull ups, when I was, you know, just building muscle and trying to get stronger, and had a hard time doing pull ups myself. I would, I was working out at this gym, and we would do these group classes, and we’d have to do pull ups, and I couldn’t do a pull up, you know, by myself. So I had to use the bands. So I step into the band, you know, you wrap the band around the bar, and then you step into it, and then it assists you up. Okay?
And they also have a machine that you can use that mimics the pull up, where you kneel on this machine and it and then you can adjust the weight. So anything like that is going to help you to get stronger. Again, the idea is that we’re working on this principle of progressive overload, where you’re going to overload your muscle groups, and as you overload those muscle groups, you’re going to have a positive adaptation, a positive response, and you’ll get stronger. And then the next time you do it, you should be able to do just a little bit more weight. And so that’s another thing that you can do if you’re interested in being able to do a pull up.
Another thing that she and I talked about was doing dead hangs. So that’s where you just hold on to the bar and let yourself hang. Now, this is a hard one for a lot of people, because they don’t have the grip strength, but it is one of the ways that you start to build that endurance. And you build, you got to have grip strength if you’re going to be able to do a pull up. So you need to build that grip strength. You’re building that forearm strength. You’re going to start building the bicep strength and the tricep strength, and, of course, the lat strength, and the shoulders, and things like that. So dead hangs is another great tool that you can use if you are interested in being able to do a pull up or increase the number of pull ups that you do.
Let’s see another thing that you can do if you’re interested in getting stronger in general, but especially if you’re trying to do something like a pull up or a push up for the first time, you’ve got to give your body what it needs in order to build muscle. So that means you got to increase your protein intake.
This is one area that she and I talked about where she’s doing all the other things I mentioned so far, but she wasn’t really, she doesn’t eat enough protein. She says, she totally admits, actually, I am probably not eating enough protein. I said, okay, well, let’s try to work on increasing the protein, because if you want to build muscle, you need the building blocks of muscle. So you need to give your body what it needs in order to turn that protein into muscle. So increase your protein intake. And a lot of people, especially runners, they don’t think about that correlation there. But if you want to get stronger and you want to get larger muscles or stronger muscles, you got to give your body what it needs in order to create those muscles, which is protein.
So a lot of runners don’t do enough strength training in general, and they don’t get enough protein in general. So if you make those two changes, right there, you start some sort of regular strength training routine, and you give yourself enough protein, you should be able to get stronger muscles so that you can actually do things like a pull up, okay? Okay, so these are just a few things that you can do if you’re interested in being able to do a pull up. And you might be thinking, what does this have to do with the shortcut to health and fitness success? Well, I’m getting to that. Okay, I’m taking a long way around to get there, but I’m, promise you, I’m going to get to that.
So she’s doing all these things, and she told me that it’s taking too long. And I just laughed, like I just did. And she said, well, how long is it supposed to take? And I said, listen, it’s gonna take whatever it takes. Everybody’s different. Everybody that I’ve worked with is at a different place with this. And sometimes you got to do this stuff for a long time. She’s been working on this for I don’t know the exact number, but I’m going to guess it’s just been a few weeks that she’s been doing these things. And a few weeks may not be enough time if you’re kind of starting from scratch.
So you’ve got to give yourself the time that is required in order to build that strength, and building stronger muscles takes time. So it’s not something you can do for a few weeks and expect to see, like, massive results, like, it’s gonna take a while. And the thing that kind of spurred me to want to talk about this today was that she wants it to go faster. She wants to know what the shortcut is. And the funny thing is, is that I told her, you’re doing the shortcuts, all the stuff that you’re doing, that is the shortcut. You know, if you want it to take longer, don’t do that stuff. You know, if you want it to go faster, keep doing what you’re doing like there really isn’t a shortcut in this particular instance to being able to do a pull up if you’re not able to do that.
I worked for a long time, I want to say, a few months, on getting to the place where I could do pull ups unassisted. You know, I used those bands. I wrapped the band around the top, stepped into it. I used that to pull myself up. And I was able to do that and keep lowering the, whatever you want to call it, the strength of the band. So I got to the really light bands, like the lightest ones that we had at the gym, super light, almost no resistance at all. And I could do those. And then I was able to do them without, but I could only do like one or two pull ups at a time. And, but then I, you know, got to the place where I could do seven to 10, you know, and, and today I can do like 10 or 12 pull ups at a time. And I have been working on that for a long time, you know.
But the thing is, if I had given up on myself, if I had just said, like, Oh, this is taking too long, why bother, then I never would have been able to get to that one pull up or 10 pull ups. And this is so true of so many things that we do in life that people will give up if it looks like it’s taking too long, which to me, is a really silly thing to do, because all these things we’re talking about today, not just doing a pull up or a push up, but being able to lose weight or being able to run faster, like if you want to run a faster marathon, that is not something that is going to be quick to achieve. You cannot run a faster marathon. You can’t get faster over that distance in just a few weeks, or even a few months.
Sometimes it takes a couple of years to get there. When I first started running, I remember my first marathon, actually had a pretty good time. It was under four hours, like 3:57:00 I think was my first marathon, and that was a pretty good time, but I wanted to do better. You know? I wanted to be closer to that 3:45:00 and so that was my goal for a long time, and I got a little bit closer, like I did a 3:55:00 and then I did a 3:50:00 like, a year later, and then I was able to do a 3:47:00 or something like that. And it just kept ticking down until, you know, it was probably six years. I mean, now that I’m thinking about it, yeah, it was six years after I ran my first marathon, when I had my marathon PR of 3:43:00, you know, which is nothing completely stellar, but for me, that was pretty amazing at the time and but it took a long time to get there.
You know, it’s not something that happens overnight, but if I had just given up on myself, I never would have got to that place, you know. So just understand that if you want something and it’s something that is important to you, it’s something that would be considered a big accomplishment, that it’s going to take time to get there, and that we have become this society of people who just, we thrive on instant gratification. We want everything right now, from being able to instantly download any bit of music or any movie we’ve ever wanted in our lives, we can just instantly watch it.
I was thinking about that today, because I thought about having to go get some music at the store, like, if you heard some music that you liked on the radio, if you if you heard a song that you loved on the radio, you could either, like, try to record that song off the radio, which was really hard to do, or what you could do is hear that song and then go to the music store, hope they had what you were looking for, and then buy that album, because you had to buy the whole album. Sometimes you could get a single, but usually you had to buy the whole album, and then to get home, and then open that thing up and take the plastic off and all that stuff, and then you could actually start listening to that song, but it was a process.
And now any song that has ever been created in the history of the world is instantly available to you. Any movie that has ever been made you can basically watch instantly on your phone, you know, so and then, you know, I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this episode things like, you know, ordering food. Or, you know, we can order food. We can just sit on our couch and have food delivered to us within an hour or so, or half an hour, or order something from Amazon and have it delivered sometimes within a couple of hours, you know, just about any item you can think of on the planet, and it’ll show up in your door within a day or two, you know, whatever.
But we’ve just become so used to instant gratification that anything that takes longer than a day or so or a few weeks just seems like, why bother? And we have to get out of this mentality. We have to start losing this mentality when it comes to things like our own health and fitness, because your health and fitness journey is something that you’re going to be on from now until the end of your life. If you do it right, it’s going to be something that you’re committed to forever.
And so if it’s something you’re committed to forever, it doesn’t matter that losing 30 pounds takes six months or a year. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you’re on that journey, and you’re doing something, and you’re moving in that direction every single day, even if it’s baby steps. You know my friend, it may take her three or four months to get to the place where she can do a pull up, or maybe six months, I don’t know, but I told her that it really doesn’t matter. She didn’t want to hear that. She just laughed and said, that is not the answer I was looking for. She wanted the shortcut. And the truth is, all those things that she’s doing is how you get there faster, like there isn’t really a true shortcut other than just doing all the little things that you can do each day.
You know, it’s kind of like running that faster marathon. You know, you got to do your speed work, and you got to do that a couple times a week. You might do a high interval session, high intensity interval session. One day, you might do a tempo run. Another day, you might have a couple of maintenance runs, then you have your long run on the weekend, and you got to rinse and repeat that over and over and over again. Same principle applies, though, that progressive overload, you overload your systems. You know, you overload your skeletal muscular system. You overload your cardiovascular system with these high intensity intervals. The next time you go for a run, your body has adapted positively to those stressors that you put on yourself, and you get a little bit faster, you get a little bit more efficient. Your heart rate improves a little bit. Your vo two Max goes up a little bit. That’s how you how you get better. That’s how you get faster. It takes a long time to get there, though, it is not something, there is no fast track. There is no next day delivery when it comes to your health and fitness. Okay?
So for my friend, she didn’t want to hear that, you know, that the shortcut was just doing all the things she’s already doing. She won the true shortcut. And when I told her there wasn’t one, she was a little bummed out about that. But I think she understands that. You know the thing is to never give up. The thing is that you just have to commit to this process, commit to the journey, and stay on that journey.
Now, I will say this, when it comes to having a shortcut to health and fitness success, there is something that you can do that will help you, and that is a true shortcut, and that is having a coach help you. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a coach or because I’m trying to get you to do coaching with me or anything like that, but a coach actually is a shortcut to your success, because they’ve already made all the mistakes, they’ve worked with hundreds of people, they know what works and what doesn’t work. You’ve got somebody there that can give you a step by step guide, which, when you’re trying to figure this stuff out for yourself, it’s, there’s so much information out there anymore that it’s very confusing, especially when it comes to things like your diet or getting stronger.
Like there’s so many different ways of doing this that having somebody there that’s in your corner, that’s got your back, that’s holding you accountable, that’s providing a step by step guide for you. Is really a pretty amazing shortcut, in my opinion. This is what helped me to become healthier, stronger, lose weight, like I had somebody just showing me what to do, and I just do what they said, like that, right? There is a true shortcut. Okay, it’s still going to take a while, but to keep that under in your mind, because it’s one of those things that you might have somebody guiding you and helping you through the process, but it’s still going to take whatever it takes.
Getting stronger is not a fast process. Getting faster is not a fast process. Losing weight is not a fast process, okay, it takes what it takes, and everybody’s different, and so we just have to accept all of that. We have to accept that, you know, we are, are committed to this lifestyle of being a healthy human being. We’re committed to this as a lifestyle. We’re not looking for short term fixes. We’re not looking for, you know, the fastest way to get there possible. What we’re looking for is what is going to work for us for the long term. What is going to keep us healthy, get us healthy first of all, and then keep us healthy for the rest of our lives. That’s what we’re really looking for here.
Okay, so you know, while I’ll say there really isn’t a shortcut. Having a coach is kind of like having the shortcut, right? It’s just a way to fast track your success as much as possible. So you’re going to get the benefits of having somebody that’s just done it all before and has that experience and that right there is the true power up. That is really the true shortcut to your health and fitness success. But at the same time, you have to just commit to the process, commit to the process of change. What am I doing today to better myself? What am I doing today to stay on my plan? What am I doing today? To be consistent? What am I doing today to get a little bit stronger? And you just have to keep doing these things over and over and over again and and you will see results. You will see progress.
If you don’t, then you got to do something different. You know, don’t keep doing the same things, expecting things to change for you, right? If it’s not working, try something else. But for my friend, who is, you know, working on doing a pull up, she’s doing all the right things, she just has to commit to this process and stay committed. She’ll get there. I know she’s going to get there when she does, I’ll let you guys know. I’ll ask her about it next time I see her, see how things are progressing, but I’ll try to keep you guys posted with her progress, because I think it’s pretty fun to watch.
Okay, that’s all I got for you today. I hope this has been helpful. If it has, feel free to share this with someone that you care about. It’s really all I got for you here. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean. I will talk to you soon.
I talk a lot about carbs here on the podcast, mainly why it’s advised to keep your carbs low if you’re a runner who wants to lose weight and use body fat as fuel for running. I realized I haven’t …
Continue Reading about 246. The Macronutrient That Matters Most for Runners →
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 246, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today, the Macronutrient That Matters Most for Runners. So I know I talk a lot about carbs here on the podcast, mainly why it’s maybe advised for you to keep your carbs low. If you’re a runner who wants to get fat adapted, use body fat as fuel for running and wants to lose weight, I think keeping your carbs low is a very good plan for most people, not everybody, but for most people. But I realized I haven’t spent much time talking about the other macronutrients, fat and protein. Fat and protein are essential nutrients that often get overlooked when it comes to low carb diets and fat adapted running. So I’m hoping to remedy that here today. So this episode is all about that one macronutrient that matters most for runners, and how it benefits your overall health and fitness.
But first I want to talk a little bit about what being a coach means to me. So I’m someone who struggled with eating properly, struggled with my weight, struggled with getting stronger, struggled with my business, and I decided at some point that I was going to get some help, and so I reached out, and I got a nutrition coach that helped me greatly, and I figured out a lot of important things for me, and it was really the key to me losing weight and be able to keep it off forever. I really wanted to get stronger and leaner and build more muscle, and I just was trying to do it on my own. It really wasn’t working. So I got a coach. I had a personal trainer that was working with me to help me get stronger and showing me what to do and correcting my mistakes and keeping me accountable and keeping me on track. And then I had a business coach that really helped me to get my business started, and get my business to a place where it was something that was very sustainable for me. And all along this process, I learned so much from having coaches guide me, show me the way, show me what to do. You know, they’ve already made all the mistakes so they can just teach me what to do without me having to make all those same mistakes, which is really awesome. It’s like taking everything that they know and then just downloading it into me and going like, Okay, perfect. You know, I’m good to go here. But having that accountability, having somebody to bounce ideas off of, having somebody to talk to when things aren’t going well, having somebody to help keep me on track all of those things were vital to me becoming the person that I am today, to losing the weight, to keeping it off, to improving my strength, my overall fitness, to having a thriving business. All those things were benefits of me reaching out and taking a little bit of a leap of faith here, because I had never really done too much in the way of coaching prior to doing all this stuff, and it was a game changer for me. So this is why I became a coach, because it was so impactful for me. And this is why I’m so passionate about being a coach, because I had such an amazing experience with my coaches. And I was just talking to someone the other day who is a coach herself, and she was reaching out to me to get some help. And, you know, we both agreed that all the best coaches have coaches, you know. So it’s just one of those things that if you’re looking for some help, you want somebody to just show you exactly what to do. You’re looking for some guidance and some accountability. You want somebody that’s had all the experience that can just, you know, really take everything that they’ve learned and just dump it into you then, then coaching is probably a good fit for you. And if you want to know if working with me is a good fit for you, just go to my website, running lean coaching.com, and click on the big button that says, work with me, and I’ll show you exactly how you can become the most badass version of yourself. Yeah, cool. Running, leancoaching.com. Click on work with me, and let’s do it. Let’s work together. I think it would be super fun. Cool.
Okay, so today, let’s talk about the macronutrient that matters most for runners, and I know that we talk a lot about carbs here on the podcast, because I’m a big proponent of just keeping the carbs low. What does that mean? It’s different for each person. You know, we kind of take a break from eating sugar and some of the really starchy grains and try to lower our carbohydrate intake at the beginning of this process. That’s kind of like phase one that I go through with most of my clients.
We keep the carbs pretty low at the beginning, and then at some point we start to increase the carbs. We time carbs around workouts. You go to a place where you’ve kind of maybe hit your ideal weight, and you can dial in your carbohydrate intake to determine, okay, I can eat this many carbs until I start to gain weight again. Oh, maybe I need to back it off a little bit. You know, maybe 100 grams. 150 grams is good for you. Maybe it’s 75, maybe it’s 20. I don’t know. Just everybody’s a little bit different. Everybody has the sweet spot that they feel good about.
So we know we talk a lot about carbs, and being a low carb runner is something that is pretty amazing. Getting fat adapted as a runner is pretty amazing, because now you have this unlimited fuel source of stored body fat that helps improve your endurance, helps improve your athletic performance, and it gives you a whole nother tool that most runners just don’t take advantage of. You know, burning fat as fuel, so keeping the carbs low is a really amazing tool. It helps with weight loss and helps improve your running.
And I realize that I talk a lot about carbs. And if you want to go back to many, many episodes, there’s lots of episodes where I talk about carbohydrates, you know, good carbs, bad carbs. Why carbs are not the enemy, how we feel with carbs, all that kind of stuff. Just go back through my different episodes. You can actually, if you go on to, I don’t know what Apple podcast or Spotify, you can actually scroll back and see all the different episodes. Or you can go to my podcast website, which is runningleanpodcast.com, and that will give you all the episodes that I’ve ever put out there. And you can, you know, just have a scroll through all of those as well.
So anyway, lots of information about carbs, right? But I realized I haven’t talked about the other macronutrients too much, and protein is one of those ones that does not get the air time that carbs get, even fat. Fat gets talked about a lot, you know, especially people who are trying to watch their weight and so they cut out all the fat, which is, we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second. That’s really not recommended, but protein is one of those things that we really need to focus on, especially as runners and when we’re talking about macronutrients, I just want to set the stage here.
The macronutrients that we’re talking about are fat, protein and carbohydrates. Fat and protein are both called Essential macronutrients. That means that your body does not produce fat or protein, so you have to get that in your diet. And when I talk, when I say fat, it doesn’t mean that your body doesn’t store fat. It does store fat, but your body needs fat in order to survive. If you were to go to a zero fat diet, this would be a problem. If you were to go to a zero protein diet, this would be a problem. You would die.
But carbohydrates are not essential. There is no essential requirement for the human body to consume carbohydrates. I’m not saying you shouldn’t consume carbohydrates. I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that they are not essential, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute, too. But the macronutrients are the things that make up kind of the majority of our diet, fat, protein, carbohydrates. If you look at the back of most labels, it’ll give you the macronutrient breakdown. But there’s also something called micronutrients. And I’m not going to get into a lot of this, but just understand that micronutrients are not, they are required, and we, there are certain essential micronutrients that are required because our bodies that make them so we need to to get in our diet, things like vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D, iron, iodine, folate, zinc. There’s all kinds of essential micronutrients. And then there’s something called micro minerals, which is salt, potassium, magnesium, calcium. These are all essential as well. So we need to get those in our diet as well, because our body doesn’t produce those things. So as long as you’re eating a well balanced diet, you’re going to be getting all of the micronutrients and all the macronutrients that you need to be a healthy human being.
Okay, so now that we know there’s a difference between macronutrients and micronutrients, I wanted to talk a little bit more about carbs. So carbs are kind of considered non essential nutrients, so proteins and fats, vitamins, minerals, all those things I just mentioned are essential because your body doesn’t produce those. So your body actually produces glucose, which is carbohydrate on its own. And your body can actually use other energy sources if there’s no glucose available or very little glucose available. So fat is a good example of this, right? So just understand that you do not need to load up on the carbs all the time, because your body doesn’t really require that much in the way of carbs. Actually, there’s no essential amount of carbs that are required, you know?
And I’m not opposed to carbs, like I said, you know, I think they’re great for helping to improve your athletic performance. It’s fun to just eat some cake sometimes, or ice cream or whatever. So carbs are fine. They’re kind of addicting to a lot of people, though, I know I’m one of these people where I start eating carbs and I can’t stop, you know, so it’s one of those things where I need to really keep my carb intake in check.
Okay, so carbs are fine, but they’re just not essential in the same way that fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals are, but just understand it’s one of the macronutrients that’s talked about a lot, and the other one being fat. So fat is often touted as, like, the enemy of weight loss. Like I know, back in the 80s, they determined, you know, with some pretty shoddy science, that the reason people were getting fat is because they were eating fat. The reason people were overweight is because they were eating too much fat, so stop eating the fat. So they took all the fat out of everything. Everything became low fat, no fat, non fat. And with most of those food products, they replaced the fat with sugar. Because taking the fat out of stuff made it taste terrible. You know, you take the fat out of whatever. There are people who were like, oh, this is disgusting. And so they were like, oh, we’ll make this better, don’t worry. And so they added sugar to it, okay. Well, now everybody became even more overweight. And they’re like, See, you’re not eating all the fat, so you’re healthier. But everybody, the obesity rates have just skyrocketed in this country since we’ve done dumb stuff like that.
So you gotta eat fat like, fat is important. It is an essential nutrient. Fat and protein are both essential nutrients. If you don’t eat fat, you’ll die. There’s actually something called dietary fat deficiency. It’s kind of rare, but it can happen if you just, like, cut all the fat out of your diet. I know some people who have tried this, they’re like, Oh, I’m just gonna go super, I’m just gonna eat no fat, like zero fat. But it leads to things like vitamin deficiencies, dermatitis, slow wound healing, hair loss, sickness problems with your eyes not functioning properly because of like, vitamin deficiencies. There’s like, all kinds of problems that happen when you completely cut out fat. So don’t do that. Fat is a essential macronutrient. We have to get fat in our diet. Don’t be afraid of the fat. The fat is not causing you to get fat.
There’s other factors involved here, and carbs have a bigger role to play when it comes to gaining weight. So we don’t want to just cut out all the fat. We don’t want to go to some kind of a low fat diet, because a lot of times when you do that, you know, you’re replacing a lot of that fat with sugar, and your carbohydrate intake tends to go up pretty high. So just keep the fat in check. You know, I’m not saying you need to be wrapping bacon around sticks of butter and eating that every day. That’s not what we’re talking about here. But don’t be afraid of the fat. I eat lots of fat in my diet.
I actually found that I was trying to cut back on the fat a little bit as an experiment. So I did this for, I don’t know, for four to five months, something like that, and I noticed I just was more lethargic. My running wasn’t going as well. I just didn’t feel as good. Generally, I wasn’t making gains at the gym, and so I added more fat back into the diet, and I noticed that I started feeling better. I was sleeping better. I had more energy. My running improved. My energy levels throughout the day improved. My workouts got better. I started putting on some muscle again, like, so for me, eating a little bit more fat is good. It works for me. And everybody kind of needs to figure out their own fat intake or whatever. But just understand that.
You know, we don’t want to be just cutting all the fat out of the diet, but fat gets so much, you know, whatever you want to call it, press, people talk about fat a lot. Talk about carbs a lot. The one macro that I think you should really be focusing on here is protein for a lot of reasons. And I mean. Give you a few of them here.
Like, one of them is that when you eat more protein, you typically don’t eat as much food. So I’m a person who is, I’m a chronic overeater. I just eat a lot of food when I sit down to eat food, like, if you give me a large pizza, I can put a big, huge dent in that large pizza. People are like, oh, we’re going to be taking some of this home. I’m like, Yeah, I don’t think so. Like, I can put away some food, and I’m not a big person, but I just, especially when it comes to eating carbs. Carbs mess up your hunger signals. When you’re eating a lot of sugar, a lot of carbs, they make your body, they make you feel more hungry. You know, they increase the production of ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, so you feel more hungry. So if you’re eating a lot of carbs, you’re going to be hungry all the time. They suppress the production of leptin, which is the fullness hormone, so then you’re hungry all the time, but you’re not feeling full when you do eat.
So that’s a bad combination, because now you’re just you tend to overeat, and you’re eating and you’re more hungry and eating more all the time. So when we increase the number of the, or the amount of protein that we’re eating, I think what happens for most people is they reduce the amount of fat, and they reduce the amount of carbs that they’re eating. And I would say, if you’re going to replace something on your plate, you know, I would say, just cut out some of the carbs and replace it with protein. We want protein to be the main event at every meal. We want protein to be the main event, and I’m not gonna, you know, necessarily tell you, you got to get so many grams of protein every single day.
I think there’s some new data out there that suggests that a good place for most people who are athletic, like for runners, I think a 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight is a pretty good place for most people to be. If you’re non athletic, you could probably go a little bit less than that, maybe 0.5, 0.6, some people, if you’re highly athletic, you know, maybe bodybuilder type of person, you might need closer to 1.0 gram of protein per pound of body weight, but I think runners can do really well at about 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight.
And this is some new data that’s been coming out. And you know, I’ve been trying this and working with a lot of clients who have been doing this, and it seems to work pretty well for most people. Again, you’re an individual, you got to do what works for you. But when you’re eating more protein, you tend to not eat as much and so and when you do eat, you tend to be more full, because protein is very satiating. And when it comes to, you know, satiety per calorie, protein is going to give you, you know, one of the best bangs for your buck there, okay?
Plus, you’re giving your body what it really needs. Protein is required to build lean muscle. And when most people try to lose weight, they just cut their calories. They lose weight, but they lose muscle through this process. We don’t want that. You definitely do not want to do that. So when you increase protein, and, you know, do some consistent strength training, this is going to stop this from happening. This is going to prevent the loss of muscle. So we want to make sure that you are eating enough protein to build lean muscle, not lose that if you’re trying to lose weight, especially if you’re training for any kind of you know, half marathon or a marathon, then you do not want to be losing muscle in the process.
Getting enough protein also means that you’re going to recover better from those hard workouts, whether at the gym or on the track or whatever, long runs, anytime you get out there and you push yourself hard, that you break down muscle tissue. Running is a catabolic activity. It breaks down muscle tissue, and you need to recover from those workouts, and so getting enough protein helps support the repair of muscle tissue and the building of new muscle tissue.
So if you want to make sure that you’re recovering properly from your workouts, you want a low inflammatory diet. So that means a diet that’s not going to keep you in a state of inflammation and bloating, which is, you know, the low carb diet tends to work pretty well for that, and you want to make sure you’re getting enough protein. So we want a higher protein diet.
Also, when you eat more protein, you will perform better as a runner, because you’re going to get stronger, you’re going to build stronger muscles. You can run harder, you can run faster, you can recover faster. Stronger muscles means you are less likely to get injured. It helps improve your immune function as well. So if you’re somebody that gets sick a lot, especially as you’re running more. I used to get sick all the time, late stages of marathon training when I’d be, you know, getting out there and doing these super long runs. You know, it’s just a lot of stress on your body, and it can really break down your immune system and compromise your immune system and help, you know, getting enough protein helps you to stay strong and build muscle tissue and helps to improve your immune function, which is amazing.
And then understand that when you’re eating more protein, this can really help with improving your weight loss for a few reasons. So you’re not as hungry all the time, like you stay more satiated throughout the day. You don’t need to eat as often. So you can eat a couple times a day. You don’t need to eat six or eight times a day, and you start to get in tune with your body’s natural hunger signals, which is a really powerful thing, if you think about it.
When did we start having MyFitnessPal to count all of our calories and track all of our macros? We started that. What, 6, 7 years ago, 10 years ago, I don’t know, but it hasn’t been that long, and before that, what did we do? How did people stay in shape? How did people not just blow up and get super fat? They just listened to their body. They just did what their body was telling them to do. Are you hungry? Eat something. Are you not hungry? Don’t eat anything. Don’t eat because you’re bored. Don’t eat because you’re stressed. You eat because you’re hungry, and when you’re eating more protein and fewer carbs, your body tends to be much better in tune with your natural hunger signals, and you tend to just eat less in general, you tend to eat fewer carbs in general too, because you’re satiated, you don’t need more.
So more protein has, gosh, so many benefits. You know, it also means you don’t need to count your macros, you don’t need to count your calories. You’re just going to feel better. You’re going to notice that you’re getting results. You’re going to lose more weight. You’re going to improve your strength, you know, more protein plus strength training. This is like magic for weight loss, it just helps improve your metabolism. Helps improve fat burning. There’s so many benefits. So for runners, especially runners who want to lose weight, or if you’re a runner who maybe you don’t need to lose weight, but you want to maintain a lean, strong body, you don’t want to keep breaking yourself down. You want to recover faster. You want to make sure that you’re building lean muscle tissue, then it’s more protein for the win every time. Cool.
All right, that’s all I got for you today. Hope that was helpful, and love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
When it comes to weight loss tips, one principle stands out among all the others: counting calories. For decades, you’ve been told that the only way to lose weight is to make sure you count all …
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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 243 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, Why Counting Calories Doesn’t Work. So when it comes to weight loss tips, one principle stands out among all the others, counting calories. For decades, you’ve been told that the only way to lose weight is to make sure you count all your calories honestly. If this worked as advertised, we wouldn’t have a crisis of obesity here in this country, and no one would really struggle with their weight. The truth is, it doesn’t work. So today, why counting calories doesn’t work, and what you should probably do instead.
But first, if you’re interested in getting leaner, getting stronger, running faster or running longer, you need to change something. What do you need to change? Probably your nutrition plan, probably whether or not your strength training or how your strength training, probably how you’re approaching your running training, because doing the same things you’re doing right now is not going to get you new results. I think we all know that nothing changes if nothing changes. So the real secret here is to make changes, but stick with them. You got to make them last. You got to do them consistently. So doing new things consistently is really the goal. That’s what we’re really after here. Trying to do new things consistently on your own, it’s tough. It’s challenging. I get it. I tried. It doesn’t work. Didn’t work for me. It didn’t work for me, until I got some help. I got a coach. I got somebody there that was in my corner, that was showing me the way, that was telling me what to do, that was holding me accountable, that was giving me guidance, that was offering suggestions, that was keeping me motivated. Once I had a coach, everything changed for me. I needed someone there to tell me what to do when things weren’t working right, you know, somebody there to hold me accountable and say, Hey, did you do what you said you were going to do? Yes or no. So I made a lot of progress. Once I got a coach. I improved my eating, my running, my strength, all those things. I’ve had all kinds of coaches in my life. I’ve had a nutrition coach, I’ve had a strength coach, I’ve had a business coach, and these coaches have really changed who I am from the inside out. Why I decided to get into coaching, because I got such a great experience. I’ve had such great experiences with my coaches. So if you’re interested in getting some help becoming the most badass version of yourself, just go to my website, running leancoaching.com. Click on work with me. I’ll show you exactly what to do. I’ll show you exactly how to become that best version of yourself yet. Okay, that’s running leancoaching.com. Click on work with me. Cool.
Okay, this topic today is one that I’m pretty passionate about. I’ve got a few notes here, but I just have to tell you that I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ve talked a little bit about this in the last episode of the podcast, I mentioned 10 tips to help runners lose weight, and one of them was about not putting yourself into a calorie deficit. You don’t really want to go into a calorie deficit. And it sparked a little bit of conversation online. And you know, some people are asking some questions and stuff, which I thought was really great, and I’ll get into that in a minute, but it got me really thinking about this whole idea of counting calories and I was like, why is this such a accepted method of losing weight and eating healthy is to just count your calories. Don’t restrict anything you’re eating, don’t change anything you’re eating. Just keep your calories to a certain level and you should be fine. Why is this so popular? Why is this something that everybody kind of talks about?
We’ve got programs like Weight Watchers with points and they’ve, you know, determined what foods are higher in calories, and those get a higher point level, and lower in calories get lower point level, and things like that. You know, we’ve taken out all the fat from all our foods and replaced it with sugar a lot of the time, but we’ve taken out all this fat because fat is high in calories. You’re going to be eating a lot of calories. And I was just thinking like, if this worked so well, if counting calories was the answer to all of our weight loss problems or overweight problems, nobody would be overweight. Nobody would struggle with gaining and losing weight constantly, there wouldn’t be an obesity crisis here in the US and in other countries. And I was just like, this is really interesting.
And one thing you know that I saw a while back, but I thought this was really fascinating, is that there’s an obesity epidemic amongst toddlers here in the US toddlers. So these are people that are not making their own decisions. They can’t count their calories anyway. So the whole idea of counting calories is very controversial, and I’m going to admit that, and what I might have to share with you guys today might go against a lot of what you know or have thought to be true, but one thing that I really want to start with is just saying like we have evolved as human beings to be really good at metabolizing certain foods and not good at metabolizing other kinds of foods. We’ve evolved over 1000s upon 1000s of years.
You know, we’ve been some form of human hominid, some sort of human being, for like, two and a half million years. So you can argue that our evolution started about two and a half million years ago, and we’ve never had to track calories before. You know, we never had MyFitnessPal until recently. Why, all of a sudden, is tracking all your food in an app necessary? Why all of a sudden do we need to be eating in a calorie deficit, and we better know all these numbers. You know, do all this math and figure out all these numbers in order to maintain a healthy weight as a human being, we’ve never had to do this in the history of our species before.
Were there overweight people in the past? Yeah, probably, especially once we started processing more foods and people were eating a lot more bread and sugar, let’s just say those were two things that started to cause some of the obesity in people and so but think about when we started eating those foods. It wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things, you know, maybe a few 100 or 1000 years ago, something like that. So just be thinking about, you know, the fact that we’ve never really had to count calories before, and now all of a sudden, everybody’s saying, well, that’s the only way that you can lose weight, is to count calories and listen. I was on board with all of that. I tried that for a long time.
I got an app. The app I was using was called Lose It. So it’s similar to my fitness pal or, you know, carb manager is another one that I like to use just for looking up foods and stuff like that. But I use this app called Lose It. And it was all about, okay, put in your weight loss goal. Okay, I want to lose, you know, 40 pounds. Okay, all right. Well, you just need, well, how much you working out every day? Oh, I’m doing this, and this is okay. So here’s what your daily calorie needs are. Let’s say it’s, you know, 2000 calories a day, and so you just need to be eating around 1700 or 1800 calories a day. Oh, okay, great, no problem. So I did that.
I tracked all my food, tracked all my calories, and then it asked you, okay, did you work out today? I sure did. I went and ran 10 miles today. Oh, well, good. You get another 1000 calories. Oh, awesome. I eat another 1000 calories of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or whatever. And so I did this, and I did all the math, right, and I was putting in all my all my numbers, and putting in all my food. And at the end of the day, I lost like zero weight. It did not change a thing for me. So doing all this math, counting all my calories, tracking all my food, meticulously tracking on my food for a long, long time, because after some time it wasn’t working.
I was like, I just have to do this longer, you know? And this went on for months. I want to say I did this for like, a year or something like that, and it didn’t work for me. And in the process, I was running and training for marathons, ultra marathons and things like that. And so I was doing a lot of training and gaining weight in the process. I’ve shared this before, and a lot of people that I talk to tell me, yeah, Patrick, the exact same thing happened to me. I’m training for a marathon and I’m gaining weight. What the heck is going on? I should be losing weight. I know you should be according to the numbers, right? Right, but it doesn’t really work that way.
Now I need to say this, can you lose weight by limiting your calories? Yes, you can. Is it a good thing to do? I don’t believe so, because for a few reasons. Number one, it’s not sustainable, like you can’t just limit your calories and be able to maintain a calorie deficit for the rest of your life. You cannot do that if you want to lose weight and you’re trying to cut your calories, you’re going to get to this place where you’re cutting your calories probably too low. If you’re a runner, you probably shouldn’t be cutting your calories because you need the energy for running. But if you keep your calories too low for too long a time, you end up kind of slowing down your metabolism.
This is what happened to the people that are in like the biggest loser shows like that. They lose a ton of weight by dramatically cutting their calories and exercising like crazy, and they can burn some fat, and they do burn some fat, and they do lose some weight, but like 96% of the people on that show gain all the weight back, and then some. So they actually gain more because their metabolism slows down to the point where they can’t maintain that deficit anymore. And so let’s say you cut your calories to 1000 calories a day, and your body needs like 2000 calories a day. Well, your metabolism is going to start to slow down. To say, like, if we maintain this, if we keep doing this, we’re going to die. Like, your body will slow your metabolism down to match the energy that’s coming in. So that means that now your body’s only burning like 1200 calories a day, or 1000 calories a day, but you’re eating 1000 calories a day, so now weight loss stops, so now you got to start eating less again. Okay, well, I’ll just go to 800 calories a day. Great. Your body’s going to eventually slow down 800 calories a day.
And it takes time for that to happen. It’s not going to happen if you do that for a couple of days, or something like that. I mean, it takes time, but that’s the principle that a lot of people want to follow. They want to follow this principle of just eating less, eating less, eating less, it is not sustainable. They did a meta study that looked at hundreds of different diets. A meta study is a large study that looks at other studies. Okay, so they did a meta study on all these different diets, and they found that the one that had the most weight loss at the beginning was a calorie deficit. So cutting your calories does work to lose weight. They also showed from all these diets that the one that was the absolute worst in long term longevity was cutting your calories. So it does work.
You know, you can lose some weight in the beginning, but then you gain it back because of, you know, slowing down your metabolism, and that it’s just not really sustainable to continue to track your calories and cut your calories, at some point, you have to start eating more, and then you’re going to start to gain the weight again. And you’re probably going to gain it faster, because now your metabolism has slowed down. So this meta study showed that it was really good at initial weight loss, and I think that’s why a lot of people are so attracted to cutting calories, is that it does work, but it’s very short term. It’s not something that is sustainable.
Okay, so, like, can you track your calories forever? Do you really want to do that? I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it’s necessary. Again. Let’s go back to how we evolved as human beings. We’ve never had to track calories before. Why do we all of a sudden have to do this? And this whole idea is based on the energy balance theory.
The energy balance theory says, you know more energy going out than coming in, and you will lose weight. So if you exercise more, you can eat whatever you want, but as long as, you know, you burned X number of calories, you will not gain weight. And it’s a good theory, but it’s thought it’s flawed, because it’s assuming that we’re some sort of perfect vessel, like a steam engine that that works off of, you know, perfect principles of so much energy coming in, and then everything works perfectly, and we’re all the same, and then the energy going out, and we’re not steam engines, we’re very complicated, organic creatures, and we’re all different. We all have different genetics and different metabolisms and different food preferences and different cultures and things like that. We got to factor all this stuff in there.
So the energy balance theory, it’s a good theory, but it’s flawed. It’s much more complicated than that. The types of foods you eat matter. So if you ate nothing, but, you know, Twinkies and you were, you know, burning so many calories? Can you lose weight? I don’t know, but you know what? That’s gonna mess up your hunger signals. It’s gonna make you super hungry all the time. You’re not gonna have control over what you’re eating. You’re eating something that is really bad for you. You’re not getting the proper nutrition like there’s so many things we have to consider here. So just to eat a bunch of junk and say, Well, I’m not eating X number of calories, so it’s fine. It’s flawed.
And what happens when we eat certain foods? What happens to our hormones, our hunger signals? You know ghrelin as a hunger hormone. When you eat sugar, ghrelin is produced in mass quantities, so you become more hungry. That’s why, when you eat more sugar, you crave more sugar. You’re just hungrier in general, one of the worst things you can do, in my opinion, is to start your day with a high carbohydrate, high sugar meal, because then you’re setting yourself up for disaster. The rest of the day, you’re gonna be hungry the rest of the day. That’s why people can’t understand why somebody like me who does intermittent fasting, you know, and that just means I don’t eat breakfast. That’s the way I, you know, define it for me.
Anyway, I don’t eat breakfast. And people think I’m crazy because they can’t understand what it would be like to not eat breakfast because they have to start their day with a bunch of carbs, a bunch of sugar, and then they’re hungry the rest of the day. And so they just can’t imagine going until lunchtime without food, because they’re hungry all the time. But I’m telling you, once you stop eating all the sugar and you stop eating breakfast, you’re not going to be hungry all the time. You’re going to be very satisfied.
Another hormone we have to consider when we eat certain foods, like sugar, is leptin. Leptin is the fullness sensor. It’s a fullness hormone. And so when you eat certain foods, you get full, like if you eat steak, you can only eat so much steak, and then you’re going to get full. Chicken is another one, man I can eat a lot of food, but when it comes to something like dense protein, like chicken, I can only eat so much. And I’m like, Dude, I cannot eat any more of this. I am so full. But you give me a plate of pasta, man, it’s like, I can never stop eating it, because leptin, the hunger hormone, or, I’m sorry, the fullness hormone gets turned off or turned down when you start eating a lot of carbs and sugar.
So you’re more hungry because more ghrelin is being produced, less leptin is being produced, so you’re not feeling full. And this is a bad combination, because now you just, you’re more hungry, you’re going to end up eating way more than you should be eating, and your body is just not functioning the way it’s supposed to, right? So this is another reason why, you know, there’s more going on than just calories in, calories out. I believe that tracking your calories forever and going into some kind of calorie deficit and trying to count your calories is a very short term thing that you can do. I mean, maybe if you want to do it, just to get some data, good.
But listen, I think that it is very unsustainable. It’s very unsustainable. Do you want to track your calories for the rest of your life? Because if that is the case, then, I mean, go for it, if that’s what you want to do, but there’s got to be a better way, right?
Related to that, though, somebody asked a question on a post from my last podcast where I was talking about, you know, not going into a calorie deficit. That’s a mistake that a lot of runners make, is they want to lose weight, but then they think they need to cut calories, and you shouldn’t cut your calories, you shouldn’t go into a calorie deficit. And this person asked a question, if the idea is not to go into calorie deficit, shouldn’t you track your calories so you know that you’re not going to calorie deficit. So I get where this person is coming from with this, and it is a good question. But listen, if you’re eating to satiety, you really shouldn’t need to track anything. Some days, you’re going to eat more because you might have a higher training volume.
So you might be in the throes of marathon training, and so you’re going to be hungry, and you might eat more food. So your food volume might go up. Sometimes you might be at a lower place in your training volume, and you’ll be eating less food either way. It’s fine. Listen to your body. Eat until you feel full. Don’t go beyond that. Though. Eat whole foods. Eat real food. Get plenty of fat and protein in your diet. And you shouldn’t really need to track anything. You don’t have to track calories if you’re eating the proper foods, the proper human diet, which, in my opinion, is things like eggs, meat, fish, dairy, you know, avocados, fruit, vegetables, whole foods. Eat food that still looks like food, food that our ancient ancestors would say, oh, I understand what that is. I’ve seen that before.
What would happen if, instead of eating all the sugar and the carbs all the time, you just started eating more satiating foods? Fat and protein are very satiating, so when you’re eating more nutrient dense, more satiating foods, you’re going to be less hungry. You’re going to feel more full when you do eat, you will naturally be eating the right amount of food for yourself, because you’re going to start to get in tune with what your body really needs. Because now your hunger and fullness signals are not all messed up, so there shouldn’t be any need to track calories.
Now you know, if you’re one of these people, that you’re like, well, what about the numbers? Like, I just need to know the numbers. Then go for it. You can help yourself figure out how much, you know, what the numbers say you should be eating every day, and then stick to that if you want to do that great, but you don’t have to. If you’re eating the right foods. You shouldn’t need to do that.
One of the big problems is we are a society who is attracted to hyper palatable foods. Hyper palatable foods are foods that have been engineered in a laboratory to be crave worthy, to be something that we cannot get enough of. You know, right on the can of Pringles, I believe it is. I don’t know. I don’t buy that stuff. It says, like, once you pop, you can’t stop, or there’s another potato chip or something that says, bet you can’t eat just one. They’re telling you on the label, hey, we’ve designed this so that you cannot stop eating it. It’s that good. And it’s true. You start eating Pringles. You can eat a whole sleeve of those things.
You know, I used to be able to do that. I used to love Pringles for road trips because I just put that can of whatever they’re called. I don’t, they’re not really potato chips. Is there even potatoes in there? I don’t know. Probably put that thing between your legs while you’re driving, and just, you’re just good to go. You just keep dipping in there, and, you know, just eating all the Pringles out of the tube, whatever. So those foods are very hyper palatable. They’re highly processed, they’re full of carbohydrates and sugars, and they taste amazing, and they make you crave more of those foods.
So when you’re eating a lot of that stuff, eating less or eating the right amount of food is going to be very difficult for you. Instead, stick with those nutrient dense, satiating foods that have good sources of protein and fat. Protein is going to be one of the best things you can do for yourself, eat more protein. Just make that one change, starting this week, just start eating more protein, eggs, meat, fish, dairy. You’re going to be less hungry. You’re going to be more satisfied when you do eat, you’re getting nutrient dense foods that your body actually needs. There shouldn’t be any need to drop calories once you start eating more protein and good sources of fat too. Once you start eating good sources of fat and enough protein, you’re going to start to feel so much better.
So this idea that we have to count calories in order to be healthy human beings in order to lose weight, it’s flawed. I just don’t think it’s sustainable. You know? I don’t think it really works. If it worked so well, there would be no problems with people gaining weight or struggling to lose weight. So I think instead, a better idea is to focus on eating whole foods. Stay away from highly processed foods. I mean, if you stay away from foods in a package, for the most part, I think you’re going to be in a much better place.
And I don’t mean like, oh, it’s a piece of cheese and it’s, you know, got, you know, what, clear plastic over it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about those foods with all the ingredients in them, you know, highly processed, highly palatable foods. Stay away from that stuff. Focus on more fat and proteins, you’re going to feel much better. It really is the key to losing weight and being able to keep it off long term.
And this is what I work on with my clients. We figure out what foods work for them, you know. And a lot of it is this, from these different categories I’m talking about here, you know, eggs, meat, fish, dairy, that kind of thing. And it’s just so, so much easier to do that and definitely more sustainable.
Okay, so that’s your work for this week. Get out there and start eating more protein. Start eating real food. Start eating more satiating, more nutrient dense foods. Stay away from these hyper palatable, packaged processed foods, and don’t count your calories, just stop doing that. You know? It just really doesn’t work. It’s not sustainable. It’s not something that I think you’re going to be able to do long term.
Okay, that’s all I got for you today. I know you got this. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you in the next one.
There is so much contradictory advice out there when it comes to losing weight. It’s really hard to know what’s right and what’s just BS. I’ve always taken the approach that you need to ignore …
Continue Reading about 242. Top 10 Weight Loss Tips for Runners →
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 242, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today my top 10 weight loss tips for runners. So there is so much contradictory advice out there when it comes to losing weight, it’s really hard to know what’s right and what’s just BS. And I’ve always taken the approach that you actually need to ignore most of the info that’s spewed out there on the internet and social media, and just figure out what works best for you. We’re all different. There’s simply not one approach that’s going to work perfectly for everybody. So with that principle in mind, for this episode of the podcast, I want to share with you my top 10 weight loss tips for runners, and these tips should work for most of you, not all of you. So as always, try some things and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. Cool.
But first, if you want to get leaner, stronger, run faster, run longer, you need to make some changes. Making change is hard, but listen, if you don’t change, nothing changes. Nothing changes, if nothing changes, I think we all understand that the real secret, though, is to make changes and make them consistently. And that’s where coaching helps you, because making change and doing things new things consistently is hard. That part is hard. So if you have a coach there, helping you, keeping you on track, showing you the path, showing you what to do, holding your hand, walking you through the whole process. It makes making change and making change consistent, much, much easier. Getting a coach was one of the best things I have ever done for myself. This is why I’m a coach today, because I got so much out of my coaching. It was such a powerful life changing experience for me that I decided to devote my life to helping other people by coaching them through their achieving their goals. You know, whether it’s losing weight or improving their health, improving their strength, getting faster, whatever it is. So if you’re ready to start making some change and you want help making those changes stick, making them consistent. Reach out to me. Just go to my website, running, leancoaching.com, click on work with me, and I’ll show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself yet.
Cool. Okay, so today, Top 10 Weight Loss Tips for Runners. So I wanted to put together a list of what I believe are some of the best changes that you can make as a runner, if you are interested in losing weight, and if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a runner, and you’re probably interested in losing some weight. And there’s a lot of misinformation out there, a lot of contradicting information out there. And you might be just sitting there, like, what do I do with all of this? And you know, there’s a lot of polarizing content out there, you know, that kind of divides people.
Oh, you have to eat nothing but plants. And this other group says you have to eat nothing but meat, and you can never deviate. And they will tell you. Each of those people will tell you that their way is the right way and the only healthy way. And is that true? Because they can’t both be right. So I take a lot of the advice that’s spewed out there with a grain of salt, and I want you to do the same thing. I want you to kind of make up your own mind when it comes to what works best for you, because only you will know what works best for you, but with that principle in mind, with the principle of like, individuality and like, knowing that there is no one size fits all. When it comes to this stuff, I wanted to put together what I thought was a pretty decent list of principles that tips really, that I think will work for most people, you know. And if you’re somebody that’s been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know a lot of the principles that I teach when it comes to, you know, how many carbs you should be eating, and how often you should be eating, and some things like that.
But I wanted to put together a kind of a bullet list of action items that you can start kind of working through. So try some of these things. You don’t have to try them all, but you can try some of these and see if they have a positive effect on you, if they work, great, if they don’t, don’t do it. You know, it’s there. I’m not telling you that all of these are going to work perfectly for everybody, but in my years and years of coaching hundreds and hundreds of runners, I’ve decided that there are some principles that seem to apply to most people. So that’s the kind of thing I’m sharing with you today. So these are my top 10 weight loss tips for runners. Again, you’ve got to figure out what works for you, but try some of these.
So number one is going to be to not cut calories. Don’t just cut your calories. This is the typical weight loss advice that’s out there. If you want to lose weight, you got to cut your calories. And the reason I’m saying don’t do this is because it doesn’t really work, not long term. The reason most people tell you to cut calories to lose weight is because it is a very effective way in the short term of losing weight, you can lose weight pretty quickly if you cut your calories. So if you’re going from eating 2000 calories a day and you drop down to like 800 calories a day, I’m gonna tell you right now, you’re going to lose weight.
The problem, though, is that if you keep this up, your metabolism will slow down. So instead of burning 2000 calories a day, now you’re only burning 800 calories a day. Now you got to, like, cut your calories back even more if you want to continue to lose weight. And you can see where this is going, like, there’s a point where you’re just going to start gaining weight again, so you don’t want to slow your metabolism down. Right? So that’s one problem. Another problem is that, yes, it is one of the most effective short term ways of losing weight. It’s also the least effective method of keeping weight off long term of all the diets out there, and they’ve done massive studies on all these different diets, and they have shown that, yes, cutting calories is a great way to lose weight short term, but it’s also the most problematic, like people gain the most weight back the fastest when they do nothing but cut calories. So it’s not a very viable long term solution, because you can’t keep your body in a calorie deficit forever. If you do, you’re going to risk that slower metabolism. And it’s just, it’s, it’s a vicious cycle to get into.
The other reason why I don’t want you to cut your calories is because it’s not really recommended for runners. If you’re somebody that’s working out and running consistently, 3, 4, 5, 6 days a week, you need energy. You need the calories you need to recover from your workouts. You need the energy to perform properly in your workouts. And if you are not giving your body what it really needs, and you’re kind of starving yourself like you’re just trying to drop the calories so you can lose a bunch of weight, you’re going to suffer from a running standpoint.
So we don’t want to cut calories, so just don’t do it. It’s very, it’s not recommended, and it’s, actually, it’s very bad in the long term, like it just does not work long term, and it’s just not good. It’s not going to help you improve your running. Okay?
So instead, number two is to adopt a diet that just keeps your blood sugar levels normalized, right? So we want stable blood sugar, because when you have stable blood sugar, that means you also have stable insulin levels. Insulin is the hormone that lowers your blood sugar. And if you eat a bunch of sugar, high-carbohydrate meal, your blood sugar goes way up and so does insulin. Insulin goes way up and it stays up until it brings your blood sugar back down. Every time insulin is present, though, your body is storing fat, not burning fat. If you want to keep your body in fat burning mode, then you want to keep your insulin levels low. So we want to keep our blood sugar chill. We just want it to be low and we want it to be chill throughout the day. We don’t want to have these big spikes and crashes in our blood sugar.
Because when you have spikes in blood sugar, you feel good because you’re energized, but then you come down and your blood sugar goes below baseline. That’s when people say, Oh, my blood sugar is low because they’re, they’re going so high, they’re, they’re raising their blood sugar so high, so much insulin is being produced to push that blood sugar back down, that the blood sugar actually gets too low, and then you’ve got to eat some sugar or something like that, just to feel normal. Again. Okay, this is a bad life cycle to be in right here. Okay, so we want to keep your body in fat burning mode. That means keep the blood sugar low, keep the insulin levels low. We don’t want to keep our body in fat storing mode. That’s high blood sugar, high insulin levels.
Okay, also, when you adopt a diet that keeps your blood sugar low, it means you’re going to be less hungry throughout the day, and you’re going to have fewer cravings, because high blood sugar means you’re putting your body into an unnatural state of being more hungry. You also produce more ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, and you suppress the production of leptin, which is your fullness receptor. It’s a fullness hormone. So more ghrelin, more hungry, less leptin, you know, less full. Okay, and so you’re going to have cravings like crazy. You’re going to be hungry all the time. So high blood sugar means that you’re just going to be more hungry. You’re going to be more hungry, you’re going to be eating more food, you’re going to be craving more sugar and more carbs, and it’s just, again, the vicious cycle to get into.
So instead, adopt a diet that just keeps the blood sugar low, and you’re going to see a lot of this just take care of itself, which leads me to number three, which is to get fat adapted. This is just training your body to burn more body fat. We all have tons of body fat stored on our bodies. Even the leanest people out there who maybe have 3% or 8% body fat or something like that, you have plenty of body fat on you to sustain you for weeks without food. Burning fat is the natural state for us as human beings. We are really good fat burners. We’ve just gotten away from that.
You know, fat burning is like we eat some food, some of the energy that we eat, especially when we eat the sugar and carbohydrates, some of that energy gets stored, gets used, and then some of it gets stored as body fat. So we use some of it in our muscles. We use some of it when we are in activity, or just like keeping our body running throughout the day. We use some of that energy from food. Some of that energy gets stored as fat. The problem is that we should be tapping into that stored body fat as a fuel source later, but we’re not. We’re just keep adding more wood to the wood pile, so to speak. So we just keep piling on more fat. We’re not burning the fat. So we want to get into the fat burning state. We want to get our bodies fat adapted.
Fat Burning means you’re going to lose the weight. Like if you want to lose weight, you got to burn the fat, right? So if we want to get fat adapted, we want to train our body to burn more fat. Diet has a lot to do with that. Also, when you’re burning more fat, it helps to improve your running. You improve your endurance. You have this natural fuel that’s on your body all the time, and you don’t have the need for as much fuel. From a running standpoint, you can run a half marathon, a marathon, with very little fuel, as opposed to people who are carb adapted, who need to eat tons of carbs just to keep themselves going for the run. So it helps you to lose weight. It helps to improve your running. Why wouldn’t you want to get fat adapted? Okay, that’s number three.
Number four is to time your carbs around your workouts. So this is where this isn’t about no carbs. This isn’t about never eating any sugar or any carbohydrates ever again in your life. We eat some carbs, right? We just want to time them around our workouts. So you might go a few days where you’re pretty low carb throughout the week, and then you have a long run on a Saturday. So the night before, you might increase your carb intake. The morning of a long run, you might increase your carb intake during that long run. You’re probably gonna take in some carbs, and this isn’t a ton. I’m not talking about getting 300-500 grams of carbs a day or something like that, but we want to be mindful that just because we’re doing a low carb thing doesn’t mean we don’t ever eat carbs. We do. We use carbs for fuel.
Runners will benefit greatly from having two sources of fuel, from being really good fat burners and from adding some carbohydrate into the mix. You want to earn your carbs. So you earn your carbs by using, you know, having a workout where you’re going to be using them as fuel, and then you burn the carbs, so you’re actually going to metabolize those carbohydrates during a long run or a hard workout or something like that. So that you’re, you’re not just storing a bunch of that carb energy as fat, right? So you earn your carbs by requiring them for fuel, and you metabolize them. You burn them pretty quickly during activity. So you don’t have this huge surplus of carb energy that you’re storing as fat. Cool. So earn your carbs and burn your carbs. Time your carbs around your workouts.
Number five, you’ve got to prioritize protein. Talk about this before on the podcast here. Listen. Running is a catabolic activity. Catabolic activities are ones that break down muscle tissue. So what we want to do is we have to. To offset that, we want to build lean muscle. We want to maintain and build muscle. And a lot of people will tell you again, this is why you shouldn’t run, why you’re trying to lose weight. Because if you’re just cutting calories, a lot of the weight that you lose is going to be muscle tissue, and then running is just going to make that worse. But if you’re doing this the right way, you’re not cutting your calories, you’re adding more protein into your diet. You will actually build lean muscle through this process.
More protein also means that you’re going to feel more full when you eat. You know, protein has a much higher satiety point than carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are not satisfying, like you can really overeat carbohydrates, and then they make you more hungry throughout the day. When you’re eating more protein and good quality fats too, you’re just less hungry throughout the day, and you’re going to feel more full when you eat, and you’re going to recover better from your workouts, because you’re getting, you’re providing your muscles with what they need to recover properly from your hard runs, long runs, hard workouts. So you have to make protein the priority at every meal, and make sure that you’re getting your right amount of protein every day.
And then that leads me to number six, which is you also have to add strength training into your weekly training schedule. So whatever you’re training for, if you’re ,you know, running a 5k or an ultra marathon, or anything in between, you have to make sure, even if you’re not a runner at all, you have to make sure that you are adding some sort of consistent strength training to your regimen on a weekly basis, you should be doing some strength training two or three times a week. At least twice a week would be the bare minimum that you should be doing some kind of strength training.
You have to include strength training into your training schedule, because you want to be gaining muscle, you want to be building lean muscle, not getting big. We’re not talking about becoming a huge bodybuilder. That’s very difficult to do if you’re an endurance athlete, but we want you to be stronger, because when you’re stronger, this means you’re going to offset that catabolic nature of running, so you’re going to not lose muscle through this process. And a lot of times, you can become anabolic, which means you’re building muscle. You get stronger. This means you’re going to have a faster metabolism. You’re going to burn more fat, you’re going to lose more weight.
When you’re stronger, you are at less risk of injury. You improve your endurance when you’re stronger, because stronger muscles take longer to fatigue than weak muscles, you become a faster runner. Then some other side effects that just happen to come along with regular strength training is less stress. You’re in a better mood, you’re just happier. You’re nicer to be around, you sleep better and you live longer. So strength training absolutely has to be something that you add into your weekly training schedule. If you’re not doing it, make sure you start doing it today.
Number seven is going to be to eat less often, not eat less, but eat less often. And this is one of those things where you may have been told, Oh, you need to eat six times a day to keep your metabolism burning hot. You know, this is just gym bro science. You know, there’s really no science behind this, the human body. If you look at our digestive systems, they’re really designed to work two or three times a day at the max, so eating six or eight times a day is just not recommended. Again, every time you eat some food, you’re going to raise your blood sugar, you’re going to raise insulin, and you’re going to be kind of storing some fat. So the fewer times a day you’re eating actually is better for you. And this doesn’t mean you eat, you know, one tiny little meal per day or something like that. We want to make sure you’re getting enough calories and enough protein throughout the day. So eat two, three times a day, twice, seems to be what a lot of people love doing, and it just feels really good, and you’re getting what you need at those two meals.
But this is a great way to keep your body burning fat. You want to space out your meals so that in between meals, your body is getting into that fat burning state. And if you want to lose weight, you know this is a great way of helping to enhance that. And you’ll get fat adapted faster. You’ll be burning more fat. You’ll get all the energy you need. You’ll get all the calories you need. You don’t need to worry about that.
But another great side effect of eating less often is that it helps you start to maintain, get back control of your eating, and maintain control of your eating instead of being an automatic eater where you just, every time you think about food, or you get stressed, or you get bored, you go and you grab something from the pantry. You know you’re just munching on stuff all day long. You become a more mindful eater. So you learn how to not snack throughout the day. You learn how to skip breakfast. You learn how to control your eating to where you’re eating a couple of times a day. It makes you a much more evolved eater, and not just a reactive eater. Okay, so this is really important, so eat less often. That’s number seven.
Number eight. This one might surprise you. Number eight is to not be too restrictive. Don’t be too restrictive with your diet. Allow yourself the indulgence every now and then. Listen, whatever your diet is, the formula that works for you, it has to be sustainable for you. And what I have found over many years of coaching people is that if it’s too restrictive, it’s not going to be sustainable long term for most people.
Now we do some things where we might cut the carbs pretty low for the first 30 days or something, and then we can, like, start adding in some of these little treat meals, or whatever you want to call them, treats, cheat meals, exceptions to the plan, whatever you want to call them. But if you want to stay in the game long term, you have to have this little release valve every now and then, from my experience, and I need this too. It works for me every now and then I’m like, you know, I’m really craving pizza. I need to eat some pizza, and I’ll just go eat some pizza. It’s something I do a couple times a year. Big whoop. It doesn’t throw me off. It might set me back a day or two, but then I’m right back on my plan.
I like the 90/10 approach instead of 80/20. 80/20 is a little too loosey goosey, in my opinion. But if you try the 90/10 approach, this equals maybe one meal a week that you can have an exception to your plan, right? So there’s too many people out there, too many diets that are promoting that you never, ever deviate from the plan. And this just is not something that is sustainable for most people. And I’ve worked with hundreds of people who’ve had much more success long term when they have the cheat meal every now and then, you have to learn how to do it properly. You can’t just go crazy every weekend and just binge out on everything. I’ve tried that approach, that does not work, but you definitely need to, like work on this, and it’s something you have to sort of practice and ease your way into. But being too restrictive too long is is definitely not something that’s going to work long term. Okay, that was number eight.
Number nine. Keep on running like you just have to keep up with the running. Lots of dietitians, lots of weight loss coaches out there tell you don’t run if you’re trying to lose weight. They tell you not to run because they don’t want to restrict calories, because that’s going to have a negative impact on running, which we’re not doing that. We’re not restricting calories, so we don’t need to worry about that.
And a lot of these people will tell you, well, you should only be focusing on one thing at a time. And, you know, I kind of get where they’re coming from, instead of, like, focusing on running and lifting weights, and, you know, your diet, they want you to just focus on one thing. Just focus on your diet, and don’t do anything else. But listen. I know from experience that you listening to this podcast can absolutely focus on more than one thing at a time. You’re a runner, so you like, you love running. You love strength training. You love working on your nutrition. You love cross training. This is how you live your life every single day.
Why now should I tell you that you should only be doing one thing at a time, right? Consistent running, also, it’s going to help you to burn more fat, which is going to equal more weight loss. But also, don’t forget, with all the running that you’re doing, don’t forget your speed work, long, slow, easy running is great, but be sure to add in some moderate to high intensity intervals, like sprint repeats and tempo runs, to help improve your cardiovascular system, to help improve your heart rate, we want lower heart rate to have a higher VO2 Max, improved lactate clearing, not to mention you get faster when you’re doing the speed work.
Also, little side note here, faster running makes your slow, easy runs feel very, very easy. So if you want running to just feel easier in general, make sure you’re doing the speed work every week. All right, okay.
And number 10, and maybe the most important tip I have for you today is don’t be in a hurry. Weight loss takes time. How much time? Who knows? It’s different for everyone. So just commit to the process. Don’t compare yourself to where you are today to where somebody else is. Just compare yourself to where you were yesterday and just always be trying to improve. Don’t set arbitrary weight loss goals, especially with dates like, oh, I need to lose 40 pounds in four months. There’s just too many factors involved with something like this, and who knows how fast your body’s going to respond to these changes.
Instead, commit to the process of change. Do what you need to do today to stay on track. Don’t worry about tomorrow until tomorrow. This has to be a lifestyle change if you want it to last. People that lose weight fast with like liposuction or weight loss surgery, they don’t learn how to maintain it, because they’re not learning what works for them. They’re not learning new habits and new behaviors. You have to learn how to make this work for you long term, and you know what, that takes time.
You need to learn how to shop differently, how to handle vacations and holidays, how to handle family functions, dinners out with friends, how to handle stressful situations in your life. There’s always going to be some kind of stressful situations in your life. You need to learn how to get through those without totally going off plan. So every day, just make a commitment to being the best you that you can be from now until forever.
So that’s the good news, and the bad news is that this doesn’t change. You just keep working on this. You just keep going. There’s no finish line. There’s no destination you’re trying to get to. This is who you are. This is how you live your life from here on out, right? It’s good news and bad news because, you know, it’s bad news because there is no finish line. You’re just going to continue doing this. But it’s good news because this is how you get to live your life now. This is how you approach everything. You’re just a, you’re a different person now, and you’re a healthy eater, and you commit to your workouts, and this is just who you are now.
Actually, it makes going through your life much easier. You don’t have to think about it anymore. You don’t have to question these decisions you’re making. You’re just gonna do it. You’re just gonna show up for yourself every day. So commit to the process. Don’t ever, ever, ever quit. Don’t give up on yourself. Okay, if you don’t give up on yourself, eventually you will reach your weight loss goal, but you just can’t take your head out of the game. You have to keep your head in the game.
Okay, cool. Those are my top 10 tips, my top 10 weight loss tips for runners. That’s all I got for you today. I know you got this. I love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
