Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
I talk a lot about what it takes to become a lean runner, and it involves making changes physically, mentally, and emotionally. You need to learn how to get your mind right, how to change your …
Continue Reading about 23. Eating Fat Does Not Make You Fat →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 23 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And as always, I’m your host, Master Life Coach and a weight loss coach for runners. And today, I have an interesting topic to talk about with you guys today. The title of this is eating fat does not make you fat.
And I know right now, some of you are just like, wait, what, and you might have an issue with this, but trust me that by the time we’re done here today, hopefully I will give you some things to think about, if not, maybe change some perceptions and some, some misconceptions that we have, about what fat is, how it affects us what eating it does to us what it doesn’t do to us.
You know, I talk a lot about lean running. And my focus now is like I really want to help runners become, you know, these lean running machines. And there’s a lot of factors that go into, you know, changing your body, not just, you know, physically but also, you know, changing yourself mentally, and emotionally.
So there’s like physical, mental and emotional aspects that go into becoming a lean running machine. All three are important, you know, you need to get your mind, right, you need to change your thinking, you need to be aware of your thinking, you need to be aware of how you might have some old mental programs running in your mind some things that you have just been habitually believing, and thinking over and over again, for your whole life, like, we just want to be aware of those things, okay.
Maybe some of that stuff is serving you, maybe it’s not. The things that aren’t serving you, we want to try to get some awareness around in physics. So that’s the mental aspect. And there’s the emotional aspect, you know, we’re so keen to want to just push our emotions away and not feel them.
And when we do that, we want to just do something else instead, like eat, or drink, or do a drug or something like that. So instead of feeling our emotions, we do other things, because we just want to feel better right now. So we want to learn how to process our emotions.
And then there’s the physical aspect of this, of becoming lean. And that’s what’s actually happening in your body. So you have to address all of these things, you have to address what’s going in your mind, what’s going in, what’s going on with your emotions, and then what’s happening in your body.
And so today, we’re gonna talk about one thing that I think is very key for you to wrap your head around. And that’s the idea that eating fat makes you fat. This is a myth. It’s actually not true and never has been true. And I’m going to talk about what it means to become a fat-adapted runner, and when eating fat, how it can actually help you. Before I get into that, I wanted to share something with you guys. I just created a Facebook group that I want to invite you to be a part of, it’s the Running Lean community on Facebook. And I created this as a way of extending this conversation that we’re having here on the podcast.
You know, I feel like a lot of times, I’m just talking into this microphone. And I hope it’s resonating with people. But it’s hard to get that feedback. So I wanted to create a place where we could continue the conversation where you could ask questions, and learn more, we could take a deeper dive into these topics.
So I created this Facebook community called the Running Lean community. It goes hand in hand with the podcast, if you listen to this podcast, you really should join this Facebook group, you really have to be a part of that too, because it really extends the conversation and enhance it.
We’re going to do Q&A’s in there. We’re gonna have awesome discussions and it’s a place where you can get support. It’s positive, it’s safe, it’s informative, it’s totally free. It’s just a place where I want people to come together to continue this conversation about what it means to be a lean runner because there’s so much that goes into this.
And I can only talk about so much here on the podcast. And again, this is kind of a one sided conversation, I want to, I want to make this more of a two sided conversation. So please join the Running Lean community on Facebook, to find it, just go to facebook.com/groups/runninglean. That’s one way. Another way is just search Facebook for Running Lean community. Or you could go to this podcast episode. So that’s therunningmindpodcast.com/23. And I’ll have a link on that page.
So all kinds of ways of finding it. But I want to see you in the group. You know, welcome, you will say hi, and we’ll start the conversation or keep the conversation going. So that’s just something I wanted to share with you guys. Okay, cool.
So let’s get into this topic that may be a little controversial. Eating fat makes you fat, right? I mean, this is, this is what we’ve been told for so long, right? And the truth is that it’s just not true. It is not true. So where this comes from, though, so part of the history of this is that, you know, they they did some studies back in, you know, early part of the 20th century, one of these studies that kind of, they were trying to kind of prove some sort of correlation between cholesterol, and fat and, and heart disease.
And so they did this study back in like 1913 on rabbits, and they fed them a bunch of cholesterol, a bunch of animal fat, and then they had terrible diseases and heart disease or whatever. Here’s the thing, though, rabbits do not eat meat. They’re not designed to eat meat, they’re herbivores. But this is one of the studies that was like, touted as being like proof, quote, unquote, proof that eating fat, you know, leads to heart disease.
And it’s one of those things. It’s like, once people started to just hear this, they were like, oh, yeah, of course, fat makes you fat. I mean, it makes sense, right? It’s one of those words, “fat”. That’s just like, oh, of course, you know, you don’t even question it. We don’t question it anymore. This is crazy.
Another study that was done was a study that was done in like 1970. And that was by Ancel Keys. Now this guy, he did this study where he went and, and found a bunch of countries and studied people and study their diets and came to the conclusion that, you know, eating a diet high in saturated fat, meaning like animal fat, basically, will lead to disease, you know, especially like heart disease and stroke.
The problem with that study, though, and there’s all there’s all kinds of problems with this is that it’s called The Seven Country Study, and you can look this up. But it’s been refuted since then. Because what he did was he just kind of hand picked the countries that kind of supported his ideas.
He actually did a study that included 22 countries, but he called it the Seven Countries Study, because those are the ones that just supported his ideas. All the other ones were ignored. Crazy. But there were some other studies done earlier in the 20th century, like back in the early 1900s.
They did this study on the Canadian Inuit Eskimos up in the Arctic. Now, these people eat nothing but caribou and salmon. That was like their entire diet. They didn’t have they don’t have vegetables to eat, okay, so they eat vegetables. And then when the winter came, and the caribou and the salmon were not available, they basically ate eggs.
So like, almost 80% of their diet came from animal fat, okay. And the other thing to consider with these people is that they lived in darkness half the year. So, they didn’t like go out and exercise. They weren’t like, you know, working out at the gym, or anything like that. Most of the time, they were like sedentary, you know, because it was cold and they didn’t want to go outside.
Whatever they had to do in order to survive. They would stay in there, you know, igloos and stuff. The thing is, these people have no heart disease, no obesity, and they lived like 200 years old. Like there’s no there’s no evidence of, you know, heart disease, stroke or obesity, obesity with these people.
So that was back in the early 1900s. And then later on, in the 60s, they did a similar study of the Maasai people in Kenya. These people ate nothing but meat, blood and milk, which I know, it sounds disgusting. The blood part anyway. I can’t wrap my head around that one. But anyway, they almost ate entirely animal fat like that was their whole diet. Animal fat and full fat milk and animal blood, right really fatty meats. Their idea around fruits and vegetables was that that was only for cows to eat. Like it was not something that was fit for humans to eat fruits and vegetables. Crazy, right?
Again, these people had no heart disease, no cancer, no diabetes. Now, one thing you might say about these people is a lot of them are shepherds. And they would like walk for miles a day. True. But then as they got older, they didn’t do that they were sedentary, they would just sit around all day. And still, they had like super low blood pressure. They didn’t have any of the kind of cancer and diabetes and heart disease that we see here in the West.
In 1955, something interesting happened. So the president at the time, Eisenhower, had a heart attack. And his doctors came out. And were basically saying like, oh, you know, America, here’s what you need to do. And so they gave this advice to Americans: stop smoking, reduce stress, and cut down on saturated fat and cholesterol.
So this idea of like, you know, don’t eat fat became so prevalent after the Eisenhower heart attack, that people were just like, oh my gosh, you know, we got to stop eating fat. Despite the fact there were all these other studies that had been done that totally contradicted this. So once this idea got out there, though, in the American minds, it was really, really hard to like you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle basically.
And then, you know, flash forward a couple decades in the 70s, and the USDA, dietary guidelines for Americans came out. And again, they suggested a low fat diet, high carb, you know, the whole food pyramid and all that. And then since then, like, everything has just been following that same advice.
Eat a diet, low in fat, fat is bad, especially saturated fat, you know, animal fat, that’s really bad. That’s the worst kind of fat. So don’t eat that stuff, eat lots of vegetables, lots of fruit, lots of grains, and exercise more. So we’ve been doing that. We’ve been following that advice since 1977. Or earlier than that, actually.
And what has happened here in the US, obesity rates have more than tripled. Heart disease is still the number one cause of death here in the United States. Strokes, diabetes, these are all dietary problems. And people are exercising more than ever too, I think there’s something like 30,000 running events each year in the United States, you know, like, we’re a country of people who work out all the time. And yet, there’s, there’s something really wrong here.
There’s something really wrong that that we’ve been told, we didn’t. And there’s this idea of like, just you know, eating fat makes you fat. And we’ve all just bought into it. And it is just not true, and it doesn’t work. And so what do we do at this point? You know, like, what are we supposed to do? When everybody’s telling us this, you know, low fat is the way to go. And it’s not working. It’s kind of crazy.
And anybody that steps out and says, you know, that’s not true. And kind of like what I’m doing right now, I’m saying this is like, not true. It’s a myth. And people get shot down, they get attacked, they get ridiculed, they get outcasted, you know, a lot of the scientists back in the early 70s, that were coming out and saying, like, no, the problem is not fat. It’s other things. It’s like highly refined carbs. It’s sugar. That’s the problem. Those people were like shunned from the scientific community because of this. And it’s crazy. It’s like, let’s just be scientists, you know, let’s look at the data. And the data says otherwise.
Okay, so now I’m not going to get into all the studies and all the data and stats and all this stuff. But I just want you to understand this one thing, and that is that for decades, we’ve been told that eating a low fat diet is the way for us to become healthy, and that we should be eating lots of grains, and lots of fruits and lots of vegetables and stop eating animal products and stop eating fat.
And what’s happened is heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. And early death has been the result of that. I don’t know about you, but I’m like, I’m done believing this, okay, I’m done with that belief. Now, for me, I’ve been plant-based for, like, almost 10 years now. And prior to that I was vegetarian, because I was really locked into this idea that eating more vegetables was healthier for you.
In fact, you know, and eating animal products was bad for you. And so I kept, you know, eating fewer animal products, you know, I switched to eating like, you know, a regular standard American diet. I didn’t have all kinds of meat and stuff like that, too, only eating like fish like salmon. And then I even stopped doing that, and then eventually just stopped eating all milk and cheese, and any kind of animal products whatsoever.
So I went from, you know, just kind of eating a regular standard American diet, to eating a plant based diet. And one of my experiences is that over the last 10 years, you know, at first I was feeling pretty good and was pretty healthy. But then that started to change for me. And I started gaining weight, and I really tried all kinds of things to figure out what was going on there.
And one of the things I had to do is just, like, start experimenting with, you know, other types of diets, you know, like, what about eating a diet high in fat? Like, what would that do? And I, you know, heard about these people that are keto and, and do like, the Paleo thing, and I’m like, yeah, but I don’t want to eat meat only, you know, any kind of animal products.
So what can I do instead? And I tried to do like the Keto thing as plant-based, and that was pretty stressful. Keto was pretty stressful, because like, they really limit the number of carbs you eat, you gotta eat, like, under 50 grams, and you’ve got to count everything. And I don’t know, I just for me, that’s a little too stressful.
But I tried some other things. And I’m gonna get into that in just a second, I’m going to talk a little bit more about my experience, after I go over a couple of things about fat because I wanted to just kind of stick to that. But I do want you to understand that I have done my own kind of experiments with this, and I’ve had some pretty amazing results. I’m going to share those with you shortly here.
I want to talk about, you know, when we talk about fat, what do we mean by that, you know, and what, what fats are good and what are bad, you know, and I’m gonna let you do some of this research on your own. And I’m gonna let you expand this, your breadth of knowledge on this subject on your own a little bit up, but I want to give you some information up front here. Okay, I want to share a few things with you.
So, first of all, let’s talk about the different types of fats. So there’s basically, you know, healthy fats and unhealthy fats. unhealthy fats are fats that are found in a lot of commercial products like vegetable oils, soybean oils, canola oil. These fats are not good. They’re found in a lot of things like salad dressings, you know, canola oil is one of those things.
It’s just not, it’s not good for you, they have a lot of there’s a lot of body color processing that goes into producing these fats, okay, so it’s like to get oil from corn requires a lot of processing. And they use chemicals and stuff like that. These kinds of fats are not good for you.
Okay, then there’s another kind of fat that’s really, really not good for you. And these are trans fats. So these are taking stuff like that vegetable oil, which is just liquid at room temperature. And making it so that it’s more hydrogenated so these are called hydrogenated oils, and or partially hydrogenated oils, like these are really bad for you.
These are like margarine, vegetable shortening. A lot of stuff that’s in packaged food and a lot of fast food uses these trans fats. These are really bad. This is like just basically poison. So just stay away from this stuff altogether.
And then there’s what we consider healthy fats. So these are things like olive oil, avocados, nuts, seeds, sunflower seed, oil, animal fat. It’s things like unprocessed cheeses, animal meats, eggs, whole milk, butter, coconut oil, these are all good, healthy fats, they actually help to reduce your cholesterol levels in your body. Whereas some of these other unhealthy fats kind of increase that.
And there’s reasons why that works. And I’m not going to get into that, because it’s like complicated scientific stuff, that’s probably boring. But here’s just the thing to understand is that the animal fats, the coconut oil, the butter, the whole milk, the eggs, the olive oil, the avocados, all good, you want to increase the number of those kinds of fats, and you want to decrease the vegetable oils, just like get that out of your diet, to stop, stop eating that stuff.
Stop taking on any kind of processed oil like that, especially the trans fats, that stuff is just totally toxic. And they did this study in 2010. So it was a very recent study. And they did it as a very large study so they did it with over 347,000 people in this study. And basically, they demonstrated that eating saturated fats, so the ones that I just talked about as being healthy fats, you know, the animal fats, eggs, milk, butter, coconut oil, that kind of stuff, that there was no increased risk of cardiovascular disease with any of those people.
In fact, they demonstrated that a diet moderately high in these kinds of saturated fats actually, is very protective against heart disease and stroke. Wow, that’s crazy, right? Dietary fat has been essential for our human survival, it is what allowed us to, you know, continue to survive as a species for millennia, we’ve always had a diet that was, you know, pretty high in saturated fats. But we’ve been urged by health officials for decades to avoid these things.
And as a result, you know, we’ve replaced this high fat with highly refined carbohydrates, and sugar. And when you do that, your body has to produce some kind of fat in order to survive. And so what it does is it turns those carbs into an unwanted type of fat, that kind of fat that makes you fat, that kind of fat gives you the beerbelly and the love handles and causes diabetes and stuff like that. Okay, so that’s just a little bit about, like, what kinds of fats we’re talking about here, and what you should be doing, versus what you should definitely stay away from.
Now, I want to go back to my personal experience, so I followed this plant-based diet for, you know, a decade and I even had like a vegan food blog, you know, I was like, really into it. When I get into something, by the way, I get into it. Like, I don’t just dabble in something like I do it like full on, bring it on, like I’m gonna go all in, I’m gonna see if this works or not.
And that was my experience with the whole plant-based diet thing. Like I went full on, and I was doing it for, like, a decade. And it worked. I mean, I was feeling good, you know, I had lots of energy. And I was running marathons and ultra marathons and stuff like that. But here’s the thing, I kept gaining weight.
And even though I was doing a lot of running, I was still like, just kind of maintaining my way but not really, I was always like, I was I never had a lot of energy I was sluggish running was hard. And I tried some of these things to try and lose the weight. So one of the things I was mentioning earlier was doing, like the Keto thing as a plant-based person, which is very challenging to get enough fat into your diet that way.
And, and I just, you know, I did it for what? It was about six months, I guess. And I just decided that it was too hard. And trying to like, count all these calories or count the macros and all this stuff was just too stressful. And so I just gave it up and said, yep, that doesn’t work.
And I went back to just eating tons of grains and tons of carbs and tons of sugar and just kept gaining more weight until I was like, probably about 30 pounds overweight and one of the things that happened is that I didn’t, I stopped doing like the ultra events and I stopped running quite as much.
So I’m still running like regularly. But like a normal person. Like, just like normal people run. I wasn’t necessarily training for a 100 miler or anything like that. And that’s when we really started to come back. And again, this is like I’m eating a plant-based diet, I’m eating all the grains, I’m eating all the fruits, all the veg, like, why is this happening? Why did I not have any energy? Why was I so sluggish all the time? Why wasn’t I sleeping?
Well, and I had to figure out the answer. And so one of the things I’ve done in the last few months here is that I stopped eating sugar, and I stopped eating refined grains, and I started eating more fat. Now, I will tell you, that stopping eating sugar and refined grains is challenging. There are challenges that go into that there’s physical challenges, because you go through some withdrawal, which really sucks ass, but you can get through it.
But then there’s like these emotional, mental and emotional issues that come up as well, because you have all these crazy urges and cravings. And as a life coach, I understand how the mind works. And as a mindset expert, I understand how the brain operates. And I know how to deal with that stuff.
So I’ve developed some tools and some processes for dealing with that part of it, which is huge, it really makes it so much easier to do this kind of thing. But when I stopped eating the sugar and refined grains, and I started eating more healthy fat, in fact, I actually switched and started eating meat again. I know it’s crazy.
It was a little weird at first I will tell you, you know, but I was like, you know, all the data supports that this is not bad. For me, it’s all the data supports that this is what we’ve evolved to eat. And so I’m going to go all in again, like when I do something I go all in. So I’m like, okay, I’m going to eat meat again, and see what happens.
You know, if worst case scenario, if it’s a total failure, I can just go back to being a vegetarian or vegan or whatever. And I switched and I started eating meat again. And I’ll tell you something very interesting happened. I started feeling better and a lot of this has to do with not eating sugar. So I’m going to make that very clear. It wasn’t like meat was the magic ingredient here. No, it was that I stopped eating sugar. That was the big thing.
But you know, in order to get the right kinds of fat, I wanted to include meat again. So I’ve been eating some, you know, fatty meat. And I started to become more fat-adapted. So I stopped using sugar as a source of energy for my body and I stopped or started using more fat, good healthy fat I eat, you know, butter, coconut oil, avocados, some avocado oil.
And I started eating some meat and eggs and things like that. And I’ve become fat-adapted, meaning that my body is no longer, you know, relying on sugar or glucose as a form of energy for my body. I’m using my own body fat for fuel, which is a much better source of fuel for our bodies anyway, I’m not hungry all the time, I have more consistent energy, I’m sleeping better, I’m running better. I have more mental clarity.
And then this is the most awesome part or I guess that’s all awesome. But I’ve also lost 30 pounds by following a high fat, low carb diet and getting my mind right and getting my emotions right. So how does this help you? Like how does following a low carb high fat diet help with running?
Well, first of all, you have to understand that when you are primarily burning glucose for fuel, so you’re like a sugar burner, you have a very limited amount of energy. Your body holds around 2000 calories of glucose at any given time. That’s why when you’re a marathon runner, you’ve got to keep ingesting all the gels, you got to keep the sugar in your system because that’s your only source of energy. And you only have about 2000 calories of that and you know that after running, you know a couple miles you know 10-15 miles that you’re going to burn through all that glucose and you need to like, re-up, okay?
When you burn fat when you’re a fat burner, you basically have unlimited energy. So your body can hold at any given time your body can hold over 100,000 calories of fat for fuel. So the way this works is that a pound of body fat contains around 3600 calories of fuel. Okay, so for me, I’m 5’11, I weigh 165 pounds right now, my BMI is like 23%.
So 23% of 165 is basically I have something like, you know, roughly 38 pounds of fat on my body, okay? Which when you say like, that sounds terrible, but anyway, it’s normal like this is in the normal range. But that equates to 136,000 calories of energy that I have on my body at 23% BMI. And that’s awesome because I don’t need gels to run anymore, I can just go run. And I’m fine.
You know, water, water is good. But I don’t need to, like constantly be fueling with sugar anymore, because I’ve trained my body to access my fat for fuel. The thing is, it’s harder to get to the fat for fuel. So you have to be able to use up all the glucose first. And that’s why when I said earlier, I have become fat-adapted. That’s what that means.
I’ve learned how to, you know, I’ve stopped eating sugar and having all that glucose in my system. So that’s not even available for fuel anymore. And so now my body’s like, what do we use for fuel? The next thing it wants to do, the first thing it wants to use as sugar because it’s so easy to get to. The next thing it looks to for fuel is your fat.
And when you can start using your own body fat for fuel, that’s when you become a fat burning machine. That’s when you start to lose weight. The only way you can lose weight is if you can burn fat. In order to get to the fat, you’ve got to stop eating the sugar. Okay, that’s so important to understand. Fat is great energy.
In fact, you get like nine calories per gram of fat, versus four calories per gram of sugar. So fat has actually more than twice as much. There’s like twice as much energy in a gram of fat than there is in sugar. So just understand that, you know, when you’re a fat burning machine, you lose weight, you have basically unlimited energy. And you have so much energy on board, you basically have an unlimited supply, you can basically run forever.
I know that there’s fat-adapted ultra runners out there who do, you know, 30 or 50 mile runs, and they eat no food. They don’t need any kind of fuel because they are just using their own body fat for fuel, which is totally cool. I think that is just so awesome.
So here’s what I want to do, I just want to summarize where we are here and leave you with this. So first of all, the data and the science and all the myths around like fat makes us fat. It’s just wrong. It always has been. The studies that were done were flawed. And we’ve just adopted this as the truth. And it’s just not true. It just doesn’t work the way that they say it does. Eating fat doesn’t make us fat.
You know, what makes us fat is eating sugar, and eating refined carbs, like stop eating that stuff. Start eating the good fats, the avocados, the nuts and the seeds and the animal products, butter, it’s all good for you. Coconut oil, eat more of that. Get fat-adapted.
When you get rid of the sugar, you can start using your own body fat for fuel, you will become a lean fat burning machine, you will watch yourself lose weight like magic, you’ll be able to run faster and further than you ever thought possible. It’s amazing.
And then I have two awesome resources I want you to check out. The first is a film so if you’re into like watching documentaries, and you want to watch one, it’s a really, really good documentary and you know I pulled some of the information I’m getting that I mentioned here in this podcast episode from these two resources.
So the film is called Fat: A Documentary, and you can find that on Amazon Prime. And then a book that I’m reading right now, which is just so amazing is called The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. And this is by Nina Teicholz. And she’s an investigative science journalist. So she’s got, she’s got no, you know, agenda here, she doesn’t work for any of the big food companies or anything like that. She’s just trying to, you know, give us the real info. And it’s very eye opening.
So those are two awesome resources I would suggest for you. Come join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, join the group. Let’s take a deep dive into this subject. I want to answer your questions. If you disagree with me, bring it on. Let’s talk about it. If you listen to the podcast, please join the group. I think it would be a really great adjunct to being a part of this podcast, okay.
You can just search Facebook for Running Lean community, you’ll find it. I hope you got something out of this today. It was fun doing a little bit of research for this and sharing some of my experiences with you. And I’m gonna continue to do that. You know, there’s, there’s a lot that goes into becoming a lean runner, and being fit and healthy.
And it’s not as simple as just like counting calories. It’s not as simple as running more. There’s more that goes into it. I’m going to share with you not only my experiences, but the things that I find on my journey. Okay, I hope you’re getting something out of this. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
This is the second episode of an eye-opening podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying every …
Continue Reading about 20. How to Become a Lean Running Machine Part 2 →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 20 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, Master Life Coach and weight loss coach. And today, I’ve got part two of my three part series on how to become a lean running machine.
This series is something that I’m very passionate about. This is something that is very near and dear to my heart, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort and energy trying to figure out how to lose weight as a runner, because I was really struggling with that. I put on about 25 or 30 pounds and was able to finally figure out how to lose the weight.
And it didn’t involve running a million miles, or restricting calories or anything like that. And so I’m sharing all this stuff with you here, okay. I’ve gotten back to my goal weight, you know, what I weigh now today, the same that I did when I was like in this heavy training for Ironman back in 2013. So it’s been like seven years, since I’ve been at this weight, I’ve just put on weight ever since then. But I finally got back there.
And it only took me a couple of months really to get there. So I’m going to share a bunch of that stuff with you here. My goal here, I just want to help you. I know there’s a lot of runners out there that kind of struggle with their weight. And it’s not something that we talk about, we don’t feel comfortable talking about that a lot.
It’s almost like a taboo thing to talk about in the running community. But I know there’s a lot of people that struggle with this. So I want to be an example of what’s possible. And I want to help you. So I hope you find some value from these episodes that I’m sharing here. I’m just sharing what I know. And I hope it brings you some kind of help. And I hope it gives you something that you can do, some action that you can take that you can put into place and that you can get some results from that.
Okay. So here’s something I wanted to share with you guys. I just got this awesome text from one of my weight loss clients. And he said that he’s lost 13 pounds so far. He has more energy than ever feels better than he has in a long time. And here’s a guy who’s a runner, who also has struggled with his weight for years. And he joined my program. And he’s now well on his way to his goal weight. And oh my gosh, it’s so amazing.
I love, love, love getting texts like this from clients, it makes me feel so good. This is why I do what I do. You know, I want to help people transform their lives, I want to help people change the way they think about their bodies and the way they think about themselves. I want people to love themselves more. I’ve learned how to do that. And I want to share that with as many people as possible.
But I know what it’s like to try to just run and run and run and not be able to lose the weight. And to go to the gym six days a week and restrict what I’m eating and feel terrible all the time and still not lose weight. Like I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. So this particular client has gotten some amazing results.
He’s well on his way and he keeps texting me all the time. Like, you know, I’m down another two pounds, I’m down another three pounds. And I just love it. I just give him big hearts and smiles and everything every time he texts that to me. So I learned what to eat, I learned how to manage my mind. I learned when to eat, learned how to stop using food as an escape from my life, I learned how to deal with all the cravings and hunger.
And I will teach you all of this stuff. And I have an upcoming masterclass that starts on Monday, June 1, and I will teach you how to do every single one of these things. I only take about 10 people through these classes. Okay. It’s an intimate class. And once it’s filled, I just closed the doors and we gotta wait till the next time.
So another couple of months before I do that again. But if you want to save your spot for this class, just go to innerfiretribe.com/overeating, and enroll now. I know for a fact that this is the solution to your weight loss struggles. I know for a fact that this is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program you will ever experience.
I walk you through everything step by step. I’m there for you. It’s a six week program. When you’re trying to lose weight and you’re changing a bunch of stuff. Those first six weeks are the hardest. But I got you through that. Okay. I will walk you through that and help you get through the challenging stuff so that you can have this success that you’re looking for listen, you deserve this, you are worth it. Go to Inner Fire, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. It’s easy to say and sign up today.
Okay, so today, like I said, this is part two of the three part series on how to become a lean running machine. And if you haven’t listened to the first episode yet, go back and do that. Now listen to part one. That was episode number 19. And to find any of these podcasts, you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/and, then the number 19. And, and that’ll take you right to that episode. So listen to that first, because it kind of lays the foundation for what I’m going to be talking about here. Talks about why losing weight is so hard. In fact, I’m going to recap that here.
So here’s what I talked about in that episode. Running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. It just doesn’t. Calories in calories out does not work. And eat more, run less, or I’m sorry, run more, eat less just does not work, which people just have been telling us for decades.
We just need to move our bodies more, move more and eat less and you’ll be fine. It does not work. And I explain why. But some of the reasons why are your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite when you exercise more, so you get hungrier, and you’re eating more, you end up eating more calories, than you can burn.
Also, progress is very, very slow when you take this approach, and it’s minimal at best. And then running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. Okay, you got hormonal hormonal imbalances going on, you’ve got mental cravings, you got emotional eating, and it just doesn’t address those things. Okay.
And then the calories in calories out, you know, everybody thinks this is the only way to lose weight and adjust does not work and never has is a myth, your body, the body will naturally work against this process to keep you from like dying to keep you from starving to death. So when you reduce calories, your body lowers its metabolism in response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism.
And you cannot run fast, run as many miles or reduce the amount of food you’re taking in order to burn off those calories. Right. So there’s some other things and some other reasons why that doesn’t work either. But basically, metabolism lowers when you limit the amount of calories you take in. And so it can only go so low, before your body starts to like to get into starvation mode. Okay.
So the first secret to understand the first thing you really have to understand is that running more and eating less just doesn’t work. Okay, and so I break that all down. And I talked about that in episode number 19, episode number one of this series, but the podcast episode number 19. Okay, cool.
So today, I am going to ask your permission to get a little sciency because I want to talk about hormones. And so I’m going to be talking about the three main hormones that are involved with weight gain, and why it’s really hard to lose weight and what we can do about that, okay.
But for a lot of us, we’ve thought that there must be something wrong with us because we keep gaining weight, even though we’re watching. We eat a good diet, and we don’t, we might be vegetarian or vegan, or paleo or something like that. And we exercise regularly. But we keep gaining weight, and we can’t seem to lose it.
And, and so we come to these conclusions like It must be me, I’m doing something wrong, I don’t have enough willpower. I’m not strong enough. This is just the way I am. I don’t have the self control other people have. Nothing ever works for me. Basically, there’s just something wrong with me. But here’s the truth, there is nothing wrong with you, my friend, at all.
It’s not your fault. And this is the thing I want you to understand here. And this is kind of the second secret I want to talk about to permanent weight loss is that it is not your fault. Your hormones, more than anything else are causing you to gain weight, your hormones are what are keeping you from losing weight. Okay.
If you want to lose weight, you have to be able to burn fat, you’ve got to become a fat burning machine right? And more than anything else your hormones are responsible for whether your body is in fat storage mode, or fat burning mode. And so if you want to get into fat burning mode, you’ve got to like make sure your hormones are regulated properly. Okay. So the three hormones we’re going to talk about today are going to be insulin, ghrelin, and leptin. And these all have to do with your body’s ability to become a fat burner or a fat store. We want to be fat burners, we don’t want to be fat storers. We’ve done enough of that so far in our lives. Okay?
So let’s talk about insulin first. Okay, this is the most important hormone when it comes to weight loss, insulin’s job, its main job is to lower your blood sugar. So anytime you eat any kind of food, and especially foods that are high in sugar, your body secretes, releases insulin to help keep that blood sugar low and keep things in balance, okay?
But here’s the thing. When insulin is high in your system, you are in fat storage mode. Because what insulin is doing is saying like, hey, we need to take this energy and put it somewhere, we need to store it. This sugar, let’s say, and so what we do is insulin stores it as fat for use later on, okay?
So when insulin is high, you’re in fat storage mode. The opposite is also true. When insulin is low in your system, you’re in fat burning mode, and you can start consuming your own body fat, which sounds disgusting, but you can start using your own body fat for fuel, okay? Until you get rid of the sugar that you’re burning in your system, you really can’t access that fat very well.
Okay, so we want to get rid of that, get out of that sugar burning mode, we want to get out of that fat storage mode, and we want to get into the fat burning mode, okay? And the way we do this is to lower our insulin, okay? When you have too much insulin in your system, you just cannot lose weight. Okay? Very, very important to understand. When you have too much insulin, you’re in fat storage mode, and you cannot lose weight.
So there’s two types of insulin disorders, basically, there’s type one and type two diabetes, okay? Type one diabetics, their bodies do not produce enough insulin. So it is very, very hard for them to actually put on any weight, because their insulin levels are so low. And so it’s kind of sad.
But back in the earlier 20th century, type one diabetics used to starve to death because they couldn’t get enough. Their bodies were not getting enough. They were not storing their fat, their bodies were basically just burning off everything that they took in, okay, so their insulin was way too low, until they figured out how to you know, inject insulin. And that was a life saving thing, which is awesome. But they didn’t have a way of storing fat. And so they were way too thin, and they ended up starving to death. It’s horrible, right?
Then there’s type two diabetes, and this is a disease of, of diet, basically. Okay, and type two diabetics produce way too much insulin. And type two diabetics are always in fat storage mode, so they can’t lose weight. And the treatment for type two diabetics, there’s a couple of different things, but one of the treatments, which is crazy, and I really don’t understand this, but the treatment for a lot of type two diabetics is to increase their insulin, so they give them more insulin, which produces the same fat storage mode.
And it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, which is the big problem anyway. And it just compounds the cycle, it creates a problem called insulin resistance. Too much insulin means your body is resistant to insulin’s effects, it just stops working. It’s like when you take too many antibiotics, you know, the bacteria becomes resistant to it, right? This is same thing here.
So what we want is we want our bodies to be sensitive to insulin, okay, so we want to lower the insulin so we can access our fat for fuel. And so this is the first thing that you just really have to understand. I know I’m talking about a lot of like, sciency stuff here. Okay? But what I want you to understand with this is that insulin’s job is to lower your blood sugar.
And when your insulin is high in your system, you’re in fat storage mode. When it’s low, you’re in fat burning mode, okay? So if you’re trying to lose weight, we want to get the insulin levels down.
Okay, the second hormone I want to talk about is ghrelin, and that’s the hunger hormone. So whenever you get hungry, there’s this hormone that gets released called ghrelin, and that kind of tells you that you’re hungry. It increases your appetite so that you’ll eat some food. And this works great. You know, we should be hungry at different times.
Like there’s every now and then we should be hungry, we should feel hungry. We should have an appetite and we want to eat some food. This way we don’t die. And all these hormones. They’ve been working this way for millennia. We’ve evolved for these hormones to work beautifully, okay?
Here’s the problem. When insulin is high in your system, ghrelin gets blocked, it does not turn off. And so it’s constantly producing these signals that are saying I’m hungry, I’m hungry, my it increases your appetite. And it’s saying feed me feed me. And you constantly feel like you need to eat more food, even though you don’t.
So high insulin levels blocks ghrelin, and so you feel hungry all the time and you end up just overeating. That’s a real problem, okay? So high insulin is kind of insidious, okay? It has one more insidious effect here, and that is how it affects the hormone leptin.
And leptin is the safety hormone. So leptin’s job is to tell your brain when you’re full, and so it sends signals that says, hey, I’m no longer hungry, stop eating, and you’ve probably experienced leptin. Everybody does, you know, but think about the last time you had like, Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re like, stuffed, and you’re like, I cannot eat another thing, you got a lot of leptin going on here, okay.
But here again, when insulin is high, leptin gets blocked, same way, and it cannot do its job. So you never really feel full. You end up overeating at every meal, you eat too much food. So high insulin levels block leptin, you constantly feel like you can still eat more food. It’s like after that Thanksgiving dinner when you’re stuffed in somebody’s like, hey, would you like another piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream? And you’re like, yes, of course I would.
That is a hormonal imbalance that’s going on there. Okay, because, you know, it’s really not good for you to do that. It’s not good for you to stuff yourself to the point of feeling miserable and terrible and sick to your stomach, okay? But because the hormones are all jacked up here, we do that to ourselves.
So high levels of insulin, cause this chain reaction with these other hormones that puts your body into the state of relentless over eating and relentless fat storage mode. So the big villain of this whole story here is insulin, okay? So too much insulin is the root cause of insidious weight gain. It’s the root cause of obesity. It’s the root cause of type two diabetes, okay? Too much insulin is bad.
So what causes insulin levels to get so high? So anytime we eat food, that food that we eat, no matter what it is, becomes, to some extent, sugar in our bloodstream, glucose. And so your body produces insulin to lower that glucose level to kind of balance things out to lower your blood sugar.
So anytime you eat any food, there’s an insulin effect. So insulin gets produced, okay, so whenever you eat, insulin goes up a little bit, okay? Which is totally normal. One of the problems though, is that when we eat all day long, our insulin is always elevated and never goes down. And so we kind of put our bodies into this consistent fat storage mode, like all day, every day, we never give our bodies the chance to regulate and for that, blood sugars actually come down, and the insulin levels go down and everything starts working the way it’s supposed to.
So eating any food causes insulin to go up, but eating all the time causes insulin to be always high. Okay? The other thing that causes insulin to be really high is certain types of foods. So sugar, and processed foods, especially highly refined carbohydrates, make insulin go way up. These are super concentrated foods, they have a huge glucose response in your body, which causes a huge insulin surge to try to bring your blood sugar down. This is a big problem.
When you’re constantly eating refined carbs and sugar, you are in way higher levels of glucose and way higher levels of insulin. Okay, and then the whole system is jacked up. So eating all the time, and eating processed foods with a lot of sugar will put your body in a state I have constantly elevated insulin, which puts your body in this state of constantly in this fat storage mode. Okay?
Which can lead to insulin resistance, which can lead to obesity, but it definitely causes weight gain, for sure. Okay. So the big question is, I know what you’re thinking, and I have an answer for you. The big question is, I didn’t get your insulin levels down. How do you get your hormones back in balance? How do you, you know, get that insulin production down, get it into the normal ranges?
So you can become that lean, mean fat burning machine. How do you get your body back into the fat burning mode and lose weight, because that’s what we’re talking about here. There’s two things you can do, you can change what you eat, and you can change when you eat.
So first, you need to change what you eat, you need to eliminate the foods that cause those huge insulin spikes. So mainly, you’re not going to like to hear this. But here’s the truth, you need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. What? I know it sounds terrible. But everything you eat causes insulin to rise somewhat.
Sugar and highly refined carbs create this intense glucose response in your body. And they cause the highest insulin spike. If you were to just cut out eating sugar and refined carbs, you are going to decrease your insulin like crazy and you will start losing weight, I guarantee it. It’s hard to do, I can teach you how to do it. It’s hard to do on your own for sure. But if you can do that, then you are going to be well on your way to getting your hormones in balance and starting to lose weight.
One thing that I would encourage you to do is to just eat whole food, eat the kind of food that we’ve been eating for millennia. Okay? If it comes with a, if your food if you’re buying food that has a nutrition label on it, it’s probably not what you want to eat. You want to eat the stuff that’s on the outside of the store, you know, the produce, the meat, the fish, the dairy, like, stick with this stuff on the outside, okay.
Try to get away from the sugar and refined carbs, you know, and then check those labels because there are so many different types of sugar that is put into food, especially food that says like low fat or whatever, like stay away from low fat stuff all together. But when you see food and it says like, you know, healthy, whatever, low fat look at the label and see what kinds of sugar are in there.
So a lot of times there’s not added sugar, or there’s added sugar, but it’s hidden. So it’ll be called like agave nectar, or brown rice syrup or maltodextrin. Like they have all these different names for sugar. I think there’s something like 78 different names for sugar. And they try to confuse us. So they actually put sugar in the ingredients like six times.
But it’s all these crazy names. And so you think like, oh, like sugar is like only the 12th ingredient on here, you know, and oh, this must be good for me. But then they’ve hidden sugar and all these other ways. So anyway, stay away from food with labels. How about that idea? Okay.
Really, the best thing you can do is just eat whole foods. Just eat like fruits, vegetables, meat, fish protein, dairy, poultry, like all the good stuff, right? There’s so many options out there for you. But the sugar and the refined carbs are poisoning us. And it’s making us overweight, it’s keeping us from losing weight. Okay, so if you want to lose weight, drop the sugar, drop the highly refined carbs. Okay. So that’s number one, that’s changing what you eat.
Number two, is you need to change when you eat. So basically eating less often. So you know, insulin levels go up every time you eat any kind of food. So one of the simplest things you can do to get your insulin levels down, is to just not eat anything at all. And here’s the thing, like, I know what you’re thinking like, dude, I’m not going to starve myself. And I’m not talking about that. Okay?
But um, one of the things you can do to extend the time where you don’t have food in your system to give your insulin levels a chance to go down, is to stop eating snacks altogether. Okay, let’s just start there. So there was this time back in the 50’s. Like and prior to that where there was no such thing as snacks. There was no snacking going on. People would eat their three meals a day. And that was fine.
But back then starting in the 50s, the big food companies were like, hey, we got to make more money, we got to sell more food. How do we get people to eat more food? And so they came up with this whole category called snacks, okay? And they could, you know, they would tell people like you need a little pick me up in mid morning. So have a mid morning snack. And feeling love lethargic after lunch, you know, have an afternoon snack.
And then after dinner, you need a little snack, you need some dessert, you know, so we’re basically eating three snacks and three meals a day, we’re eating six times a day, here in the United States. I mean, a lot of other countries don’t do that. But at least here I know, for a fact, most people eat five or six times a day.
So your body is always in this state of elevated insulin levels, okay, you’re always in this state of storing fat, we never give our bodies a chance to lower that insulin and so that we can, you know, become fat burners. Okay, so we always have food in our system. So one of the biggest things you can do, and the easiest thing you can do is to just don’t eat something in between meals, like that’s number one.
And it’s so easy, it doesn’t cost any money to do this. You don’t have to like add anything, you don’t have to figure anything out, you don’t have to decide what you’re going to do, like just don’t do anything, just don’t eat anything. All right.
Another thing you can do is extend the amount of time between meals. And I get into this in my program. And I talk about intermittent fasting. And I’m not going to talk about that right now. But one thing you can do is extend the amount of time between your dinner and your breakfast the next day.
So if you want to give your body just a little bit more of a chance to get those insulin levels down and get into fat burning mode, eat your dinner a little bit earlier, you know, maybe an hour earlier than you normally do, and eat your breakfast like an hour later than you normally do. Okay, so extend that what we call the fasting window, you’re you’re fasting every day anyway, unless you eat while you’re sleeping, which I do know somebody that does that, which is crazy.
But if you’re eating dinner at let’s say, you know, seven o’clock, usually, and then you eat breakfast at seven o’clock. So that’s like a 12 hour window of fasting, you know, maybe just extend it, you know, eat at 6pm dinner and then eat breakfast at eight o’clock. And so now you’ve got like a 14 hour window there.
So you’ve given your body two extra hours, and you won’t even notice that really, you know, have your coffee in the morning, whatever you need to do, but just don’t eat, just push that back a little bit, you will find that you will. These two things combined, like getting rid of the sugar and flour and then extending periods where you’re not eating will actually have a huge effect on your body’s ability to get into fat burning mode and lose weight.
These two ideas are gold, they are absolutely gold. What the idea here is we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on board, we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on our bodies, which is our own fat and we have tons and tons of this on our bodies we do we have pounds of it that we can use it.
And a pound of fat has way more calories than a pound of you know, whatever. Fat has more calories than glucose, okay, so like fat is a better fuel source for us than sugar is anyway. So get rid of their sugar, you know and start accessing your fat, you’re gonna have tons of energy, you’re gonna feel amazing, and you will start losing weight. It’s awesome. And this and what you do here with these couple of simple things I’m talking about is you get your hormones back in balance. Regulating your hormones is critical. If you want to lose weight, and if you want to start becoming a lean, mean, fat burning machine. Okay, got to get those hormones regulated.
So I know I talked about a lot of stuff here, a lot of science. Let me just recap really quickly. Okay. One of the main reasons why you can’t lose weight, your hormones are out of whack. increased insulin levels puts your body into fat storage mode. Elevated insulin also causes ghrelin and leptin to stop working properly. So you’re always hungry, you never feel full and you constantly overeat, which makes it even worse.
You can put even more weight on your body okay, so increased insulin causes your body to become a fat store. When you decrease insulin, when you lower the insulin levels in your body, you become a fat burner. It means that ghrelin and leptin start functioning properly. So your hormones are all in balance, you aren’t hungry all the time, you aren’t hangry all the time.
And when you do eat, you feel full and you feel more satisfied for longer. How do we reduce insulin, we change what we eat, and we change when we eat. So we eliminate the two main causes of insulin spikes, which is sugar and refined carbs, eat whole foods, and then we eat less often, we just eliminate the snacks, and maybe extend our fasting nightly fasting period by an hour or two.
So the second part of this three part series, the second secret to permanent weight loss is basically your hormones are causing you to gain weight. And it’s not your fault, it’s totally changeable, you can fix this easily. And I teach you exactly how to do all of this in my weight loss master class.
If you really want to become a lean running machine, you have to get your body out of the fat storage mode and into the fat burning mode. Reducing insulin is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to solve the physical aspect of permanent weight loss. So in the next episode, in part three of this series, I’m going to be covering the mental and emotional aspects of permanent weight loss.
So most diet programs, they tell you what to eat here, eat this food, do this and good luck, you should be fine. Just eat this stuff right here. They don’t tell you what to do when you have all these crazy cravings. When you have withdrawal from when you stop eating sugar, let’s say when you have these uncontrollable urges around food, when you have this unhealthy relationship with food, they don’t tell you what to do with all that.
They don’t tell you what to do when you start feeling your feelings, you just want to eat over it and you just say eff it and you eat all the food anyway, this is why most diets don’t work. This is why a lot of the approaches that most nutrition coaches take just doesn’t work either. Because they basically just tell you what to eat, they give you a nutrition plan to follow.
And my approach is very different. The way I work with my clients, it’s vastly more effective. It’s basically 100% effective, because I provide solutions for all of the factors involved, that contribute to being overweight and I provide solutions for all the things that are the root causes of weight gain, not just the physical stuff line, what to eat, but the mental and emotional factors as well.
Okay, so we’re going to talk about that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that you will not want to miss it. And then one more quick little reminder. The next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I only take a few people through the program at a time, each person gets a lot of my personal attention and they get personal coaching time with me. It’s actually like the probably the most affordable way of working with me as your weight loss coach. But you have to get signed up now because it will fill up innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to get signed up. Remember, if nothing changes, then nothing changes.
You know, if you want different results in your life, you have to take different actions. I know it feels uncomfortable, I know that it will be challenging for you. That’s why I created this six week program to basically walk you through all of the tough stuff step by step and help you to get to the other side where you become the person that you want to be.
Where you start to feel good about yourself again, where you start to love yourself again, where you feel good about your body and you feel you feel good about your mind. I want this for you. I’ve experienced this, I’ve learned how to do it. I’ve learned the formula.
So I’ve put together this system and this program that works wonders. I want you to be a part of this. So please join me. innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, sign up today. That’s all I got for you here. Can’t wait to see you on the next episode. And as always, I have lots and lots of love for each and every one of you. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
This is the first episode of an eye-opening new podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying …
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My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 19 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and a Master Life Coach and weight loss coach for runners. And today, I want to talk about how to become a lean running machine. And this is the first episode in a podcast series that I’m doing a three part series that I’m doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine.
This subject is near and dear to my heart because I’ve spent years and years trying to lose weight, I was very overweight for a while there. I lost some weight with running and exercise and diet, and then put a bunch of that weight back on. And then I’ve spent the last few years trying everything imaginable.
And nothing was working at all, until I finally figured out the secrets to losing weight and to becoming a lean runner to getting back to my natural weight and being able to stay there. And now I’m on this mission I want to help as many runners as possible to stop struggling and stop trying to run more to lose weight. I want to help you stop struggling and hit your goal weight too.
So over these next few episodes, these next three episodes, I’m sharing everything I know about becoming a lean running machine. That’s all right here on The Running Mind podcast. As a reminder, my next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I’m really, really excited about this. I’m really proud of this work that I’m doing and the people that have taken the class already have seen amazing results. Anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds lost in the first five or six weeks, up to 35 pounds loss in the first six weeks. It’s amazing.
You will learn how to control your cravings, manage your emotions, and stop the overeating for good because really the cause of being overweight is overeating. This is a one of a kind masterclass, it’s not a diet program. It’s not an exercise program. It’s a transformational coaching program and my job.
And what I do really well is to help you permanently change your relationship with food. Most diet plans, they just focus on the food, here’s what you do, do this. They don’t do anything to address all the mental and emotional factors, all the mental and emotional causes of overeating, overeating and weight gain.
So as a master life coach, this is my area of expertise and I got you covered here for sure. I will help you go from feeling exhausted out of control and hating how you look in the mirror to feeling full of energy in control. And loving how you look feeling confident about your new body and your new mind. You’re going to completely change how you think and feel about food and about yourself.
It’s a six week masterclass, and we teach this live so we do a zoom call with the group. And I only take like 10 to 15 people at a time. I want to keep it small so that everybody has a chance to get personal one-on-one coaching time with me.
Okay, but in the six week masterclass, you will learn how to control the hormones that cause you to gain weight, you’re going to learn how to stop the cravings of those foods that do not serve you. You’re going to learn how to only desire food that fuels your body, you’re gonna develop this whole new healthy relationship with food, you’ll stop struggling with the uncontrollable urges, we’ll recalibrate your hunger.
So you will feel satisfied for longer, you’re going to be able to use food as a way to thrive not as an escape from your life. And I will teach you how to manage your mind and your emotions, like a badass. And this work that we do. It’s not just about losing weight. It applies to every aspect of your life. The tools that you will learn here you can apply to your work, to your relationships, to your family, to your career, if you’re an entrepreneur, whatever it is.
So here’s what it looks like when you enroll in the master class. Week one we uncover the hidden causes of weight gain so you’re gonna learn all the reasons why you’re gaining weight and what you can do about it. You’re going to learn what foods you absolutely have to stop eating and the most important things you should be eating if you want to lose weight.
Week two we will go into how to recalibrate your hormones. Okay, next week we’re gonna be talking about hormones. But there’s these differences between like, what is physical hunger? What are withdrawals? What are cravings? What’s emotional hunger? You’re gonna learn how to deal with all that stuff, you’re gonna learn how to recalibrate your hormones for optimal weight loss. You’re gonna learn what a food protocol is and how to stick to it.
Week three, we talk about the mental cravings, the urges, desires, how to control your thoughts, how to manage your mind, this is such a key component to this program. And so different from what other people offer out there, honestly, you’re going to manage your mind to eliminate this over desire, this unnatural desire for food, you’re gonna learn how to believe in yourself, you’re going to learn how to believe in your ability to get back to your natural weight, and we will get you there, you’re going to learn how to process those urges and those cravings.
Okay, week four, we talk about making decisions ahead of time, the power of that I talked about that in the podcast, in a recent podcast episode, the power of making decisions ahead of time,
how to overcome obstacles that stand between you and your goal weight, using the power of visualization, and then we get into in week five, the emotional eating piece, you know, we’re we build up to this, okay.
And then in week five, we talk about how to stop using food as a way to escape your life, as a way to escape your emotions. What false pleasures are and how to create emotional well being instead of relying on these false pleasures to feel good. There’s food, it’s much like a drug, you know, we eat food, it makes us feel good, but we’re escaping our life.
When we do that we’re avoiding something, usually when we do that, okay, so I’m going to teach you how to create emotional comfort, without all these negative side effects that you get from like, from overeating, okay.
And then in week six, we’re going to talk about how to feel on purpose, like how to choose your emotions, it’s fascinating that you can choose your emotion, you can choose how you want to feel, did you know that? So we’ll talk about how to do that.
The power of making commitments, how to stop reliving your past, and start creating an amazing future for yourself. And then how to keep getting ongoing support, motivation, how to, you know, do your maintenance, your ongoing maintenance once you get to your goal weight.
So I talk about all of this stuff. It’s a comprehensive program that addresses the physical, mental and emotional aspects of gaining weight, and how to master those things. So that you can lose weight and get back to your natural weight and stay there, okay. You also get access to all the training material. So I record everything and put it on a private website. We have a private Facebook group where you guys can interact, we can ask questions, I post questions and answers in there. And you get one-on-one coaching with me.
So this is one of the biggest things that I offer. One of the most powerful things that I offer through this program is that you get one-on-one time with me throughout the course of the six weeks. And this is key because if there’s something you want to talk about, that’s, you know, maybe a little personal or you want help with a specific issue, you and I will have a chance to do that together. So you get me as your personal weight loss coach throughout this program.
Now, if you’re looking for some kind of a quick fix, this is probably not the right program for you. A lot of people want the magic pill that’s going to make them lose weight, or just tell me the one thing that I should eat. I gotta tell you, that stuff does not work. Okay. This is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program that you will ever experience.
I guarantee that the program itself is pretty simple. Okay, it’s a simple concept, but I will tell you this, it is not easy. Over the course of the six week masterclass, you will be challenged mentally, physically and emotionally. But I am there to help you navigate every single piece of that you will not be doing this on your own. I’m not going to just tell you what to eat, and send you on your way and say good luck with that. That’s the way most diet plans work.
Okay, that’s not what I’m going to do here. Also, if you’re the kind of person who likes to sort of half assed stuff, this is probably not for you either. This is a program of commitment, empowerment and action. I want people who are committed to reaching their weight loss goal. If that feels like you, then this is the perfect program for you.
Okay, I can’t do the work for you. Just like your personal trainer can’t do the push ups for you. I can’t do your weight loss work for you. I can’t be there standing next to you every time you know somebody shoves chocolate cake in your face, okay? But I can be there virtually for you to help you. Okay. But you have to show up and you have to have a commitment to do this work. And if that sounds like you, have you committed? If you’re ready to do this now, then this is the right program for you. Again, I only take about 10 to 15 people through this class at a time so that everybody gets the personal attention and coaching that they need to be successful.
So if you want in on this, please go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, that’s one word, and enroll now you can learn more about the program their enrollment is on a first come first served basis. So once the class is filled, I’m going to close the doors and you’ll have to wait until the next program starts in probably another eight weeks. But if you want to save your spot for this life changing masterclass, then please go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and enroll now. I want to see you in this class. You deserve this. You are worth it. Okay, so sign up today, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating.
Okay, so here’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Here’s some things that I hear from my weight loss clients a lot, especially my runners. See if any of this resonates with you. So I hear things like, I’m running more, and I’m eating less, and I’m still gaining weight, or I’m running every day, and I keep gaining weight. Or I’m training for a marathon, and I’m not losing any weight, I’m actually gaining weight.
What is happening here, why can’t I lose weight by running? If you have found yourself thinking these things, or trying to run more to try to lose weight, or if you’ve tried to just limit the amount of calories you’ve been eating to try to lose weight, and it hasn’t worked for you, this is not your fault.
The truth of the matter is that this is a broken model of weight loss, it does not work. Okay, we’re going to talk all about that today. I’ve been there, I know exactly how this feels. So just a little quick backstory about me. I was about 60 pounds overweight, I was very sick, unhealthy. I was eating too much, drinking too much, I had a lot of health issues. I got really sick.
So I started eating better and running. And I did lose a lot of weight, okay. And I started getting into ultra marathons and Ironman and stuff like that. And I lost a lot of weight. But I wasn’t able to keep it off. It was temporary. It took me a long time to lose that weight. And then it didn’t take me very long to gain it all back or to gain a lot of it back.
So I started running more and trying to eat less and really controlling my calories by using apps and all kinds of stuff to like count my calories and stuff like that. I tried all these different diets. And none of that stuff was really working. I kept gaining the weight.
And so I had this mission of like trying to figure this out. I’m a runner, I’m healthy. I’m pretty fit, you know, I work out all the time, how come I’m gaining weight? And I had to realize that it wasn’t about the running. And it wasn’t about the calories. It was about this abnormal desire that I had for food and over desire, an unnatural craving and over desire for food. And that unnatural over desire was causing me to overeat.
My body and my brain. We’re addicted to food we’re addicted to eating, and no amount of running is ever going to fix that problem. Okay, so in order to lose weight, I had to figure out what was causing this over desire for food. And I had to figure out how to fix that so that I could stop the overeating so that I could get back to my natural weight. Okay, so I tried all kinds of stuff that I tried diets willpower, starving myself running more, none of this stuff was working.
So I had to get to the to the actual cause. And I discovered something interesting. My overeating was just a symptom of deeper problems. And if I wanted to lose weight, I had to identify and solve those deeper problems. I had to solve the cause of the over desire, cause of the kind of food addiction, not just treat the symptom which was overeating.
So here’s what I learned. The reason we are overweight is not because we don’t run enough. The reason we are overweight is because we overeat, period. And the reason we overeat is because we have a physical, mental and emotional over desire for food. And when we solve these underlying issues, mental, physical and emotional issues, the overeating stops the way It comes off, we get to our natural weight, and we can stay there permanently.
Now, there are three things you need to understand if you want to stop the struggling, if you want to stop the overeating and if you want to lose the weight and keep it off permanently. And these three things go against a lot of what you may already know about weight loss are about diet and exercise. And these are three things that a lot of people are not talking about.
I’m going to talk about them here. These are the secrets to getting your body back to its natural weight. Okay. So the first thing I’m going to talk about, and the subject of today’s podcast is all about how running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. Okay, so this is secret number one. So we’re going to focus on this today.
So we’ve been told for decades that the formula for weight loss is this, right: eat less, exercise more. That’s all anybody has ever said. And so this has like been the normal advice we’ve all been given. But unfortunately, it’s not good advice. And it’s basically wrong. It just doesn’t work.
Okay, running more and eating less, does not work. If you want to lose weight, and keep it off permanently. So, just a little backstory back in the 1970s, early 70s. There was this guy named Jim Fixx, and he and he wrote this book called The Complete Book of Running. And so this guy is considered sort of the catalyst for the American Fitness revolution, okay, he really popularized the sport of running.
Since then, running has become like such a popular and such an accessible sport to people. I just did some research on this, there are more than 30,000 running events in the US every year. So that includes 5k’s marathons, half marathons, ultra marathons, all that stuff. Yet, as a nation, we are fatter than ever. We are exercising more than we ever have in a recorded human history. Yet since the 1970s, the obesity rates, especially here in the US have tripled. This is crazy.
Okay, what is happening here? Here’s why running or exercise doesn’t really work for weight loss. So there’s three parts to this: running doesn’t work for weight loss. And the first part is this, that we tend to overcompensate by eating more food. So when we exercise, we burn calories, right, we burn a bunch of calories. Well, when that happens, our body requires more calories.
So do you ever notice how hungry you are after a long run? I know that I used to eat like crazy after a long run. That’s because after your long run, your brain is sending signals to your body to increase your appetite. So this causes you to actually eat more food. So your body’s always like trying to regulate itself, right? It’s trying to get back to a neutral state.
That neutral state is called homeostasis. And what happens is when you burn a lot of calories, your body’s like we got to get all those calories back. Okay, so it sends signals using hormones to your brain, to increase your appetite to cause you to eat more food. And a lot of times we overcompensate.
So instead of just, you know, eating the exact same amount of calories that we burn or fewer, we eat more, which leads to weight gain instead of weight loss. That’s why a lot of people who train for marathons gain weight, because their appetite is increased and they overcompensate. And there’s kind of a mental thing there too, where people think, hey, I ran today, so I can eat whatever I want.
And they’re just shoving doughnuts and stuff in their mouth all the time. Right? And it’s fun, I get it. Like it’s like, hey, I’m a runner, I can eat whatever I want. And I see all these memes and all these posts in Facebook groups, from runners who are like, I run so I can eat anything I want. And it’s funny, but it doesn’t really work.
Okay, you can’t just consume donuts and expect to lose weight. I don’t care how much running you’re doing. That is not going to work for you. In fact, it is going to have some very detrimental effects for you. It’s just not about it’s not about that you just can’t eat anything you want just because you’re running. Okay.
So when you exercise, you’re burning a lot of fuel and your body’s like I need to get back to homeostasis as quickly as possible. So it does this by making you hungry so you eat more food. Running actually makes you hungrier, you overcompensate, you gain weight. And this cycle just continues.
And then when you’re not exercising those hunger signals because you’re eating certain types of food, and we’ll get into that later, but because you’re eating certain types of food, and because you’re constantly burning a lot of calories, you’re constantly in this like increased appetite mode. It’s a vicious cycle, okay? You just can’t outrun this process, you can’t outrun your appetite here. Okay. So that’s number one. The number one reason why running doesn’t really work for weight loss is because you tend to overcompensate and your body’s this is just a natural process that your body is doing here. Okay.
Number two, when you try to use exercise running as a way to lose weight, progress is slow and minimal at best. It takes a long time to lose weight just by exercising just by running a bunch of miles. And when you do, the effects are usually pretty minimal. So there’s a couple of studies that were done. One of them studied this large group of men and women for over a year. And they had them do an hour of strenuous exercise six days a week for more than a year. Okay.
After the study, after more than a year, the women had lost an average of only three pounds, and the men had lost an average of around four pounds. This is after a year of exercising six days a week. They’ve done a lot of studies like this that prove that exercise is not a great way to lose weight. Okay.
Another study that I think is really fascinating is that they took this group of sedentary people, people who normally do not exercise, and they had them trained for a marathon. Okay, so what is that, 17 weeks, 20 weeks? And then at the end of the training season, they checked in and the men had lost an average of around five pounds, which is not bad. The women had lost zero pounds. This is crazy.
This is a ton of running that you’re doing when you’re training for a marathon, right. But it just doesn’t work. All of these people were overcompensating by eating more food, okay. But one of the most compelling studies was the Women’s Health Study. So this is where they followed around 40,000 women for 10 years. 10 years!
And they were divided up into three different groups, high exercise, medium exercise, and low levels of exercise. And the high intensity group exercised for like an hour every day, okay. And after 10 years, they checked out the groups, and this high exercise group has lost no additional weight. In fact, there was no noticeable change in body composition. This is insane, right?
But you just got to look at the facts. You know, science has proven time and time again, that exercise is not a great way to lose weight, yet we are so Ultra focused on this one thing: just run more, and the weight will magically come off, but it doesn’t work. Okay. So that is reason number two why running does not really work for losing weight. Which it progresses slow and minimal.
And then reason number three, why running is not a great way to lose weight is because running doesn’t address the underlying causes of weight gain, the mental, physical and emotional causes. Okay, running is just treating a symptom. So you gain weight, and then you want to try to burn it off by running right?
All you’re doing is just putting a tiny bandaid on this huge wound, okay, it’s just not enough, it’s not going to work, okay, you just cannot run enough to get out of that cycle. And you’re not addressing the underlying issues. And that’s what the third thing here is, it doesn’t address the cause of overeating, the cause of your over desire for food.
Like I said before, overeating. That’s just a symptom. You’ve got to treat the cause of the overeating, which is an over desire, okay. And I feel like I need to say this here. So I don’t want you to stop running. Running is awesome. It’s very, very good for you. It helps to build strong bones and muscles. It improves your overall fitness, especially your cardiovascular fitness. It helps you sleep better. It helps reduce stress, it’s really good for your heart. It’s an amazing thing to do. So keep running for sure.
Just don’t rely on running as a way of losing weight. Okay, so I just want to make sure that I threw that in there, okay. But there are mental issues and emotional issues that are hidden kind of beneath the surface that cause us to overeat that cause us to crave food and have an unnatural craving for food and running just doesn’t address those things. Okay?
So the three things that why running is not a great way to lose weight is you overcompensate, progress is slow and minimal, and then it doesn’t address the underlying causes: the physical, mental, emotional causes of overeating.
Okay, so that’s why running is not a really great way to lose weight, and then why eating less doesn’t work for weight loss. This is fascinating stuff right here. So we all think that if we just burn more calories than we take in, we can lose weight, right? We’ve been taught this forever. And it’s not that simple. It really does not work the way you think it does.
Okay, so here’s what we think. We think that if we normally burn something like 2000 calories a day, if we restrict our daily calorie intake to 1500 calories a day, we’re going to lose weight, right? I know you’ve tried this, I’ve tried this for years, I actually had this app where I was logging every bit of food that I ate, every time I went to a restaurant, everything I bought in the store, everything I made at home, like I was logging every single item.
And you know, getting my macros right, and counting all the calories, and then making sure that I’m running to burn off more of these calories. And it was completely ineffective. And so frustrating. I can’t tell you how much time I wasted entering food data into this app. It was crazy, okay.
But here’s what happens, you restrict your caloric intake to you know, 1500 calories, okay. And what happens is your body then lowers its metabolism to conserve calories. Okay, your body, again, is trying to get back to homeostasis, it wants to get back to normal, okay. So if you’re used to eating 2000 calories per day, and you limit your intake to 1500, your body has this process where it will down regulate its metabolism, to only burn those 1500 calories and no more, your body has a very good system at regulating this.
What’s happening here is your body is trying to keep you from starving to death. If you were to continue to lower your caloric intake, you know, there’s this idea that if you continue to lower your caloric intake, you can just keep losing weight, and you can lose some weight, but your body will continue to downregulate.
Okay, so let’s say you lowered your caloric intake and you’re losing like two pounds a week, you know, if you went on this thing for, like, two years, would you lose 200 pounds? No, you would not. Your body will downregulate what it burns. And it’ll keep you at a certain level. Okay.
Because your body’s like, I do not want you to starve to death. Okay, your body is really good at this process, okay. They actually did this experiment back in the 40s, like 1944 or 45, right after World War Two or during, during the end of it. So it was called the Minnesota starvation experiment.
And it sounds terrible I’ll tell you, but they took a bunch of healthy young men, who averaged eating around 3000 calories a day. And they lowered their caloric intake to around 1500. And then they lowered it even more to like less than 1000. And there were all kinds of issues that they had.
They ended up being like super cold all the time. Their fingernails got really brittle, their hair was falling out. Like there were all these side effects, you know, because their body was trying to conserve calories it was trying to and so it was putting all its it lowered the metabolism so much that it wasn’t effective at keeping the body in, in a good state in a natural healthy state.
And so these people were slowly losing their minds. They were starting to, you know, hallucinate and think about food all the time, and anyways, horrible. But anyway, the expected weight loss for each of these guys was around 78 pounds. That’s what they expected would happen. They discovered though, that on average, they only lost about 37 pounds each.
And what they figured out is that their bodies were reducing their energy expenditure in direct response to the reduced caloric intake. So the body was lowering its metabolism to make up for the fact that they were getting fewer calories. So for those people who were doing like 1500 calories a day, at that time, their energy expenditure dropped to only around 1400 calories per day.
So the body actually creates this little buffer, this margin of safety. Again, it’s like trying to stay healthy, so you don’t starve to death. Okay? Once the experiment was over, though, and they went back to their normal caloric intake, the 3000 calories, or whatever it was, they started gaining weight until it was actually they were even heavier than they were before the experiment.
And I know that we have all experienced this kind of thing, you kind of starve yourself, you eat less for a while, and you kind of lose a few pounds, but then you start eating normally again, and, and you gain all this weight back. In fact, you’re heavier, right? It’s crazy. I’ve done this before. It’s a crazy cycle. It’s no fun at all. But the fewer calories you eat, the lower your metabolism goes, and the fewer calories you burn.
There was another study done most recently in like 2008. And they had these participants, you know, they lowered their caloric intake, and they initially lost like 10% of their body weight. And their total energy expenditure decreased as expected. But it didn’t last very long, their metabolism actually remained reduced. So their ability to burn calories remained reduced for the entire year of the study. So even after a year at this new lower body weight, their total energy expenditure was still reduced by an average of almost 500 calories per day.
When you lower your caloric intake, your metabolism decreases almost immediately. And then that decrease persists basically indefinitely. Otherwise, you’d keep losing weight until you die. And the application of this is like it’s, it’s obvious like, let’s say, prior to dieting, a woman eats and burns 2000 calories per day. And then following doctor’s orders, she adopts a calorie restricted portion controlled low fat diet and reduces her intake by 500 calories a day, quickly.
Her total expenditure also drops by 500 calories a day. So her metabolism lowers. She feels lousy, tired, cold, hungry, irritable, depressed, but she sticks with it thinking that things must eventually improve, she might lose some weight. But as the caloric expenditure decreases to match the lower calorie intake, the weight plateaus.
And a year later, things have not improved, the weight slowly comes back. Even though she’s eating the same number of calories, right? So she finally figures this is not working. She abandons this failed diet and resumes eating 2000 calories a day, but her metabolism has slowed. She’s only burning off like 1500 calories a day now. And all the weight comes rushing back.
And people will say, well, you just are lacking willpower, right? You need to just, you know, eat less, control yourself. Right? Does this sound familiar to anybody? This is my experience for sure. Okay. Everything I’m describing here has been well documented, okay. Remember, your body is always trying to balance things out, your body always wants to get back to homeostasis.
And when you limit the amount of fuel that you give your body, your body also limits how much fuel that will burn. So you don’t become calorie deficient and starve yourself to death. calories in, calories out is broken. It does not work. Your body naturally works against this process. Okay.
So let’s recap. Running more does not work for weight loss. Your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite and you end up actually eating more than you would normally. Progress is slow and minimal at best. And running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. It doesn’t address the hormonal imbalances that cause us to overeat the mental cravings, the emotional eating.And then eating less doesn’t work either, calories in calories out is a myth.
It doesn’t work. Your body naturally works against this. You reduce calories and your body lowers its metabolism and response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism basically forever. And you cannot lose weight this way. If you want to lose weight, you have to address the causes of weight gain. And just eating less and running more does not address the cause.
It’s just treating a symptom and doesn’t do very well. That’s why this approach to weight loss is so frustrating. It was so frustrating to me for so long and so frustrating to my clients for so long, because it doesn’t work. Okay, so next week on the podcast, I’m going to be talking about the role your hormones play in overeating and gaining weight. And this is a fascinating, fascinating topic. You will learn a lot I guarantee it.
But one of the biggest reasons why we gain weight is that our hormones are just completely out of whack. Okay, and I’m going to talk about how to get your hormones back in balance by simply changing what you eat. This is fascinating. It’s eye opening information, it will completely change what you know about food and how it affects your body.
Okay, quick reminder, my next weight class weight loss masterclass starts June 1, and I only take about 10 people through the class. So if you want in, you have to enroll now, go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and get signed up. Drop the Quarantine 15, get your body ready for the summer, become a lean running machine. Go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to enroll now. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
Chris Wissman is a personal trainer, a movement and lifestyle coach, and an all-around badass when it comes to functional fitness. He's co-owner of Real Human Performance in Madisonville. Today we …
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host. And today I’ve got a really cool treat for you. I’m talking with my good friend, Chris Wissman. Chris is a personal trainer, he’s more of a movement and lifestyle coach. That’s what he calls himself.
And Chris and I can have conversations that just go, who knows where, and they’re awesome. We talk about mindset, we talk about physiology, about physiological load. In this particular show, we get into running form and posture and how important that is, and what happens to your body when you don’t have good form.
We talk about things like being hunched over all day sitting down and what that’s doing to us, maybe the importance of having something like a standing desk. And we talk a lot about diet, too, and how there isn’t one diet necessarily for everyone, there’s not one diet that’s perfect for everyone. And then it’s important for you to figure out what your metabolic diet type is.
Chris has a wealth of knowledge on all this stuff. And like I said, we could go in many, many different directions here. And we could talk forever about some of this stuff. We don’t talk forever, but we do talk about a lot of different things. This is really cool. I love love, love talking to Chris. And then at the very end, he gives us a couple of simple, very simple tips for endurance runners to help us to be more efficient in what we do.
So you have to wait until the end of the podcast for that one. But before we get into that, I wanted to quickly go over something I’m very excited about. And I just recently launched Inner Fire Tribe’s group coaching program for runners. So this is a comprehensive online training program.
And it’s designed for you if you’re a long distance runner, if you’re a half marathon or marathon or ultra runner; it’s designed to help you bring your mind and your body into alignment so you can get the results that you want. It’s designed to show you and teach you how to train your mind like you train your body. So you can get those powerful results. So you can reach your goals, whatever those may be, they may be running faster than you ever have before or completing a distance you have never done before.
So when you become a member of the Inner Fire Tribe, you’re gonna get detailed training plans. So we’ll have comprehensive half and full marathon training plans. And then a training library that’s going to continue to grow. So new training plans will be added all the time, you know, we’re going to be adding 5k and 10k. And you run your first ultra plan that’s going to be coming very soon. You’ll get mindset training.
So I will do weekly, live mindset training, so you can learn how to train your mind to work for you. You know, the key, the key to success in all of life, but especially in running is to get your mind and your body into alignment. If your mind is fighting against you every step of the way, running is going to be very challenging for you. So as a master mindset coach, my focus is helping you build the mental toughness that you need to make running easier, you know, get faster and actually have more fun doing it.
You will get live online coaching. So I do a live coaching in a private Facebook group. And let’s face it, running is hard, right? There’s a lot that goes into becoming a successful long distance runner. And not everybody’s needs are the same. So what I want to do is some one-on-one coaching with you in an environment where other people can benefit from it. You’ll also get that supportive community of the Facebook group. It’ll be comprised of runners just like you. So it’ll be fun, I’ll be supportive. It’s a great place to ask questions, get help about all things running nutrition, gear building, mental toughness, and so much more.
And then everything we do, becomes archived into a comprehensive video library. And then we’ll be adding to that video library all the time. So we’ll be covering main topics like running forearm strength training, stretching, recovery, nutrition, fueling for race day, proper nutrition, hydration, pay strategy, tapering, all the things that go into running rain, seems easy enough, right? Just put on your shoes and head out the door.
But when we get into the sport of running, and especially the sport of distance running, there’s a lot of factors involved. And you can almost not have too much training when it comes to that. So this video training library will be ever growing. Now, here’s the best part about joining Inner Fire Tribe, this is not something that is going to break your wallet. Okay, you’re gonna get the training plans, the mindset training, the instructional video library, live online coaching, and a supportive community, you’re gonna get all of that. It’s less than $1 a day, you can find $1, you know, right now in the couch cushions, probably.
So when you join the Inner Fire Tribe group coaching program for runners today, it’s only $26.2 per month. And here’s what’s cool about it: it’s a subscription based system. And the longer you stay, the more valuable it becomes for you. Because we’re always gonna be adding new strength routines, new exercises, new training videos, new coaching sessions, and more and more and more, get in on this today, because it’s only going to get better.
And I can’t guarantee that I’m going to keep things at this low price point. So it’ll probably end up going up soon. So go there today, there, you got nothing to lose, really go to innerfiretribe.com/coaching. And you can sign up today, come and be a part of the tribe. I would love to have you there. All right, cool. So let’s get into my interview with Chris Wissman.
Today, I am joined with Chris Wissman. Chris is a movement and lifestyle coach, and just kind of all around badass. If I can say that, of course. Chris, why don’t you tell me and tell everybody else a little bit about what you do.
Chris Wissman
So at Real, Jen and I owners of a company called Real Human Performance. So we really focus on specifically the gym floor, just corrective movements and making sure everybody’s moving for their kind of individual approach. We also do stress management courses and workshops, outside of real and different corporations to the city. My passion is becoming more and more oriented towards kind of helping people through their, like changing their lifestyle factors.
That way we can like what you’re focusing on, help people ease the load, so their mindset can be even stronger and better than it’s ever been. So we approach it from kind of a pillar standpoint. And we can get into those pillars as we, as we were we record here, but um, movement, and then just like lifestyle factors and I help people with that.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool, so you’re different from the traditional gym or from, you know, traditional, yeah, something like CrossFit, you know, so explain a little bit about the differences and how that would relate to somebody who’s let’s say, an endurance runner.
Chris Wissman
So running is the perfect thing to compare that or to relate that to, because CrossFit tends to stay in what we call the sagittal plane, which is just up and down movements, a lot of barbell movements, a lot of burpees, they’re not really incorporating the way that our core is originally designed to move our core is meant to propel us through locomotion is we’re meant to locomote and to run.
And that’s why I love this approach, because with running, you oftentimes see posture starts to either deteriorate depending on how you’re built, or just be stronger than it’s ever been because of that rotational ability that we train on the gym floor. So a lot of the things that we do on the floor, are oriented back towards restoring our core function and our back functions so we can locomote better. Locomote just meaning walk and run, just go through that plane of motion.
So do a lot of rotational drills, a lot of anti rotational drills, a lot of ground based movements, stuff that’s really designed to restore that style of movement and just recognize that not everyone needs to do the same thing. And everybody’s starting in a very unique spot. And we have to be very intelligent about how we deploy these movements to people to make sure benefits them because what use of it is that if we’re not if we’re not benefiting that person.
Patrick McGilvray
I want to go back to something you just said about posture. And for me when I think of that when it comes to running I think of running form. For sure a lot of people have what you would consider like terrible running form, terrible posture so they may stand like they may be really hunched over over, you know, their shoulders are up in their ears. They may be rounded at the back, or, you know, they may be flailing a lot, you know, and I see this in long distance runners, especially, you know, because we spend a lot of time out there running together, and you see some people you’re like, how’s that guy able to run a marathon like that?
Yeah, and some people are pretty, you know, they seem like they’re pretty fast runners. But my guess is that they could be a lot more efficient for sure and probably stay injury free. Like talk a little bit about the importance of posture.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, exactly. So that posture, you talk about that anterior rolled, forward posture has a lot to do with being seated. Unfortunately, we’re both seated right now. I usually try to sit on like a Swiss ball or something that keeps me active, that way, it stimulates my posture throughout the duration, which is just a big exercise ball for, for lack of a better term.
But um, basically, when you see that for rolled posture, and that kind of head for neck, it’s something that I still suffer from. And that’s kind of why I went out on a limb and tried to learn so much about it. It’s a lot of times that dysfunctional breathing pattern, when we start really heavily mouth breathing and getting exhausted, the musculature on the front side of our body, and our chest will start to constrict and just pull ourselves forward.
Which makes us have to try to keep our head up, our head is trying to do our head and eyes are trying to do anything they can do to stay in the horizontal plane of motion to make sure that we’re not going to fall over, right.
So as our chest falls forward, our head will start to come up. And that’s where you see what’s called back kyphosis, which is just lack of thoracic extension, lack of keeping what I’ll cue in the gym is just like, hey, keep up, keep up proud chest when we’re down there. That way, we can restore some of that extension to the mid back.
And when we’re able to train ourselves to maybe not so much panic, breathe throughout the day, use our nostrils, you’ll and just be very cognizant of our posture, you’ll slowly start to notice that improving. Again, it’s something that you can’t just fix overnight. Keep in mind how long it took us to develop these postures and, and so you have to really reinforce it every day, with everything that you do.
And that has effects way deeper than we know and has effects on our nervous system. It has effects on our digestion, it has effects on how our feet strike the floor. It’s very, it’s a, it’s a feedback loop from up, up and down and down and up. And it’s constantly talking to itself to help us try to find balance.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, that sort of proud chest that you know, sitting up straight, basically, right. It’s kind of a, it’s kind of a trendy thing right now, because there’s all these gadgets that you can wear, you know, that’ll bind you to, yeah, right. I’m like, okay, why is this all of a sudden a thing? You know, are we really that bad hunching over? And I guess we are.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, we are and, and that kind of pulls us back to it makes us a really quad dominant runner as well. And as we become quad dominant, then our glutes, and the hamstrings kind of start to relax or not do what they’re supposed to do, which is the pulling part of the movement. So the more anterior we are, the more front of the body we are with our posture, the more that’s going to go down the chain to our feet, and our knees, our quads and our shins. So you could see shin splints because of this knee problems, and all of that. So it’s kind of just a cascade of effects, if you will.
Patrick McGilvray
So really just stand up straight when you’re running with a proud chest. That’ll really help a lot, right?
Chris Wissman
Oh, for sure. For sure. There’s some really good people in the city if you want to get down deep in the nitty gritty with this. But I mean, generally speaking, we want to try to strike the ground with ease, we don’t want to be slamming down. We don’t want to be landing too much right on the heel immediately, we want to land kind of whole foot or maybe even front foot. And again, everybody’s really unique in that regard. It’s just about doing it, like you said, efficiently if it sounds and looks not efficient, and probably isn’t.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t know how people get through like 26 miles running the way they do sometimes. Well, I’m not saying I’m perfect at all, but…
Chris Wissman
I’ve seen like good posture, you hold really, really good posture while you’re moving. You’re a lot better than I am. So that’s great.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, yeah, and just full disclosure, I do work out with Chris. So that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get him on here to talk about this is because we talk about this at the gym extensively. And I’m like, dude, we just need to get a conversation or record it and share it. It’d be awesome. So here we are.
Chris Wissman
Heck yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
So you mentioned like sitting on a Swiss ball is something you do to stay active while you have to sit because I mean, let’s face it, we do have to sit sometimes, yes. Or there are alternatives like a standing desk. Have you seen people having actual results from that? And what are the results from that, because everybody’s talking about, you know, they’re telling me like Patrick, you should really have a standing desk. Because I sit a lot.
Chris Wissman
I’m very big on the approach of individuality and almost like in everything that we talk about. And if we have bad posture, and if we’re not using our, our glutes or hamstrings, our knees, and if we have a dysfunctional breathing, pattern standing, and sitting really don’t make a difference.
In my opinion, if we’re able to stand upright, correctly, and be very long in the spine and access our proper breathing mechanisms, then yeah, it’s awesome. And it’ll keep us active throughout the day. If you’re someone that’s not getting enough movement throughout the day, it gives you a chance to just slide side to side, and it gives you a chance to stretch and open up. But I guess, standing desk with awareness, awesome, without it could lead to some long term things. But they’re great for some people.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And you’re touching on something, though, that I think is important for us to all remember, which is that it’s different for everyone. Yeah, you know, everybody has their own needs. Everybody has their own things that work for them. And, you know, I’m in a lot of groups, and I see people post questions in groups, like, what’s the best way to do x? Or what’s the best shoe for x? Or what’s the best watch to where it’s like, dude, who knows?
Whatever works for you, you know? Yes, it is the best. Anyway, and I like your approach with that, like, when we do work out at the gym, you’re very much about the individual person and what their needs are. It’s not just about like, everybody do the same thing, no matter what. Yeah, you know, you take into account what people need, you know, I need certain things, and somebody else might need something completely different. So that’s cool. For sure.
So we’re talking about building strength, right? Yes, you’re talking about becoming stronger. You know, what are, what are some of the benefits of strength training for runners, because here’s, here’s something I’ve heard before. You know, runners, you know, you don’t want to bulk up. Because, you know, you got to stay lean. So, you know, the standard thing is, like, just don’t lift heavy weights.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, I think there’s benefits at certain times for that heavy lifting category for certain people. The main benefit that I see with the model that we use is restoring the transverse abdominis and your inner unit, so your, your core and your back and the way that functions, I don’t see a lot of people teaching humans how to rotate.
And there’s a ton of different ways you can approach this and it’s really not all that come left, you just have to know how to not go too far. So basically, you would teach someone how to resist rotation, via just like a planking platform or a box plank platform. And then you would slowly start to maybe lift a hand or a foot and make sure their hips don’t die from side to side, we can get activity in that deep pelvic floor, then they’re ready.
And I’m kind of fast forwarding a bunch, but then they’re ready to use resistance on the rotation. And if we can really learn how to powerfully rotate, then we’re going to go through that gait cycle fast, and you’re going to be very strong in it. So that’s really my focus on strength training around running.
I mean, there’s all the normal things such as, you know, just having more strength, your muscles, more endurance, the remote tools, you’re going to build, like stronger ligaments and everything around that joint. That way, that joint works better. And we’re at less risk for injury as long as we’re safe on the gym floor. But my real focus is restoring that rotation because we don’t do enough of it anymore.
Patrick McGilvray
And what a lot of people don’t realize is that running is a very rotational activity. Yeah, yes. You’re rotating. Yeah. You do use your core a lot if you’re doing it right.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, if you look at like these guys that are on the track for like, the Olympic athletes, you’ll see them literally, chin to hip. They’re ripping their hands as they go through and they’re doing our T spine is meant to have a ton of rotations. That’s why we’ll start our day off with mobility drills such as like the 90/90 sweep to open up the ribcage and intercostals and get everything available to move again, because it’s so stiff from just being forward all day. Seated and watching TV or in the car on the cell phone. Everything is just very stiff and rigid. So it’s just like let’s build some rotation back in this game and then people tend to do better?
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I know that when I first started distance running, I was not focused on the core at all. And then I started doing some core work and started to realize how important it is. Especially the outside. Your oblique slings, man.
Chris Wissman
Those are obliques. Yeah, you’re good at that you have the anterior and posterior oblique slings that connect. And this is why we go through a gait cycle that connects your shoulder and your hip. So it’s a big cross pattern from the front and the back of your body. And that’s what propels us through the so when we can if you look at a six pack on someone, this is like the most desirable thing to see as a six pack and someone that might not be the most functional. That’s our rectus abdominis. That’s like the top layer. And that doesn’t really have anything to do with the way we were built to rotate. It’s just kind of our protection mechanism for our organs. So it’s really good in that regard. But as far as locomotion, a six pack, isn’t that functional.
Patrick McGilvray
So interesting. Yeah. So it’s all vanity.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, many people picked up on it. And they just want to keep it and so I get it.
Patrick McGilvray
I get it. Good. Well, then I’m gonna stop. Yeah, I’m going to stop going for the six pack, then there it goes. I know. It’s just a vanity thing, you know, strong oblique slings.
Yeah. That’s cool. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. The gait pattern, you know, in that whole gait cycle, because it’s fascinating to me to just kind of learn a little bit more about, you know, propulsion, and how we are, what we’re actually doing when we’re running. You know, I’ve heard it said that running is like a controlled fall, you know, you’re sort of falling forward, you’re leaning forward at the, at the ankles slightly. And so that your body is just sort of controlling that fall, you know. So anyway, that’s just one way of looking at it first, talk through that a little bit.
Chris Wissman
So there’s a really awesome woman that I studied through, named Katie Bowman. And she’s got a couple of books, one of which is Movement That Matters. And there’s another one called Move Your DNA, she talks about that, you can see people that lose their core propulsion.
And while they’re walking, it’s like they are falling, and they’re just catching themselves every step, and that’s pretty abrasive to the joint. So if you can take that, that controlled fall and make it more fluid, and I’ve heard it explained to me like you’re Spinning the globe, if you can make it be very easy, that will help that control fall. And that will propel you forward.
Ultimately, you really want to see at the end of that fall, aka push off your foot, you want to see full extension. And we practice that a lot when we’re doing our, our drills from from deadlift to overheads or whatever they might be, is extending through the hips, and pushing and plantar flexing off the ground and really learning to get as long as you can, the more we learn to extend, the more using that your posterior chain, your backside, your body, your hamstrings, your glutes, and you’re really able to fire them.
And that will help that fall that you’re talking about. Just be powerful. So extension, in regards to power will help you a ton. And there’s a lot of drills that you can do around that as extension base drills. So for power extension up, up, up those drills man, they’re my favorites.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t love them. No, they’re good. It’s good. I know I complain about the workouts, Chris, but I know.
Chris Wissman
You really don’t, man. I noticed when you came in, when you were really interested in starting this and have you started it, you had a different energy about you entirely. You literally were, you’re glowing. It’s a you’re a different Patrick than the one that I met, not that you weren’t a great human before. It’s just like, do you see Patrick? He’s dude, he’s radiating like he’s fired up. I really really like what you’re doing and everything. So that’s why I was stoked that the mind approach is what you’re choosing because it’s so important.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, that’s a good segue. Let’s kind of talk about that. So you know, I’m, I’m under this I’m operating from this place of like, mindset is everything. Okay? Yeah. Like everything that you want in your life was, you know, first created as a thought, and that our thoughts create the things we feel the emotions that we have. And it’s those emotions that create our behavior or actions, okay, so when you say or inaction.
You know, so when you say like, why did you do that? Oh, I felt like it or I didn’t feel like it, you’re talking about an emotion. Why didn’t you feel like it? What’s the thought that was telling you that you didn’t want to work out today or you didn’t want to go for that run, it might be some belief that you have about yourself that, you know, you’re not a good runner or something like that.
Anyway, so our thinking creates our emotions, our emotions, determine what we do our behavior, and then our actions or behavior gets us our results, okay, you want better results in your life, change your thinking, you know, that’s where I’m kind of, yeah, that’s where I’m operating from here,
Chris Wissman
It’s literally that because with your thoughts, you’re changing your hormones, and that, and that is what propels our emotion. So hormones, control emotions, emotions, control what we do, and then reinforcing them by embodying that thought. And it’s, literally, it’s the most powerful thing that you can, you can change. And it’s, it’s incredible. It really blows me away.
Because it is, the higher it is, the top notch in the hierarchies scale on what we want to address. When it comes to lifestyle coaching, if you’re constantly in an automatic negative self thinking, then you’re going to just repeat your cycle over and over and over again. And it’s not like I’m perfect, I still struggle with it in multiple categories. And the best thing that you can do when you’re in those thoughts is just stop the thinking and interrupt it with something that you really think is positive, or you want to it’s an affirmation, essentially.
But with that information, I found it really important. And Elliot Horowitz kind of reinforced this to interrupt it with something you’ve experienced very positive in your life, something that, like I used to ride BMX and dirt bikes a ton, and I can just visualize myself flying into the woods. So that is just like, my utmost flow states.
So if I can reinforce my affirmation, with a feeling that I got was riding dirt bikes are as close as I can get, then you’re more likely to achieve that positive thought or what it is that you want to do. And you’re interrupting that negative thought, right now, and with some success.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and people really think that this is more complicated than that, you know, and, like, and it really isn’t. So, you know, being happy or being confident, you know, those are just states, their states of mind, you know, and if you want to be happy, go back to a time when you were super happy, like go float back into your body.
In that time, close your eyes, float back into that time, see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel those feelings of happiness. Once again, I guarantee you if you take 30 seconds to do that, you’ll have a big smile on your face, for sure, man now, but what happens is we choose different thoughts. We choose thoughts of stress and anxiety and fear and hurt and sadness and guilt and shame. Like we choose these things. I think about choosing them.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, I think the statistic on that is like, like 90% of the population today is 90% of the thoughts are negative.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it would have something like 60,000 thoughts a day? Yeah. So think about that, like, okay, what’s 90% of that? I don’t know, 50,000 of your thoughts are negative. What are we doing to ourselves, you know? And then we wonder why everybody’s on Lexapro or whatever, you know.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, with those thoughts, you’re not only reinforcing a negative mindset, you’re feeding an overall disease. I like the disease that broken down like that because it is just that, it’s a disease. And with just, I remember at an old company, I worked at the stress that it gave me and went off to get into the details of it but I had a chronic ulcer and I had just really really bad stomach pains really bad digestion and the day that place stopped my stomach problems, I stopped right along with it.
So these can manifest as anything like headaches, stomach aches, actual joint pain. If you have a vulnerable spot in your body and your real for reinforcing a negative thought, that vulnerable spot like I will know if I’m experiencing something out of the norm or negative via my diet or my mindset if my knee starts throbbing, like just like, hey, here’s here’s a sign for you. Something’s a little off you know, pay attention because I’ve beat my knee up so many times it’s very vulnerable to inflammation and we’re creating inflammation with the reinforcing negative thoughts and debt and bad lifestyle factors.
Patrick McGilvray
It’s crazy. Yeah. So your thoughts create these, this release of hormones and chemicals, right? Like serotonin. I can’t remember the other ones.
Chris Wissman
It’s complex, but you’re right on. I can’t really remember them either. But adrenaline…
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, stuff like that. And they can have an effect on you. So you can think yourself into, you know, a panic attack, basically, you can think yourself into that fight or flight kind of, right, where you’re, like, so anxious, and so fearful that you, that people actually have a panic attacks have to go to hospital, just because of thinking, you know, isn’t that wild? Like wouldn’t it be in our best interest to think something more positive instead?
Chris Wissman
Yeah, you’re right on and with that, that psyche is like the hierarchy of, of everything that we do, like I said, and therefore, like also reinforcing that you’ll also be you’ll see people that have that, that panic attack kind of mindset also, or those same kind of people that maybe are casting blame, or holding, like forms of resentment towards other people. And that really reinforces that anxiety. Yeah, it is crazy man.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and Bruce Lipton talks about this, in his book, The Biology of Belief. I don’t know if you’ve read that one yet. I actually haven’t. But you’ve told me about it. I will.
So you know, he basically just talks about this relationship between the mind and the body, and that we think ourselves into health, or we think ourselves into disease. And, you know, he goes on to talk about how most disease and especially chronic pain, any any pain that lasts more than like, 90 days, or something like that, is is all based on our thoughts, our beliefs, and that you can change that and change the physiological makeup, you know, the chemical cocktail that you got floating around in your body, and cure yourself?
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah, without a doubt. And with that comes like, the other things in life. And this is where I, I’d love to kind of dive into the other things that make our mindset vulnerable are like just just things in our modern day world, whether it be sleep or eating out of your diet type, or moving too much or too little or not, or having too many stimulants, you know, and breath is a huge one, we talked about that a little bit.
The environment that you place yourself in the actual environment, with the people you surround your wit itself with, and the environment via like, the things we put on our skin, the things that we breathe, the things that we put in to our mouth, the things that, yeah, just the actual, like the physical environment that you put yourself, put yourself, then it’s, they all play a role in our low, or what you and I’ve talked about before, are physiological below to potentially compromise our mindset.
So if we can reduce the that load through any of the number of like pillars that we work on, then our mindset has a better chance of like, hey, let’s take you know, maybe we can have 80 or 80% of our thoughts be negative instead of 90, and then slowly work your way into just being a person that really believes what you say, and what you say is a positive thing to yourself. Yeah, I’m really interested in Bruce Lipton’s work, I’ve heard a lot about it.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it’s pretty wild stuff. There it is. It’s just really fascinating. Like, I can go, I’ve read a bunch of books like this, and I can just get really deep into that rabbit hole of like the mind body connection. It’s fascinating.
Chris Wissman
You are, your mind is your body, man.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it really is. I mean, it’s like, it’s like the central processing unit. You know, it’s the CPU of your body, you know, it’s controlling everything. So you mentioned something in passing just now. I want to go back to that a little bit. You said something about diet type? Yeah, that.
Chris Wissman
So everyone has genetic makeup. And we all have what’s called a metabolic diet type or something, also referred to as bio biochemical individuality. So our gut is predisposed to absorb some things better than others. And when we have more eating out of our diet type, and really now, we have so many availabilities to eat healthy foods.
It’s more about not eating like the processed garbage and trying to eat foods that you know where they came from, you know, they’re clean, they’re not doused with herbicides and pesticides, and then that will help us and help our gut not be inflamed.
And if you can even take it a step further and do some diet typing questionnaires and you get really in the nitty gritty with what kind of vitamins and minerals that you might be an excess of or are not an excess of you can really dial in your nutrition and be right on the money with backing up your genetics.
So like people from like extreme northern climates would have like. It’s a shame that keto has gotten such a bad rap, but also a good rap because there are some benefits to it. Maybe if you’re an Eskimo I had the mistake of like, of getting wrapped up in the rabbit hole being keto, and I, I really messed up my gut.
And I don’t want to deter people from trying that because there are some definite benefits of having fats in your diet, but they have to be the right fats. And you have to know who you are, individually, if you’re going to get benefits from that. And so, it’s really more about just taking a step back and talking to yourself after you have the food.
And just see how you feel like I’m the weird person in the grocery store going, Hey, Chris, do you want do you want that? And like, you get an answer right away? You do, you do? I swear if you just, if you stop for a second and ask, you get an answer right away.
Like there’s sometimes that this company Jackson’s Honest, has these really good corn chips that are just it’s literally sea salt, blue corn and coconut oil. And sometimes my body’s like, yes. And other times, like, nope. And it’s just you just talk to yourself and your innate wisdom knows what you need.
Patrick McGilvray
My body always says yes, when I’m standing in front of the ice cream display. Patrick, do you need this? And I’m like, yeah, do you know, it feels so good.
Chris Wissman
I got really caught up again, when I sort of learned all this stuff. I got really caught in a rabbit hole just thinking all that was bad. And like, to kind of back up the mindset. Like if that eases your mind. And that’s something that is a treat to you and you really enjoy it. If the juice is worth the squeeze mentally, and you don’t feel terrible, like maybe not make it a habit, but enjoy that, like, enjoy the Graeter’s, you know what I mean?
If you’re gonna do it, enjoy it, don’t beat yourself up about it. Because that will really throw you down a spiral. And I’ve seen a lot of people, including myself, not get the benefits from that. Yeah, it gets a little tricky. So I kind of live and this is kind of a popular thing. But I kind of do live by the 80/20.
And just been taking a step back and asking myself if that’s what I wanted, that’s what I needed. I’m actually more of a carbo type if I were to do my metabolic diet typing, so I do really well on on like good carbohydrates. So I will have like Ezekiel bread, which is a great source of like sprouted soaked seeds and grains.
And for a couple of years ago, you wouldn’t catch me eating that because I thought that was bad. And it causes inflammation. And it sounds like it’s got gluten in it. It’s got gluten and, and to gluten is defense, everyone that has been tested, like they get a couple of controlled studies and everyone that had gluten showed gut permeability, which is like inflammation. So there is some truth to it.
But that was American gluten. Keep that in mind. We could go down a really deep rabbit hole here. And there’s American gluten and basically American students got a bad rap. Oh, it actually doesn’t have a bad rap. It’s bad because it’s been sprayed with so many chemicals and actually mutated what it is. So if you find an organic source of gluten, you might not unless you’re celiac, you might not get that effect.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, I mean, corn apparently is a good ancient grain. That’s low in gluten. Yeah. Yeah, man. So Metabolic Typing, this is very interesting. I’m interested in doing this, you know, like, how would I go about doing this?
Chris Wissman
So there’s an actual book called Metabolic Diet Typing. And the company that I do my training for, the Czech Institute, has their own version of it that I like. And so if you’re ever interested in a questionnaire, I’m more than happy to pass it to you. I like some things from the Czech Institute. And I like a lot of things from the diet, the diet typing from the book is very in depth.
So if you want to go down the rabbit hole, I’d go that route. If you don’t, I would just just ask yourself some questions, you know, and just be really honest with yourself about what’s benefiting you and what’s not.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay. So I did a quick search here on Amazon, like the Metabolic Typing Diet. Yep. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that’s it. And Walt, and Trish Fahey. You got it.
Chris Wissman
It’s been around for a while. And, you know, there’s, again, a lot of questions when you start to identify your diet type, but it’s really intuitive, and it’ll help you. And keep in mind, our diet type will change seasonally because our ancestors had different foods available at different times throughout the year.
We have the luxury now to just eat food from anywhere at any time and just go to Whole Foods and grab whatever. So if you got down into the nitty nitty gritty of your diet type you may change your food according to like, when it’s wintertime or when it’s spring or summertime, you know, you might eat a little I’m hotter and heavier in the winter, and more dense foods and in the summer of cooler, lighter foods, and it just, we crave those things, and we crave the soups, you know, in the winter, and then the salads in the summer.
Patrick McGilvray
So, pumpkin spice chai latte, fall in.
Chris Wissman
That’s, that was I think that was programmed later.
Patrick McGilvray
I don’t know, it’s pretty been around forever. What I love hearing you say is that, like diet, it depends on you. And I love this idea of just like figuring out what works for you, because so many people in the fitness community have kind of a one size fits all, you know, everything’s a nail, and they’ve got the hammer, you know, approach for diet, you know, it’s got to be keto, or it’s got to be, you know, paleo, or it’s got to be, you know, plant based, or it’s got to be, you know, whatever, or no carbs, or whatever it is. And I’m like, you know, it’s not that simple. You know, we’re not one size fits all people, you know?
Chris Wissman
Well, and when you when you start to make your, your transition into caring about what you how you treat yourself physically, and mentally, you’re gonna get some things that you identify with, you want to be like, that helped me like, so starting to clean up my diet and getting rid of X, Y, and Z, eating more of a paleo heavy fat approach was something that helped me and I identified with it.
And that was a part of the growing process. So I can really relate to where people are there. But it would be really sweet to start seeing people take a step back and just understand how different we all are. It is extraordinary how different of human beings we are, our gut microbiomes are totally different.
The way we move is different, the way we sleep, the way we act throughout our day, and our requirements are all different there, there might be some people that are just naturally deficient in vitamin A and others that aren’t at all. So you know, like, finding that kind of stuff out takes a little bit of work, but it’s well worth it. And just acknowledging the differences, I think is really important in it. And it kind of sets the ego aside for a minute. And, and allows you to relate to people and understand where they’re coming from.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, no, I love that. And, you know, I went, I was on a standard American diet for a long time. And that led me down the path of a lot of diseases, you know, me is what changed my Yeah, and I changed my diet. And I went from like, you know, pescatarian to vegetarian to plant based. And now I’m not as hardcore about plant based, I’m still vegetarian, I don’t crave eating, you know, meat at all.
And I don’t have anything against people that do. And I’m not saying one way is right or the other, but it’s just for me, I don’t have that desire for that. Yeah. So like, yeah, and I do like to have like a little cheese on my pizza, sometimes, you know, or, of course, whatever, you know, whatever. And I don’t beat myself up about it. Like, I have to do it this way or that way. So when people ask me, I say that I’m like, 98%, plant-based, you know, and that 2% is like, some Graeter’s every now and then you know, and cheese pizza, and I enjoy that it’s fine. And that way when I go to a party, and they’re like, have a cookie, I’m like, sorry, you noticed that it has butter in it? I’m like, Sure, Alex.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, my family just, oh, man, it’s been really accepting of it. But I can see the frustration on their face when I choose. I’m like, so every year that goes by, I experiment with a little more and a little more and, and I’m like, okay, I’ll try this this year. They’re like, why you’re gonna you’re gonna eat. I’m like, It’s not that I don’t think your food is good. It’s delicious. Which is like, since I’ve cleaned up so much when I do introduce something out of the ordinary for me, I just get, like ramifications sometimes. It’s like having a hangover. It’s not worth it.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, that’s a whole nother topic. So, just to kind of recap, like, I love this approach of like, do what feels good for you. Yeah, ask yourself, Do I want this? You know, and I think that can apply, you know, to a lot of things, you know, we could do that in our training. We can do that. You know, am I is this hurting my body? Is this form hurting my body? Is this long run good for me right now?
And it’s probably good for us to you know, ask those questions of ourselves on a regular basis, you know, and just just kind of check in with our mind. You know, what do you what does my body need here? Because your mind is so powerful that it really does know your your subconscious mind actually has a a blueprint of your of your body at perfect health that homeostasis.
Yeah, so it knows what that looks like for you. Yes. And if you can just tap into that, if you can just sort of like, let it be, you’re going to be much healthier, you know, for sure. Your subconscious mind is always trying to get you there. And we fight it, we fight it every day, we have a lot of this has to do with us wanting just wanting to feel good, we just want to feel good. I want to eat that bag, you know, of potato chips, because that’s salt in the ocean fad is just gonna make me finish sugar from the, you know, she’s gonna feel so good.
Chris Wissman
They have actual scientists that are behind, like, like flavor profiling now, so they don’t, I don’t even think they do nearly as many taste tests as I used to, they know it’s gonna taste good. It’s gonna, it’s gonna trigger our brain, and we’re gonna want more of it. And it’s already sugar. Yeah. And you have the brain addicted, the Holy Trinity, right?
Yeah, we can talk about something. So you mentioned the standard American diet. And what the standard American diet for you and I did was create disease, it may not have showed its face and shown its face. It’s like an actual, like a modern day disease yet, but we probably had a lot of different things going on with us, whether it be mood dysregulation, or aches and pains, or maybe weight gain or whatever it might have been.
But when our gut gets that much stress, it starts to become permeable. And you’ve heard everyone talk about leaky gut. And that’s kind of a really common topic to talk about. But the thing that I really love to dive into is something called visceral somatic inhibition. And those are just a bunch of fancy words for saying, when our gut is inflamed, that it’s taking over the nervous system response, the blood flow, and the hydration from the surrounding musculature.
The musculature is connected on those on those different on those nervous system pathways to protect itself. So when our organs are in bad shape from something like the standard American diet, or from maybe negative self talk, then our core, our transverse abdominis, and all these things don’t really have the opportunity to run at maximum capacity.
But when all the nutrients are taken away from the musculature and put in towards the organs, our liver and our in our gut and our small, large intestines, then we’re losing the availability to even use our core properly. And then we go down that rabbit hole of like, this is potentially where low back injuries come from, you know, our inner unit shut off, it can’t even work, right.
So it’s just all these stabilizing muscles up our spine that are responsible to take all the load of the spine and support us. And I’m sure they get mad, you know, and they want to shut down as well and take a break. So it’s very interesting to see what all these stressors can do on our body. And one of them is shut our core off. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s wild. And so like you said, though, the most powerful things in line if we continue that positive mindset, you can heal your gut through that. Just know that.
Patrick McGilvray
Fascinating. So give me one tip that we can take away as long distance runners. So if I’m running a half marathon or a marathon or an ultra marathon, you know, what’s something we can do? What would you recommend if you just met somebody at a party and you were like, Hey, do this one thing that’ll help you a lot.
Chris Wissman
Sleep and breathe, sleep and breathe. The more we can, but those are going to be really important as far as our availability to perform the next day, no matter what. Like your lifestyle prior to the couple of weeks before the race is going to be what it is. But if we can get a good sleeping pattern set, set and balance our circadian rhythm. Like you mentioned, we can come back in homeostasis relatively easy enough, we can start reincorporating diaphragmatic breathing, which would just be breathing down the deepest layers of our lungs and quit the panic breathing up into our chest. If we can breathe low and not high, then I think it would really set yourself up for some good endurance.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, how long does it take to for that sleeping pattern to kind of have an effect like is it right away?
Chris Wissman
I mean, I mean think about it the next day after you sleep eight hour you feel infinitely better than if you slept five. Especially again, everybody’s really different. Some people can get away with less but I wear an aura ring. And I know when my REM sleep is off. I know when my heart rate variability is often when my heart rate is elevated and it’s and really I don’t even need it because I can just tell it’s funny because I knew I just needed some reassurance and sleep affects so much. It’s so important to just sleep in a cool dark room. Try to get rid of the blue light before you go to bed and just get a good night’s sleep. And that’s helps me more than most things.
Patrick McGilvray
And then diaphragmatic breathing, that’s kind of like what you would call belly breathing. Is that right?
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah. And you can get really complex with it. But if you just train yourself maybe lying on the ground, and expanding 360 degrees around your stomach, your back and your hips, and then coming back in, if you could expand 360 degrees, you know, efficiently learn to essentially diaphragmatically breathe. And my partner Jen is a expert with breath, if you ever want to talk with her, so she can, she can niche out on that.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ll be getting her on here, for sure. Cool. Is that something we can do while we’re running to that diaphragmatic breathing is that?
Chris Wissman
Yeah, it definitely will help. It will definitely help. And as long as you can handle maybe trying to train yourself to nasal breathing. I’ve read that that really helps her endurance. I don’t know, I don’t want to speak out of context. I don’t know the science behind that. I think Jen would be able to speak to that better. But no matter what I know that the guy frantically diaphragmatically breathing will help you whether or not you transition from nasal to mouth while you’re running is something that I’m not as familiar with yet.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ve done the nasal breathing while running. In fact, Jen and I, she gave me some tips when I was training for my 100.
Chris Wissman
Oh, cool.
Patrick McGilvray
So she yeah, so she helped me with that. And it worked for me for slower paces, you know, because you get to a point where you just I couldn’t get enough air to my cells.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, you have to oxygenate.
Patrick McGilvray
And so it was like mouth and nose and ears, anything I could just open up to get as much air in. But then there’s a lot to be said about that. Nasal Breathing. So we’ll get into that later. But that’s cool. That’s cool stuff. Heck, yeah, man. All right. Thanks, Chris. for hanging out with me. I know, I didn’t really know where this conversation was going to go. And it kind of went in a bunch of different directions. And that’s awesome. I just love to have these conversations with you. Where can people reach out to learn more about you or to learn more about Real Human Performance?
Chris Wissman
Real Human Performance on Instagram spelled out just like it sounds. And that’s where Jen and myself are and there’s a couple of our co-workers that are awesome coaches there. And my personal Instagram is @wissmansworld. But I do all my business there, so you can check both of them out. I do my weird stuff on my personal page. I’ll do like ice plunges and ice cold showers, and just act like a wild man and get out in nature and then keep it more professional at Real.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you don’t have to keep it that professional. You’re not that, why is that wild? Honestly, good. Okay, cool. So thanks again. This has been awesome. Looking forward to having another conversation like this with you sometimes.
Chris Wissman
I really appreciate the opportunity to vomit my thoughts everywhere.
Patrick McGilvray
We love being the recipient of your vomit.
Chris Wissman
What a way to end.
Patrick McGilvray
Did you know that most runners fail to reach their goals? It’s not because of lack of training, lack of desire, whether it’s running faster or running farther, I believe most runners just haven’t developed the mental toughness they need to get them across the finish line. That’s why I created a step by step training called How to Build Mental Toughness and Become A Badass Runner. I want to show you how to train your mind so you can tough it out when the going gets tough. And the best part, this comprehensive training is yours absolutely free. To get it right now just go to innerfiretribe.com/badass and get started today.
Hey there and welcome to Running Lean! My name is Patrick McGilvray and I am the host of the podcast. I am a Licensed Sports Nutritionist, a Personal Trainer, an experienced marathoner and …
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