Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
I’ve been hearing a lot of stories lately from people in the low-carb athlete community who tend to adhere to an all-or-nothing mentality when it comes to diet and exercise. They hear that low carb …
Continue Reading about 145. All or Nothing is Not Always Best →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 145, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, all or nothing is not always best. So I’ve been hearing a lot of stories lately from people in the low carb athletic community, who really tend to adhere to an all or nothing mentality when it comes to their diet and how they exercise.
So they might hear that low carb is a good way to go. And so they’re like zero carbs all the time. And that’s how they do it. And that’s kind of what they’re putting out there in the stories. They’re telling you just about no carbs, no carbs, no carbs. They might hear that training in the fasted state has certain benefits, which I’ll be talking about that in a minute, and it absolutely does; but then they do all their workouts fasted, no matter what, all of them all the time.
So today, I want to address these principles, these beliefs that I think some people have, because I think it’s important to understand when the all or nothing approach should be embraced and when it should be avoided. So in this episode, I’m going to explain why all or nothing is not always best, especially when it comes to nutrition and exercise for the endurance athlete.
So when should you use fuel for workouts? When should you add carbs around those workouts? How much fuel, how many carbs? What types of carbs? These are all great questions. And they require more information, they require more context, you can’t just answer these questions for everyone the same way because we’re all different. Everyone is different.
And we each need to figure out the right formula, right for what is going to work for you as an individual. It’s like building the perfect recipe around fuel, fuel timing, the types of exercises, you’re doing your exercise intensities, your rest, recovery, all that stuff matters. And it’s all different for each person, there’s not one recipe that’s going to work perfectly for every individual. This is why I do what I do. This is why I’m a coach.
This is why I work one on one with my clients to help you figure out the right recipe to help you figure out the right recipe that’s going to get you to your fitness goals, get you to your weight loss goals and help you improve your health overall. The only way to figure all this stuff out is really by kind of trying some things, seeing what works and then of course correcting right it’s trial and error.
And having a coach there to guide you through this process every step of the way is going to make it so much easier. So if you’re looking for that guidance, the support, the encouragement that you get from a coach, the motivation and the accountability apply to join the Running Lean coaching project. To learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join me in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners the Running Lean coaching project where the project is as always you.
Alright, so let’s get into this all or nothing approach here. Okay, and why I’m talking about this today is because I’ve been hearing a lot about people that embrace the low carb approach to endurance sports. And I love this approach. Obviously, I talk about this all the time. And they also talk about fasted workouts and they and they talk about doing all of their workouts fasted all the time.
And when I hear these things, when I hear people talk about zero carbs and carbs being bad and you have to avoid all carbs all the time. And when I hear about people doing all their workouts fasted all the time, it kind of makes me cringe just a little bit. And maybe I’ve kind of promoted some of this by talking about how I’ve done a marathon.
Well, actually I’ve done like two marathons and 50k all with zero calories fasted just to say like, hey, you know, you can do this right? You don’t need carbs to run, you know, it’s kind of fun. I tried to prove a point, you know, but maybe people think that this is like, the only way to go and it really isn’t. Okay. So a low carb approach to endurance sports does not mean zero carbs.
And training in the fasted state at times doesn’t mean you have to do all of your workouts fasted, and it doesn’t mean that you never fuel for anything. Okay, so I wanted to talk about this today and really kind of shed some light, especially in these two areas, when it comes to nutrition.
And the low carb approach, I want to make sure we understand that there are times when you will want to use some strategic carbohydrates to fuel your workouts and, and then adding fuel for workouts and not necessarily doing everything in the fasted state. Now, there’s benefits to doing these things to doing a low carb approach, or kind of a zero carb approach at times. There’s also benefits to training in the fasted state at times. But it doesn’t mean we do it all the time.
And it doesn’t mean that we never use carbs or never use fuel for our workouts. So I want to make sure that we get a better idea of when it’s okay to do these things. And when it’s okay to experiment with adding in some fuels, and especially adding some carbohydrates to help improve our performance to help improve our fitness. Because they’re not, as you know, carbs are not the enemy.
Carbs are not evil, carbs are not bad. Yes, the types of carbs you use does matter. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. But just remember that all or nothing is not always best, okay, and all or nothing is definitely not how we need to do, how we need to do all this stuff. Okay, so I just want to shed some light on this so that we can be successful and do it in a way that can support us.
And we can add some carbs and add some fuel and not have to do all this stuff. Totally fasted or unfasted, or zero carbs, it’s not a zero carb approach, I’ve never really talked about that being the only way to go, okay. So, all these things matter. And I kind of touched on this at the beginning here, all these things depend on you as an individual.
So being fat adapted just means it kind of means different things to different people. And being a fat adapted athlete is going to look different for somebody who maybe they’re training for their first 5k. And so they’re doing like a couch to 5k program and they’re just getting started with running. And they’re doing most of their runs at a very low intensity, a very low heart rate. And they’re losing weight in the process. And they’re feeling amazing. That might be a great place for someone to do a lot of workouts fasted and to really not dip into the carbs too much, okay.
But if you’re somebody who is, you know, training for your fastest marathon, and you’re trying to qualify for Boston, and you’ve got to shave, you know, 15 minutes off your marathon time, your intensity level is going to be high, your training is going to be high. And for higher intensity levels and longer training sessions and more intense longer training sessions especially, you will absolutely want to fuel for those things.
And you do not have to do those things fasted. So being fat adapted means different things for different people, we’re all a little bit different. We have to accept and acknowledge this. And then all these different differences in our goals in our training levels and our fitness levels in our gender like men and women need to feel a little bit differently for these things. So all these things matter.
And we have to look at this as an experiment of one and you’ll hear me say this probably 10 times today, because an experiment of one is always how we approach all of this stuff when it comes to changing your diet, losing weight, getting faster, you know, getting stronger, we all have to do this and play around with some things and figure out what works best for us. Okay, so first I want to talk about carbs.
So the first principle that I kind of hear people get into is, you know, oh, low carb, that means no carbs, zero carbs. And as athletes, we can use carbs. And we can time our carbs around our workouts and it’s not going to kick us out of fat burning mode.
It’s not going to, you know, ruin what you’re doing here and it’s not going to mean you’re starting from scratch. I’ve heard some people ask that question where Oh, you know, ate some carbs. Does that mean I’m not fat adapted anymore? It’s like no, absolutely not. It doesn’t mean that at all.
Getting fat adapted means you’re burning fat really efficiently. you’ve trained your body to burn fat efficiently as athletes and especially if you want to increase your performance and increase your fitness. It’s a good idea to use some carbs and time them around your workouts and improve your metabolic flexibility, you want to be metabolically flexible, you want to be able to use both carbs and fat as fuel efficiently. Why not?
Why would you just rely on fat as a fuel source? Fat is a great fuel source and, and you can really get really efficient at burning fat even at higher intensities, but we don’t have to use just fat as fuel, we can absolutely use carbs, okay. So if your goal, again, you’re gonna, you want to crush your fastest half marathon, different phases of that training cycle will require you to increase your carbohydrate intake, especially around those workouts, you know, and maybe even on a daily basis as your training cycle increases.
So if you’re, you know, if you’re doing the lower carb approach, and your goal is to lose weight, and you’re probably in that 30 to 50 grams of carbs a day kind of mode, or whatever, and that kind of works for you, you know,if your intensity is increasing in your workouts, and you’re really crushing some more intense harder workouts, you might be in that 80 to 100 grams of carbs, a day kind of mode, you know, and, and it’s not going to kick you out of fat burning mode, and it’s not going to impair your performance, if anything, it’s going to give you that extra gear, when your intensity increases.
So initially, we do want to keep our carbs low and get fat adapted. And then over time, we want to start to slowly kind of ramp up our carbs, as your body responds positively to the changes, you want to ramp up your carbohydrate intake, depending on the intensity levels of your training. And this does not mean that we’re going to just go crazy and eat, you know, just you know, whatever you like to eat, that’s like pure sugar and junk food, like we’re not talking about that.
We’re talking about using real whole foods, sources of carbohydrate and some slow burning carbohydrates in order to improve your running performance. So remember that, you know, when we this whole low carb approach is to help regulate blood sugar, it’s to help, you know keep your blood sugar from from spiking and crashing, to keep your insulin levels normal instead of because when your blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, and then you’re you’re in that fat storage mode, you know, you’re burning, you’re burning the sugar, you’re burning sugar and you’re storing fat and we need to get blood sugar normal.
We need to stop the spikes and crashes in the blood sugar, stop the spikes and crashes in the insulin levels so that your body can start burning fat instead of burning all the carbohydrates that you’re eating. Okay. Think of this like a fire. I love this analogy. So sugar, it’s like kindling, right? It burns first. It’s the first fuel source your body will use. It burns very quickly. But it’s not sustainable. It depletes rapidly and then you’re left with nothing. Okay? So sugar’s like kindling, it burns quickly, it burns first, but it doesn’t burn very long. It’s just it’s boom, burns and it’s gone.
Whereas fat burning is like the logs you put on the fire right, it takes a little bit longer to get going. But once it’s burning, it’s going to last a very, very long time. And to achieve this log burning to achieve the fat burning, we need to get rid of the sugar and the refined carbs and the processed junk food and the carbage, I like to call it, and we need to get into the fat burning, we need to get into the log burning.
And once we do that, you will have steady energy and you will have plenty of energy to fuel your you know lower intensity workouts especially at the beginning, okay, but that does not mean you never use any kind of carbs to improve, okay. And again, what we’re after is metabolic flexibility, the ability to burn both types of fuel sugar and fat very effectively.
Humans are really good fat burners, we’re, we’re naturally good fat burners, it’s our natural state of being. And we’ve just gotten away from that state. This junk food is processed carbohydrates, the carbage that we’ve been eating, it now makes up over 50% of the calories that we consume here in the United States. And that number is rising every single year. We’ve become a nation of sugar eaters, and therefore sugar burners.
So we’re not burning fat naturally anymore. And we’re gaining weight and you know, experiencing all kinds of metabolic issues and diseases and you know, obesity and all these other things, right? So we all were talking about doing things like lower the carbohydrate intake, get rid of the junk food, get rid of the garbage and start eating real whole foods. Doesn’t mean zero carbs. It does mean we will ditch a lot of the problematic carbs But we want to use some types of carbohydrates and time them around our workout so that we get the benefits of the added sugar intake from the added carbohydrate intake.
Because when you’re burning fat efficiently and when you’re exercising at a higher intensity, you’re going to burn through that sugar that you’re taking in, you’re going to burn through the carbohydrates that you’re fueling with pretty quickly. And then you’re back into fat burning again. Okay, so it’s not like you just like, oh, you’re just always burning sugar or always fat, you’re always burning both, right, but at different levels, different intensities, okay.
So when you increase your exercise intensity, you might also need to increase your carb intake. And this is where most people kind of freak out a little bit, right, they’re like, oh, my gosh, no way, I don’t want to eat any carbs, I’m gonna kick myself out of fat burning mode, I’m gonna be fat adapted, you know, low carb, low carb, zero carb.
But listen, don’t freak out, there’s a way to do this in a way that it’s not gonna really affect your body’s ability to burn fat, you can still burn fat and burn sugar at the same time, okay, if most of your training is done at a low heart rate and a lower intensity, then there’s not much of a need to add carbs as fuel, you can continue to burn fat efficiently.
And if you’re just doing some, some lower intensity stuff, lower heart rate stuff, you’re gonna be fine, you can improve your fitness, you know, you can get a little bit you know, stronger as a runner, and you can get a little bit faster, and that’s going to be fine. But if you really want to make some gains, you want to improve fitness, you get stronger, get faster, workout at higher intensities, higher heart rates, then some strategic carbs around those workouts will give you the energy that you need to improve and to and to go a little harder.
And to have that extra gear that you need to hit those faster times and hit that PR, okay. And it doesn’t mean that you have to go and start downing all the gu’s and gels and sports drinks that are laden with high fructose corn syrup and all this junk, right? There are fuels that are specifically made for the fat adapted athlete, and there’s brands like Muir energy, and that’s M-U-I-R, there’s S-fuels, there’s you can and these all make products that have slow burning carbohydrate fuels designed for the low carb athlete, so check out those brands, but really, we’re talking like 12 to 20 grams of slow burning carbs per hour might be enough to give you that little bit of an extra edge that you need.
You know, 20 grams of carbs is like a medium size banana, this is not a lot of fuel we’re talking about here, okay, so don’t freak out about this too much. But consider trying some carbohydrates around your workouts and see what works for you. Again, we’re all different. This is an experiment of one, try it and see how it feels and how it works for you.
If your goal is just to lose weight, if you’re just interested in losing weight, you’re not interested in improving your running or running longer, then stick to the low carb approach. You know, again, it doesn’t mean zero carbs, but just stick to the low carb, you know, nutrition regimen. Keeping in mind that, you know, some people will require slightly more carbs than others. And everybody’s a little different, you know.
In talking about like pre menopausal women versus postmenopausal women, pre menopausal women will probably need a little bit more carbs, especially around certain days of their cycle. I’m actually going to put together a podcast on this topic and just kind of talk about how women are different from men and how they require a little bit of a different approach when it comes to nutrition and around fitness.
Because you guys men and women are different, did you know that we are very different and we all have some slightly different needs. And I’ve been really doing some research on this lately. And it’s a fascinating topic to me. And I’m learning a lot about how women respond differently to dietary changes in intensity levels, changes in their workouts and things like that.
So we can all do this, we can all kind of maintain that kind of a lower carb approach. But we don’t have to do it with zero carbs. Okay, so when it comes to carbs, especially for the endurance athlete, all or nothing is definitely not always best. Adding in some carbs as fuel around your workouts is recommended for most people for most low carb athletes.
Especially if you want to improve your performance, okay, you can still maintain efficient fat burning, you can still lose weight, you can still prioritize fat as that main fuel source you still get to those, those logs that you’re burning, okay, but you’re just adding in a little bit of kindling to help get things going. Okay. And you’ll burn through the carbs during your workout.
So you’re not going to be like storing a lot of extra energy as fat or anything like that. Okay? So for the first sort of all or nothing, zero carbs versus some carbs, definitely, you know, give it a shot, try fueling some workouts and see how it goes.
The other all or nothing mentality is around fasting and whether or not we should be doing all of our workouts in that fasted state. And I’ve just seen a lot of people talking about this lately. And I wanted to really clear this one up too, because I think there’s some misconceptions here as well.
So, fasting, the way I’m talking about here is basically when you train in the fasted state, meaning you haven’t had any kind of fuel, any food at all, really no calories, for, you know, typically like 4 to 12 hours prior to working out. So let’s say you typically what most people do is they eat dinner, the night before they wake up in the morning, it’s been, you know, 12 hours, since they last ate, they might have a cup of coffee, and then they go and do a workout that would be considered training in the fasted state, they do a workout, they don’t use any kind of fuel.
And this is pretty, pretty effective. You know, this is a good way of ramping up, the fat burning is a good way of getting your body fat adapted. So fasting has lots of benefits and training in this state has many, many benefits, right? And please understand that fasting this way is like super normal and supernatural, it’s just kind of our natural state as humans.
One of the things I’ve heard recently, which I think is really fascinating is that the human body is designed to process digest, metabolize about two meals a day, you know, one to two meals a day is about all that we’re really supposed to be metabolizing because our pancreas can’t work more than that. And our liver has issues if we are processing more than that.
So the systems of the human body are naturally designed for eating a couple of times a day, and that’s about it. So fasting is really a natural state, again, burning fat and fasting very natural states for humans to be in, okay. But we’ve gotten away from that. We have to, you know, adhere to this three meals a day, plus eight snacks and dessert, you know, it’s like we’re eating 13 times a day or whatever. It’s ridiculous, right? We don’t need to eat that often. Right?
But so fasting, working out in the fasted state just means that you’re working out without added calories without fuel for that workout. Okay, so it helps you to get fat adapted, it helps you to stay fat adapted helps you to burn more body fat, no fuel coming in, means your body is prioritizing that stored body fat as fuel.
And the low carb approach and fasting like this and doing workouts in that fasted state all help to maintain the blood sugar like I mentioned earlier, they help to keep the insulin levels down, help to prioritize fat as fuel will help you to tap into that stored body fat as fuel. These are all amazing benefits of working out in that fasted state.
You know, the fasted workouts also help improve your fat burning efficiency. And even at higher intensities. So for most normal carb adapted athletes, you know, they’ll burn fat up to about 60-65% of their VO2 max and then they kind of start prioritizing just carbohydrates as fuel, they need carbohydrates fuel.
But as fat adapted athletes, we can actually push our fat burning up into the 75, 80 90% range. And there are some elite athletes who even go above 90% and fat burning, so 90% of their VO2 max. So this is like, massively cool, right? This is massively cool because we can not only burn fat at the lower intensities, but we are also really good at burning fat at the higher intensities, okay, so this is going to help you improve your higher intensity running is going to indefinitely improve your endurance more fat burning means you’re just going to be able to go longer without bonking, which is super amazing.
And then also training in the fastest state helps to improve your hormonal responses. So more adrenaline gets produced when you’re working out in the fasted state, which means you can go a little bit harder. It’s almost like a performance enhancing tool, you know, and then more growth hormone gets produced to help you recover faster from those workouts.
So this combination of you can go harder and recover faster is pretty awesome. And then people are like, well, yeah, so I want to do that all the time. But here’s the thing. Is it necessary or is it a good idea to always do all of your workouts in that fasted state? Yeah, there’s some great benefits to doing it. But it isn’t necessary to do it all the time.
So, I recommend people definitely train in that fasted state to build the fat adaptation and to really get efficient at burning fat. Okay, and this could take a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Again, we’re all an experiment of one. Everybody’s preferences are a little bit different. Some people love training in that fasted state, some people just don’t, they just don’t like doing it doesn’t feel good. I’ve heard people that kind of get sick when they train in the fasted state, they need some fuel, okay, great, then you’re the kind of person that would benefit from some fuel, okay.
But if you find that you, your workouts, maybe you’re taking a hit like you’ve hit a plateau in your fitness and you’re not improving, maybe you’re not getting faster, maybe you’re not recovering as quickly. Maybe your heart rate isn’t where you want it to be, it’s staying super high, you might want to consider adding in some fuel for your workouts, you know.
But I do love the idea of doing kind of the bulk of your training, especially at the beginning, in this fasted state, when you’re trying to get fat adapted, it just helps you to get through that initial phase, that first phase of getting your body trained to burn fat more efficiently. It really helps with that whole process. Okay?
So it’s a good way to begin, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it all the time. So how do you know like, when it’s time to add some fuel to your workouts, keep track of your workouts, log your workouts in a log or journal. Maybe you use an app. But you know, look at things like heart rate, pace, how you felt during that workout recovery time, you know, how long does it take you to recover? And then don’t be afraid to just try some fuel and see how it affects you.
Everybody’s a little bit different. So you got to try something and see if it works. If it does, great. If not, then try something else. And what kinds of fuel are we talking about here? Well, I just mentioned using carbs as fuel, so that’s always an option. But it doesn’t even have to be carbs. Because when you’re fat adapted, you can take advantage of using exogenous fat as fuel so fat that you eat, you know, fat and protein actually can work pretty beautifully as a fuel source.
Okay, so remember, we burn sugar first, and we can burn like fat that we get in our diet and then we kind of burn that stored body fat. So if we you know, don’t have carbs coming in, we’ll be able to take advantage of the some of the fat that we’re getting in our diet so we can actually use some fat as fuel before a workout.
And this might be as simple as putting MCT oil and heavy cream and some collagen in your coffee pre workout. That’s it. Like that could be how you fuel a workout. And remember all the brands that I mentioned above Muir energy, S-fuels you can they all have products for like pre workout, for during a workout, for post workout, they have bars that have fat and protein, you could do an hour before workout, they have drink mixes with fat and amino acids and electrolytes that you can do during a workout they have kind of a gel product that you can use during longer training runs.
And you could do those, you know, maybe they have 12 to 20 grams of carbs, you can do one every hour or so you know, and all these products. Again, they’re designed with the low carb athlete in mind, they’re designed to keep you in the fat burning mode to still prioritize fat burning, but give your body that little bit of extra energy that you need for those longer runs are those more intense workouts. So fat is fuel is a good approach and it’s something that you definitely want to try. And you might find that a little bit is all you need.
Okay, so again, like when should you start adding fuel and stop doing all your workouts fasted, again, just kind of play around with when you if your training is starting to tank a little bit or if you’re plateauing. But if you’re training for something like a marathon, and you’re up to 12 to 15 miles and you’re doing those fasted and you’re feeling pretty good, you might want to try you know, going forward from that point on, you might want to try fueling and see how it goes for you and try a couple of different products.
Try a couple of different fueling approaches, because here’s the thing, you don’t want to wait till race day right to try to fuel for your race. If you’re deciding you’re going to use fuel on race day. Don’t wait till race day to experiment with it; you have to play around with it ahead of time. You have to practice fueling strategies during your training, right? Nothing new on race day ever. Okay?
So that could be where you decide that feeling might be a good strategy for you. workouts that are over 90 minutes is a benchmark a lot of people use when they start to choose like maybe the fat protein combo for for the most part. And then as your intensity increases, your carb intake should increase as well. So the fuel sources, the carbohydrate, fuel sources can increase as your intensity levels increase, or even if you’re going super long, maybe you’re training for an ultra 50k 100k 100 miles, something like that, you’re definitely going to want to have, you definitely asked us fuel for something like that. And that that approach is going to be very different from what it looks like for, you know, fueling for a half marathon or something like that, right.
So, when it comes to fasted training, just remember, all or nothing, not always best. And really, what we’re going for with all of this is metabolic flexibility, we want to be able to burn both fat and sugar very effectively, right, we want to train our bodies to burn both fuel sources really well, so that we have the ability to use both types of fuel and improve our running, improve our fitness, improve our strength, improve our intensity, and become the badass runners that we know we can be okay.
So to do this does not mean that we have to do everything, all or nothing, it doesn’t mean we have to do all our training fast, it doesn’t mean we have to do zero carbs, it means we can use proper types of fuel and, and train fueled and, and use carbs in a very strategic way to help us and not hurt us. It doesn’t have to kick us out of fat burning mode, it doesn’t have to, you know, ruin what we’re doing here, right?
So, and as always, if you want some help with any of this or all of this, apply for coaching you and I will work closely together, we’ll put together a personalized plan for you. I’ll help you stay on track so you can achieve those goals so you can achieve your weight loss goals, your fitness goals, we can do it all cool. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply and I’ll see you over in the Running Lean coaching project. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
If you are overweight, chances are it’s a problem of metabolism. Your metabolism is not working properly. By nature, animals (including humans) do not become overweight unless there is some kind …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 141 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today how to fix your metabolism. If you are overweight, carrying around more body fat than you’d like, then chances are it’s a problem of metabolism, your metabolism is not working properly.
By nature, animals, like animals in the wild, including humans do not become overweight, unless there’s some kind of dysfunction happening in the body most likely a dysfunction of metabolism. One of the most common dysfunctions in humans is that we have either purposely or accidentally slowed down our metabolism. Okay, this is where the body is not burning enough calories to maintain homeostasis, which just means, you know, stable and optimal health.
And I usually don’t talk about burning calories here on the podcast. But today, I’m gonna make an exception because I believe this is an important topic. And I really want to share this information with you. So today, it’s all about how to fix your metabolism here on the Running Lean podcast.
And I read a lot of books on the topics of metabolism and in the art and the science of exercise and running and mindset and building strength and nutrition. Like I’m always reading books and listening to books and listening to podcasts on these topics. And one thing that I’ve found to be 100% true from everything I’ve read and listened to, is that while books might provide you with some knowledge, the personal application of that knowledge is a whole other ball of wax.
Okay, this is why I do what I do as a coach, because what’s written in a book is going to be generalized information. It’s not a specific plan that’s created just for you. Okay, listen, you have your own goals, maybe you want to run a half marathon, or maybe you want to lose 30 pounds.
And the way that you get there will look different for you than it will for somebody else, maybe somebody else is pretty lean, they just want to drop 5 or 10 pounds, maybe they want to qualify for Boston, these are different people with different goals and different body types. The same plan is not going to work for these two people, right?
So and then we talk about how we structure workouts, how much muscle we’re trying to build, the different food preferences that we have, our different lifestyles, work schedules, travel schedules, cultural differences, there are so many differences, like we’re all individuals. And so this is why I do what I do as a coach, because there’s not one book that’s going to work for everybody. There’s not one plan is gonna work for everybody.
And this is why I offer coaching because what works for them probably won’t work for you. So in my program, you and I sit down together, we put together a plan that will work for you based on your goals and your life and your preferences.
So if you’re ready to make some changes that are designed for you, specifically for you for your goals and your lifestyle, maybe you want to lose weight or get stronger or run faster, then come and join me in the Running Lean coaching project.
This is my unique coaching program for runners to help you crush both your weight loss and your running goals because you can do both. To learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. And get started I’d love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project where the project is always you.
All right, fixing your metabolism. How do you fix your metabolism? Why am I even talking about this today? Well, like I said at the beginning here, if you’re overweight, it’s most likely a problem of metabolism. There’s some kind of dysfunction happening there. And in order to get your body to where it needs to be to get your body into homeostasis to lose weight, we need to fix the metabolism. And I think we all kind of know this on some level that there’s some metabolism dysfunction and happening. But I want to talk about this kind of frankly today and I want you to understand what your metabolism is and what it’s not. Maybe dispel a few myths about metabolism because there’s a few myths floating around out there that you may think are true but maybe they are not.
I want to share some key lifestyle choices that really affect your metabolism, you know, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. And then there are certain things to consider, especially if you’re a runner, and a fat adapted runner. Okay, so we’re gonna get into all of that, let’s first talk about what metabolism is. So metabolism is a term that describes really, it describes all the chemical reactions in your body that keep your body alive and functioning, right, the main way, we’re going to be using metabolism today.
And the main way that I think we all understand metabolism is how we convert nutrients from the foods we eat into fuel that we can use for our bodies. Okay, so we convert our food into energy. And, and our body needs energy to breathe and to digest food and to circulate our blood and to breathe our lungs and to repair damaged tissues and cells and all those things, right.
So our body needs energy, and we get it from the food that we eat. And when our metabolism is working properly, our body is in a state of homeostasis when it’s not working properly, we’re out of that state. Okay, so what we’re really talking about is, you know, the process our body uses of converting our food into energy. And really, we’re talking about, you know, broadly we talk about calories, you know, it’s like, okay, we’re burning more calories. Okay.
So, metabolism is why some people seemingly can eat a lot of food without gaining weight, while others seem to eat a lot less and still maintain their weight or get fatter because their metabolisms are working differently. Some of this has to do with genetics, some of it has to do with lifestyle, we’re going to talk about all that in a second here.
But I want you to understand that really, your metabolism, the speed of your metabolism is how you burn calories, how you burn calories at rest, how you burn calories during exercise. And this is commonly called like your metabolic rate, sometimes they call it the resting metabolic rate or, or basal metabolic rate, those two terms are very similar. And we can kind of use them interchangeably. Okay?
If you’re a scientist, don’t give me a hard time about that. Because I don’t, there’s a subtle difference there. But I don’t want to confuse you with that. But let’s just say resting metabolic rate is what your body is burning, while you’re just sitting around not doing a whole lot just sitting around, right, which we do a lot of the time, right, you want to increase your resting metabolic rate, if you want to increase your body’s ability to burn calories. Okay?
So one thing that is very, very important, and I want to color this whole conversation with this is, what are you metabolizing? What types of calories are you burning? Because this makes a huge difference. We talk about how we want to burn more calories, and everybody’s talking about calories and how calories are so important. We got to burn the calories burn the calories, but what calories are you burning? Are you burning carbohydrates? Are you burning fat?
Because if you’re trying to lose weight and become fat adapted and improve your endurance as a runner, you want to be burning more fat, you just do, you can’t lose weight without burning fat, you got to burn the fat that’s on your body. Unless you have liposuction, right, you can certainly do that and lose some weight that way for sure.
But if you want to change your body composition, and lose fat and gain muscle, then we have to be training our body to burn more fat, we got to get more efficient at burning fat. And eating a diet that’s super high in sugar. And super high in carbs means that you’re just going to be burning mostly sugar and carbs. Right.
And for some people, this is fine. Maybe they haven’t gained weight. Their diet is mostly carbohydrates and sugars and, and they burn that stuff just fine. And they don’t gain weight. That’s great. But for most of us, probably 80 to 90% of us, that doesn’t work, especially as we get older, right? So if your goal is to lose weight, all the sugar and all the carbs, it’s going to make it very difficult for you right?
Losing weight means we got to be burning, we want to be burning mostly fat, right. So when you ditch the carbs, when you ditch the sugar, even as a runner, you get fat adapted and you train your body to be really good at burning fat. This means you’re going to be burning more fat at rest and during exercise.
So when we increase our metabolism, that means we’re actually going to be increasing the amount of fat that our body is burning, because our body is focused on fat as our main source of fuel instead of carbohydrates as our main source of fuel. I want to make this very, very clear at the beginning here so that when I talk about what I’m going to be talking about today, the factors that affect your metabolism, how we can increase your metabolism, the diet matters, it really, really matters, okay?
We want to be metabolizing more fat instead of carbohydrates, okay. And especially if you’re an endurance athlete, and especially if you’re an endurance athlete who also wants to, you know, change the body composition and lose some fat, we got to increase the fat metabolism, it’s also called fat oxidation, the more fat we’re oxidizing, or more fat, we’re metabolizing, then the more energy we have, and, you know, that’s how we lose weight, too. So it’s a win-win, it really is okay.
And that typical runner’s diet that I’ve talked about before of all sugar, no carbs, is probably not going to get you there. Because your body always wants to prioritize the carbohydrate metabolism, because it’s just an easy source of fuel for your body to use. And as long as you’re filling your body with that stuff, you’re never going to be really getting into fat burning mode. Okay?
So step one is to ditch the sugar, ditch the carbs, let’s get into fat burning mode. That’s really the first step here. Okay, that way, when we increase our metabolism, when we’re burning more calories, we will naturally be burning more fat, we’ll be using fat as fuel. And this is our goal here. Okay.
So let’s get into what affects your metabolism and how we can fix the metabolism, how we can increase the metabolism. And some of this is pretty interesting. And some stuff that I, in my research for this, I think, is kind of new data. And there’s some new studies out there. So I think you’re gonna find this pretty interesting.
So the first thing that affects your metabolism, of course, is going to be the foods that you eat, how much food are you eating, how often are you eating, you know, the amount of food you eat, can really affect your metabolism positively or negatively. If you’re over eating constantly, if you’re constantly eating more food at each sitting than your body really needs, you will slow down your metabolism, you know, your body just cannot handle that much.
And so what we want to do is not overeat, we want to eat just enough, okay, when we want to eat enough to be satisfied, you don’t have to count calories to know if you’re overeating or not, right. If you’re eating to the point where you get uncomfortable, you’re eating too much. Okay. But then we talked about the types of foods and already mentioned, you know, that we want to be, we want to get off the sugar and the grains in the refined carbohydrates.
And when we do that, we’re going to be obviously metabolizing more fat. But for example, if we increase our protein intake, you will actually increase your metabolism, at least temporarily, at least for a few hours. But if you’re eating plenty of protein at each meal, you’re going to do yourself a big service, because you’re going to have an increase in your metabolism overall.
And the reason for this is something called the thermal effect of food or TEF. So when you eat the food, your body has to burn some calories to digest that food, okay? And protein between the three major macronutrients, you know fat, carbohydrates, and protein, protein causes the largest rise in the thermal effect of food, meaning that your body will use more calories to process and digest protein than carbs or fat.
So dietary protein requires 20 to 30% of its usable energy to be used for metabolism of the protein. So that is huge, because 20 to 30% of the calories that you’re eating from protein is actually being used to digest the protein and to metabolize the protein compared to 5-10% for carbs and 0-3% for fats. So your body does not use much energy to digest and metabolize fats, it uses a little bit for carbs, but a lot of energy for protein.
So right there, eating protein will help you to increase your metabolism, right. It also helps you to feel more full, and helps to prevent you from overeating, because it’s really hard to overeat a lot of protein, sit down and try to eat, you know, a pound of chicken breast. I’m going to tell you right now it’s gonna be really hard to do. So, a lot of food and you know, but you could eat, you know, a couple pounds of pasta probably pretty easily without really feeling that full from that. Okay.
So people that have a drop in metabolism, when they lose a lot of weight, we’ll get into this in a second here. When people have a drop in their metabolism from losing weight, a lot of this is due to losing muscle mass and eating enough protein can help prevent this, right? One of the things that we want to do when we are setting out to lose weight is we want to lose fat weight, we don’t want to lose muscle weight.
So we got to make sure we’re maintaining some sort of strength training and getting enough protein. And that’ll actually help to keep your metabolism going. You know, because more muscle means you’re burning more calories in general. Again, I’m gonna talk about that in just a second. But listen, like we got to make sure we’re getting enough protein at every single meal, it’s definitely going to affect how your metabolism functions.
Okay, body size. Another thing that affects your metabolism. In general, larger people typically have faster metabolisms, right, it just requires more energy to maintain a larger body. So people that are larger, will generally have faster metabolisms. This is not to say that you should become larger.
That’s not what I’m saying here at all. But people with larger frames, even obese people tend to carry around the who are carrying around way more body fat and muscle, then than typical people, their their metabolisms are actually going to be a little bit faster, which sounds kind of counterintuitive, but there’s other things happening there. There’s some other dysfunctions happening there. But just understand that if you’re a bit of a larger person, your metabolism might be a little bit faster, okay?
Sleep is a big one. Sleep will really increase your risk of fat storage, okay, Sleep is linked to major increases in weight gain and the risk of obesity, and partly because of the negative effects of sleep deprivation on your metabolism. So lack of sleep actually increases blood sugar levels and increases insulin resistance. It increases your risk of developing type two diabetes, it affects your hunger hormone ghrelin, and your fullness hormone leptin.
And this explains why some people who are sleep deprived they’re often pretty hungry, and they have a hard time losing weight, you know, you’re in this, you’re putting your body in this chronic state of stress when you don’t get enough sleep. Right. So if you’re having a hard time losing weight, if you’re having a hard time metabolizing fat, one of the things you have to look at is getting good sleep consistently.
And good quality sleep on a regular basis, this is going to get your body out of that stress mode, and get your body working the way it’s supposed to. Another thing that affects your metabolism in a good way is caffeine. And I know some people don’t don’t do caffeine at all. And that’s great. But studies have shown that caffeine in coffee and green tea can have a little bit of a temporary boost on your metabolism and promote more fat burning.
So if your goal is to lose weight and burn more fat, then coffee can definitely help you there. I know that’s good news. For some of us, it’s good news for me, I love coffee, and I drink a little bit of coffee every day. And I really love it. And you know, I’m one of those people I don’t, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t eat sugar. And really the only the only thing that I ingest that gives me a different feeling is caffeine, it does give me a little bit of a boost of energy in the morning when I’m drinking coffee and especially helps me with workouts. It’s a good performance enhancing drug, so to speak, right. So I’m cool with that.
And, you know, I think I live a very clean life. And if caffeine is the one thing that I use to kind of give me a little bit of a boost in the morning, then I’m happy to just keep doing that. Okay, maybe one day, I’ll decide that it’s just not for me anymore. But for now, I love my coffee and I’m gonna keep doing it. And it does help with weight loss, it does help with weight maintenance. And it does help with metabolizing fat. So there’s a lot of good things about caffeine if you like it if that’s something that you want to do.
And then another thing that can affect how your metabolism functions is the types of workouts you’re doing. So I used to be like, oh, just cardio, cardio, cardio all the time. And this is all anybody talks about: burn calories, burn calories. But one of the types of workouts you may want to consider if you’re not doing it already, is HIIT training. So this is high intensity interval training.
So this is where we’re doing very quick, very intense bursts of activity could be sprints, you know, sprint repeats, 400 repeats, it could be more of a group class where you’re doing, you know, high intensity intervals in a different way. But basically what happens here is that when you do these types of exercises, you increase your metabolic rate. And even after you’re finished with the workout, right?
So they found that the effect of increasing your metabolism is greater for HIIT workouts than for most other types of exercise. And that hit has also been shown to help you burn fat. And this is one of the reasons why I talk about intervals so much. Like we don’t want to be doing all this, what I call like chronic cardio where you’re just like, always doing the same kind of long ish runs at a, at a medium pace, like all the time, we want to be really doing some short bursts of intense activity, and some longer slower running as well to improve endurance, but the HIIT types of workouts are going to help you to increase your metabolism for sure.
And then kind of along with that is weight training. So increasing your muscle mass will help you to burn more calories and burn more fat. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, your body requires more energy and will burn more energy carrying around muscle, then fat. So the more muscle that you have on your frame, the more calories you are burning each day even at rest, right. So lifting weights can help you build muscle and maintain muscle.
And like I said, a lot of people that that do what I call like dieting, or you know they try to lose weight by restricting calories or something like that, a lot of times they’re just losing muscle along with fat, we don’t want to lose muscle, you know, we’re athletes, we want to maintain our muscle mass, or we want to build some muscle.
And when you build muscle, you will increase your metabolism and it’ll stay increased even at rest. So this is a really important thing. I talk about the importance of strength training all the time. This is one of the reasons why it’s important. And then they did this review of 58 different studies. So this is what they call a meta study where they study studies. And so they looked at 58 different studies.
And they said that resistance training was significantly more effective at reducing body fat percentage, total body fat mass and belly fat compared to a control group. So resistance training is going to be one of the best things you can do for yourself. If you’re not doing this currently, get into it. Okay.
Another factor that will affect your metabolism is how much water you drink. And they did a study, an older study back in 2013, but it was a study that showed that drinking 17 ounces of water. So roughly about a pint of water increases your resting metabolism by 30% for about an hour. That’s pretty interesting. So if you’re drinking more water throughout the day, you know, you are just going to naturally have a faster metabolism. Plus, we need water, water is good for you, we have to have it or we will die.
And then there’s something I want to talk about. I’ve kind of touched on this a little bit. But people that do like the crazy calorie restriction type of diets, they kind of put their body into what is called starvation mode. It’s also called metabolic adaptation or adaptive thermogenesis. But you know, I think we’ve all heard the term starvation mode. What does this mean?
So, starvation mode is when your body adapts to a calorie deficit. So when your body isn’t getting enough food, it will compensate by reducing its metabolic rate and the number of calories that you’re actually burning. So when you restrict calories too much for too long, then your metabolism will slow down significantly. This is one of the main reasons why I do not focus on just you know, restricting calories to lose weight. If you restrict calories as a weight loss method, it’s going to be problematic, you know, you can restrict a little bit, but you got to be careful not to restrict too much or for too long.
Because it can have a rebound effect, you will lose weight, but it’s also not sustainable. It’s one of those things where you might lose weight in the short term, but long term, your metabolism is going to slow down and then you’re going to start gaining that weight back again. And then you’re going to try to reduce calories even more and it’s going to have just a negative effect. And so this is just not a good way to go and think about us as human beings.
We don’t need to count calories. We’ve never counted calories until the last 50 years or so, like, do we need to be doing this? No, we don’t, there’s a better way. Just eat real food, eat food, our answer shows we have been eating for thousands of years. And I promise you, you won’t need to count another calorie again, okay. But when you look at shows like The Biggest Loser, you know, they have these obese people, and they lose a ton of weight by really restricting calories for a long time, and they’re doing tons of cardio or whatever. And they lose the weight, but then they gain it all back.
And then some, I think something like 96% of people on that show have gained the weight back or more, which is not a good, that’s not a good number. Okay. So starvation mode is a real thing. And we got to be careful not to do that. So that’s why I don’t preach restricting calories really, I don’t right.
And then there’s some other things that affect your mere metabolism. And things like hormone disorders, okay. So hypothyroidism will slow down your metabolic rate, causing a higher risk of weight gain. And then there’s genetics that can play a role here. But listen, genetics alone does not mean that you’re going to gain weight, or that you can’t increase your metabolism. So you might be predisposed to a slower metabolism or to obesity.
But if you maintain healthy eating habits, and healthy exercise habits, and you know, have a good, you know, quality of life, good lifestyle, good sleeping habits, things like that, you won’t become obese, you know, it’s kind of like saying, you have a genetic predisposition for alcoholism.
But if you don’t drink alcohol, you’re not going to become an alcoholic. So what I’m saying here, lifestyle matters. It really, really matters, okay. And one of the big myths I wanted to talk about here is age and how getting older affects metabolism, because I think that most people I’ve talked to have told me they’re just like, well, as, as you get older, you know, your metabolism just slows down. And as you age, you’re just gonna start gaining more weight. And it’s really hard to lose weight, because you’re getting older.
And they did a study back about a year ago, so this is a pretty new study in August of 2021. And this was in the Journal Science. And that suggests something very different. So thinking that your metabolism will decline, as you reach middle age and beyond. They’ve done this very intensive study. And I think this is pretty interesting. So they looked at over 6000 people, like 6400 people, ranging in age from eight days old, I know, pretty young to 95 years old. And they looked at their height, their weight, their body fat percentage, their average metabolic rates for when men, women and people in different age groups, like they looked at all these different people in all these different age ranges, okay.
And they put together a pretty clear picture of how our metabolism changes during our lifetime. Okay. And here’s what they came up with. I think this is really interesting. from infancy to one year old, your metabolic rate surges, right? It’s about 50%, higher than at any other time during your life. Okay, so from zero to one, it’s the highest right, then from one to 20 years old, your metabolism decreases by almost 3% a year.
So this is the biggest drop in your metabolism actually between one and 20 years old. From age 20 to 60, your metabolism doesn’t really change. That’s interesting, right? Most people think that between, you know, you know, 20 to 60 years when your metabolism really slows down. And it doesn’t really change at all. This is good news, right?
And then after age 60, the average metabolism decreases by 0.7% annually, which is not much that is not much. So just know that if you’ve been using, oh, I’m getting older as an excuse up to this point. We can’t use that as an excuse anymore. Okay. I just want you to think about that. Okay.
So these studies are showing us that your metabolism doesn’t have to slow down as you get older, and that it’s much more likely that changes in our behavior. Changes in our lifestyle are responsible for our metabolism, you know, increasing or slowing down. And this includes pre menopausal women and postmenopausal women. These same principles apply.
Just because you’re going through menopause does not mean that you will automatically gain weight. This is really good news. So whether you are male or female, whether you’re going through menopause or not, as you get older, stay active, get good sleep, maintain muscle mass, do some, you know, hit workouts, practice healthy eating habits, make sure you’re getting plenty of protein, and drink lots of water.
And you should be able to keep your metabolism burning nice and hot, nice and strong for the rest of your life. Okay, so this is all good news. I hope you guys got something out of this episode today. It was really fun. Putting this together. I think increasing our metabolism is really an interesting and really achievable goal for us. Okay.
And if you ever want help with this, if you want me to help you put together a personalized plan, reach out, I’d love to help you with that. We’ll put together a plan that’s based on you and your goals and your lifestyle and what we think will work for you. And then as we go through the process of change as we go through the process of changing your lifestyle and changing some of the eating habits and exercise habits. We’ll see what’s working and what’s not.
And we just continue to make progress, we continue to course correct as we go. That’s the power of coaching. It’s designed specifically for you and if you want a little help, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply Apply for coaching and you and I will have a conversation we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool. Right on you guys love you all keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I know you’ve heard the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. But so many runners keep doing the same workouts over and over …
Continue Reading about 140. You Have to Do More to Become More →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 140, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, you have to do more, to become more. I know, you’ve heard that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things over and over again, and expect different results, right. But so many runners I talk to, they keep doing the same workouts over and over and over and somehow they expect that they’re just gonna get faster.
Or people that lift the same amount of weights all the time and expect to get stronger or build more muscle, or you just keep eating the same food over and over again expecting to magically lose weight. I don’t know how this is supposed to happen.
But whatever, from an external perspective, these problems, they’re pretty obvious, right? You have to do things differently in order to get different results. But from an internal perspective, like from the inside, looking out where this lesson is often missed, it’s just, it’s a blind spot that a lot of us have, we all have had this at some point a lot of us have right now.
So today, I’m gonna get into what it looks like to stop doing the same things over and over again, and start doing things differently because you have to do more in order to become more. And one of the things that I love about what I do about being a weight loss coach is that I get to help runners, people who are already pretty focused on their own health and fitness, I get to help them take things to the next level.
So a lot of the runners I work with have been running consistently for a long time, or maybe a short period of time, but for some time, they really are into running, they get it, they love running. They’re also doing other kinds of workouts pretty consistently. Sometimes it’s cross training, cycling, yoga, strength training, whatever it is.
But when it comes to nutrition, there’s this blind spot there, okay, they’re at a loss, they get confused by all the conflicting information that’s out there. And they’ve tried all kinds of diets that don’t work. They even get told by some dietitians or coaches to stop running altogether. Which is really just not an option for people like us, am I right? So what’s the answer?
How do you lose weight while you keep running? How do you keep running without all the gross gels and stuff, you know the stuff that makes you gain weight? Well, that’s exactly what I do. As your coach, I put together a personalized plan for you that you feel good about to get your nutrition in line with your weight loss goals and your running goals.
Because you know what? You can do both, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. And I see this every single day: people who are learning how to fuel their bodies to promote good health, to lose weight, and to promote their athletic performance to improve their running. And this topic I’m talking about here today is all about doing more, so that you can become more. And if you’re finally ready to do more to take your health and fitness to the next level to lose weight for good to improve your running performance to really become the most badass version of yourself then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project.
This is my unique weight loss coaching program designed specifically for runners to help you crush those weight loss goals and crush those running goals too. Okay? To learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply and get started. I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you.
Alright, let’s get into this topic here today, you have to do more to become more so that old saying that I mentioned at the top of the episode here where the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again expecting different results. We’ve all heard this before. We all know it but still so many people are on willing to change anything at all. They just keep doing the same things over and over and over and expect somehow that things are going to be different and something is going to change.
For example, a lot of people come to me because they want to lose weight and they want to improve their running and these are amazing goals and they truly want these things for themselves. They have been overweight for some time, you know, the more they run, the more they tend to put on pounds. I know, it’s counterintuitive, but I see it all the time.
And when I talk to these people, I can really feel it, I really feel that they want these things for themselves, they are important to them, they really want to change. But there’s something that comes up, it’s a resistance, it’s a resistance to change.
Anytime we think about changing, anytime we think about embarking on some sort of process of change. When we want to become more we want to get out of our comfort zone, there’s this resistance that comes up, even thinking about changing how you eat, is going to create a resistance from within you.
And Steven Pressfield, in the War of Art calls resistance the enemy within. So it’s not something that is out there. It’s not resistance from outside of you, it’s resistance that’s within you. And you will experience this resistance every time you get outside your comfort zone, or even think about getting outside your comfort zone. When you think about how, you know what, I really want to improve my marathon time, I really want to PR my next marathon, I really want to qualify for Boston. But that’s going to require me to shave 15 or 20, or 30 minutes off of my already, you know, challenging marathon time.
When you even think about that your brain starts coming up with all sorts of stories, and excuses and reasons and justifications. And you start telling yourself that you know what, there’s just going to be too hard, I can’t do it. Right there. That’s the resistance.
And you have to understand something: the resistance is normal, it’s perfectly normal to have this, we all have this kind of resistance that shows up for us. Anytime we want to embark on a journey of change, and the bigger the change, the bigger the resistance. And so the real work that we have to do is really battling that resistance. And what it looks like to bow the resistance is in a nutshell is to suit up, show up and do the deal. Whatever it is you need to do.
If you want to become more, you got to do more. So you got to show up and do what you need to do. Even though you’re experiencing the resistance, even though you’re experiencing all these excuses and reasons. And these obstacles that are seemingly in your path. If you want to run faster, you can’t keep doing the same workouts right, you need to practice running faster, you got to do the speed work, you got to do intervals, you’ve got to do tempo runs, you got to do fartleks, I just love saying fartleks.
If you want to lose weight, you can’t keep eating the same foods that you’ve been eating that helped you to gain all the weight, you’re going to have to change up your nutrition game, your nutrition game is going to have to get on point. If you want to build muscle, if you want to get stronger, you can’t keep lifting the same amount of weight, you’ve got to increase the amount of weight that you’re lifting because your body adapts to the weight.
So if you want to build muscle, if you want to get stronger, you’ve got to keep increasing the weights, or reps or both. So you keep creating that adaptive response and your muscles will grow. And this goes for anything that you want to change in your life. And again, like I said, the bigger the change, the more resistance is going to come up. But this is how it works.
You want to change something you do a little bit more, you’ve got to get outside of your comfort zone a little bit, even just a little. You stick with that until that kind of becomes your new normal. Your Comfort Zone grows, you grow, you become more and then you repeat, rinse and repeat this cycle over and over again until you reach your goal. And then you keep going because we always have some goal out there it doesn’t we don’t stop growing. We don’t stop learning. We don’t stop evolving. We don’t stop becoming more.
But that cycle I just described none of that happens without the doing bit you got to do more to become more but this is where most people get stuck or most people stop or most people quit because doing more is hard work. Doing more is uncomfortable. Doing more is getting into unfamiliar territory. And sometimes you know what? It just feels terrible.
Getting outside your comfort zone does not feel good. That’s why we call it outside your comfort zone. It is not something that is comfortable, it feels terrible. So fear is an example of what I’m talking about. Right now I’m working on getting stronger legs, my legs have always been kind of a weak point, I just have these skinny little bird legs, whatever.
And so I’ve been focusing on doing more leg workouts and being more intentional about doing leg workouts. You know how many people love to do leg workouts? Zero. Zero people, nobody likes to do leg workouts, right? In particular, one of my worst exercises is lunges.
And the way my trainer has me doing lunges is it’s a type of lunge called a Bulgarian split. But it’s a type of lunge called a Bulgarian split squat. And we use kettlebells. And your back leg is elevated on a bench and your forward leg is the leg that you’re squatting on. So you really are using just that forward leg and that back leg, you know, you really don’t have any sort of leverage from that back leg. It’s just there to kind of balance you.
And I hate doing these. They’re terrible. They’re super hard. And I was talking to my trainer about it the other day, and I was telling him how much I hate doing these things. And he’s like, Well, that looks like where you need to focus your attention here. And I was like, oh, I hate that. I hate that. I have to focus my attention on the things that are hard and uncomfortable. And the things I don’t like to do. But I did it.
And four days later, I did this on Monday, today’s Thursday, four days later, my legs are still sore. But here’s the thing, I want more, I want to become more in this case, I want stronger legs. So I know that I’m going to have to do more than what I’ve been doing. And for me, doing more means doing the things that I don’t want to do. Doing the things that are uncomfortable, doing the things that I’m weakest at.
Because honestly, if it’s easy, it’s too comfortable. It doesn’t change you at all. Right? It just helps you stay where you are. So for me, I’m focusing on doing these lunges and other leg workouts to build stronger legs so that I can become the runner that I want to be and improve my running and some other things.
And so just you know, in order to make this change that I want for myself, I’m doing the hard work, and I’m just embracing it and I don’t like it, but I’m doing it anyway. And then here’s an example from a nutrition standpoint. For years, I was eating the same diet, basically the typical runner’s diet, which is you know, carbs, right, all carbs, literally all carbs.
And over the years, I was steadily gaining weight. And I was running a ton of miles. Every week, I was training for marathons, I was training for ultra marathons, and I just kept steadily gaining weight. And I wanted so badly for things to change. I wanted to lose the weight, I wanted to feel better. I wondered if running was ever going to be easier. I wanted to have more energy. I was feeling rundown a lot, I was really inflamed and bloated. And I use the word puffy, because I just felt very puffy. And I wanted to become more.
But I knew that in order to become more, I had to do more. And I knew all about ditching the carbs and getting fat adapted, and I knew it was going to work. But I wasn’t willing to put in the work. I wasn’t willing to get uncomfortable. I wasn’t willing to change what I was doing, because it’s an uncomfortable process. So I avoided it, I just put it off and put it off and put it off. Because I told myself, this is going to be too hard.
I gotta wait until I’m really ready for this maybe when I’m not training for something. And and I just kept telling myself all these stories, and I had all these reasons and all these excuses. But what it really was was that resistance, that resistance kept coming up. And I was giving into it. I was just letting it control me.
Until finally I was just fed up with that I had gained like 40 pounds, I was overweight, I was miserable. Running was just becoming so hard. I felt terrible all the time. And I eventually just made the decision to do it: to ditch the carbs, embrace the suck for a short period of time, you know, I got outside of my comfort zone.
And it took work. It took months of me really kind of learning what to do, what to eat, what not to eat, how to learn how to run without all the carbs. I started weight training in a different way. You know, getting getting my strength training on in a very different way. And all of these things combined helped me to get through this period and become the healthier, fitter, leaner, stronger, faster version of me that I always wanted to become, that I knew I could become.
And then I just, I kept thinking it was going to be too hard. I kept thinking about all the stories and excuses and reasons why I didn’t want to do this, because it was an uncomfortable thing to change. But I wanted it so badly for so long. And I finally was ready to do it. And looking back on it, I’m like, why did I wait so long to do that?
If I had just done this a few years prior to that, I wouldn’t have had to suffer for such a long period of time, I wouldn’t have to struggle with my weight and with running, and with the way I felt every day in my energy levels. And I wish I had done it sooner, but everything happens for a reason. So I’m like, okay, it’s perfect timing, whatever, it’s all good.
But I say this all the time, I say, nothing changes, if nothing changes, right? And it’s not just a pithy saying it is the absolute truth. It has to be something that we embrace change has to be something that we embrace. Because if where you are right now, is not where you ultimately want to be, then you’re going to have to do more, you only get different results by taking different actions, right, you don’t get results by thinking differently. Although that’s part of it.
You’ve got to think differently. But you also have to take actions, actions produce results, thoughts don’t produce results, right? You can think about losing weight, you can think about changing your diet, you can think about running faster. But unless you actually do things and get out of your comfort zone and push yourself and get uncomfortable, nothing’s going to change for you.
You don’t lose weight by thinking about changing your diet, you don’t get stronger by thinking about going to the gym, right? Actions produce results. And the same actions, if you just keep doing the same things over and over again, will just continue to produce the same results. So just keep doing what you’ve already been doing, you’ll just keep getting more and more of what you’ve already got. Right? In order to be more, you have to do more.
So here’s some action steps for you this week. Here’s what I want you to watch. Here’s what I want you to work on this week, I want you to think about who it is you want to become. Get very, very clear on this, create a vision for your future self. What does the future you look like? What does the future you feel like? What has the future you accomplished? And spend some time every day thinking about this, this is a very powerful tool called this visualization.
This is what elite athletes do, they create a vision of who they want to be, sometimes they envision the race they’re about to run. And they visualize it every single day. It’s a very, very powerful to tool to help you achieve these big goals that you want for yourself. And it doesn’t matter what it is, if you want to get stronger, if you want to lose weight, if you want to get fitter. If you want to get healthier, if you want to improve your running, or you want to qualify for Boston, whatever it is, imagine yourself crossing that finish line and looking up at the clock and seeing that PR time on the clock. And do this every single day. That’s a very, very powerful first step. So you have to know who it is you want to become and you have to spend some time thinking about that. Okay.
Next, I want you to think about what you need to do in order to get there. And you don’t have to have every step, like mapped out because it’s kind of impossible to do that anyway, like, just focus on what is the next step? What is the next action you can take? What can you do today or this week? What’s one thing that you can change today or this week, to get you a little bit closer to that goal? If you want to become that future self, you’ve got to do things differently. So what is one thing you can do differently today?
And then step number three is to do that thing. It’s not going to feel good. That resistance is going to come up and you got to do it anyway. Remember, the results come from taking action, no action, no results. No doing equals no becoming. So what is it that you can do and then do that thing, okay? And then just rinse and repeat this process. Keep thinking about who it is you want to be,every day, every week, come up with an action step or two that you can take and then do that thing even though you’re going to experience that resistance.
Okay, that’s how we become more. If you want to become more, you have to do more. And I want to encourage you to do more this week, okay? And if you’re looking to become more, if you’re ready to do the work to get there, I’m here to help get you there. Okay? Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I’ll bet you’ve thought about eating healthy at one point or another in your life and then thought, nah…that’s going to be way too boring. If this sounds like something you’ve thought (or even said …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 139 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, eating healthy is so boring. I bet that you’ve thought about eating healthy at some point in your life. And then you’ve thought, man, that’s going to be way too boring.
If this sounds like something you’ve thought or even maybe said out loud, then you are definitely not alone. People tell me all the time that they can’t stick to their food plan, or they don’t even want to start in the first place. Because it’s all going to be so boring. And I used to think this way too, but definitely not anymore. I’ve embraced the idea that food can be a little bit boring. If it means I get to live a long, healthy, happy life.
So today, I’m going to be talking about this big lie, this lie that eating healthy is boring. And how you might be able to radically improve your health by rethinking this by rethinking how exciting your meals really need to be. And as a licensed sports nutritionist, my focus is on food, it’s on nutrition, that’s like my number one focus, I want to help you make good choices I want you to I want to help you change your eating habits, I want to help you to change your body composition, to lose weight to gain muscle.
But really, what I want to help you with is to become the healthiest version of yourself to become healthy, fit and strong. So my main focus is on nutrition. This is the main driver of good health in my opinion. And I understand that you also want to crush your running goals. So this is where I’m a little bit different from other coaches.
So you might be training for a half marathon or a full marathon, or your first 5k. You know, maybe you’re just getting started with running. And lots of coaches out there will tell you that you cannot lose weight while you’re training for some race or while you’re running. You should stop running to lose weight. And I think this is ridiculous.
Okay, so for us, we, the people in my coaching program, we change our eating habits while we’re training for a marathon, lose weight feel better, running gets improved, our health is improved. And we do it all in a way that feels good for you. It’s not about severe caloric restriction, because we can’t do that when we’re training for a marathon. Right?
We’re not focused on counting calories and doing all this math about how many calories you should be eating because you ran this many miles, which means you burn this many calories and all that stuff, right? That’s just that’s too much. It’s ridiculous. That’s not how we do this, right? I do things differently.
I focus on helping you simplify nutrition, we don’t want to make it more complicated. And I want to help you change habits around food, simplify change habits, and make healthy eating just a way of life. It’s like it has to be part of who you are and what you do. Right. It has to be something you can do without a coach without me.
So the goal is to help you develop new habits, develop a new mindset. So that how you eat just becomes effortless. And it’s just what you do from here on out. So if you want help simplifying your nutrition, you know, maybe you’re ready to embrace the boring. I’ll talk about that more in a minute here.
And if you want a plan that also supports your love of running, then I want to encourage you to apply for my coaching program, you can just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a short application and we’ll talk about coaching. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Sounds good. I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. That’s where the project is you.
Alright, let’s talk about how eating healthy is so boring. The reason I’m talking about this today is because I’ve had a lot of people say this to me recently. I’ve had clients, potential clients, I’ve had friends and family all tell me that they don’t want their food to be boring, and that some people haven’t even engaged in any type of, you know, change of their nutrition regimen, and they’re just thinking about it. And they’re just thinking about like, oh, I could never do that because it would be so boring.
Here’s the thing that is really just a thought. It’s a thought that you have in your head. And it’s a thought that stops you from making any kind of changes. And if you want something different for yourself, then you have to, like drop that thought that eating healthy is going to be boring, okay?
Eating healthy, can be fun, and can be sort of exciting. But if you think that it’s going to be boring, then you’re, that’s what’s going to be reality for you. If you think eating healthy, nutritious food on a regular basis is going to be boring, then that is your reality.
So I just want you to like embrace this idea that this idea of food being boring, is just a thought, okay, but it definitely is something that comes from somewhere. Right? So there’s this idea that food has to be exciting. Food has to be amazing. Every time we sit down to eat a meal, it has to be an experience to remember forever.
And really, this is all just marketing, right? This is all just marketing. It’s the big food companies that are coming together to market an idea to us. And the idea is this. The idea is that if you want to have an amazing, fulfilling, happy life, then every time you sit down to eat a meal, it has to be amazing. It has to be an entertainment experience.
Everything you eat has to be so delicious that you are compelled to post about it on social media. And there’s a term for these photos of food that make you drool and make you crave whatever food is in the picture. And they call it food porn, like porn. But for food, that’s kind of weird, if you think about it, okay. But this is what this is the term I didn’t make it up to this is the term that a lot of people use for this idea of posting all these pictures that make you drool and make you say, oh my gosh, I have to have that.
Another term for this feeling that you get is called euphoric recall. So you see a picture. And you remember how amazing the food was, and you remember an experience similar to that. So you may have eaten that exact thing, but it reminds you of something else that you’ve had. Or you can just be sitting around talking to friends and you can, you know, recall, this amazing meal that you had, or this amazing dessert that you had.
And it brings back all these thoughts and feelings of euphoria, like you start to feel amazing, your mouth will start to water and all you’re doing is just thinking about food. Right. And so this idea of euphoric recall, really, it’s a, it’s a mechanism that’s happening in our brains, where we are driven to remember very deeply and very vividly an experience.
And it’s a good evolutionary thing, because in the past, we may have, you know, encountered some berries or some honey as hunter gatherers, and we would, you know, eat that particular food. And we would want to remember that because it will be like, hey, this is a really good source of calories, or this is something that we can, you know, that is that tastes good. It’s delicious, it feels good. We want to remember that.
So your brain sort of locks that into your memory. But now we’re doing it about everything that we eat, and it’s becoming a problem. It’s becoming a problem, because people can’t even imagine switching their diet and eating a more healthy diet because they’re like, Well, what’s going to happen to all this amazing food that I remember, this is all just stuff that’s happening in your brain, by the way.
And food never used to be like this. Like this is a relatively new phenomenon. This idea of like food being so amazing, and there’s a meta or a scientific term for this. It’s called hyper palatable food. Hyper palatable means it’s uber uber palatable, like, like I mentioned, some berries, like you know, we’d find some wild blackberries, you know, as, you know, ancient hunter gatherers, and we’d be like, oh my god, this is so amazing, or fruits that we would find back in the day.
Now, those things have been engineered to become hyper palatable. And then there’s all these scientists that are actually creating hyper palatable foods in the lab, you know, and they really light up our pleasure centers in our brain, these foods light up our pleasure centers, just like alcohol, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines. And they know what they’re doing. They know that it’s going to give us a rush of dopamine, they know, it’s going to give us a high.
And we’re just buying into this whole idea. I’m gonna sound a little crazy here. But that, to me, this is very much like what drug dealers do, they want to get you hooked on their product. Because once they get you hooked on your product, you can’t stop thinking about it, you want to get that feeling again. You know, and they know what they’re doing, they put it right on the label, like once you pop, you can’t stop.
They know that we’re addicted to these hyper palatable, processed foods, and we can’t get enough of them. So the scientists that are creating these things are creating something that really, really lights up our pleasure centers. A lot of times even more so than those drugs I mentioned.
They did this experiment with rats, I think poor little rats, right? They’re always like experimenting on them. But they gave them a choice between sugar and cocaine. And over time, the rats preferred the high that they got from the sugar, so they would go for the sugar or the cocaine.
So when you talk about something that’s addictive, I mean, is sugar addictive? I mean, we crave it like a drug. We get hooked on it, like it’s a drug, we can’t stop thinking about it, and how amazing it is, like a drug. But they say it’s not a drug. And that’s okay. I mean, they can say that, but we sure act like it is. We sure buy more and more and more of this stuff, because we can’t stop eating it and are hooked on the product. We’re hooked on the quote unquote, drug. Okay?
If we stop, we’re gonna have withdrawal symptoms. I see this all the time, I help people get off sugar all the time, by the way. And when we stop eating sugar, our brains start to freak out. And we have withdrawal symptoms, we have headaches, and we feel nauseous, and we’re grumpy. And it’s just like coming off of other drugs like cocaine or alcohol. Right.
And if we stop just the idea, just thinking about stopping makes us feel like we’re gonna be missing out on all that good stuff. All that amazing stuff. Everyone else is having all these amazing experiences, how come I can’t. So just the idea of like, not eating sugar, kind of freaks us out. You know, food can’t be boring. I can’t live a boring life. Everybody else is having an amazing life. They’re living their best life. Thank you, Cheesecake Factory.
So they’ve created this product that really gets us hooked on their product. And when we think about not using the product, we feel bad. So we don’t want to give it up. And we were being sold this idea that food has to be amazing. And it has to be an experience. And if you’re the kind of person that’s like, hey, I just want to eat healthy food. I just want to live a long, healthy life, healthy life, right?
But we can’t even do that. Because we have sort of convinced ourselves or we’ve been programmed to think that it’s just going to be too boring. Eating healthy food and living a long happy life can’t do it. It’s going to be too boring. It’s going to be too boring. So we have this. We have a physical addiction to food. We have a mental and emotional addiction to food, or obsessing over food just like an addict obsesses over their particular drug of choice.
And we’re certainly acting much more like this as a drug than a food. So I just want you to know that if you’re feeling like you cannot make a change like this in your life, like you can’t stop eating, you know the junk food and you can’t stop going to Cheesecake Factory or whatever it is that you’d like to do. Because this idea of like, oh my life is going to be boring. I’m never going to be happy again.
I just want you to rethink that. Because you know food did not used to be like this. This is a recent thing in the last 50 years especially really the last probably 20 years since the Internet, this has really become this has exploded, right? This idea that food has to be amazing or whatever. But really in the last few 100 years, let’s just say, that’s really no time at all in this, you know, in the life span of humans.
So we hunted and gathered, we came together to celebrate with food. And we came together with our tribe and with our families, we socialized, we connected we bonded over food. It was nourishment, it was fuel as a source of life. It was something to be set to celebrate, you know, it was important. And nobody would ever say like, oh, God, this is so boring.
You guys, woolly mammoth again, geez, this is so boring. I know, it sounds kind of ridiculous. But that’s kind of where we are today with all of this, right. But again, this is all just a big lie. And you don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to buy into this idea that food has to be super exciting and that it has to be a source of entertainment. And every meal has to be amazing.
Food was pretty boring for like 2 million years of human evolution. Why all of a sudden does it have to be some amazing experience? Now, every meal doesn’t have to be an entertainment experience, it could just be a meal. And listen, would you rather experience a little tiny bit of short term pleasure now, or a lifetime of health and happiness in the future?
Because here’s what we’re doing, we’re choosing one over the other. When we choose short term pleasure, we’re choosing to feel good momentarily, we’re choosing the effect that the drug has on us. We’re choosing the dopamine hit that we’re going to get. And we’re choosing that. We’re forgoing our health or forgoing what makes us healthy human beings and what really is going to drive our fitness, our health, improve our running, all those things that we want for ourselves.
So we’re programming ourselves to choose short term pleasure over long term health and happiness. What if you just delayed that pleasure? Like, what if you just said, you know what, I’m not going to give in to the idea that I have to have something amazing right now, in this moment? What if we just forego the immediate pleasure, for feeling amazing for the rest of your life? Like, what if you did that?
And runners are kind of bad at this in general, I’m just going to say that because the typical runner’s diet is just bad, like lots of refined carbs, lots of sugar, lots of alcohol, really kind of the worst things you can do for your health. But they think that, hey, I’m a runner, so I get to eat and drink whatever I want. You know, I’m gonna drink like crazy. Like, if there’s anybody else, it’d be like, Hey, I think you might have a little problem with drinking. But no, it’s like, I’m a runner.
So it’s okay. And if this is working for you, you get to eat and drink whatever you want, as often as you want, as much as you want. Donuts, you know, all the refined carbs, tons of sugar, alcohol, whatever. Like, that’s all good. If this is working for you, more power to you. But I’m gonna tell you right now, it’s probably not gonna work for long. It’s probably not sustainable. If it is, and you’re that rare person that can just do that for your whole life, and you can stay super healthy. That’s amazing.
I don’t see that happening, especially as you get a little bit older. You know, once you get into your 40s, things start to change, things get a little bit different. And I’ve found myself running with friends on Saturday mornings, and we talk about food. And we’re talking about what we’re going to be eating when we’re done running and people will be like, oh, yeah, I can’t wait.
I’m gonna have this huge stack of pancakes and waffles and doughnuts and croissants and drink some beer. And I’m like, really, beer on a Saturday morning? And they’re like, yeah, what are you going to be eating Patrick? I’m like, bacon, eggs, yogurt, fruit, and they’re like, boring. And I’m like, Hey, listen, I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. I’m done with that now, though. I’m 55. And then the best shape of my life. I’m fine with my food being boring. You call it whatever you want. I enjoy it.
Can we just embrace boring, though? Can we just drop the idea that food has to be amazing? Can we just accept that our food can be a little boring? I teach my clients how to simplify their meals. Meaning that every meal doesn’t have to be different. Every meal doesn’t have to involve recipes, and shopping, and tons of ingredients and lots of time and effort to prepare.
And I really think we do ourselves no good by holding on to the notion that every meal has to be an experience for the ages. One of my favorite meals that I love to eat and I eat this a lot, is a grilled ribeye steak with sea salt. Here are the two ingredients. It’s a ribeye steak and sea salt. And I put some salt on the steak and I cook it on the grill, and then I eat it. And that’s my meal.
Sometimes I’ll do like some steamed broccoli on the side with some sea salt and lots of grass fed butter melted on there. Simple, delicious, effortless, two ingredients, almost no time to prepare. It’s simple. You can call that boring if you want to. I love it. And it’s so delicious. Boring does not mean it has to taste bad or it can’t be delicious. I love the simplicity of food these days.
Because when I eat food now I can really taste the flavors. Because I’m not making everything into this big ordeal, right? You can change your palate, your tastes will change over time. When you start to simplify, and you get off the hyper palatable foods and you start eating real foods, foods will start to taste much better than they ever have before.
So you could eat something like a plain chicken breast with salt and pepper on it. You’re like, oh my god, this is like the best thing I’ve ever had. And I never realized this until I stopped eating all the junk food. And when I stopped eating all the junk food, all that stuff that’s been designed to be like super, hyper delicious or whatever. All of a sudden, the simpler things just taste so, so good.
I think you know, we should still enjoy food. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying food should not taste good. And I’ve heard people say that food is fuel and it should just be fuel and you shouldn’t even enjoy it. And I’m like, no, we should enjoy food. We’ve been programmed to enjoy food, it’s what’s kept us alive for millions of years, if we didn’t enjoy food, we wouldn’t go back to it, we wouldn’t seek out nourishment when we need it. You know.
So I think food can be both simple, and delicious. I think food can be kind of boring, and still tastes amazing. So this isn’t about not enjoying ourselves or not enjoying food. I just think we have to get away from this idea that every food experience has to be amazing. Now I went out to dinner last night, and I had a steak and it had this kind of like South American sauce on it. And it was really delicious. It was really good. I really enjoyed it.
And every now and then I will go out to dinner. And I will do something that is a little bit more of an experience around food. And, you know, I might go out with friends or my girlfriend or something like that, and we come together and we can enjoy food. And we like I mentioned, you know, our ancestors would come and celebrate around food and it’s how we bonded and connected and how we grew closer together. And I still think we should do that.
But I think we can also simplify things. And that every food experience doesn’t have to be, you know, something amazing, right? Because when we have this idea when we have this thought in our head that every food experience has to be amazing, then, just the idea of changing our our nutrition plan, changing our diet is gonna seem just undoable, it’s just gonna seem too hard. It’s gonna seem too hard.
So, the idea that food has to be an experience, we just have to squash that idea. Start by simplifying food, make it simple. What can you do to simplify a meal? Stick with real food food that still looks like food. Try to stay away from anything that has a marketing message behind it right? So don’t be eating that stuff that’s been concocted in a lab to get you hooked on the food like an addict is hooked on the drug. Gotta get away from that.
Start to make better choices and start to simplify your food. And yes, it can be boring. Eating healthy can be boring, and it can be delicious. And it can improve your health and it can improve your fitness and it can help you improve your running all those things.
And remember, if you want help with this, if you want help simplifying your nutrition, you know maybe you’re ready now to embrace the boring and you want to be able to support your running performance reach out. I’m always always here for you. Cool, love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I keep hearing from other coaches this crazy idea that, as a runner, you cannot lose weight while training for a race. Most runners who set out to lose weight will probably make some mistakes along …
Continue Reading about 137. The Most Common Weight Loss Mistakes Runners Make →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 137, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, the most common weight loss mistakes that runners make. So I keep hearing from other coaches out there on social media and stuff. There’s this kind of crazy idea that as a runner, you can’t lose weight.
If you’re training, if you’re running consistently, you just can’t lose weight, or you shouldn’t. And I think this idea is kind of crazy. I’ll tell you more about that in a second. But most runners who set out to lose weight, probably make some mistakes along the way. And this is why some of these coaches just say don’t even try to lose weight while you’re a runner. Because it’s hard to do.
Well, I think it’s just because people are doing it wrong. There’s mistakes being made, and we need to just fix the mistakes. Okay, so I exclusively coach runners to help them lose the extra pounds. And I’ve seen all these mistakes, I’ve seen every mistake possible. And then some.
And a big part of what I do now is to help you as a runner not to make the same mistakes, right? You can absolutely lose weight while running, while training for a marathon, while training for an ultra marathon. And you can even maintain or improve your running performance along the way. You just have to focus on a few key things here.
Okay, so today on the podcast, I’m going to be talking about the most common weight loss mistakes runners make and what you can do to avoid them. And making mistakes is part of the process. Sometimes unfortunately, it’s part of the process of learning.
But like I said, what I do now as a coach is I help you with guidance with direction, I help you to not make the common mistakes that so many people make when they set out to improve their health to lose weight to get leaner, stronger, improve their running performance, all that stuff.
This is why I do what I do. This is why I created my coaching program, the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program that delivers knowledge, guidance, support, accountability, encouragement, motivation, to help you stay on track, so that you can improve your health, lose the weight, and make changes to your health at last permanently.
This isn’t about quick fixes and quit, you know, losing weight as fast as possible. You can go somewhere else and figure out how to do this, how to do that. This is about becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself and doing it in a way that you can make it last.
That’s you know, we’re talking about longevity here. We’re talking about permanent lifestyle changes. So if you’re ready for that, if you’re ready to lose weight, get stronger, run faster, run longer, and do it permanently, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project.
You gotta apply for coaching with me, it’s not for everybody, you got to fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me. We’ll have a conversation, it doesn’t take that long. We’ll talk about your goals. I’ll answer your questions, we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you.
To get started with the process, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Put in your application and we’ll just see if this is a good fit. You know, I would love to see you in the Running Lean coaching project. I’d love to help you become the leanest, strongest, most badass version of yourself yet. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply and let’s get started.
Alright, let’s talk about some mistakes. Some of the most common mistakes that runners make when they set out to lose weight. And like I was saying at the top of the episode here. I’ve heard from a lot of coaches and a lot of “experts” in this space that talk about not being able to lose weight while you’re training. Like it’s just impossible to do. So why even bother?
And I’m going to say right now that I think that’s BS because I help runners all the time to lose weight while they’re training for a marathon, while they’re training for an Ironman, while they’re training for some other endurance sport, some race.
But a lot of people out there think that you shouldn’t try. And I think it’s coming from this place of runners eating kind of a terrible diet, really eating a ton of carbs. And if you’re eating a ton of carbs, it’s going to be very challenging for you to lose weight, that’s for sure. You know, I’m talking about that today.
Or they think that, you know, just running more is like the answer to losing weight. And it’s not right, it’s, it can be part of a healthy weight loss strategy. But it’s not the answer. It’s not alone. Running is not a great weight loss strategy. It just isn’t, you know, it’s good for you. It’s good for a lot of things. But by itself, as a way of losing weight, it just doesn’t really work too well. Okay.
So there are some sort of myths out there, there are some mistakes that people make. There’s some misinformation out there. And I just want to clear some of that up here today. And really, I want to focus on some of these big mistakes that people make, because I want you to be able to approach your weight loss journey in a way that feels good for you. And that, you know, where you keep making progress.
If you’re not making progress, it’s not working, then obviously, something isn’t working, right, you got to change something. But a lot of times, it’s just because you’re making one of these big mistakes, okay. So just know that there are people out there that believe wholeheartedly that you cannot or should not even try to lose weight, if you’re if you’re running, especially if you’re training for a race.
And I think that is untrue, I think you can absolutely lose weight. While you’re in training mode, you just have to do things a little bit differently. And you have to like, make sure you’re focusing on a few key things. So let’s talk about these. All right.
The first is this, this is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they approach weight loss in general, but especially as a runner, somebody that’s engaged in regular running, regular exercise, endurance exercise, and that is not eating enough, not getting enough calories.
And this might surprise you that I’m even talking about this. Because in general, I think that counting calories is a mistake, I think that we shouldn’t be focused on the calorie number. This is not really, this is not really the way we have evolved as human beings, like we never had my fitness pal until very recently.
So if counting calories meticulously was the only way you could lose weight or maintain weight, we would have been overweight and obese individuals throughout our entire existence. But no, no, we’ve only become overweight and obese and sick and, and diabetic in the last 50 years pretty much before that. The numbers were much, much lower than they are now.
And so I think this idea of just like counting calories is not the answer. Okay, so I think most people when they set out to lose weight, they think they need to be in some sort of massive calorie restriction. And this can be a problem, especially when your training load increases, because if you’re restricting calories, but you’re pushing yourself harder and harder, this is going to kind of slow down your metabolism because your body is trying to conserve energy and conserve calories.
So it’s going to slow down how much energy you’re expending. And so your resting metabolic rate will actually go down. The amount of calories you burn just from sitting around watching Netflix will go down. So no amount of exercise is going to like offset that.
You know, they talk about you can’t outrun a bad diet. You can’t outrun calorie deficit either. Okay, so you have to be mindful not to let your calories go too low. And listen, if calories in and out if that was like the answer to all this to like losing weight and being healthy and everything. We wouldn’t be having this discussion right now because you’d know what to do.
All the food tracking apps that are out there, all the exercise trackers, all the calorie deficit diets, all this stuff would work. It worked beautifully. They all work perfectly, but they don’t. You know, we’ve got nutrition labels that talk about calories, we’ve got meal replacement shakes, we’ve got guidelines, we’ve got 100 calorie snacks, like all these things would work.
But none of these things actually work. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to stop tracking every single calorie and every single workout and try to do some math where you’re subtracting the amount of calories burned with the amount of calories that you’re taking in. And then make sure you’re, you know, making this equation like you’re doing all this math, like to try to make all this work for you, right?
Your body doesn’t understand math, here’s what your body understands. Feed me real food. I should eat until I feel full. And when I exercise more, I’m probably gonna need to eat more. That’s a good rule of thumb to follow right there. Eat real food, eat to satiety. And when you’re in heavier training loads, you need to be eating more. Don’t worry about the number of calories as much as, “Do I feel like I’m giving my body what it needs? Am I eating the right amount of food for what I’m doing right now?”
It’s a pretty easy question to answer most of the time. It should be pretty clear to you. Yeah, I think I’m doing it, some people are overeaters, and they will eat more than they need. And then you feel like overly stuffed. If you’re feeling overly stuffed when you eat. That’s a problem. You gotta stop doing that, okay, eat to society, not pass there.
Eat more when you’re hungry for more, because you’re working out harder. And let’s just put away the calorie trackers, right. You can lose weight, without starving yourself, you know, you can lose weight without this massive calorie deficit. Yes, if you reduce your calories dramatically, you can lose a lot of weight, but it’s not sustainable.
Like I said, your metabolism will slow down to match the calories that are coming in. And if you’re a runner, and you’re putting out a lot of extra effort, you’re going to be breaking yourself down really fast. Okay, so you gotta like, make sure you’re keeping your, your the number of calories you’re eating up, you got to keep the amount of food that you’re eating up high enough to support your metabolism, and keep your metabolism going also to support the kind of training that you’re doing, right.
And it really helps also, if you’re eating the right kinds of foods, okay, so that’s point number two. So point number one is not eating enough, you know, not eating enough or getting enough calories, not eating enough food. Point number two is this the biggest mistake I see. Number two is just like eating way too many carbs, like thinking that, oh, as a runner, like I just got a fuel with all the carbs.
And here’s something I have to tell you. You do not need carbs to run. You heard me correctly, you do not need carbs to run, your body will do just fine with other sources of fuel. For example, your own stored body fat, this is a much better source of fuel for running. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve never heard this before. Just know that what I’m describing here is, is being fat adapted, it’s adapting your body to use your own stored body fat instead of carbs as a fuel source, okay?
When we get into fat adaptation, you can run longer, you’ll have more steady energy throughout the day. You’re burning fat, which is a great way to lose weight. You virtually have an unlimited store of body fat on your body, even someone who’s very lean like me, I think I’m like 13% body fat. I have, you know, 100,000 calories of fat on me at any given time. You know, 13% body fat for me is like 20 pounds of fat on my body. You know, if you do the math, that’s like over 100,000 calories of fuel.
I could run for like two weeks straight without stopping and still, you know, have plenty of fuel on board without eating anything. I’m not, I’m not recommending you do this. But you could if you were if you had to, okay, you can survive just fine on your own stored body fat, but you got to get fat adapted, you got to train your body to use fat instead of the carbs as fuel. This takes a little bit of time. It takes a few weeks to get your body used to that.
But once you get there, it’s so amazing. It’s such a great source of fuel. But what runners do is they’re like, well, listen, you know, running would be easier if I eat more carbs, I’m just gonna eat more carbs. And what happens is they get hungrier, and they get hungry and they start overeating.
And the reason we get hungry when we’re eating carbs is that carbohydrates will spike our insulin, insulin jacks up our hunger signals, you know, messes with the hunger hormone, ghrelin and it produces more gallons so we feel hungrier, so eating a lot of carbs will just make you in general, consume more food and be hungry for more food.
And if you’re also training you’re going to be hungrier as well. So you’re going to be really ramping up these hunger signals. And chances are, you’re gonna be overeating. So a lot of runners who are trying to lose weight, they just start on this high carbohydrate diet. And they actually gain weight.
So many people come to me and they’re like, Patrick, I’m training for a marathon, I’m crushing my workouts for like this past month, and I’m gaining weight, what is going on. And that’s exactly what’s going on. You know, it’s not a big mystery to me what’s happening when I see somebody eating like that. So what I’m saying is you don’t have to eliminate carbohydrates from your diet, this isn’t about zero carbs.
You know, depending on your goals, you can still include some strategic carbs around workout, some targeted carbohydrate loading, right before a workout, you know, just to help you maintain higher performance levels. But if you’re trying to lose weight, you’ll want to keep your carbs low. Or if you’re really crushing workouts trying to build muscle or something like that, you can afford to go a little bit higher, right?
Your carb intake varies based on your goals, your metabolism, how well fat adapted you are, how you feel, overall, your overall energy levels, how you’re sleeping at night, all those kinds of things, okay, and this is one of the reasons why I do personalized coaching, because I can’t tell you here what’s going to work for you. We’re also different, right?
And I’ve seen people do amazing things without using carbs at all, including myself, like, I’ve gotten pretty much zero carb for marathon training, and then ran a marathon with zero calories, I did a 50k with zero calories. And I’ve done training cycles where I eliminate carbs, you know, pretty much eliminate, there’s a little bit of carbs in some of the things that I eat, but it’s very, very low.
And, and my training improves, my running times improved, my running performance improved. This is crazy, right? Anybody that says you need carbs, you need carbs to run, just go just tell them thank you for your opinion. You don’t thank you for your opinion, I’m gonna move on now, right. So some people, you know, they do fine without hardly any, some people like to increase carbs as their training ramps up.
So maybe they’re really low carb at the beginning of their training cycle, then they can kind of afford to ramp up their carbohydrate intake towards the end of their training cycle when their mileage is increasing, or they’re getting closer to their race or something like that. And this is one of the fun things about all this for me because you get to experiment.
The bottom line with this and with everything I’m talking about here today, and everything I talk about with my clients really is that we are all an experiment of one, n equals one, that means that the number of people in a study is one and that’s you. N equals one number of people in the study in this experiment that you’re conducting is one. So experiment with this, try to get fat adapted, go super low carb, see how you feel, see if you can improve your running performance without adding carbs. You can, absolutely you can. I see it all day, I help runners do this all the time.
So you don’t need to eat carbs to run and going too high in carbs is going to really mess up your weight loss. Okay, so one of the biggest mistakes I see is people just thinking they need to add a bunch of carbs.
Another mistake I see people see is not eating enough protein. Most people in general, are protein deficient, they’re not getting enough protein. And runners need more protein than the average person, the average sedentary person, or the person who’s not training for a marathon, you’re a runner, and you’re training for some kind of endurance event or triathlon or cycling or swimming or whatever it is, you’re going to need more protein than the average person.
So because most people aren’t getting enough protein, runners tend to be very deficient in protein. Running is a catabolic exercise. Catabolic meaning it breaks you down. Running will break down muscle tissue, right? So we got to prevent that from happening. And you can prevent it from happening. You’ve got to incorporate strength training, and you’ve got to get enough protein to support the athletic performance that you’re doing on a regular basis.
So you can do this in a way that also supports your weight loss goals, right? It’s not one or the other. It’s not like oh, you can eat a lot of protein or you got to like lose weight, or you can’t gain muscle while you’re losing weight. Or you know, you can’t be burning fat if you’re getting loss.
I’ve heard all these different like myths since stuff out there. But here’s the bottom line. Bottom line is you need enough protein to support the running that you’re doing at your activity levels. And when you’re doing strength training and eating enough protein, you will, should be able to maintain or gain muscle mass.
More muscle means your metabolism will be faster, you’re actually increasing your metabolism, the more muscles that you carry on your body. And as a fat adapted runner, that means you’re going to be burning fat even more efficiently, you’re burning more calories. In general, since you primarily burn fat, you’re gonna burn even more fat, okay, so one of the most important things you can do is regular strength training, getting enough protein.
If you’re actively working out on a regular basis, you need more protein than you’re probably used to getting, I’m going to give you a number here to kind of shoot for, for a protein target. And I’ve talked about protein in the past, and I may have given you different numbers in the past, the science on this keeps changing.
And so I’m trying to just keep up with the science and give you what I think is good information at the time. So if I’ve said something different in the past, that’s fine. But here’s what I’m going to tell you. Now. If you’re a runner, you’re actively working out on regular basis, and you want to maintain or gain some muscle mass, then you need to be consuming around .9-1 gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight.
I’m gonna repeat that .9-1 gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So let’s say you’re a woman, and you currently weigh 180 pounds, but you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get to 140. So then let’s use 140 as your target, okay? .9 would be 126 grams of protein up to 140. Okay, that’s what you should be shooting for every day.
It may seem like a lot, but I’m telling you right now, it’s not. It’s not this is what’s going to help prevent muscle loss during weight loss, muscle loss during training, especially for endurance athletes, okay. Let’s say you’re, you’re a man and you’re like 200-220 pounds and you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get to 180. So that would mean somewhere between 162 grams to 180 grams of protein a day. .9-1 gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight.
Now, these are averages, your needs will vary based on your goals again, and this is an experiment of one. But when you’re eating enough protein, not only are you going to feel more full, and you’re gonna feel more satisfied and be less hungry throughout the day, you’re also going to be supporting your running.
You’re going to be supporting your muscle mass, you’re not going to be losing muscle while you’re training, you’re not going to be losing muscle while you’re losing weight, and you’re actually going to kick up your fat burning into high gear, okay, so all these are good things. All these are good things, okay, so get enough protein, it’s very, very important.
Another problem I see and mistake that I see runners make when they’re trying to lose weight is not getting enough rest and recovery. So really, this is like just running too much right and just doing too much running, you put your body into this state of chronic stress, you put your body into this state of chronically being in that fight or flight mode.
When your body is in that fight or flight mode. Cortisol is very high. That’s the stress hormone. Cortisol being high increases the amount of glucose in your blood because your body is like, Hey, we got to get prepared to fight. You know, we got to get prepared to fight or flight here. So your body will be constantly releasing more glucose in your blood. So your blood sugar raises, is being raised constantly, which means insulin is being raised constantly, which means your body is chronically going to be storing fat instead of burning it.
Remember, insulin is the driver here. Insulin being high means that your fat is being locked up in your fat cells. You cannot burn fat, you cannot lose fat when insulin is present. This is why we keep carbohydrates low. This is why we practice things like intermittent fasting. This is why we keep our stress levels low. Okay, so we got to be burning fat. We don’t want to be storing fat, right?
We want to be using that energy instead of conserving it. Okay? It’s very hard to lose weight with this strategy. If you’re overtraining, it’s just going to be hard to lose weight, right? So you have to prioritize rest and recovery days. You have to make sure you’re planning into your training schedule, rest days, recovery days. You got to give your body the chance to recover from the hard workouts you’re doing. You got to get a good night’s sleep every night and stuff like that. Okay.
So I had somebody ask a question like, how do you know if you’re training too much? How do you know if you’re overtraining? So if you’re not getting enough rest and recovery, if you’re overtraining, you’re going to start to see some negative impacts on your running performance, right? So that’s number one, you’ll see that you’re running, you can improve, or it’s starting to decline, that’s a good sign that your health and fitness is kind of suffering, right.
And, you know, remember that running is a catabolic exercise, it breaks you down. So without proper rest and recovery, your body will not be healing properly, right, so it’s gonna break you down even faster, and your body’s not gonna be able to adapt to the training load. So as your ramp up your training, your body won’t be able to adapt to that. And your running performance will, you’ll really see your performance start to suffer, especially as you ramp up the training load, okay?
If you’re feeling tired all the time, if you’re not getting a good night’s sleep, these are all indicators that you’re overtraining, right? If your workout performance is reduced, if you notice the RPE, or rate of perceived exertion is going up, if you feel like your workouts keep getting harder and harder. Your endurance starts to tank, maybe you can’t run as long.
These, these are all signs that you’re overtraining, okay? Also, we can see some mental impacts, like maybe you’re not as clear headed, or maybe your mood starts to suffer, you’re like, really grumpy all the time. Have you ever noticed that like, when you get into these higher training modes, you start to be really grumpy around people, that can be a sign that you’re overtraining, right?
But this can lead to other things like depression, and you start to lose motivation. And you start to doubt yourself, and you just don’t feel like running anymore. All these are signs, like if you’re in this mode, right now, like, these are signs that you might be overtraining, right. So just take some rest recovery days, make sure you’re practicing this, and building this into your training program.
Because if you’re trying to lose weight as runner, you can do it. But being in this chronically stressed out state and overtraining is going to make it very, very difficult for you to lose weight, okay.
And then the last mistake I see people make, and this one’s interesting, is not practicing what I call variation, okay, so your body is an adaptive machine, right? If you keep doing the same things every day, day in and day out, your body will adapt to those things. And this can be a good thing, depending on what it is. This is how you develop good eating habits.
For example, this is how you develop good workout habits, you know, if like, getting up at 4am to run is something that you have to do because your work schedule changed. And at first, it’s really hard to do. But over time, you keep doing it and you get used to it and you get adapted to it and you feel like oh, I actually enjoy getting up at 4am Hey, good for you.
You’ve created a new habit, your body’s adapted to doing something that it didn’t want to do. This is all good, right? So there are also times when doing the same thing over and over again, can be kind of, you know, hard on our bodies, things like that, right? And so you’ve probably heard this term, probably, and I don’t like this term, but somebody was talking about this recently.
And they were like, Yeah, you need to be confusing your muscles. Like when you go to the gym, you got to be doing different workouts. So you, you know, you’re you want to confuse your muscles, muscle confusion, muscle confusion, I’m like, What does that even mean? And I started doing a little digging into this.
And muscle confusion. I don’t really like that as an analogy, I don’t think it’s really a thing. You’re not confusing your muscles at all. But we actually want to be consistent in what we’re doing in our workouts. We want to be consistent, we want to mix things up a little bit, but we want to be fairly consistent so that our bodies will adapt, we do want our bodies to adapt. Okay. So there’s this idea. Or this, it’s not an idea.
There’s this principle called progressive overload. And this is that you challenge your muscles by changing the stress that you put on them, right. So the stress that you’re putting on your muscles, if you want to build muscles, this can come in the form of the intensity of the lift, the number of sets you’re doing, the number of reps, you’re doing, the duration of the workout, the amount of time you engage in the activity.
So it could be the same exercise. You can be doing deadlifts and just be like changing how intense you’re doing, how many sets you’re doing, how many reps like if you do it for an hour or you do it for 30 minutes, whatever any of these kinds of changes will help to positively impact your performance. Okay, so we’re willing to progressively overload the system. And we can do that in a number of different ways. All right? When it comes to training, weight training and trying to build muscle, progressive overload is a great way to break a plateau.
So if you’re finding that you’re not being able to increase muscle mass, then increase the amount of weight you train with, right? Progressive overload can also help you with your running workout. So let’s say your running workouts are starting to plateau, well increase the duration of a cardiovascular type of workout, or increase the duration of a tempo workout, you know, so these are all different ways of changing things up to break through some sort of a plateau. Okay?
So variation is important, but I want to just make sure that we understand that this isn’t about confusing yourself or confusing your muscles necessarily, it’s more about that progressive overload principle than it is about confusion, I think that’s just a silly way of saying it, to be honest with you. So variation is key for running too.
So one situation a lot of runners find themselves in is that they kind of do all their runs at that same effort, they sort of do like a five, six medium hard effort. And this can kind of lead to that chronic fatigue that I talked about, you know, in the overtraining section, right. So we want to vary our workouts, you want to do some speed work very hard, very fast workouts, but very short.
So you’re putting a certain type of stress on your body, or progressively overloading the system, but in a very acute way, very stressful, but acute, short, short, bounce very hard and fast, then you also want to include some long, slow running, this helps you to build endurance, this is much less stressful, it’s much longer, much longer workouts, but it’s a less less amount of stress on your body, it’s, it’s more of a chronic stress.
So you don’t want it to be as high, you want the stress to be lower, for that long, slow running. Okay, so this is how we vary our running workouts. And then when it comes to diet, and nutrition, variation is key there too, right? So you don’t have to do the exact same thing every single day, week, month, you know, mix it up a little bit.
You know, we talk about things like intermittent fasting, which just means like, we don’t eat all the time, we don’t eat six times a day, we eat maybe two, three times a day, right? That’s all that means. So maybe you normally eat around noon, you eat at 8pm. And maybe don’t be so rigid about this, if you want to eat a few minutes early, or even an hour or two on either side of that it’s all good. It’s not going to make or break your whole weight loss plan. Okay?
Sometimes you need to eat around your training schedule, sometimes you need to eat around family schedules and things like that, it’s totally fine. Don’t be too stressed out about that. Okay? Practice a little bit of variation here, right? Some days, you may even add an extra meal or take one away. So you might do longer fasts or like shorter fasting periods. And that’s all good. These are all good variations. This is going to help you to maintain this for the long haul, right?
And when we’re practicing variations like this, it should not negatively impact your running performance, it shouldn’t negatively impact your weight loss plans. So just make sure that what you’re doing isn’t, you know, well, I’m going to practice some variation. So I’m going to eat, you know, a whole large pizza by myself because you know, it’s variation.
No, that’s not what we’re talking about here. So we want to practice some variation, but in ways in our workouts and in our nutrition and stuff that actually helped us support us and don’t throw things off off our whole program. Okay. Okay, so quick recap.
As a runner, if you’re trying to lose weight, you can do it, it is possible, you can still maintain your training, you can still lose weight, you don’t have to lose muscle. But don’t make some of these mistakes. Number one, don’t restrict calories too excessively. Be sure to eat enough fuel to keep your metabolism going and to fuel your workout. So sometimes you’ll need to eat more, sometimes a little bit less.
Don’t be tempted to start eating all the carbs, right, because that’s just going to make you super hungry, it’s going to kick you out of that fat burning mode, slow down your weight loss.
Make sure you’re getting enough protein. Running breaks down, it really does. So strength training and enough protein are going to help prevent muscle loss while still burning fat while still losing fat weight. You can still do this right?
Make rest and recovery days a priority. Keep your body out of that chronic stress mode. If your body is in that chronic stress mode, it’s going to be very, very hard to lose weight right?
And then lastly, practice variation. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t be so rigid and mix it up a little bit. Variation is one of the keys to creating a well rounded, super healthy, badass version of you.
Okay? And remember, all of this stuff is subject to what works and doesn’t work for you as an individual. We are all an experiment of one, you get to try some of these things and see what works and what doesn’t. And if you want help with any of this stuff, that’s what I do. You and I can work on putting together a plan for you.
And then we can kind of see how things are working with you and continually tweak things so that you’re always making progress so that you’re always losing weight, so that you’re always moving closer to your goals. Cool. Awesome. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
As a runner, you’ve probably been told that if you want to avoid hitting the wall, you need to consume a whole lot of one main fuel source - sugar. This approach does work for some, but for others …
Continue Reading about 135. The Benefits of Becoming Metabolically Flexible →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 135 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, the benefits of becoming metabolically flexible. As a runner, you’ve probably been told that if you want to avoid hitting the wall, you need to consume a whole lot of one type of fuel: sugar basically, right?
And this approach does work for some, but for others, it spells metabolic disaster leading to incessant weight gain, insulin resistance and a host of other health issues. If you fall into this latter category, you may want to consider becoming metabolically flexible. Metabolic flexibility means you’re able to use multiple fuel sources effectively, this approach will help you lose weight, run longer and run faster.
So in this episode of the podcast, you’ll learn exactly what metabolic flexibility is, you’ll learn all about the benefits of metabolic flexibility. And I’ll show you how to get started with it. And you have to understand something: metabolic flexibility is not a one size fits all type of solution.
Okay, this does not work the same for everyone. Everyone’s a little bit different. We all have our own goals, we all have our own metabolisms, we all have our own likes and dislikes. You know, we all have our certain food preferences, body types, genetics, all these things factor into how we approach nutrition from an athletic performance standpoint, and metabolic flexibility, you know, choosing different sources of fuel for different types of activities is going to be the same it’s going to, it’s going to be different for every individual.
Okay, this is one of the reasons why I created the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program. And in my program we work together. So I work with you as an individual to help you come up with a personalized plan that works for you. You want to become metabolically flexible, you want to become more efficient at burning fat, you want to, you know, lose weight, you want to get faster, you want to be able to run longer than you ever have before.
All these things require some level of metabolic flexibility is what we’re talking about on the podcast here today. But also, if you want to take things a step further, and you want a little help with this, then consider joining the Running Lean coaching project. And what we do together is that we will put together a plan that works for you. And that will help you to get to your individualized goals, whatever those are for yourself.
So it’s really about you becoming the best possible version of yourself, the healthiest version of yourself, the most badass version of yourself and making it last. This is about long term, sustainable results, not about quick fixes, okay.
So if you’re ready to lose weight, get stronger, run faster, run longer, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. You’ll fill out a short application, you and I will jump on a quick zoom call. We’ll talk about your goals. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you. I would love to have you join me in the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Put in your application and we’ll see you soon. All right on to the topic.
So what is metabolic flexibility? At its simplest, metabolic flexibility is your body’s ability to use whatever fuel is available to it at the time. It means that your body’s metabolism is flexible, the ability of your body to metabolize different substrates, meaning different types of fuel. So different types of fuel could be food that you just ate could be used as fuel. It could be fuel that is stored in your muscles like glycogen.
It could be fuel that is stored in your fat stores could be stored body fat that you use as fuel. And so for most people, and I’ll get into this in just a minute for most people, though, they are only using like one source of fuel, mostly that stored glycogen, okay? And we want to change that we want to be able to tap into multiple sources of fuel, the two main sources of fuel we’re going to be talking about.
And the two main sort of preferred fuel sources that your body prefers to use, especially for exercise, like running, are going to be carbohydrates stored in your body. So sugar is stored in your body as glycogen in your muscles, and fat that’s stored in your body’s fat cells. Okay, so these are the two preferred fuel sources that we love to use it we’re very well adapted at using.
So the science calls this glucose oxidation and fat oxidation, okay. And something you have to understand about, you know, fat burning or a sugar burning is that we are always burning both at the same time. So it’s never just one or the other. Or very, you’re always burning a little bit of one or the other, okay? But what we’re talking about here is, is maximizing the amount of fat or, or glycogen that you’re burning, okay, so it’s never an all or nothing when it comes to fat and glucose oxidation, you’re always burning both.
But for example, the longer you’re out there running, the more fat that you’re actually burning, your body will, you know, if you’re running at a lower intensity, you will start out burning more carbohydrate, but that fat oxidation will continue to go up. And so what’s nice about you know, being really well fat adapted, is that you can burn much more fat much more efficiently.
And you can run for longer and longer distances without having to, you know, refuel, because you’ve got plenty of fuel on board at all times. And if you are a fat adapted athlete, so if you’re a low carb athlete, and you’ve become fat adapted, then you can even run at higher intensities, and still be very efficient at using fat as your main source of fuel. This is one of the reasons why we get into fat adaptation.
It’s because we want to be able to burn fat very, very effectively for long distance running. But also we can get into some pretty intense running as well. So they did a study a while back, it’s called the faster study and you can look it up. And one of the things they did was that they found that for the most part, most athletes that are, you know, the carb adapted athletes, so just your standard athletes, not fat adapted athletes, that once they get over 65% of VO2 Max, that they they tend to stop burning fat and start burning, mostly carbohydrate. Okay. So this is the majority of people out there.
Once you get over 65% VO2 max, you’re burning mostly carbohydrates up to 65%. And you’re burning mostly fat. And this goes across the board for most people. With the faster study, they found that the fat adapted athletes could burn much more fat than the carb adapted athletes. So their peak fat oxidation was 2.3 times higher in the fat adapted group.
So over twice as much fat they were able to burn. And they found that they could increase their intensity and still be burning mostly fat so they could get up to 76% of their VO2 max and still be burning more fat than carbohydrate and really didn’t need the carbohydrates in order to the carbohydrates in the form of fuel in order to achieve those kinds of numbers.
So just understand that one thing I think people get into this idea of becoming fat adapted, and they think that they’re just burning fat, you know, and that’s it. That’s the end of the story. Or if you’re not fat adapted, you’re only burning sugar, you’re only burning carbohydrates.
And really, it’s not the case, you’re always burning both, okay? Just understand that. But as a fat adapted athlete, you can take advantage of your levels of fat oxidation, which are going to be much higher than the standard of carb adapted athlete. And it’ll give you a bit of an edge.
So why am I even talking about this? Well, I’ve been really on this kick this whole month about talking about ancestral living, you know, and what we’ve done as human beings for millions of years. And really, for since like 2.5 million years ago, to about 10,000 years ago, humans have been very metabolically flexible, we’ve been able to, to burn fat very, very efficiently, we’re able to take advantage of other types of foods when they were available to us, you know, think about, you know, times when certain types of foods would have been scarce, we had to have different types of fuel, and we had to be able to metabolize those different types of fuel.
So for example, when we would hunt and you know, eat meat, or we are eating things like fish and eggs, very dense, nutrient dense types of foods, we could eat, we could hunt and eat a lot of meat, you know, and share that with the group. And then we might go for days without food. So in that case, we are consuming fuel in the form of, you know, meat and animal protein. But then we would go days, without food, where we would be basically using our own stored body fat as fuel, right?
This is the way we are designed to operate as human beings. We are very efficient fat burning machines, we always have been. What has happened in the last 50-60 years is that we’ve gotten away from that? And we’ve gotten more into just relying on very quick sources of energy, like carbohydrate, like sugar, like grains, like really concentrated refined carbohydrates, refined grains, that kind of stuff.
And the problem with that approach is that we really well, there’s all kinds of problems with that approach. But from an athletic standpoint, we’re only using one source of fuel when we do that, we’re not able to take advantage of the fact that we are really efficient fat burning machines. Okay, so back in the day humans would eat sporadically, we would take advantage of the fact that we could find things like tubers and nuts and seeds and fruit and things like that. And we would be able to use those things as fuel as well.
So we became really good, really efficient at being metabolically flexible. It’s one of the reasons we’ve survived. Whereas a lot of other hominid type species did not, you know, because we were able to have that flexibility. Okay. And all I’m proposing here is that we get that back. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying.
And especially if you’re a runner, then you are absolutely leaving a lot on the table. If you’re not taking advantage of metabolic flexibility, you absolutely are leaving a lot on the table. Our bodies are well adapted to feast and famine. Our bodies are well adapted to a variety of fuel sources, especially using stored body fat as a fuel source. Most people do not do that. Most people, most people are good at storing fat, but not actually using it as a source of fuel.
But we humans, we are really good at burning fat. We’ve been doing it for millions of years, I just want us to get back to being really efficient at burning fat, okay. And as a runner, you absolutely want to be taking advantage of this virtually unlimited source of fuel that you have on your body. stored body fat is an amazing source of fuel. And I talk to runners every single day and I coach runners on how to become fat adapted every single day.
And I get a lot of skeptical runners out there. They’re like I just don’t see how this is possible. I don’t see how, you know, not taking in all these gels and stuff and sports drinks that I’ve been doing forever. I don’t see how I can possibly run without all that stuff. And then they do it. And then they’re pretty surprised at how amazing they feel, okay?
But it’s not about just doing just using that one source of fuel. This is the thing I want to kind of drill home here today is that metabolic flexibility means you can use multiple fuel sources. So yes, that does mean that you can use carbohydrates as a fuel source as well as fat. But most runners don’t take advantage of the fat side of things. They’re only interested in the carbohydrate side of things.
But why would you leave a tool on the table, so to speak, you know, why not become fat adapted and get really, really good at burning fat? And also, you can use carbohydrates strategically, in order to have that flexibility for different types of activities, different intensities of running different distances, all right.
The problem is that most people are just metabolically inflexible. So most people, especially here in the United States are eating the standard American diet. It’s interesting that the acronym for that is SAD because it’s a sad diet. It’s so sad, it’s making us sad, it’s making us unhealthy, or it’s creating a nation of sick, weak, unhealthy, overweight people.
And one of the issues with this is that it’s a very, very high carbohydrate diet. And it means that you have to rely on just one fuel source for energy. So if you’re a runner, and you’re eating the standard American diet, you are relying on one source of fuel carbohydrates for energy for running, and you’re not taking advantage of being fat adapted.
So that standard American diet with all the carbs, you might be eating six, seven times a day, you know, you are relying on one source of fuel and you need it, you need it every couple of hours, or else you’re going to crash and burn.
Not to mention you’ve got to carb load before running the night before you got to carb load before you get out there and run you got to carb up during runs. You’ve got to carb up after runs or else you’re going to crash and burn. And this might work okay for you for running like it might help to fuel your runs. And you might be okay with that.
But eating that much carbohydrate, especially eating every few hours, it does a few things. Not good things by the way. For example, It ramps up your cravings for more carbs. So you just want more and more and more of that same stuff, same sugary goodness, you know, it causes your body to keep storing a lot of that excess energy as fat in your fat cells.
And because you’re not fat adapted, you can’t really tap into that fat for energy. So you just keep storing more and more fat in those fat cells. It causes massive spikes and dips in your blood sugar, and therefore your energy levels throughout the day.
And you end up being hungry all the time you feel fatigued, you have these massive cravings for more sugary foods, more carbohydrates, you get what people call hangry because you’re hungry and angry at the same time. And really, it just causes a host of issues not just weight gain, but it can lead to things like insulin resistance, which means your body is producing so much insulin that your body has become accustomed to that much insulin and so it’s no longer bringing your blood sugar down the way it’s supposed to.
Which means your body just keeps storing more and more fat in your fat cells. And insulin resistance is something that causes type two diabetes, and it leads to gaining a lot of weight and obesity and things like that.
And not to mention that eating that standard American diet with all the carbs and you know, eating just a ton of carbs, especially for running means you’re going to be hitting the wall at some point during a long run because you’re going to crash and burn unless you keep the sugar intake coming in.
But even that can have all kinds of digestive issues, it can cause digestive stress, and a lot of people cannot handle that much sugar while they’re out there running. And so they end up just sort of like either having to find a portapotty or they end up just crashing and burning. And you’re hitting the wall.
So that’s kind of the problem with the way that most people do this thing, right? They’re not metabolically flexible. So they have to rely on one source of fuel only for running. And you end up running out of fuel, you end up with insulin resistance with weight gain, and with a host of other metabolic issues, right. So that is the way that most people do it.
And I’m just saying here, listen, there’s another approach that you can take and you can become more metabolically flexible, you can actually train your body to use fat and carbohydrate as your two main fuel sources. very effectively, you can do this very effectively. So here are some of the benefits of metabolic flexibility.
So first of all, you can tap into different fuels and use different fuels for different types of activities, more intense activities, you can increase your carbohydrate intake, you can use different types of carbohydrates, you can use, you know, very concentrated forms of carbohydrates. So you can use slow burning types of carbohydrates. And you can use carbs for long distance activities, or for higher intensity activities. But one of the benefits is that you have this flexibility, and you have the ability to use different fuels.
So as you get into that higher, you know, intensity exercise closer to 65-70-80% of your VO2 max, when your fat oxidation starts to go down, you can actually increase your carbohydrate intake. And in preparation for that, you’ve got to do it ahead of time. But you can increase your carbohydrate intake, and maintain high intensity levels, without as much carb intake as you would need if you were not fat adapted.
Okay, so that’s one amazing benefit, obviously, you’re gonna burn more fat. One of the biggest benefits here is that you burn fat very efficiently. And when you burn fat, you know you’re losing weight, it’s much easier to lose weight. If you become fat adapted, if you actually train your body to be a really efficient fat burning machine, right. And you use fat as a source of fuel for running, then you’re going to lose weight much easier, and you’re no longer going to be storing so much body fat, you’ll be burning that body fat. Okay, so losing weight becomes much much easier when you’re fat adapted.
You know, one of the other benefits is that you can improve your athletic performance not only running longer, but running faster again, because you can tap into different types of fuel, you’re not relying on just fat, or just carbohydrate as a fuel source.
One of the other things is that you become more insulin sensitive. So instead of becoming insulin resistant, your body becomes more sensitive to the effects of insulin, meaning your blood sugar’s will normalize, you won’t have those spikes, and crashes and blood sugars, you’re going to have more all day energy. So you’re going to have more steady energy throughout the day, which is amazing.
You’re going to be able to think more clearly because your brain uses fat as a source of fuel. So your cognitive function will be improved. You will sleep better at night, you will feel more rested when you wake up in the morning. And going forward with your weight management or weight maintenance. That becomes much much easier if you are metabolically flexible. It’s much harder if you’re relying on just carbohydrate as a fuel source, because it just it makes managing your weight much more of a challenge because then you have all these other things the insulin resistance and the weight, you know the storing body, storing of more body fat, and incessant weight gain and hunger levels and things like that.
So being metabolically flexible means that you have the ability to tap into multiple sources of fuel, and you have the ability to improve your athletic performance and just become this amazing fat burning machine as well as having the ability to use carbohydrates as fuel.
One thing a lot of people one mistake a lot of people make when they become fat adapted is they don’t regularly use carbohydrates as a fuel source for certain athletic endeavors. And you got to kind of train yourself to use carbs as well as you know, your stored body fat as fuel, you don’t want to just become fat adapted and wait six months, and then, you know, try carbs for a race, because your body at that point is so used to using fat as fuel. It’s not really used to having that carbohydrate glycogen stored as fuel the way that it used to when you were carb adapted.
So you have to actually train yourself to become more carb adapted as you get into some of the more intense running and things like that. So that’s just something to keep in mind. So how do you do this? How do you become more metabolically flexible?
There’s a couple things you can do to get started, number one, is getting fat adapted, this is really important. So you gotta get your body burning fat more efficiently. And most runners just don’t do this. Right. So you got to get off the sugar, you got to get off the refined grains and things like that, and start training your body. To use fat as a fuel source, one of the easiest ways you can do this is just train in the fasted state.
Don’t eat anything before you run, like let’s say you run in the morning, don’t eat anything after dinner the night before, you know, just get out there and start running in that fasted state. And that will force your body to start using stored body fat as fuel. And of course, you have to lay off the carbs too, that’s going to kind of hinder this process.
But getting fat adapted is one of the best things you can do to become more metabolically flexible, because now you’ve taken advantage of this fuel source that most runners are not using. Okay. The other thing you can do to become more metabolically flexible, is to exercise regularly. And you gotta do it the right way, you have to be doing both aerobic type exercises. So long distance running would fall into that category beautifully, right.
But also you have to include some form of high intensity exercising, so something like weightlifting or HIIT training, or sprinting, all those things are going to help increase that intensity that you’re putting on your, your systems, you know, your muscles, your aerobic system, you’re, you’re gonna help to increase your lactate threshold and things like that. All those things will help you to become more efficient at burning fat and help you to become more metabolically flexible. Okay.
So getting fat adapted, and then doing both aerobic type of exercise and higher intensity, shorter duration, but higher intensity exercises, is going to kind of kick things into gear for you there. Okay? So think about this this week, I want you to think about becoming more metabolically flexible. There’s so many reasons why you want to do this. You don’t want to be doing things the way that most people are doing things. Because the way most people are doing things does not work. It does not work for the majority of us, okay?
And if you’re one of those people, and you find yourself wanting to lose some weight, and you find yourself wanting to improve your running performance, and you find yourself not wanting to rely on all the carbs and having all the negative things that go along with that thing, consider becoming fat adapted, and taking advantage of that metabolic flexibility that we as humans have developed over millions of years. Let’s just get back to that. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you this week. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
